Christmas Dinner

A few days ago we had our annual Christmas dinner for employees, a group that came to around fifty people with some additional invitees. The entire dinner was cooked by clinic staff: Alex, Janell, Leslie, Yanire, Juan, and I, with some help from Ben.

The night’s menu:

Appetizer sandwiches

Candied Pecans

Salad

Chicken “Janell style” with McBride’s special homemade stuffing

Honey-orange glazed Pork (step four of this recipe: inject100cc’s of maple syrup into meat, using a large-bore syringe)

Twice-baked potatoes

Island-style Black-eyed peas and rice

Cranberry delight pies

Chocolate pies with bourbon sauce

Even with all that food, we ran out completely…people who came later were reduced to scraping the pans to get at scraps. Alex and I did not even get a full plate of food, as we were some of the last in line. Luckily, we had been scrounging a bit during the cooking stages, so all was good. We strung up Christmas lights, had decorated candles on the tables – a very festive affair.

Later that evening, some of the staff were hanging out on the porch, and saw a large plume of white smoke rise up from the plaza in the center of town (Santa Lucia’s annual “Feria” has been going on for a few days). A few minutes later, the on-call doc was summoned downstairs for what we thought was a single emergency patient. In reality, it was 15 patients all at once.

The story apparently goes something like this: The current mayor of Santa Lucia, in his infinite wisdom and what was said to be quite the drunken stupor, decided to light a large pile of fireworks (read: gunpowder hastily wrapped in dirty Chinese newspapers) in the middle of a crowd of people, in the plaza’s church steps, and then run like a bat out of hell. The ensuing explosion ended up burning 14 people and blowing a large chunk out of one boy’s leg, caused a minor stampede, and generally spooked many people, including clinic staff that were on the plaza – and had to literally dive to avoid the explosion. Nice work, alcalde. Nice work indeed.

Unfortunately, I will not be present for today, when I can only hope the mayor will be run out of town by a disgruntled mob of campesinos, armed to the few teeth that remain with various farming implements including, but not limited to, lots and lots of machetes.