Crisis Christmas 2011

Yes, I only ever seem to blog about Habitat and Crisis, but they are inevitably the highlight of my year! Crisis in particular now has become a compulsory yearly event, made worse by the fact that all the troops for the afternoon shift at our residential centre has become so cliquey, it is simply an excuse for us to spend lots of time together and catch up.

This year was no different, with the same old kitchen team of Norm, Synthia, Dave and myself, but this year we also had the wonderful culinary skills of Evelyn joining us. What was radically different, and thank god for it too, was that there was no airplane food in sight! We had proper proper food to cook with, and this made it a lot easier (although I guess I secretly missed the challenge of taking apart 50 airplane meals to make it into something palatable).

Case in point was when I arrived on the first day to a whole load of beautiful haddock fillets. We are now the smallest centre only feeding up to 40-50 mouths including the volunteers, but we had been delivered about 50 fillets of fish, and no freezer had yet arrived for us to store it! So we had to cook it all, which meant me making the biggest batch of bechamel sauce in my life for a lovely fish pie for the first day. My right arm is about an inch thicker than the other one now. It was so yum, probably the best thing I've ever cooked at Crisis.

Although one still felt sorry for the vegetarians, as unfortunately we still had to rely on good old Linda McCartney for sustenance. I must say, when I started Crisis the Lindas were actually pretty nice, but now we have the ever occurring sawdust-like vegetarian sausages which do not look the most appetising...


The most challenging day as always is Christmas Day itself, the only day we can't make it up as we go along. We were a small kitchen, with only one small oven, so that was a challenge doing two big turkeys. But Norm led us well, and we managed to do not only very moist turkey, but also pigs in blankets, roast potatoes, sage and onion stuffing, roast parsnips, broccoli, carrots, peas, but no sprouts alas!


The Christmas was made even more special as we were also sent a whole bunch of smoked gammon, so we could make proper Christmas ham!!! To be truthful, none of us had actually cooked this before, I vaguely remembered watching someone's mum do it once before, so it was a bit ad lib. But it was still so good! I love love a Christmas ham, I can probably just do one in the middle of summer and eat it all myself.

And don't worry, I haven't forgotten the most important thing about Crisis Christmas, and that is the Crisis Christmas Custard. Oh yes it needs a capital C for the Custard. It is what we get the volunteers to come back each year, and Evelyn made it even more wonderful by bringing in some proper vanilla pods, so that we had proper proper Custard! God it was so yum. We also made a Christmas trifle (very inventive actually with some dried up scones), but I forgot to take a photo, probably because it was devoured rather quickly.

The only slight hiccup was when suddenly morning shift didn't have any chefs in on the second to last day, and Dave and I were roped in to help. We have never done a morning shift before, which informs doing breakfast to order, as well as doing lunch at the same time. We were a little stressed, why do people all want eggs that we suddenly cannot fry very competently?! We will be happy to go back to the cosy familiarity of afternoon shift again :)

And finally to my favourite picture of Crisis this year. Bless the likes of Tesco, Sainsburys, the Co-op who donate all of our food each year, but goodness is it tough to work with catering sizes of some items! This was our cheese block at the end of the week; even after hacking at it every day, we still literally had a square foot of cheese left. Lucky Dave and I mastered the art of making macaroni cheese for the masses this year, we will try to reduce the cheese mountain for 2012!

Return of the refried bean

I worked with Habitat in Guatemala back in 2005, and it was the first time I went anywhere really "exotic"! And unsurprisingly for greedy little me, the recurring memory was that I ate a LOT of beans, and a LOT of plantains. As Honduras is next door, it is not surprising that it again featured heavily on the menu (contributing to my rather heavy hips after the trip :( )

Creature of habit, I ate the same breakfast everyday when we were in Santa Rosa - huevos rancheros (ranch eggs, or basically a fried egg with some tomato salsa on top), with fried plaintains and a plop of the good old refried bean. Thank god I was on a building site everyday afterwards.

