favorite?

Christine asked me at lunch today for a favorite story from Peru. I shared a couple that I really enjoyed (not really ministry related at all) but then was thinking that most of my favorite things came from just being there and experiencing in general, not just in snippets of stories.

One quick story: on the night when the deaf were performing (was it Tuesday? I'm so off track!) I was telling Jodi and Leon about yucca and how awesome it is. I was having a hard time explaining it to them, the best I could come up with was "more like a potato than a potato". Yeah, that makes sense. I asked Daniel, one of the translators to help me out, but he really couldn't. He likened it to me trying to explain a cranberry to him. Even if I could verbalize what a cranberry was like, he wouldn't know because there are no cranberries in Perú, he has no frame of reference.

Fair enough. Leon and Jodi laughed at me for my pitiful explanation and Daniel made a phone call. It was either the next morning or the morning after when Daniel came by around breakfast time to start the day. He had a rubbermaid container and a plastic bag. He gave me the plastic bag which contained an unprepared yucca, and then opened the container and allowed me to sample his mother's homemade fried yucca, still warm. Oh, it was so good!! I never did get to thank his mother for the wonderful gift, but I did get to share with the rest of the team who did agree that it's really awesome.

I was also vindicated in my defining yucca as "more like a potato than a potato"; Leon agrees with me now.