Marta and Melita are two women who live on La Isla De Los Monos and they have been our Peruvian mamas while we are living here. 90% of the time they can be found in the kitchen making the most delicious meals! They knew we were vegetarian and decided cook only vegetarian meals for the whole family while we are on the island!
Marta is in charge of the food and she gives us breakfast, lunch and dinner without fail, even when we aren’t hungry. The majority of our food is fresh picked, organic vegetables. We eat a ton of tomatoes, broccoli, ginger, yucca root, potatoes and cucumber. I don’t know how she makes so many different dishes with the same ingredients, but not one meal has been a repeat and they are all delicious. She also fresh squeezes fruit to make us amazing juices.
Melita (the human, not the monkey) helps Marta in the kitchen, and she washes clothes. She laughs as she watches us try and hand wash our clothes in the sink and always redoes our subpar loads. Melita is a human washing machine!! Her hands single handledly create soap bubbles, then when she wrings them out, she does it so well that they are 80% dry before laying them out. She also does a lot of the planting and harvesting of vegetables on the island.
Neither Marta or Melita speak any English so we communicate with our broken Spanish and of course, a lot of pointing. Even though we don’t understand each other, they both have taken us in and accepted us as their family.
Since we’ve been here, they’ve learned their very first English words! Sugar, bread, fan and banana 🙂
