Well, there I was blogging away on Greta (my brand-new Gateway laptop) this morning when suddenly it all started closing down on me 'saving settings', jingles, the lot, down to black screen and restart. What button did I touch by mistake? And is there no easy way to transfer everything from my old computer?

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I suppose it's my choice - someone offered to just copy my old hard disk onto this one, but I decided that everything needed to be tidied up, so I opted for the one document at a time method...

Anyway, the story I was telling was about my yesterday’s cooking (ad)venture. Alicia and I had learnt a lot from our Northern Escapade a couple of weeks ago, and this was to be a totally different group of participants: three ladies who cook lunch for 100 kids (6-18 years old) in a poor area of town. Many of the kids suffer from obesity due to poor eating habits. They are reluctant to eat anything other than the meat and fried rubbish they’re used to. The idea of not adding sugar or too much salt is alien to them. The ladies do a great job in their poky kitchen with limited resources (sneaking grated carrots into food, for example), but they needed some new ideas. We had to produce stuff that was healthy, acceptable to the kids’ palates, cheap, and practical. We were to prepare 6-people samples for each dish.

Alicia had got hold of a recipe book that UNICEF here had produced for pregnant teenagers. In the morning we went to the wholesale fruit and veg market, and then prepared Blue Peter-style – no point in wasting precious course time chopping onions and cooking lentils. So with eight separate bags, one for each dish, off we went.

We started just after two, and the dishes we prepared were:

1. Oven-baked lentilburgers (delicious – so meat-tasting!)
2. Lentil shepherd’s pie
3. Chilli con carne without carne (meat) and with very little chilli (people here don’t like spicy food) – really more of a bean and lentil hotpot
4. Mince meat stew with vegetables and rice all in one pot
5. Kidney bean salad
6. Spinach pie (well it’s a green leafy thing similar to spinach – and the filling contained egg, and rice to spin it further)
7. Oven-baked carrot tortilla
8. Fruit salad

And in two and a half hours, we were done, and all sat down to eat. During the afternoon, facilitators wandered in to taste, though we kept the kids firmly out, or it would have been chaos.

The ladies said that they thought the kids would definitely find the new dishes acceptable, and more importantly, they would get a nutritionist in to talk to them.

Term at the project (as in the whole of Uruguay) has just started again (our summer hols are January and February) so off I go now to a meeting to see what they want me to do this year – I hope I can get started with English right away – they seem to work on a system of cramming just before exams.

And what about the conjunctivitis in my title? Yesterday afternoon, while we were cooking, my left eye got all sore and gunky…I am told bathing it with tea will help, and it certainly seems to relieve the itching. It has been pouring with rain for two weeks, and a sore throat and cold are definitely forcing their way into me…summer, I think, is over…