Afternoons

Every week day I have class from 8:00-12:30. The afternoon activity varies. One Monday, I had a cooking class:

Tomates de árboles. Peel them, add nine teaspoons of sugar, blend, strain out the seeds, and you have juice. Making juice is huge here. Most people make their own. My favorite thus far is strawberry.

Note the juice in the back ground. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day and usually starts with soup. This one was potatoes, onions, olive oil, water, something that I think was just for color, and garlic. Plus cheese and avocado.

The first thing we did was cut lots of beef into bite sized pieces and boiled it with chives.

What everyone else's plate looked like. Mote pillo, tomato and onion salad, and meat.

What my plate looked like. It was so good.

Babaco for desert.

Tuesday was a "charla" (lecture) about the history of Cuenca. The interesting parts will be incorporated into later posts.

Wednesday we had the afternoon off, so I went exploring, successfully took the bus, found a coffee shop with wi-fi, and got ice cream.

Today was the really interesting one. This morning and yesterday morning our class was taught by guest speaker who is an expert on Indigenous Andean religion. It was incredibly interesting. I took six pages of notes. To simplify it into a few sentences would not do the beliefs justice, the whole thing was also in Spanish with some Cañari (the name of the group of people indigenous to this region) terms. Therefore, my understanding is not quite complete. This afternoon was spent exploring "Health and Illness form an Andean Perspective," the class was run by the same lecturer. 

We walked into a smoke filled room to hear about how the Andeans view illness as a spiritual disconnection.

After we had pictured our loved ones while standing and breathing properly, Kristen volunteered to participate in the next part of the presentation. She was rubbed with an egg. When the egg was broken into a glass of water, the way that it dispersed showed what was ailing her. 

Overall, the experience was relaxing. I generally am not able to feel the same energies that other people are when participating in spiritual healing processes. This was not an exception. However, it was interesting to hear about the reasons behind the various parts of the process. We were there for two hours in which we learned how such healing processes related to his beliefs. He frequently said "Ustedes son mi dios" in English "You all are my god." One aspect of what he believes, and what other Andeans believe, is that there is a spiritual energy in and between all things and people.  By serving others he is helping that spiritual energy.