Food and Coffee

Food and Coffee

Peace Corps is supposed to be hard, but I have to say my life has been pretty cushy lately, if you exclude the struggles the work presents.  They are many and varied and one of these days I will try to write about them.  I need a little distance to see that part of life here more clearly.  Since I’m in the thick of it, I don’t have perspective.

 But, as my son Alex would say, I’m living large in other ways. For instance as I write I’m drinking café con leche.  The afternoon rain has cooled everything down nicely.  When it’s hot in the afternoon, I treat myself to a banana smoothie.  Yes, that means we have a blender and ice in this house.  The ice is  unusual but the blender is not because it is used to make frescoes, Nicaragua’s traditional fruit drink.

After months of frugal, basic cooking, I’m taking advantage of the kitchen and I’m having a really good time.  I made yoghurt from cow’s milk.  Drop dead delicious, better than anything I tasted in Europe or in the States.  I made fabulous chili from fresh vegetables, carne de soy and my host mom’s remarkable beans. (We are careful not to waste gas so she cooks my beans with hers and they are perfect.) I made broccoli-potato soup without stock, just good vegetables and cow’s milk, all pureed it all in the blender.

 A friend asked me to show her how to make pizza.  She actually uses her oven. (Gas here is expensive, and most ovens are just used to store stuff in.)  So we made sauce from tomatoes, sautéed onions and peppers as a topping, grated cuajada (local soft cheese), and made the dough just like in the States although I had to buy a half pound of yeast and guess at the right amount (no handy little packets).  If I do say so myself, the pizza was unbelievably good, perfect really.  Another friend, learning about the pizza, asked me to come to her house to make oatmeal cookies tomorrow.  Come on!  I am hoping my reputation spreads and I get more offers to cook with people. I like the parallel play part; working with people to make something is so different from sitting in their houses being served something.  And this is a way I can give back.  I buy most of the ingredients and leave behind most of the food, although tomorrow I’ll take a few cookies to give to other people as gifts.

I guess you can tell how giddy I am about the food situation.  I talk to another volunteer who has just moved into his own separate place and is cooking for himself for the first time.  We talk food.  He’s giddy, too.  Why should this be, we asked ourselves recently.  We both agree things just taste better here. A potato has such flavor, same for onions and peppers.  Milk is whole and creamy.  Fruit tastes so sweet and good.  So maybe it’s the ingredients.  But it also could be that we are cooking food we know after eating a Nica diet (in his case) or a too basic diet (in mine) for so long. Whatever, we’re having fun.

I want to write about my bus ride back from Ocotal today. I went there to draw money from the bank, buy a baby gift and food shop at the only alternative in these parts to the unpleasant Pali. I can’t remember if I’ve written about the advantages of being an old person here, but one of them is that often I get seats on crowded buses because the generation of people older than 30 years honors my wrinkles.  Mothers holding babies often stand but I get offered a seat. (An aside—I really like riding busses and if you saw the busses you’d think I was crazy, but you get to see the people and the beautiful world rushing by and breeze blows through—all of which is enhanced, needless to say, if you have a seat.)

Anyway, I got a seat up front and another senora sat next to me.  Often people on the bus don’t talk, but she asked about me and when I told her I was a volunteer with Peace Corps, she said, so you have  amor de humanidad.  I was taken aback.  No one here, including me, has ever quite put it like that.  So I said yes, feeling a little guilty because I know how various are my motives for being here.  But my perceived altruism put her in the mood to tell me that she was on her way to visit her son.  She has 8 children and they all live on a coffee farm north of Ocotal except her son who is 20 and joined the army. She misses him and is worried about him.  He is stationed a distance from their farm.  I picked up pretty early in the conversation that she is a serious evangelical.  She asked me about my religious preference.  I have a new answer to that question which seems to work.  I tell people that I was raised a Catholic but don’t go to church any more.  She could relate.  She was raised Catholic, too.

 On her lap she was carrying her purse/bag with a thermos sticking up out of the top.  Thermoses are common here because people like sweet coffee and they make it in the morning and then keep it for the day, usually having a cup in the afternoon sometime. I don’t see people traveling with them though.  She told me she was bringing coffee to her son.  Then she offered me a cup (I swear I never mentioned the thermos or hinted in any way.  I don’t even like sweet coffee,) and when I said yes ( I always say yes to offers of food or drink) she pulled out a ceramic cup from her bag and poured me a half cup, there in the bus, the aisles jammed with people watching my good fortune. She wanted to give me her phone number but we didn’t have a pen.  She wanted me to visit her on the farm. I wish I had the number.  I would have liked to visit the coffee farm. When I finished the coffee, the cup went back in her bag.

I just realized the coffee story probably struck you as unremarkable because in the States people are always drinking coffee as they travel.  Not so here.  And I think it was a sign of her special generosity to offer me some of her son’s coffee, grown, roasted and ground on her farm. That I, a stranger, am the beneficiary of such kindness always amazes me.