My mangoes... your tomatoes...

There is so much about our life here that is so similar to any of yours, with a different flavor.  Part of my motivation in writing on this blog is to share more about missions on the personal level.  Make missionaries abroad more approachable and real.  Hopefully help to reveal that God’s calling is for each of us to serve us where He has placed us.  The call to missions is no greater in status than God’s call on YOUR life.

So the abundance of mangoes in our yard is not unlike the abundance of tomatoes or grapes or apples that many of you will be thankful for in a few months (but will have to deal with despite your thankfulness)! ;-)

Our two mango trees started dropping mangoes quite a while ago – tiny green mangoes, followed by larger green mangoes in a large enough quantity that I was able to make a batch of green mango relish (yum), followed by a steady supply of mangoes enough to feed all the guards in the area who would stop by before and after their shifts to gather mangoes, followed by an avalanche of bright yellow juicy fibrous mangoes that rain down at night with defined kurplunks outside our bedroom window.

Our first surprise is that, even behind a fence, the neighborhood felt at liberty to help themselves to the mangoes.  We gladly shared, but finding strange men gathering mangoes in the yard at all times of day was not acceptable so we had to get more strict and require a grant of permission before someone could enter our yard for their midnight snack.

Secondly, the avalanche of mangoes took us a bit by surprise when the last week of April (after watching the evolution of mango buds to flowers to fruit since early January) brought a sudden wealth of mangoes.  The market is saturated.  Our Home of Love children never begrudge a box or bags of mangoes.  Every visitor to our house left with a bulging bag of mangoes.  But after awhile, it became obvious that I needed to actually deal with these mangoes on a larger scale to make use of the bounty that God provided for us!

(Here is the yard after an hour of gathering, several of the full buckets not included in the picture.)

These mangoes are a local variety that are very fibrous – delicious, but hardly the kind that you can cut up into neat little cubes for a lovely fruit salad.  Rather, they are the kind that you rip open, slobber all over, inhale the juicy pulp, and require all consumption to be OUTSIDE of the house. 

So, friends introduced us to their method of extracting the golden nectar: pressure cook the mangoes whole just until the pressure rises, then, mash the whole mangoes through a strainer/colander.  The juice flows out with some pulp but the fibrous strands stay attached to the seed.  Finally, given our lack of chest freezer or large scale canning (we have a tiny freezer and 3 1L canning jars), I am reducing the liquid down into a thick puree.  The result: a lovely stock of mango puree perfect for reconstituting into Gracie’s thickened liquids! Perfect, since we’re running low on her thickener (she has to drink thickened liquids due to a swallow disorder). 

(I used every pot in the house 5 or 6 times today and only got through 1/4 of the mangoes that I need to process!)

Of course, we’re also getting mango juice, mango sorbet, and mango cookies out of it (etc etc!).  In fact, Ana and I dream of making a large enough batch of cookies to take some to Home of Love (that’s A LOT of cookies!)… so our entire week is going to be full of mango processing adventures in between our other adventures of life and ministry!