We return to our the Hernandez guesthouse after morning worship to find Nathaniel and Josiel Hernandez stacking cement blocks in the side yard. They are making a grill. They laugh and say it’s a “Flintstones grill.”
Three Alaskans—grandmother Irlene, mother Martha, and daughter , Andrea,9, are hosting a picnic before their Wednesday departure.
The Hernandez family cared for Andrea for her first three years while the Alaskans waited for her adoption to approved. This is Andrea’s first visit back to Nicaragua.
Soon the table is laden with homemade buns, grilled burgers and all the fixings, chips, cabbage salad, potatoes, and two-liter bottles of Coke and Fanta.
While our Nicaraguan host says grace, twenty of us hold hands around the food: a full-voiced 30—something man from Maryland , a family of five from Canada, a twenty-something redhead from Pennsylvania, a Sioux Center CRC pastor and wife, the Alaskan trio, and the Van Klompenburgs.
We eat and talk, sometimes with body language, sometimes in broken Spanish, sometimes with translation. The most popular consonant from the North Americans is “m-m-m-m.”
After dishes, the mother of five sets out a chocolate cake.
I didn’t know I missed North American foods until this feast.
And I haven’t longed for home until this taste of it.
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