Mangos

Today, while sitting in class, a random, precious memory entered my mind. My World Lit 1 professor was talking about the Odyssey, and she said the word "ration." I'm not quite sure what the context was, but I do know that whenever I hear the word "ration" my mind automatically takes me back in time to when I was an 8-year old visiting my grandparents who were missionaries in Honduras at the time. This was the summer between my second and third grade, 1994.

Honduras was experiencing a terrible drought, so water and electricity were being rationed for several hours a day by the government. The power and water only came on for a few hours early early in the morning and in the evening, so we would have to fill buckets with water the night before if we wanted to bathe the next morning. I believe that this was also the summer when my brother and I developed our fascination with entertaining ourselves with candles every time we were around them. Picking the dripping wax off the sides of the candles, rolling it up in little balls of wax, and yes, we even added kool-aid powder to some wax to make it the color we wanted and to see if it would taste/smell like kool-aid candles. Duh.

Our parents had sent us to stay with our grandparents for three weeks that Summer. We went to mission meeting with them at a lake in Honduras, which had a Baptist camp grounds. The place was so humid and disgusting. The name of the camp was (and still is....) BAGOPE, and acronym in Spanish for "Bautistas Gozando y Pescando" (Baptists Enjoying and Fishing). Whatever...the missionaries joke that what BAGOPE is really an acronym for "bugs and gnats on people everwhere." Because if you've never been there, that is really what the whole experience of BAGOPE is. Because even though there are screens on all the windows and doors you have to have a mosquito net to sleep under. I went back there several times throughout Jr. high and High School, and I must say it is not one of my favorite places to visit.

That was one of the weirdest Summers of my life. It was the Summer that my parents moved us permanently to Xela, the city we had lived in half of the time when we weren't living in our village....and when my brother and I got back, we were all moved in to our house and out of the village house that we went to maybe once a month after that.

This was also the Summer when, I guess one night while I was sleeping, I got bit by some sort of "blister bug." I had a massive blister on the back of my leg for days, and it was painful. I had to take antibiotics or something to get rid of it. Weird...don't ever get bit by a blister bug.

Back to my point. One of the best memories I have of this Summer was in Honduras, at my grandparents' house. On those nights when the power was out, those hot, muggy afternoons in one of the warmest places in Central America, my grandmother would cut Mangos (just to clarify, "mango" is pronounced with a long a, as in ah...NOT with a short a as in a) that had to have been the size of a small watermelon. The things were massively huge, and the most delicious Mangos I have ever had in my life. Even to this day, I can't say that I've seen a Mango as big as the ones that my grandmother used to cut for us, nor have I tasted anything as delicious as those Mangos that were the highlight of possibly one of the strangest, most precious Summers of my life.