arte de arroz con pollo

I got the wedding invitation today, the one from one of my favorite missionary companions, who is half Hispanic herself, who cajoled our investigators into teaching us recipes from their paises. I opened the mail at lunchtime, and examined her engagement picture while eating arroz con pollo, a dish that I had made for my family last night--the dish, coincidentally, that I always associate with her anyway. 

She and I developed a taste for Peruvian food while assigned together in the outskirts of D. C. We learned how to make the dish of green rice and chicken from Mari, a woman in her sixties, who was holed up 25 flights of stairs in a high-rise apartment complex. Limited by a language barrier, and a transportation deficiency, Mari loved to host las hermanas and tell them stories about her family and her businesses back in Peru. My companion and I received quite a few cooking lessons out of our visits as well, since the women were always showing us the proper way to cook or clean something, fulfilling their age-old duties of preparing the next generation to be wives and mothers.

When I came home, released from service, I brought home a few pictures, but more cravings for the homemade Hispanic foods that you can't find in any U.S. restaurant. So my companion and I practiced, on her family or hers, for friends or neighbors, together or separate, trying to remember how they did it, how they got things to taste so good with the limited ingredients the States offer, and I developed a knack for arroz con pollo, a simple Peruvian food of rice and chicken. It was as if a little part of my mission stayed with me, amongst all the rigors and strains of normal life.

She has been on my mind lately. Missionaries leave their assigned areas and disperse across the whole of the world, back to the places from where they came, back into the job market, back into the marriage market, back into life. We lose track of each other and the people that we grew to love and serve. Sometimes the nostalgia is overwhelming, and heartbreaking; it's a sense that you can never return to the way it was exactly, so every attempt at recreation just turns out to be a sad parody. The most you can hope for is contacting the ones you love and forging new relationships out of the old camaraderie. This week, while pureeing the cilantro and peppers, I thought about her, and the hours that we served together, traipsing through neighborhoods, teaching and helping the immigrant communities. 

Half of this batch was going to service, too. It was easy to make, and cheap, and I have found that most people like it, or at least tolerate it. So this time I split the pot and bundled up one half to go to a family whose baby just had kidney failure. I thought how lucky I was to be able to make something and give it away--I was grateful for the ingredients, the know-how, and that companion, who was ready to remind me of the ingredients when I forgot them again and again those first years that we were back. And now, here she was, fiancée smiling beside her. And I thought of how lucky we were, we all are, to go through the experiences that will teach us to be better, how part of her makeup came out of being a missionary, of walking through D.C. neighborhoods, and of learning authentic dishes at the hands of immigrant women.