Picture, if you will, a meal of potatoes, fried rice or ramen style noodles, and chipati, which is similar to a Mexican flour tortilla. Now multiply that by three because that's pretty much what you're eating three times a day, every single day.
Ah, yes, meals in the village are no frills and totally starchy, which is why dinner table talk often turns to the comfort foods from home we're missing.
Ever heard of sponge candy? It's a highly sought after sweet treat in southeast Iowa that has a crunchy honeycomb type center and is covered in delicious chocolate. My flowery verbal descriptions to salivating teammates seemed to have a couple of them wanting to book airline tickets to Des Moines just to get a little taste of heaven!
Our host family in Nepal was amazing and the food they made for us was definitely good. But, being the spoiled Americans we can sometimes be, we wanted variety. We also wanted our moms and grandmas to be the ones cooking the foods we were used to and longed to enjoy again.
Who knew you could build a very unhealthy fantasy life around food, but that's exactly what we did. It got to the point where every conversation we had around the dining table was about what we'd rather be eating and drinking. We were in over our heads, drowning in fantasies of guacamole, chili with every imaginable topping, sponge candy, and ice cream sundaes.
My dining companions and I made hypothetical meals an idol before God. That may sound dramatic, but we absolutely had our priorities all mixed up. Our constant chatter about the meals we hoped for reflected the ungratefulness lodged in our hearts. It kind of reminds me of when I was a kid and my parents said to eat what was on my plate because "there are kids starving in China" except, in this case, there are kids starving in that very Nepali village where we lived.
The truth is I've been overseas and living in questionable conditions for several months. My American palette is picky. I've been served meals I'd rather not eat. I absolutely want to fly out to southern California and have a huge burrito from Miguel's Jr. with my friend, Es. There's nothing wrong with that. But what we were doing was out of control. We were pretty much obsessed with food we couldn't have. We were torturing ourselves with detailed food fantasies that couldn't be fulfilled at the village's tiny snack stand. We were dissatisfied. We were ungrateful.
Living in the moment and being content with whatever is in front of me has long been a struggle. I'm always looking forward to the next adventure, the next party, the next mountain top experience, the next big thing. So, how do I learn to live in the present? How do I set my expectations for the future aside and walk in contentment? I'm not even going to pretend I know the answers to those questions, but I do think living the village life in Nepal brought those concepts to the forefront and I don't want to discard them without some introspection.
Epilogue: I was eventually able to have legit Mexican food in Kathmandu, Nepal at a place called The Lazy Gringo, which fulfilled my wildest fantasies!
