costaricamia: Quetzaltenango

Breakfast: plantains, eggs and onion and tomato, beans and coffee!!

Ospedale Regionale HIV clinic where padre Roberts Armas gave a presentation on rights of people living with HIV. THEY WERE GIVEN BOOKS SND FED EGGS, HOTDOGS AND THE EVER-present black beans, also a drink made of oatmeal water and WAY too much sugar (it's called atol).

Then, we saw the place where people can buy a full meal for three quetzals, less than 50 cents, and they all parade through the line with their trays, each little slot filled with rice, a meat, vegetable, dessert. They can buy an extra tortilla for an extra quetzal.

They go through the line, get their meals served, and then sit at the tables. One man raced up to me and asked if I would take his picture. I dutifully followed and took him at the end of his meal, quite please with himself and his photo.

After leaving the government run cafeteria, we went with padre Roberto to a group of women who have begun a chocolate business. These women were so much fun and so jolly, beginning with toasting corn for a cereal that they make and sell, to showing us how they roast the cocoa and peel it before it is then ground and sweetened. They are using wood stoves that are eco friendly with pipes to move the smoke up out of the kitchen.

They were very patient and let us help them peel the roasted cocoa, but I made a dreadful mess, and I began to refer to myself as the cochinada Americana.

After they let us "help," they served us lunch, chicken, gravy, rice and tamales, which seem to be hot blobs of soft rubbery corn mush. I ate rice and tamales. Once we realized we could actually buy some of their chocolate, they got another member of the group to bring a hot mound of just ground and mixed chocolate, which they then weighed and molded into bars.