We went out several times during our stay, and ate at some varied places including the local pizza joint and a Mexican place. However, it was the local place doing traditional local food that Johny took us to that stole our hearts, to the extent that we demanded to go back again! The food was good and hearty, the recurring theme of beans and plantains somehow transformed to be a bit more interesting. For example, the refried beans were served with a local cheese not too dissimilar to mozzarella in texture, but a little bit more salty, very addictive combination:

Plantains were served with a creamy, slightly sweet and tangy sauce, utterly delicious.

I also managed to sample a local delicacy of conch soup when we were still in San Pedro Sula (the city where we landed, which in the week before we arrived was awarded most murderous city in the world. We got out quickly.) It was a little bit coconutty, but not a lot else other than that I'm afraid. And obviously after the event I am feeling a bit guilty about eating conch, not sure about its endangered status.

And finally for a Lonely Planet shot, every afternoon we enjoyed going to the local coffee shop opposite our lodgings - Honduran coffee is lauded even by Starbucks, and I was happy to see the cafe culture very much alive even in this little town. And my hips got even heavier with the daily cake I was consuming :)

Habitat 2011 - Honduras

This year's Habitat trip brought me to Honduras in Central America. It is a little known country as I found out when I was trying to fundraise, but it has always been a destination for me as Ben, my first ever Habitat leader, raved about doing a Global Village trip there before.

It was my first "corporate build", which is when Habitat is working with a corporation rather than individual volunteers, and I was working with volunteers from the publishing company Reed Elsevier. Reed Elsevier is a huge organisation with over 30,000 employees worldwide, and each of my volunteers were "champions" of their local "RE Cares" community programme. It was very nice to be working with others who are all so committed to helping others, and each of them also were sympathetic with each other's efforts to make other people do more!

Honduras itself is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, and is still recovering from when Hurricane Mitch destroyed much of the country back in 1998, when 6,000 people died and more than 75,000 were made homeless. It is no surprise then that the focus of Habitat's work is to create hurricane and earthquake-proof homes in Honduras, and so far they have helped more than 10,000 families in the country.

We were building in a small mountain town Santa Rosa de Copan, their claim to fame as being the closest big town near to the Copan Ruins. It was a gorgeous little town with cobbled streets and not a lot going on. We were building for a single mother Mariela who has a little girl Sarahy; interesting to note that single mothers did not seem to have the same kind of stigma that they suffer elsewhere. With high unemployment, there is not much to entertain the youngsters of the town, to the extent that Habitat will be building a village especially for single mothers in another future project.

We were only in Santa Rosa for 5 days, as corporate builds tend to be a lot shorter, so unfortunately it did not progress as much as other builds I've been to in the past. We were also rained off for the first day! Luckily, the foundations had already been dug when we arrived:

Here is Mariela with little Sarahy. Her uncle Martin also spent most of the week with us, and he was her main helper on site. His English is non-existent, as is my Spanish, but oh did we get to know each other when we went salsa dancing on the last evening. That man has got good hips!

Our main jobs for the week were to create the "re-bar" steel reinforcements which make the house more earthquake proof, mix cement for the foundation, and start the block work for the external walls.



(and I post a rare picture of me actually doing some work! not many of these exist, ha!)

(I should take a leaf from Abbey's book...)

And by the last day, we got about a quarter up the house! It normally takes 3 months for the normal builders plus the family and helpers to build a house in Honduras, and with our help this will be reduced to 2 months, so we felt slightly better about ourselves.

Even after all these years working with Habitat, I still never fail to have a good cry during dedication. The team in Honduras should also be commended for giving us some of the most warm cultural welcome for our team. We were welcomed by some traditional dancing on our first day, and the last day's dedication had a live xylophone band (hijacked by myself and Liza after not so long, ha!). Much credit to young Johny who looked after us during the build, we couldn't have done it without you. (and also thanks to Rena who I stole all the photos from!)