No Fuego Aqui

Last night was my dinner challenge for the internship. And considering that the stove did not catch on fire or blow up, I considered the challenge throughly accomplished. However, God has a higher standard of attainment and for that, I concede that our evening was quite perfect, if I am allowed to make the assumption that near perfection is obtainable.

As for problems, the biggest ones we had were the cake stuck to the bottom of the pan (to which the solution was to spoon it out onto the plate and cover it with a nice swirl of whipped cream) and we were ignorant in how to make coffee, which may have cost us some since coffee is equivalent to manna in this country. But since God was in control, our dinner was fantastic. Our first quest, Carolina and her mother showed up only 45 minutes late, on the standard of Dominican time, I thought they were quite early. On a side-note, one of the biggest difficulties that I have with the Dominican culture is the time difference. And it comes from their attitude versus our attitude. I for one, love their laid-back attitude, but it does play havoc with my internal United Statian way of upbringing. I simply need to be more flexible. But nonetheless, we ate our dinner of spaghetti and salad minus two guests. But it was fun. Carolina and her mother were so sweet and it made for a nice dinner. When we had finished, we went to take a piece of cake to our gate keeper, and when we reached the bottom of the steps that lead to the street, who should be coming up our walk, but one of our missing guests plus two friends.

So back up we went, taking Carlos, his sister Jacyln, and their cousin Moises. Our food was cold, our salad... a little wilted, but we sat the three of them on the couch and filled their hands with a plate of cake and a fork. About this time, the rest of our group decided to come back to the apartment. But it worked to our advantage because entertaining became a group thing. Our group had icebreaker questions which we posed to our Dominican brethren, and they in turn had a few questions for us. Conversations about what superhero powers we wanted, our greatest fears, embarrassments, weird things we had seen floated back and forth across the room in excited and loud spanish and english. It became an evening of bonding and breaking barriers as spanglish became our official language.

We praise God for a good dinner challenge. We praise God that we still have a stove. We praise God for good fellowship. And we praise God for San Pedro.

Dios te bendiga