Peace Corps Cookbook Contribution

A returned volunteer who was making a cookbook from all the Peace Corps countries came upon my blog a few months ago and asked if I would be willing to contribute a Nicaraguan dish.  So I did, and here it is (look for Nacatamales):

 peacecorpscooking.wordpress.com

Thriller and Cow Butchering

So sad for me that I don’t get to celebrate Halloween here.  Nicaraguans are familiar with the American holiday, and here they refer to it as “Noche de las Brujas”, or Witches’ Night, but it isn’t celebrated.  In fact, some families condone it and think of it as relating to the witchcraft and the devil (which many people in the states also believe I guess).  I’ve heard stories of volunteers attempting to explain and share the celebration with their Nica host families or communities and the community in turn having a prayer meeting to try and “save” the volunteer from the satanic display.  I don’t bash the culture or religious practices of Nicaraguans, but thanks to my own American cultural experience, I’m programmed to love celebrating Halloween and am totally missing out on the autumn feeling  of changing leaves, gusty winds, and the promise of pumpkins, costumes, and Halloween TV specials.  In an effort to alleviate the lack of fall here, I started teaching Michael Jackson’s Thriller in my dance class.  I downloaded the video and showed it to the girls in my class, and then I taught them the first section of the dance exactly from the video.  It’s been really fun for me, but I don’t feel like I’ve successfully expressed how iconic this dance is in America to them.  They definitely know the song, as they know most of Michael Jackson’s popular songs.  But they hadn’t ever seen the video before and can’t truly know the level of popularity and following it has achieved in the States.  So I tried to share a little of the October-Halloweeny feeling I love so much from back home.  I think it’s also been a nice break for them from Bellydance (however I do plan to revisit the style in the future).

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. 

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. 

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! 

Housing addition has begun

Wow, is it October already?!  This year has seemingly flow by for me.  I only have 9 months left in my service.  I’m currently still working on getting 10 more ovens built in my community.  The funds have been held up for a while and I’m patiently waiting for the day when my bank account rapidly increases in size.  It was hard choosing the 10 families out of the 25 that were interested to receive the funds for their oven.  I went around and interviewed each family independently to get a better idea of the ones who would maybe benefit more from an oven than the rest.  For example, a family of 8, in my opinion, is more deserving than a family of just 2, considering the mouths fed.  If two neighbors who are good friends both want an oven at their house, I’m going to choose only one of them to receive the funding and they can share the oven with their neighbor.  If a family already has a little store or already makes food products to sell (bread, tamales dulces, guirilas) then they have precedent over a family that doesn’t want an oven to bake and sell food since they will be directly using the oven to improve their income and their business.  There are only a small handful of families I’ve built or will build ovens for that actually want to use it for their business, so most of my reasoning for choosing the recipients was based on family size and their apparent genuine interest in the project as a whole.  It was hard telling people no, but I finally whittled it down to 10 families.  The next problem to deal with (aside from waiting for the money to come in) is finding bricks.  In the winter my community stops making bricks because it’s harder to bake them in the rain, so I might have to wait until summer comes along (January) to actually find bricks.  Hopefully there’s another way.  I’d love to get all of them done before Christmas. 

Unfortunately for me, the construction on the spare room in the backyard at my house has begun.  The worker who put in my floor and doors when I moved in has finally finished this other project he was working on so now he’s available to start the extra room that I’m planned to move into.  So now every morning at about 6:30am a couple of workers show up at my house and start pounding away on their work, nailing boards, mixing cement and cinder blocks, and cutting rebar.  It’s not the noise so much that bothers me, it’s the fact that they’re working directly outside my door each day, so I get no privacy to just sit and read a book or cook food without their eyes bearing down on my back.  The other day after they finished and left, I went out with my measuring tape to make sure the dimensions are what the owner told me they would be, which was 4 meters by 3 meters, plus an attached bathroom.  Well it turned out to be a little narrower than 3 meters, which makes it that much harder to fit my furniture inside the space that’s about half the size of the room I’m currently in.  I figure it’s just another one of those inconveniences in my Peace Corps experience that I’ll have to accustom myself to, and it’s of course not the worst it could be.  If they in fact get the work done in time and I end up having to move to this other room, then it will only be for about 6 months of the remainder of my service, and I’m pretty sure I can deal with that just fine. 

The additional room construction progress

Due to the construction of this new room my Bellydance classes have come to a halt.  The space I was using to give classes in the front part of my house is now full of bags of cement, rebar, and 2x4’s.  Plus I’ve been out of site the past few weekends and couldn't give class.  So now I’m thinking I’ll start teaching the classes at the school, since it’s pretty much always available on weekends and has much more space than my little house.  Plus, that may attract more students since the school’s a more centralized location.  I really don’t want to let these dance classes die out because the girls are really enjoying them and it’s something good for me too.  Considering I’m not doing a ton of work these days, I really want to hang on to something good that’s fun for me and also benefits the community. 

Well it looks like I might finally be involving my community in HIV/AIDS issues.  There’s this workshop at the end of the month being presented by the Healthy Lifestyles sector focusing on educating about HIV/AIDS specifically with coffee producers who hire migrant workers during the coffee picking season.  I hadn’t asked around in my community because everyone who has coffee farms here is mostly a family run business that hires small groups of friends and neighbors to pick coffee each year.  Well, I got a couple of texts from Health volunteer friends asking me why I hadn’t applied for the workshop, and I told them that my community was too small of a production for what it seemed like they were looking for.  It turns out that not many people have applied to go, and almost no aggies, so yesterday I made a bold move and took advantage of the fact the the local Empresa (co-op) in my site was having it’s monthly meeting.  I attended the last part of the meeting and then asked to make an announcement to the group, explaining the workshop and how I’d like to go and bring interested members of my community with me to attend.  I felt really nervous getting up in front of this group of about 30 people, since usually the topic of HIV/AIDS makes people uncomfortable (because they don’t know much about it!), but my job as a volunteer is to teach and facilitate, and I have yet to do anything regarding this health topic in my community.  So I got up and announced the workshop and told them if they were interested they could see me after the meeting (I knew if I asked to see a show of hands of who was interested that no one would make a move in front of the whole group).  Well, I waited quite a bit for the meeting end (turns out they weren’t done yet), but during the waiting I had 3 men get up and come outside to talk to me about it!  One was a man I know well, and he told me he was really interested in learning about it, but that he couldn’t read, and if that would be a problem. I was super happy that he made a point to get up and talk to me because many people are super shy or embarrassed that they can’t read, so that was a good moment for me.  I told him that there may be other people there as well that couldn’t read, and that I’d be at the workshop with him to help him if he needed it.  Plus, he’s still going to be able to listen and learn a lot, which is the most important thing.  In total I had 5 people tell me they wanted to go, which was 5 more than I thought.  Now the only problem is figuring out if I’m allowed to bring 5 with me.  That’s actually why I’m at a ciber today, to send in the application for the workshop, and ask if I can bring that many people.  I sure hope so, cause I don’t like telling people no when they want to learn!

More updates later. . .

~Sarah~