One hundred ways to use caña.

It's been quite some time since we wrote about anything particularly Honduran. Since about a year ago, everything around here started seeming, well, normal. We used to write about, let's say, a Guatemalan market we shopped at, or all of the exotic tropical plants surrounding our house here in Honduras. But all those things have become normal, regular, average [well, maybe not quite average]. My point is, if we still wrote about such things, it would be similar to a Wisconsin resident writing about going shopping at Walmart and passing some maple trees on the way [oh, and having a bratwurst for lunch]. 

What I'm trying to say is this: something Honduran happened! I mean, something we hadn't experienced before. We had the chance to spend a morning with one of my English students and her family up on a beautiful mountain, watching about thirty men [all related] process the caña that they'd just harvested. In case you're unfamiliar with caña, it also has an English name: sugar cane. Here's a nice photo of some chopped caña, ready to be turned into one of many different caña products. 

Now, I could probably spend 3 hours talking about all the stuff that was happening with the caña while we were there [that's how long it took us to figure out what was going on...], but I'll make it as short and sweet as possible. 

This is a view of the operation from afar. Notice the oxen, the guy following the oxen to get them to keep moving [must be dizzy!], the man feeding the caña into the machine from the pile to his left. Meanwhile, younger boys are using burros to go collect more caña. 

 Here's a close-up. The barrel is used to collect the juice that the machine squeezes out from the caña. The kid takes the leftover caña and puts in on the "used" pile a few feet away. 

The juice from the barrel gets put into these two boiling bins- one is for the stuff that has boiled as long, so it's thinner. The other one has been boiled a bit longer and is on its way to becoming caña honey. 

A fun byproduct of the boiling caña juice is the foam that collects on the top. It's like drinking a sweet foam [well, it's not really LIKE drinking a sweet foam, it actually IS drinking a sweet foam]. The men called the foam Cachaza, but I've asked other Hondurans and they don't seem to recognize the word. Also, if you google "cachaza", you get results for some type of Brazilian liquor. The actual translation of "cachaza" is something along the lines of "a laid-back attitude". So, the name remains a mystery. 

Here, the men are using a big paddle to thicken the already boiled juice. Then, they bottle it as "caña honey". 

After being stirred around for a while, the stuff gets really thick. Then, it gets placed into molds to make little [or big!] candies. The interesting part about this is that there are a ton of bees everywhere during this process, and many of them get stuck in the candy. Nobody seemed to concerned, though... 

After drying the molds in the sun, the candy is ready to be extracted. If you look closely, you can see the little squares in the bin.

Here's Andrew and our little guy, Edgar, enjoying the sweetness of some of the extra candy that the guys took out for us to eat instead of putting it in the molds. 

And, finally, this guy is doing some sort of awesome artsy thing with the candy to make it into taffy. For some reason, they call this "the rooster", which was pretty much the most confusing part of the day. 

Coffee Cure

This morning, Essa, our beloved street dog, had her second seizure since we've known her. As traumatic as it is for me to watch her seize, at least I knew what was going on this time. This afternoon, she's back to her normal self, staring out the window at guatusas.

Fortunately, one of Andrew's students has a solution to Essa's seizure problem. After Andrew told his kids that Essa had a seizure today, he participated in the following dialogue with one of his students:

Student: "Give it coffee!"
Andrew: "Huh?"
Student: "Coffee. My neighbor's dog had seizures and they gave it coffee."
Andrew: "Really?"
Student: "Yes, but with agua pura. And NO SUGAR!"

So there you have it. The coffee solution. Keep in mind, we live in a place where 3 year-olds drink coffee (although it's usually rather weak NesCafe).

Update

Well, it's been quite awhile since we've been on here, so I thought I'd throw a little update out into the world. We spent 3 weeks over the holiday season spending time with family and checking out the job situation in New Orleans. As it turns out, there's an awesome job situation. Andrew had some pretty good interviews with a few schools, and I was accepted into teachNOLA, the Teach for America-esque alternative teaching certification program for New Orleans.

So, if all goes as planned, we'll be moving ourselves back to New Orleans in the summer. All of this is very exciting, but being someone who always overanalyzes my life choices, now is the time for me to start freaking out about the little time we have left here. That being said, I'm leaving you all right now in favor of going for a run through the idyllic mountain valley that I can only take advantage of for a few more months.

