Some of you may remember reading a blog I wrote just over a year ago regarding my first attempt to make chocolate chip cookies here in Brazil during my time as a volunteer at the girls’ house. Basically I struggled to find some of the ingredients and accidentally ended up using yeast rather than baking soda, and it didn’t come out looking anything like normal cookies (but the girls still ate it). Since then I have not been brave enough to try baking much of anything here in Brazil, but this week I decided to give chocolate chip cookies another try as I learned the proper words for all of the ingredients and I wanted to make something special to serve at the 15th birthday party of one of the girls in my group. I still faced the challenge of a gas oven with no temperature gauge and a few improvisations in terms of ingredients, yet by some miracle they turned out absolutely perfect! I still wasn’t sure what the girls would think of them as chocolate chip cookies basically don’t exist here. To my surprise, when the girls tried them, they were shocked that I had made them because they thought they were professionally made. They asked for the recipe and even though I told them I just got it off of the internet, they determined my cooking was good enough that I can get married. (Here in Brazil it is normal to tell a single woman she can get married if her food is good – I like to say the same to single men to single things out a bit.)
After the birthday party was over and the four dozen cookies had been consumed in a matter of minutes, God used this experience to speak to me about my own progress since first arriving here in Brazil. When I first got here, I didn’t know hardly anything about the language, how to find my way around the city, where to buy things, how to cook, clean, and use appliances, etc. But after a year, this is really my home now. I know how to get around the city without getting lost (most of the time!), I know how to speak the language well, I know how to use so many things that were very foreign to me at first. Something that I failed at a year ago, I not only succeeded but excelled at now! Although there are still challenges with living here and navigating in a foreign culture, I have come a really long way in the past year and am now capable of mastering things I was completely clueless regarding before.
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