Week 5 Update LP

Our translator Jenn left us on Sunday morning :( It was great having her here as a way to increase communication and as someone who is familiar with both Latin American culture and U of M Service Learning! The two weeks she was here flew by and we will miss her help a lot. We spent a relaxing yet rainy weekend in San Salvador with her and were also able to "vamos a la playa" to Playa El Espino again this past Saturday.

As Kassandra mentioned we were able to visit the hardware store while Jenn was here and she helped Kass order parts for the dehydrator. It's unfortunate that the timing didn't work out as we were really hoping to build the dehydrator or at least start it while Jenn was still here. However such is life in El Sal and we likely won't be building it until next week. Conveniently one of our neighbours is a mechanic and is going to help us solder things that need to be soldered and cut metal.

In the meantime I have been working on manuals and resources for food preparation and food safety. I have been lucky enough to contact a Canadian who visited Guatemala a couple of years ago and started a similar project with local farmers and fruit dehydration. He has given me some really helpful advice as well as the manuals they used as instructions for food prep. I've also done some other research into similar projects and even looked at old class notes for food safety information. My task now is to take all the info I've gathered and streamline it so that it can be easily understood and translated. Since literacy may be an issue I am going to make the instructions as simple as possible and locate (or possibly draw?!) some pictures to go along with them.