Monthly Archives: June 2019

Home Lab: Kombucha

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This winter I started brewing kombucha. Kombucha is a fermented, non-alcoholic drink that (like yogurt) has probiotics that are helpful for your gut. It’s made from tea, sugar, and a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). There are many ways to flavor kombucha, but I use herbal teas—mostly fruity ones.

Kombucha is a little tangy, a little sweet, and a little bitter. When all goes well it’s wonderfully fizzy. The fun part about making kombucha is every batch is a little science experiment. The goal is to produce a drink with a nice flavor combination and delightful carbonation—but it all depends on how happy the SCOBY is. The teas you use, the temperature, the amount of sugar, and the time you wait all influence the kombucha outcome. If you wait too long, the batch turns out very much like vinegar. If you’re too impatient, the kombucha is too sweet (because the microbes haven’t had time to eat it) and flat.

I’m just getting used to brewing in the summer, where the temperature is much warmer and the process goes way faster. Today when I checked my bottles, I had to put each one I opened in the sink because they had so much fizz they overflowed like a shaken soda bottle!

The kombucha process changes the flavor of the tea you use—sometimes for the best, sometimes for the bitter. For example, I DON’T like peach tea, but when I turn it into kombucha it’s quite yummy and not as painfully sweet as I find straight peach tea.

There’s something highly satisfying about cultivating microbes to produce something healthy. Many of us only think of bacteria when we get sick or when we want to kill germs—which makes us forget how many microbes are working for us each and every day. I like the meditation of thinking about microbes as my teammates.

Brewing kombucha has made me think more about the good microbes in my life, and it’s also made me feel better. A glass of kombucha a day, seems to keep the stomach aches away. I noticed this when I traveled in Spain for 2 weeks on vacation recently—many days my stomach hurt even though I was eating healthfully. I think it was a combination of my gut missing kombucha and my digestive system wanting to know where the yerba mate was (mate also changes how you digest food and I drink a lot of mate too). Not entirely by accidentally, the beverages I enjoy daily (mate and kombucha) both help with digestion. When I was younger I used to have a stomach ache almost every time I ate. I almost never do now. It could be growing up. It could be the microbes. Regardless, I enjoy the challenge of making my SCOBY happy so it works for me—I figure one more symbiotic relationship in my life can only be good.

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5 Years Later – Quiet Moments

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About five years ago I moved to Paraguay. I wasn’t sure what would come of a continental move, but I was ready for a challenge and I wanted a break from the American rat race for a few years. I had high hopes but no clue what to expect. I’d first learned of the Peace Corps when I was in 7th grade and known since then that I needed to do it.

I’m sure I’ve said this somewhere in a pervious post, but living in Paraguay and among Paraguayans changed me. People are always changing, but there are life experiences that expedite change—the Peace Corps (and living abroad for a few years) is one of them.

Living in Paraguay changed my self identity, my daily priorities, and the way I thought and saw the world. My experiences in Paraguay fine-tuned my values. Being a foreigner, the only white girl, the only American, the lunatic who liked to go for runs and hour-plus walks, the veggie addict, the advocate for sex ed and separation from abusive partners, the outspoken supporter of love regardless of gender mix, the not catholic, the woman with unpainted nails, the single one, the over 25 and still childless woman, the one who wouldn’t wear short shorts and small shirts, the female who refused to dance in heels, the one who disliked pork and large amounts of meat…being the odd one in the fish bowl forced me to think about the battles I wanted to pick and those I’d leave for never.

Of all the things I learned, what stays with me is the internal calm and confidence the women in Paraguay shared with me. Life is ridiculous most of the time, but Paraguayan women have a natural grace and pride that is humble and unwavering. I certainly didn’t luck out and get their grace, but what I did learn is that we (humans) are better and happier when we make time for quiet moments. I’ve been thinking about the secret to Paraguayans’ love of life and happiness for these 5 years, and I’m pretty sure it comes down to making time to be still. Everyone has their way of doing this, but mine has come to be drinking mate. I learned to drink mate in Paraguay.

Mate is a tea-like drink made from yerba mate. It’s loose-leaf tea that you put in a cup. In the cup is a metal straw with a filter at the end. You pour hot water over the leaves and drink through the straw almost immediately. With a little practice your lips get used to the hot straw and you don’t burn your tongue on the hot water.

Yerba mate has some caffeine in it, but I mix the yerba mate with so many other herbs (peppermint, hibiscus, lemon grass…) that it hardly has any. I don’t drink it for the energy boost. For me, mate provides moments to reflect. For me, it’s the symbol of my time in Paraguay, personal growth, and the people I care about. Mate is usually a shared drink. Since returning to the US I always drink mate alone (because people here don’t drink it), but I still think of the Peace Corps volunteers and the Paraguayans who shared it with me. I also think of the other people in my life, currently and in the past, who are shaping my world even if they’ve never sipped mate.

Five years later I still drink mate because I learned happiness is in the still moments. I learned that people are where joy comes from and that I am the best human I can be when there is time for mate in my life.

As I write this my mind is quiet, but deep down the excitement and nerves of starting medical school this August are bubbling. I’m about to embark on another journey like none I’ve done before—the expedition of learning and mastering the ways of the human body. The challenge of becoming a medical doctor. But, as hard as medical school is, I know living in Paraguay was harder and I already did that. And though there will be days in medical school when I’ll skip mate, I know that it’ll be quiet moments drinking mate that will propel me through the countless exams, the high stress of learning more than seems possible, the life-or-death decisions, and the sadness of seeing people suffering. Everyone, I think, has their grounding mechanism. It turns out that mine is a dried herb I buy 6 kilograms at a time and often sip before most other people’s morning alarms have started snoozing.

Finding the Path

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We all have bad days. The problem with having a bad day and working in healthcare is that it’s unacceptable for your mood to affect the quality of your care and people are sick every day. The trouble with healthcare on a bad day is that healthcare requires hundreds of human interactions within a shift. Hundreds of moments where patience is required, where you must do small tasks that are annoying and big tasks that are important, and all the tasks between that together help people heal. You notice everything a little more on a bad day. So how do you get through it?

Not so long ago, my shift landed on a bad day. But, there was a patient who turned the shift around for me. He told me how he raised his sons. He was a single father. He had a path he wanted them to go on and he thought his job was to lift them back up to that path when they fell rather than push them down. That’s what he did and he was proud of them. He told me he was lucky.

I think I’d like to approach bad days like this father approached his sons. A bad day is a fall from the right path. It just takes some nudging to get back on track again.

The benefits of working in healthcare on a bad day are the kind, wise patients you’ll likely encounter. They’ll set things right, even though you’re the one that’s supposed to be curing, if you listen to them.