SawatdeeKah! Welcome to Thailand

alloverthemap — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 03:00:05 GMT

Everything I knew about Colombia was bad. Bombs, drugs, terror, pain. Except. There was the music that seeped under doorways with laughter close behind. There was the smile that lit the room from a little girl hiding behind her mother. There was the magical realism that made a hat fly into the air and turn the gritty streets into a jewelbox from above. There was something to Colombia that I knew I needed to see.

On arrival in Bogota, the first bit of magic was that a stranger was standing at the airport waving a sign with our names on it. We hadn't booked a ride, so we were skeptical. Would you accept a ride from a stranger in a place you knew only for its bad news? She had a good story, though. She was our Airbnb host, and she knew it would be hard for us to find a reliable taxi, so she came with her truck and her dog to give us a ride.

We met a family full of joy despite years of fighting cancer who taught us to dance, then led us to a stranger in Medellin. I couldn't tell my mother we trusted a strange man to drive her granddaughters out of town to see the city from above and drink chocolate with cheese. But it was magic.

I want to keep telling the stories of why Colombia is not just magical but beautiful and wonderful. And I want to continue to tell the stories of other places that have a bad reputation - El Salvador, Iran, Bangladesh. I need training to tell a great visual story. And winning this would be magic.

My Scholarship entry - Understanding a Culture through Food

alloverthemap — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:51:12 GMT

I did not trick her into eating donkey meat, exactly. It was late. She was hungry. She was weary from walking all day, something this 11-year-old all-American girl was not in the habit of doing. I assured her that spaghetti with meat sauce would be just the thing to perk her up. It was only after placing the order that I mentioned that the meat in question might be different than what we have at home. Might be from an animal she’d never eaten before. An animal she might consider “cute.”
She raised her eyebrow weakly. I held my breath and waited for the whining. “Seriously?” she said, with all the cynical sass she could muster. But she was weak. “Whatever. I’m starving.”
Her sister looked on in horror as she devoured every meaty noodle on her plate.
Because I just can’t let a sleeping dog (or a dead donkey) lie, after dinner I pushed the girls to think about why it seemed weird to us that Italians would eat donkey. Why should donkey be any different than cow or pig, both of which are so prevalent in the American diet? The girls took this idea and ran with it. Instead of dreading the unknown at mealtime, they began to seek it out.
They were delighted with the separate courses of pasta, meat, and vegetables at lunch and dinner, even at a truck stop on the highway, and imagined the chaos that would present in their school cafeteria back home. In Piemonte, they were surprised that a large tray of lardo, prosciutto, and other cured meats appeared at every meal. In Turin, they declared the chocolately bicerin to be the only acceptable form of coffee.
When we got home I asked them about what they had learned on their first trip to a foreign country. “I guess it was when I ate donkey meat and I realized it wasn’t so bad,” said one. “Yeah, you know, how they eat different stuff but for them it’s normal,” added the other.
It was just what I hoped they would learn on the road: that “normal” is different everywhere. My little girls had become travelers.

Eating the Donkey

SawatdeeKah! Welcome to Thailand

My Scholarship entry - Understanding a Culture through Food