Beans and Rice, Rice and Beans

Hello friends,

I have hit the ground running and things are picking up! I spent the day today in the homes of 5 of the ladies who are being trained to be community health leaders. It turns out that many of them were already doing a similar role either informally or through a government program that has been on and off again the last 2 years. They are super motivated learners and a few of them are planning to host their first community "charlas" (trainings) for the World Handwashing Day in 2 weeks! Wendy, pictured below, has even decided to go back to school to finish her high school diploma. She then hopes to go to nursing school. I love spending time at Wendy's house because she just loves learning new things and is excited about sharing it with others!

Our first training together 3 weeks ago we started on the topic of nutrition. It sort of went like this... anyone know the 5 food groups??  rice, habichuela (beans), blank faces. More blank faces. They were seriously stuck. I guess when you eat the same thing e.v.e.r.y  d.a.y it's easy to get stuck. I  was so proud of them at our training last week that every single one could name the five food groups, identify a couple of items in that food group and for the most part tell you why the group is important! It only took 3 weeks to get to that point, but that's ok. LOL.  I've had to let go some of my expectations and meet them where they are.

We also started talking about the rule of 5  - 2 fruit, 3 veg a day. Again, blank faces. They quickly explained that there just are not those kind of options for the campo (rural) folks. The city really is just a 40 minute gua-gua (raggedy bus) ride away and a measly 60 pesos round trip. ($1.50 but that is out of reach for most folks.)  Going to the city is a big deal and NOT something that is going to be done weekly for grocery shopping. I almost panicked... this is not supposed to happen!! My beautiful lesson plans are crumbling. Breathe, revamp, keep dialoguing. This is good. So, we started talking about how to make our plates more colorful. We compared the drab brown and white plate with beans and rice and started exploring ways to add color. Add a guineo (banana) someone suggested. Or an avocado someone else suggested. Great -- now we have a fruit, what about vegetables?? That's where it really gets hard. It's all starchy vegetables - potatoes, carrots, yucca, plantains, and almost nothing green. We talked about eggplant - fairly easy to find here in the campo, beets - high sugar, but great for anemia, a chronic problem. We talked about fiber in cabbage versus iceberg lettuce. We really need some community gardens!! Anyone interested?

We will wrap up our nutrition module tomorrow (or next week) with diabetes.... but I'm procrastinating because I really am a bit stuck on how to approach the nutrition aspect of diabetes in a diet that is SO carb heavy... so I decided to procrastinate and catch my friends up on what I've been doing, ie blog post. There will be another post in a day or two because I was really procrastinating and wrote 2 updates. Now, it's gonna be a LONG night prepping for class tomorrow.

More pics....

Last week they were nutrition experts!

The milk experts compared the nutrition in regular milk, 2%, to chocolate milk. Skim and 1% is a grocery store item only. After comparing the nutrition label (yay!) they wisely recommended the regular milk because it had less sugar and sodium. Way to go ladies! 

Here we have the bean experts. It was a novel idea to compare two of the same items for anything beyond price. They learned that one brand of canned beans had about 200 mg more sodium than the other brand for the same portion size. They were surprised! Let's hope they will share the importance of reading labels with their friends and community!

The garlic experts compared the processed bottled jar garlic to the fresh garlic. They realized they can save money and eat less salt going with the less processed form. We had a good discussion about what is processed food and how they have seen more of it in their food supply!









Well, and since we are on the subject of food I will leave you with a picture of the outdoor kitchen typical for where most people cook their food. This one is a bit 'fancy' because it has a new type of stove that is more environmentally friendly than the typical ones that require a ton more wood and leave the women standing over a smoke filled pit for hours a day. Bye for now!