Getting emails that are not from listservs, political campaign, daily newsletters or random articles from my mom is like getting a present on Christmas morning. My technological life is that dull. So, I was excited when, the other day, a Peace Corps friend of mine who also won the blog competition (currently serving in Thailand) wrote to me asking if her friend could interview me for her blog about food in the Peace Corps and if I had a specific theme I wanted to cover. I said I would love to, and that my area of expertise was coffee. Here's the interview below!
Name: Bronwen Raff
Site: Dominican Republic (small town of 5,000)
Service dates: August 2013 – October 2015
If a visitor from America was coming to your site, where would you take them for their first meal in the Dominican Republic?
Right when they land in the airport, I’d be waiting with plantain chips and a big Presidente beer to enjoy while adjusting to the heat and humidity. From there, we’d grab a street empanada in the city. I’d whisk my visitor away and we’d head to my site where I’d have a lineup of neighborhood doñas (old ladies) who would have prepared us a feast! We’d wander from neighbor to neighbor eating 1) mashed boiled green bananas (mangu) and fried cheese, 2) la bandera dominicana or rice, beans and chicken, 3) sambumbio, a delicious bean stew with meats, yucca, bananas and plantains or 4) arroz con leche, rice pudding. And no meal would be complete without sugared-up coffee to wash it all down.
What is a typical meal at site like for you? (Do you eat out or cook? Eat alone or with neighbors? What foods do you eat most often?)
I lived with a host family for the first 7 months of my service, 3 months in training and 4 when I first arrived at my site. Every morning without fail, I would have two hotdog white bread buns with two boiled eggs and a cup of hot chocolate with real cows milk (after two cups of coffee, that is). For lunch, it was rice, beans and chicken (sometimes a salad if I was really lucky). And dinner would be a plate of mangu (mashed bananas) with fried salami, fried cheese or fried chicken on top. That was it, without fail. I like to call that period of my life “214 days of the same old vaina (s*&#)” and probably gained a solid ten pounds. As soon as I moved out on my own I started cooking my own breakfast (oatmeal) and dinner (vegetables, boiled pumpkin, scrambled eggs, or whatever else the nearest colmado (bodega) has). I still eat a nice hearty lunch (rice, beans, meat) cooked by my favorite doña because I’m a working girl and ain’t nobody got time to start cooking lunch at 10:30am every day!
Tell me about coffee culture in your region!
Ahhhh coffee. I could go on for days, Dominicans love their coffee! Coffee is typically prepared in a greca, I’m not really sure what it translates to in English – maybe percolator? Sounds right. Anyway, the beans are often toasted on an open three-stone fire, sometimes with hazelnut, cinnamon or sugar roasted. Then the beans are ground, prepared in the greca and boil up through the percolater. Tiny little thimble-sized cups will be waiting on the counter and one greca can prepare coffee for up to five Dominican guests or one American (if you drink as much coffee as I do). Dominicans will scoop one or two tablespoons, yup tablespoons, of sugar into the cup and fill it only enough to wet the sugar.
To be social here, one must drink coffee. Dominicans take time to sit on their porches, colar un cafecito and spend time in the company of friends, neighbors and family. Dominicans will drink coffee in the morning, twice...directly after lunch, around five, six and seven in the afternoon and any other time a visitor comes over to the house. At first, my personal coffee preferences (I drink an entire greca by myself and take coffee without sugar) got some serious stares and maybe even made me enemies as Dominicans are entirely confused why I would ever drink coffee without sugar and fill my (big) mug all the way to the top. But word spread fast and now the whole town knows that whenever Bea comes over, they better not put a drop of sugar in my cup!
On your blog, you wrote about the cultural concept of compartir, or sharing time and food with those around you. Have you shared American foods with people in your community? What was the reaction?
Compartir is a central value to families here in the DR. Spending time with people often revolves around food, or at the very least, coffee. People are always gifting a portion of their daily meal to neighbors and friends, even more so if it’s a birthday or special occasion. I share a kitchen with a family and unfortunately, I don’t get to do much American cooking. I never really was much of a chef, nor do I really like cooking, so that’s fine by me. However, I have introduced baking to my community. Whenever someone comes to visit or sends me a package, I request easy-bake brownie, cake and muffin mixes that I can make with families around town. Sometimes (when I get paid), we make pizza. Our biggest problem stopping a lot of these cooking endeavors is the price of propane, it’s super expensive and most families don’t like to use/don’t have ovens. I just finished a project in which I constructed clay cookstoves for families and I wanted to try out some soup recipes out on that.
Surprisingly (or perhaps not given all the American media presence here), most people in my town have a perception of Americans as eating only chips and drinking soda. They think its nuts that I don’t drink soda and hardly ever buy chips. I try to eat healthy, or at least talk about food in a healthy way. I try to lead by example and have spent a lot of time convincing women to add more vegetables into their daily meals. In that way, I hope that I’ve shown them a different kind of culture around food that they may have never thought of before. But how can the American not drink soda, that’s insane, that’s not what we saw in that one movie!
As a health volunteer, part of your job is to promote healthy eating and good nutrition, as well as safe cooking practices. What kinds of nutrition and cooking projects have you worked on with your community?
One of my main projects is an in-depth course for women called “Healthy Homes” and a major part of the curriculum focuses on nutrition and obesity prevention (surprisingly, obesity is one of the worst health problems facing Dominicans, unlike many other Peace Corps countries who face opposite issues of malnourishment). I encourage women to incorporate leafy greens in their rice and beans, use less oil in all areas of cooking, cut back on added salt, and exercise thirty minutes daily! We had a breakthough moment when a group of women and I were cooking a pasta and one woman was supposed to bring the oil. She brought just the tiniest amount and the entire group began to yell at her telling her she messed up and didn’t bring enough. “LOOK!” I said, “She brought just enough to fry up these onions and garlic...I’ll show you.” They were in agreement; it wasn’t so bad after all! It is a little thing, but just watching how little oil we used might (fingers crossed) help them make a change the next time they go to fry up some onions. Small steps! And speaking of steps, I’ve noticed more women out walking in the morning since this time last year when I started educating them about the benefits of exercise, so that’s another win right there! Little by little...
Anything else?
It is often extremely difficult to be a health promoter in the Peace Corps. Sometimes I (we) feel like, “How am I ever going to change these people habits when they’ve cooked with oil for years and years,” or “Why would someone listen to me about the health benefits of exclusive breast-feeding when I’m not a mother myself.” But the sooner I realized that the information I had to give was valuable, the quicker I found success in my projects and at my site. There is no way I’m going to get an entire country to stop adding salt to their ramen noodles, or adding sugar to natural juices, or drenching salads with soybean oil, but I can make a dent and the information we have to impart is of extreme value.
