coconut rice

i've found a new culinary love, and it's name is coconut rice. why didn't i ever think to make my white rice with coconut milk instead of water? i mean really! my host family does it with fresh coconut milk (you crack open a fresh coconut, hack or grind out the flesh and soak it in water till you get enough liquid to make however much rice you're planning to cook). or you can buy packets of powdered coconut milk, and just mix it with water. SOOO good! really yummy with chicken curry.

we've completed our second week of community based training. in addition to oodles of spanish class, we've now met with the four different groups of youth that we'll be working with for the next four weeks. one is a reading program for younger kids held at the Orange Walk library. a PC volunteer, Jenny, is in charge, and we're serving as her helpers, assessing the kids' reading abilities, and reading stories aloud to them.

the second group is in the neighboring village of Carmelita. the kids there have very few organized activities to keep them occupied, and drugs are apparently a huge problem. a woman from the OW Human Development Department is running a parenting class at the same time that we're doing life skills activities with their kids. i've never met a group of kids who were so timid. it was like pulling teeth to even get some of them to speak out loud in front of the group!

the third activity is split into two classes. Matt and Kyle are running a computer class with older youth, while Rebecca and I do art activities with the younger kids. we'd planned for a one hour session this week, only to find out that we have the kids for two. so, we had to do some improvising. luckily, Rebecca had brought along her handy packet of icebreakers, so we had some easy activities to keep them happy.

our final project is a youth leadership class with older teens. we spent our first meeting brainstorming possible projects the youth might like to work on, and settled on doing a youth march through the center of town. none of them had ever even heard of the concept of a march, so it will be an entirely new experience for them. this is the project we were most nervous about, since we had very little structure going into it, but it's the one that left us feeling the most energized after our first meeting. the youth seem pretty excited by the concept. we'll see what comes of it...