The Blue Tortilla

I am glad that I am a missionary who enjoys the food of the country that she has been called to.  I have tried iguana, and modongo, nances , and something called atol arrigia.  Those are not my favorites, and thankfully have not been offered much as an option.  Everything else I have had to eat here has been great.  I have to monitor myself so that I will not eat like a crazy person.  The food here is so good.  I don't care if I have beans and rice everyday.  The have a lot of recipes for beans and rice which are outstanding, but just beans and rice are a great meal.  

Yesterday, our new cook, who is a wonderful cook, asked me if I liked blue tortillas.  Here they have a seed corn that is just blue.  They have a certified seed in the store that I learned this year why nobody buys it.  Certified seed doesn't work well here. It is a hybrid seed corn.  The Lenca people plant a variety that has been here for hundreds of years.  The stalks get about 10 ft tall and produce one ear of corn, maybe two a stalk but the one ear of corn produced is a whopper.  I was told to plant certified seed.  It was pitiful.  It grew to about 4 ft, and had tiny ears of corn on the dwarfed stalk.  I also had to plant about 3 times because the sanates, or black crows would come and steal away the corn seed. The way they steal the corn is that wait until the corn has sprouted and they snatch the plant out of the dirt and then eat the sprouted corn seed that was attached to the plant.   In order to keep them away from your newly sprouted corn, you have to place a person out in the field and when the sanates land, the person that watches over the planted field whistles and the birds fly off.  The birds who are a little more determined need a different technique.  The watchman will toss a pebble in their direction and that is enough to scare them away. The watchman doesn't have to do much, just hang around and  whistle.  I got our workers to work in the coffee patch along the corn patch.  Their presence kept the birds away.  The corn finally came up.

Well, I told the cook I like any kind of tortilla.  She brought me a small black plastic sack of blue tortillas.  The tortillas aren't exactly blue.  They are the color of a stormy rain cloud, black and blue and gray mixed together all at once.  Can I say that her blue tortillas were divine?  This afternoon before lunch, I had yet another blue tortilla.  I put the last piece of ham out of the packet on blue tortilla and laughed at myself when I thought I wasn't eating green eggs and ham, but blue tortillas and ham.  I think I will write my own Honduran version of that children's story. 

When I arrived at the kitchen I found that Osiris, the young women who cooks for us, brought me yet another culinary delight hot off her outdoor cook stove,  montucas.  It is kind of like stiff cream corn/cornbread type concoction cooked in a corn shuck.  You can eat it like a piece of cake, and it tastes better than anything you can think of.   I need to get back to monitoring myself about all this eating and exercise restraint or just exercise.  

The girls have been great lately.  I find that if I pray consistently for the girls, they do better.  I am a whistle blower of sorts myself.  When I pray, I disturb those spiritual forces that would try to steal the seed that are trying to sprout in the hearts of our girls.   I also have learned that the seed is important.  It needs to be the right seed for the right time, and the right soil. You can't just plant any seed.  It needs to be the seed that God has prepared for that person.  Prayer is the key of accomplishing the will of God with the girls and in my life also.  It doesn't seem like we are doing much, but we are really doing so much more than we will ever know to drive off the enemy.    Pray that I will remain faithful to pray for the field that the Lord has given to me. Blessings, the Tortilla Lovin' Honduran Mom.