Last week I helped out harvesting malanga, which is related to the taro root. I had never tasted malanga until moving to
Nicaragua, and I love it. It grows to
the size of a large egg-shaped grapefruit, is the tuber part of a long-stemmed
plant with large lily pad-like leaves, and when cooked, is the consistency of a
potato, but sweet in taste. It’s white
in color with strips of purple mixed in, and is a popular fried chip snack sold
on buses. I’ve most frequently had it
served to me in a soup, and I’m addicted.
One of my neighbors has acres of malanga planted and when I heard he was
harvesting it I asked if I could tag along to help. I was the only woman in a field of about 15
men who were hired workers/family members to get the harvest started. It involved 3 or 4 men yanking the large
plants out of the ground and piling them in stacks, while the rest of us moved
from pile to pile, cutting off the leaves from the top of the root bulb with a
small machete. The work wasn’t hard, but
after a few hours holding 3 to 4 lb root bulbs in your left hand, cutting off
the leaves with your right, your left hand and wrist starts to get pretty
sore. Plus it was really hot and sunny
that day, and I had (stupidly) only worn my baseball hat, not my dorky bucket
hat that would have shaded the sides of my face as well as the back of my
neck. And the sunscreen I so carefully
applied earlier in the morning was pretty much consistently dripping off my
face with my sweat like a river, even as I reapplied it like a good white
girl. Once my water ran out at noon, I
called it quits and thanked them for letting me help out and learn. I told him that as my payment (since we can’t
accept wages from our community since we get paid from Peace Corps) he could
give me a malanga to take home. He was
still confused as to why I couldn’t accept being paid for my work and probably
thought I was crazy to want to show up and do the work just to learn and get
the experience. Actually, he was
probably perfectly okay with the fact that my half day’s work only cost him one
malanga. I made a vegetable soup with
the malanga that night and it was delicious.
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| Harvesting malanga |
Another first for me this past week was watching the
butchering of a cow. One of my neighbors
buys and butchers a cow about once to twice a month, depending on money at the
time, and it gets announced on the local Pantasma radio the night before to
alert the neighborhood that they can get beef the next morning. I’ve always wanted to watch the process and
see how it compares to what I was taught in my college butchering classes, but
he always starts at 3am so the meat is ready to start selling at 5am when
community members start to show up at his porch. Honestly, that’s just too early for me to get
up to go watch the bloody butchering of a cow, so I’ve never gone to
watch. However, the other day it just so
happened that in transport in the back of a small pick-up truck, the cow died
(it must have had a heart attack or died of stress) en route, so when it got to
the house they started butchering it right away, and I just happened to be at
their house making pizzas for his wife’s birthday. So I got to watch the whole thing in broad
daylight.
I must say, it’s definitely not the sanitary butchering
process we see in the States, which is no surprise considering the hog and
chicken butchering I’ve witnessed here already.
The cow is placed on its back on a cement slab and they slice back the
hide, laying it outstretched on the cement on either side of the carcass, which
is the only thing between it and the ground during the whole butchering
process. It’s all done with bare hands,
no aprons or any protective clothing to keep the carcass from being
contaminated, and the kids hang out close by hoping to help or wanting to touch
things, and the dogs and chickens stalk around the carcass hoping for a tidbit
to fly off to eat. The process goes by
pretty quickly; within a half hour the full sized cow is cut down to only the
head lying on the hide on the ground.
All the parts are hung on hooks from a wooden beam over the front porch,
and the requested pounds of meat are weighed in a hanging scale that’s
apparently not cleaned beforehand. As
the meat is being sold, the money is exchanged in the same bloody hands that
cut and weigh the meat.
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| The kids like to help too |
Seeing how unsanitary the butchering process is here is
definitely unsettling and makes me wonder if people might be healthier if the
sanitation and reduction of contamination in the process is improved. Another part of me thinks that this is the
way people have been butchering and selling their meat for generations, and why
would they want to change it if there’s no evidence that proves it’s unsanitary
when no one gets sick from eating it.
I’ve eaten many meals in this community that have meat from animals that
were butchered in the exactly the same way for decades, and I have little
complaints. So in the end, I bought my
first pound of beef ever since living here in Wale to cook for myself at home,
and it made a pretty tasty beef stew that lasted me three meals. I figure if the meat is properly stored in a
cold fridge overnight and cooked for a long time, all the bacteria should be
dead by the time I eat it, right?
If I don’t post again beforehand, I hope everyone has a
great Halloween! This weekend I’ll be
attending a gala that the business sector holds every year to fundraise for
their youth entrepreneur competition.
It’s a fancy dress-up type get together with dinner and silent auctions
and performances, so I hope it’s fun and that I can find a decent pretty dress
to don for the event. Not often do we Ag
volunteers get the chance to dress up and look presentable, so I’ve gotta get
it together!
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