Building a Community of Love that Breaks Down Social Barriers

After the youths came together to prepare some food on Saturday, it was the turn of the adults on Sunday to come together and celebrate our friendship with one another by preparing some food together. We cooked various dishes such as arroz con pollo (Peruvian style chicken rice), causa rellena (mashed potato stuffed with chicken fillings), tamales (Peruvian meat dumplings) and the dessert arroz con leche (rice with milk). It was a nice time of catching up with one another and sharing our life experiences with one another. There were adults coming from different social classes, and it was a pleasant sight to see them mingling with one another without the social class prejudices that are so prevalent in Peruvian society today. It was especially heartwarming as I saw two ladies coming from opposite ends of the social spectrum stand side by side to each other to wash the plates together, and chatting heartily with one another while they were doing the dishes.

Today, one of our friends, a manager with a foreign MNC in Peru, took some time off her work, and offered to bring our friend Joan out for lunch. We eventually had a nice meal at T.G.I.Fridays in Jockey Plaza, the largest shopping mall in Lima. One of our conversation topics was on some of the rather social problems that have seeped into Peruvian society. One problem was how many people live on credit here in Peru, spending beyond their means. We also talked about the amount of prejudice that goes around in Peruvian society, and especially how easy it is for a person to be discriminated against as a result of his skin color, family name (which can be a sign of your social pedigree), or lack of education.

After lunch, we went to visit a manager at the shopping mall to enquire about the possibilities of renting a booth to showcase some jewellery items, and allow our youths to earn some money to save up for their education. Unfortunately, the manager was not around, and his secretary told us that there was no more space available at the Jockey Plaza shopping mall. We will now have to source for alternative locations.

In the night, Aili and I whipped up a nice dinner together. We cooked a plate of fried trout in sambal chilli sauce with garlic, a plate of steamed trout (these are only 2 ways of cooking the trout; as far as I know, there are at least 8 ways of cooking the trout in Peru), a sort of fusion Szechuan chicken wings (Aili added some of her own touches to the original recipe that I had downloaded from the internet), and bean sprouts cooked in roccoto chilli. I have discovered that whipping up a nice dinner does not necessarily mean burning a big hole in your pocket. Rather, it is about creativity. For example, the raw materials for the small feast that we whipped up tonight cost only 18 soles (about S$9.00), a feast which fed four people (Aili, Delia, Joan and myself) and still having leftovers.