Happy new year to all of you! This year, do something you're terrified of doing. I bet it'll feel awesome.

Perplexed.

For as long as I live in Honduras, I will never understand why a stay-at-home mom, whose children are in school during the day, needs to hire a full-time housekeeper, cook, and nanny.

Halloween- The Devil's Holiday

Short but interesting piece of knowledge: Hondurans are not so into Halloween. For most, especially for evangelicals, it's the devil's holiday. However, this idea is not necessarily shared with other Latin American countries. In our neighborhood, on the university campus, there will be organized trick-or-treating tonight. Our university has residents from all over Latin America- almost every family with kids will be participating in the trick-or-treating, except for the families from Honduras. Interesting, eh? I'd be interested to know more about how other Central American citizens view the holiday.

An afterthought.

(Speaking of poverty, if any of you want to help to improve the situations for the families I work with, consider donating to the scholarship program at Andrew's school. I work with a wonderful, inspiring mom right now whose family only needs about $30 more a month in her scholarship fund to ensure that both kids can take advantage of the awesome education that the school provides. Her husband just lost his job, and they have no income, but she still offered to bring lunch for me at our English classes every day. Anyway, if you ever feel inspired, you can always email me about contributing to the scholarship fund.)

La Pobreza

Several people have told Andrew and me that they really enjoy reading our blog posts, that we are hilarious and intriguing and genius (well, maybe nobody has mentioned those exact three words), and that they want more. More posts! More posts!

Now, I don't want to disappoint our giant fan base (i.e. my lovely sister in-law, Karen), but here's the thing: There's one topic that I always want to address, but I don't know how to do it in a way that will be funny and witty. And that's because it's not. 

The topic I'm referring to is poverty. And poverty, well, it pretty much just sucks. 

There are certain things I do to try to fit in here: 

-I try to speak the language.

-I try to respect the fact that no wives/mothers work or do anything at all outside of the home (I get bonus points for this one, because I'm practically one of these wives, without the whole having kids part.)

-I don't punch men in the face when they whistle at me. 

-When the electricity goes out, or the water turns off when I'm all soapy in the shower, or the bus that was supposed to pick me up doesn't come, or there are no beans or veggies or milk at the store, I try not to complain. 

-LASTLY, and most importantly for this blog post, I earn around Honduran minimum wage. Andrew, on the other hand, earns a bit more than that and is generous enough to share it with the ol' ball and chain, but for the purposes of this topic, let's focus on my salary. 

So, reflecting on that last point: I earn a Honduran wage because I choose to. If my goal was to earn money, I could probably find a higher paying job here in Honduras in an area that I'm not passionate about. Even more, I could go back to the US (which I presumably will do at some point) and earn much, much more. And, because of my earning potential, I will never, ever, ever be able to completely identify with my students. 

Oh, I know what you're thinking. "It's an economic crisis!", "There ARE no jobs in the US!", "Things are BAD here!" 

But this is the truth: For as bad a state as the US economy might be in, it's the US. The land of opportunity. While I would argue that it's definitely not the land of equal opportunity, it does have a few perks. If you're hungry, there are food stamps. If you're homeless, there are shelters. If you want your kid to have better opportunities than you did, it's possible to find a public school that can prepare him/her for college. And then, if you don't make a lot of money, your kids can get grants and can take out loans to pay for college. Now, I'm not arguing that being in a situation that requires you to utilize food stamps and homeless shelters is ideal- it's not. I'm not saying that college doesn't lead you to violently weep while looking at your loan payment bills for spending four years earning a degree that sends potential employers running (read- Women's Studies)- it does. And I'm not saying that people aren't suffering in the US. They are. But that's for another post (or rather, millions of books on the subject). 

My point is that, here in Honduras, over half of the population lives below the poverty line and around 40% lives in "extreme poverty" (according to the World Bank). When there's no food in the family, nobody eats. When there's no housing, your house is a ditch on the side of the highway. My students, who are mothers, would never ask me for anything, but they tell me their stories. Stories of living with their 10 family members in one room under a tin roof, of running out of food for themselves by the time they've fed their families, of knowing that they can't support another child even though their husbands control when they have sex and don't want them to use birth control. 

I could go on and on with the heart-wrenching stories I've heard, but I won't. There's probably a 99.9% chance that I'll never live in poverty- real poverty. And that's what separates me from my students. Poverty.