Trust to your instincts
If it's safely restrained
Lightning reactions
Must be carefully trained
Yesterday I went to a health clinic to have my teeth cleaned (it only cost $2) and, in passing, I decided to weigh myself on one of the scales there. For the last several months, everyone in my village has been telling me that I am really skinny. Skinny people in Ecuador are considered to be unhealthy. The fatter you are here, the healthier people say you look. That is why so many women here are quite fat. Being fat is a sign that you have plenty of resources to feed your family and yourself.
I know that I have lost weight since I have been here, and I have explained time and tiem again to the villagers that it is because the food is so different here. But addition to the differences in food, I could not tell you how many diarrea attacks I have had which have caused me to lose weight. I can tell you that part of my weight loss is also attributed to the fact that, well to put it lightly, the food really sucks in the Amazon. All the restaurants serve the exact same thing: rice and some kind of meat with a tablespoon of vegetables pushed off to the side. That is what they serve for breakfast, lunch and dinner. There are no scrumptious, pancakes and omelletes in the morning, no yummy Subway style sandwiches at lunch, and no hot and steamy Pad Thai at night.
And it is not like I can rush off to the supermarket (the nearest one is five hours away) and buy myself some lettuce and cherry tomatos for salad, or a nice block of cheddar cheese (which does not exist anywhere in this country).
So basically, I have to eat what everyone else eats here -- rice, yucca, cooked bananas, and chicken. It gets so monotonous that I have lost my appetite. I have to force myself to eat most of the time. I have gotten to the point where I often find myself daydreaming about foods I would not normally eat in L.A., such as In-n-Out Burger, Hebrew National Hotdogs, and Cheese Enchiladas.
Even though I am a hardened Peace Corps volunteer on the outside, eating like the natives and resolving to stick it out until the very end, on the inside I am really just a junkie for good ol?all-American food. And that is why when I weighed myself at the clinic, I found I had lost 15 pounds since coming to Ecuador.
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