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.   

Mothers’ Day

Mothers’ Day

Silly me, I thought Dia de Las Madres in Nicaragua would kind of be like Mothers’ Day at home, some phone calls, dinner for Mom and a few gifts.  But where in the States Mothers’ Day is supported by greeting card manufacturers and has the feeling of obligation weighing it down, here the government is all over the holiday and yet families embrace it, too.

I’ve been hearing about Dia de Las Madres since the first of May.  The day itself is May 30 and the month builds toward it.  There were three public Mothers’ Day celebrations in my town, the first put on by a NGO which supplied actual printed invitations, a glossy magazine styled booklet condemning domestic violence and praising mothers and a gathering in the sports stadium which was  attended by about 20 dignitaries in seats at the front, and about 45 spectators although there were chairs for 200.  All the dignitaries got slick diplomas—not the photocopied kind.  I don’t know why this event happened.  I’m sure the organizers had a goal, but judging by the turnout, despite the slick invitations, they must have been disappointed. The second event for mothers was in the same place but this one was mobbed.  It is held every year and there are give-aways, big baskets of food and colorful items distributed  by lottery, all paid for by the mayor’s office.  There was an MC who kidded with the ladies, made them dance or compete for a date with him.  The moms, there in droves with their kids, loved it. The third event happened at the high school.  School was not closed for the day but there were only a few teachers in classrooms. The rest were preparing for the event which included the teachers cooking lunch for the moms, a poem recited by a member of each class and dances.  The moms came to that, too.

But the real Mothers’ Day is at home. The day before the 30th, I came home from school to find that my host-mom redecorated the front room, by which I mean she changed the slip-covers on the chairs to one with a bright red and coral print, changed the curtains from white to red, got out her red artificial flowers to fill containers and put up old Mothers’ Day cards and gifts.  All this was in preparation for the events of the next day.  Early in the morning she was cooking rice and chicken for expected family who did indeed show up, some with gifts, but all to wish her a happy Mothers’ Day and spend time with her. This day was very important to her as it was to other mothers.  All day long you could see people walking in the streets dressed up, carrying packages to visit a mother or beloved grandmother.

It’s easy to be cynical about Mothers’ day here or in the States.  The government here often doesn’t have much in the way of good news for its citizens and so celebrations of one thing or another serve to keep spirits up. But in my view the mothers of Nicaragua deserve all the celebrating and more.  Here mothers run the houses, raise the children, take care of the elderly are the social security system when the kids can’t live on their own.  They often do all this without the help of a man. I mean often, not always.  There are some really good men here, but there are a great number of households headed by moms.  How women do all they do given their lack of financial support and few jobs is a mystery.

To put a face on it, let me describe my host-mom who I called Indiana in an earlier post (not her real name). She’s 71. She had six children who lived, two who died.  She never married but lived with the same man, the father of her children, for 30 years. He worked on farms.  He left her for another woman. They are amicable now.  He visits often.

Indiana bought the house we live in with the help of her parents and a bank which partially financed it.  To start it was a simple two or three room house with a large horno (beehive shaped oven) outside.  Indiana began making rosquillas to sell.  She was a dependable worker and found a distributor to buy her rosquillas.  She employed 8 other ladies to help make them.  Her days were amazingly long.  She got up at 1 or 2 in the morning to get the oven going and begin the preparation of the dough.  She worked long days, also caring for children, and then 2 days a week, Wednesday and Sunday, she loaded up huge bamboo baskets with bags of rosquillas, got them stored on the roof of the 4 a.m. bus for the 3 ½ ride to Managua where a taxi took her and the rosquillas to the distributor who paid her in cash.  By 9:30 in the morning she was back at the bus station for the 3 ½ hour ride back to town.  She told me that she slept on the bus, her money hidden in the band of her underpants and her hands folded over her stomach. She did this for decades.

I am not clear on why she stopped making rosquillas.  What I do know is that a time came when she couldn’t pay the mortgage.  The kids were grown and so she got work in Miami caring for an elderly Cubana.  She worked for 3 years, paid off the mortgage, got rid of the horno, and added on to the house.  She made three more trips to the U.S., each on 6 month visas, caring for children of Cuban businessmen.  She returned for good to live in her house and retire.  That was 6 years ago.

Indiana has a third grade education.  Of her 6 surviving children, all but one studied after high school.  All take fine care of themselves, a couple of them do pretty well. She is devoutly Catholic, but open to new things.  She has a cell phone and a gringa in her house. I think she secretly hopes I’ll convert, but she is never pushy.  I go to church with her once in a while to be companionable.

What a woman!  And there are a bundle like her.  Mothers to celebrate.