by lara, lara@trippingonwords.com
So Claire and I have been recovering slowly from the debacle with Runner’s World. We still don’t have all the secondary girls running again, as they continue to sulk about the photographer not taking all of their photos, and we are hoping that it has more to do with the return of their extremely long schools day than continued anger at us. But we’re not all that optimistic. Happily, the marathon we’re heading to proved to be a lot more resistant to cost reduction for AIDS orphans than we expected, so we may not be able to afford all of them going anyway. So there. We’ll see what happens this weekend.
In an effort to reward the kids who are racing home, foregoing afternoon chai (tea), and braving bad weather to run, Claire and I have begun creating homemade “glucose drink.”
In a spurt of pioneering ingenuity, Claire found a recipe for homemade sports drink. It is basically what you take to rehydrate if you become deathly ill. Consisting of water, salt, sugar and a few spoonfuls of juice “to taste” (though what this means in this case is questionable), the drink is not as bad as might be expected. I was admittedly skeptical at first, as I came home to chunky and warm water in my Nalgene last week and told it would be good for me.
Well, we decided to make it for the urphans to reward the runners. So we sent eight of the smallest ones to go wash their hands, and by extension their chunky faces as well, and they came into our kitchen looking all shiny and new and excited. We filled a bucket with water, I tried to get someone to explain how to level off a teaspoon for the salt, and then we dumped in a bunch of sugar to the cheering of all eight of the kids. They decided to kick and shake the bucket to stir in the sugar. I vetoed this idea.
Then the real magic happened. I brought out the food coloring. I told them not to touch it or to taste it and to just dump a TINY bit in the water. Within a few seconds, purple fingertips and purple lips appeared as they all denied tasting the magic powder. A collective “ooooohhhh” went up when we put it in the water, and then the silence was broken as they began beating each other for the chance to taste it. I gave them each a spoon. Because it was tap water, I couldn’t taste it myself, so I asked for opinions. They all sucked on their spoons and told me it was good. Until the last little urphan finally piped up:
“It tastes like this one, not like this one” as he pointed at the salt and sugar respectively.
Turned out when my back was turned, some extra salt got poured in for entertainment, though the taste suffered as a result. We added more sugar and water and took the drink out to the road. With surprising speed, the drink that was supposed to be a reward turned into a rumor, and as we tried to pawn off our purple brew on the runners, they all began refusing it. Luckily, thunderstorms broke, running was cancelled, and the brew put away for another day.
That day was today. I took a page from Claire’s book and told them it was good for them.
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