Monday, March 4, 2013

Day Two

Good nite! Here in Belize "good nite" is a greeting, as in "good afternoon" or "good evening".

Today was a fairly long day of going through orientation and preparing for our visit to the Community tomorrow and the clinics in the next few days. Some of us woke up for a refreshing 0600 walk with our team leaders, Rita and Juliet, which was a peaceful way to start the day.  During our orientation we learned more about Belize and the culture and we talked about the formal paperwork we will be filling out as we visit the families in their community as well as the assessment sheet we are expected to fill out when we interview the patients. The doctors who we will be practicing with, Dr. Cuellar and Dr. Yorleny, came to talk to our group about their expectations for assessment during clinics. I am confident working with these doctors will provide us with exceptional learning opportunities.

Tonight we ate dinner at a Restaurant where we were able to experiment with tasting different cultural foods. Some of us ordered garnachas, which is a corn tortilla with refried beans and cheese, empanadas, a corn flour dough filled with chicken and salbutes, a corn tortilla with refried beans, cabbage, and cheese. The main difference between the salbutes and garnachas is that the former is a soft tortilla and the garnacha is crispy. We enjoyed main dishes like "pibil" that is port cooked under ground served with corn tortillas, "escabache" is onion soup that is cooked with chicken and served with corn tortillas, and the most adventurous dish "cow foot soup" which is a soup made with cows feet with vegetables in in served with rice or corn tortillas. Sarah was brave enough to order the cow soup and actually enjoyed it. There were some....different.... looking animal parts to the soup, one piece looked like an artery and another like spongy bone tissue which a few members of the group were happy to try. Aaron ate the "artery piece" curiously which some of us looked on with a little less bravery. The food is very good a flavorful, however I don't think I will be ordering cow foot soup any time soon.

Along view during the morning walk.

On the way to lunch at Canidas.

Sarah's cow foot soup dish.

2 comments:

  1. Yum Yum... I loved the food when I was there - I suspect you are all going to learn lots in the next few days. It is cold, wet and cloudy gray here - wish you would send us some Belize Bright SUNSHINE - please and thank you !! Who is driving this BUS ??? Looking forward to each days report !!

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  2. Hi Sue! We'll send warm weather thoughts your way, although, today was the first really warm day. There has been a cold front that came through the region so Belize has been experiencing some cooler weather than usual. The cool weather has also apparently brought on some colds, as we learned today when we did our community visits. Our bus driver's name is Alton. He is a very laid back guy, but he doesn't spend a lot of time with us. We met some of his family this morning in Georgeville!

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