DAY 5: Thursday, November 10

Today, I was assigned to kitchen duty along with Sally and Karen. Across from the volunteer house is where Scholastica and her staff prepare and deliver food for nearly 700 people who wouldn´t otherwise have much for nutrition. We started cutting vegetables (potatoes, onions, carrots, squash and cilantro) at around 9am or so... and didn´t finish until 11:30. The other ladies prepared meat (one looked like beef, the other was labeled "hot dogs", but not the kind you and I have come to know). Another cook is preparing rice. Two and a half hours of non-stop chopping, and one huge blister later, we were ready to put it all together, cook it, and prepare it for delivery. Every Monday through Friday, these ladies (local Peruvians who are employed through Father Alex´s food program) prepare food to deliver to the poor. On Saturdays, they spend the day going to the market to buy the food needed for the following week.

Once the food is ready (and, we´re talking a complete meal - soup, rice, a main dish that varies day to day, and a protien drink made especially for the elderly), it is poured into 5-gallon buckets and loaded into the van. Karen and I ride up in the front with Adan, the driver, while Scholastica and another gentleman ride in the back with the buckets. We take off through the streets of Alto Cayma and stop every few blocks to drop off buckets. Some of the drop off points were designated as a distribution location. Other places we stopped were just at someone´s house where Adan honks the horn and they come out with their bowls in hand. They must be the people that aren´t able to walk to the drop-off locations - mostly elderly and/or handicapped.

The route takes about an hour and a half and brings us back to the volunteer house just in time for lunch. It´s kinda hard for me to not feel guilty about how lucky we are to have such a wonderful lunch prepared for us considering what I had just witnessed over the last few hours. Even as I sit here and type this blog, I think about all the work it takes to do this every single day for the 700 people out there that have hardly a thing to their name.... and to see the sincere appreciation for that one meal a day they are given.