Before coming to Belize, my cooking repertoire included peanut-butter and banana sandwiches, burritos, and a mean tostada. In a particularly gutsy endeavor to make hard-boiled eggs last summer, my roommate and I innocently plunked a couple eggs into a pot of water and watched in horror as they cracked upon sinking to the bottom. Needless to say, I lack a basic culinary swagger.

Transitioning to a land of raw ingredients (flour, corn, squash, plantains, sweet pepper) has forced me to learn my way around a kitchen. This has not been painless, and I’ve lost a lot of good meals out there. This is straight-up jungle cooking, stovetop and four pots. Have I mentioned that we have neither an oven nor a refrigerator?

Here are a couple of snacks and tips that I have found to be comforting even in the darkest of refrigerator-less, oven-less times:

No-bake oatmeal cookies: Stovetop cookies, anytime, anyplace. The one stressful moment is the rigid timing of the boiling process, but you can handle it.

Dutch-oven cakes: Beyond the giggle factor of what the phrase “dutch oven” means (this took some explaining to my British roommate), this is the miracle process for baked goods. Take one large pot and boil 1-2″ of water. Place an object in the water that will be able to hold a smaller pot above the liquid (bent fork, upturned pot lid, big rocks, etc). Complete recipe in smaller pot and then place in larger pot, above the water. Cover larger pot and let cook for >45 minutes. The trick is the patience to let the heat do its work without lifting the lid and letting out all the steam. All recipes remain the same (here’s a good banana bread one).

Kamal cooking: A kamal is a big, cast iron flat surface used to make tortillas. It was a glorious day when we figured out a way to cover the kamal with an overturned pot to be able to melt cheese and make pizzas over a tortilla. Be sure to grease the kamal a bit so that the tortilla doesn’t burn while waiting for the pizza goods to cook.

No refrigerator substitutes: Powdered milk is not Wisconsin dairy, but it does the trick and lasts as long as the ants don’t get to it. Oil can be used in the absence of butter. And it’s key to get over the Westernized paranoia of refrigerating everything. Eggs can be left in tropical heat for >1 week and still be good. That said though, be sure to always crack your eggs into a separate bowl first, so as not to spoil the rest of your meal in case the egg has gone bad.

The all-powerful curry: Cook any bean (lentil, black-eyed pea, pinto) with an abundance of water and chuck in any vegetable. Seriously. Anything. Squash, zucchini, carrot, potato, coco yam, plantain, raisin, eggplant; sky’s the limit here. Douse everything in curry and you’re instantly serving an exotic dish.

My cooking has gotten better, but I’m still short on diversity. Due to my enthusiasm for the curry, my roommate gets nauseous at the mere mentioning of it. So if anyone has some recipes to suggest, I think he’d appreciate it.

Any tips from other countries?

Bridget Barry is currently a volunteer with the Ya’axché Conservation Trust in Southern Belize. For more snippets of the day- to-day lives of volunteers, check out these other posts by La Vida Idealist bloggers.

One of the biggest challenges in our lives was to settle in a mountain village of Tacaná in western Guatemala with my wife—and eventually two children—to learn a Mayan language and assess the viability of mother tongue education. I had already learned Spanish, had a degree in Latin American Studies, and did graduate work in sociolinguistics. Yet, to actually live in rural Latin America was far beyond just knowing about rural Latin America.

I soon learned that I was not prepared to deal with blind spots in my knowledge or the challenges to my intellectual security. I knew poverty statistics, but by befriending a lame beggar I learned something of his moral and emotional struggles. I knew literacy statistics, but had not anticipated how effectively entire communities could function without the printed word. The village became too complex to be a just a grayscale textbook illustration.

We all have blind spots and biases. As long as we’re aware of our biases, we can try to keep them in check. This is much more challenging, however, when as volunteers we’re adapting to a new culture: we want people to see that we have something special to offer, we want to dive in and do something, often before taking the time to really see the new world around us. After all, volunteering is about action, and if we waited until we knew everything, not much would ever get done.

Wikipedia has a fascinating list of cognitive biases, with more than a hundred ways that we can misinterpret our experience. I’ve committed many of these biases, but I’m learning now how to catch myself in the act and adjust my direction. During one of your reflective moments, go through the list and see if you find yourself among all those blind spots. Encourage other readers here by sharing with us how you overcame them.

I’ll go first:

According to the Wikipedia list, I had a deformation professionelle, the “tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one’s own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.” I needed to get outside my own professional discipline and admit that I couldn’t use my old paradigms to explain the holistic problems of poverty and alienation. To understand why the Takaneko language was vanishing, I had to look into economics, political history, and even physical geography. Even more, I had to know Takanekos themselves, as unique, complete and complicated individuals.

How about you? How have you overcome a blind spot?