Impromtu roomie night... and the rat attack.

So today lots of the staff here at camp left early and things were winding down because it is Friday. This afternoon I walked around with Guerline, my roommate, who is an agronomist and she showed me all her plants in the garden. Yesterday I saw the cook making something with eggplant, but she mashed it up into this pasty stuff. Today I mentioned that I could make the eggplant a different way, so that quickly became our activity of the night. I quickly googled a recipe and glanced at it and then decided to make it up as I went along. What I would have loved to make was eggplant parmesan, but since I don't have any parmesan I decided to go with fried eggplant instead. So here's what we did.

Made breadcrumbs... I'd never done that before and had no idea how, but they turned out really good!!

Made ready our eggplant

 

Set up our assembly line

...and fried our eggplant!

I have a picture of ur finished product, but after trying to get it to upload for almost an hour I have given up. You will never know what the end product looked like. I'm sorry. They call this internet "voila" but I'm pretty sure I could get them on a false advertising law suit! Just imagine what the end product looked and tasted like... (hint... it was pretty great!)

After greatly enjoying our eggplant creations, we scrambled the extra egg, so not to be wasteful and ate that with our appetizers!

As I was heading to bed I grabbed a granola bar for breakfast to put in my bag. WHY IS THERE A HOLE WITH BITE MARKS IN MY WRAPPER?? yep. the rat had found my food. ugh. I wanted to throw up. But I didn't. I held it down. After making sure that the rats weren't currently in the bag we took the bag to my house to survey the damage done. Apparently rats like applesauce and nuts more than Lara bars and soup.

As I started to throw away the bars that the rats had munched on I heard Johnny, a young orphan who works here at camp digging them out of the trash. I didn't even know what to think. Disgust for my mountain of granola bars that I brought? Pity for this boy who wanted to eat what the rats left over? As we sat in my room separating out the good from the bad and the ugly I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I could not believe I had all this food. I mean honestly I don't eat a lot of it. The Haitians think I'm some kind of crazy person because I never eat. Today I ate lunch simply because my friend Tala was mad that I hadn't eaten. Sometimes I wonder if they don't understand what "I'm not hungry" is because they have never felt that way. I tried to make the feeling of guilt and disgust go away, but it wouldn't. Finally Guerline broke the silence. She made a few jokes about rats that I'm not sure exactly how to translate, but they were funny.

Eventually we started talking while we were sorting through the food. We talked about her family, how many brothers and sisters she had, we talked about her nieces, we talked about my friends that she knows who have come here from camp, and we even talked about her ex-boyfriend! I was suprised with my kreyol while we were talking because I was able to communicate and understand basically everything that I wanted to.

God is so good to me. So unbelievably faithful. On wednesday I really missed my friends and family back home. Today I got the text message from Texas A&M that school was cancelled for the snow. It made me a little sad to know that I wasn't there to go play with my friends. I miss doing life with those back home. But God has provided me with wonderful friends here. The relationships are not as deep, we don't talk about our hearts and share every detail of our lives. But Guerline and I have been fast friends. Tonight God was so gracious to give me a fun roomie night. Last time I cooked with my roomate kylie we ended up sitting on the floor laughing so hard that I thought she was going to pee her pants and I was going to pass out from lack of oxygen. That isn't exactly how tonight ended, but it was very fun and needed nonetheless!