Food For Thought

It came to R$ 8.69--so I plan to leave 50 grams of rice out of the week's meals...

In the front, my collective staples; in the rear, my individual purchases. I walked to three different supermarkets to look for the best deals, and I found some interesting ones: like the egg pasta for R$ 1.01 and the tomato sauce for R$ 1.10. I also decided to forgo the popular oatmeal option--after living in Asia for 9 years I have absolutely no issue with eating rice three times a day...

This blog is really for the collected video entries of the students participating in the challenge, so I will be posting infrequently, but I will probably load a video or two this week as well.

I would like the participants from Curitiba, those who went shopping yesterday and those who didn't, to reflect on some questions and post some answers as comments or, better, in your next vlog entry:

1. What specifically did you learn about shopping on a restricted budget yesterday? Go beyond "It's hard." and think about the particular challenges of the experience. 
• What did you learn about shopping on your own with your individual budget? What choices did you have to make?
• If you did not go shopping, how have you already had to rely on the community? How will you make up your obligation to them?
2. Most of you have confessed to never doing your own cooking, or never having done your own cooking--ever. What are you learning from the experience of preparing your own food from scratch? How steep is the learning curve? 
3. Now, extrapolate: The point of this experience is to experience--however slightly--the challenges faced by people who actually must live below the line every day, with no Midnight Friday light at the end of the tunnel. And remember: you don't have to extrapolate very much if you were a part of our shopping group yesterday--contemplate the life perspective of our visitors in the park.
• What choices do you think they have to make on a daily basis? 
• What skills and knowledge must they possess that you might only be learning now? 
• How do you think this shapes their lives? 
• How does your regular life compare? 
• How does the answers to these questions make you feel? 

Before or after you ask yourselves these questions, take a few minutes to do some computer game playing as homework. Look for my next post.

Good luck this week!

--WJT.