sábado, 30 de enero de 2010
domingo, 10 de enero de 2010
Christmas in Peru
Aside from pig rangling, my past two weeks have been quite eventful, not so much from work productivity, but more so with Christmas and New Year’s festivities in my community. Since I was not home for Christmas, I was determined to share some of my customs with my family and friends, as well as learn and experience very Catholic, very Peruvian tradition as well. The holiday season started off in Huaraz, in an early holiday celebration with some of the other Peace Corps volunteers from Ancash. We all contributed to a potluck dinner (I made a very tasty, very hearty Minestrone) and bought a S/. 10 gift to put into a Yankee swap. With no little more than U.S. $3.33, I bought a lucky recipient a bottle of champagne and a mysterious bottle of passion fruit vodka soda, which any high school student would probably kill for, but may turn out to have traces of strychnine. No toxicologists were present, luckily, and no one turned out blind at the end of the night. While we all enjoyed our gifts and early Christmas dinner,
I brought out the Yule log, to the enjoyment of my fellow volunteers. While in Huaraz, I took advantage of the opportunity to head to the market, and decided that my gift to my host family would be baking them a large amount of Christmas cookies. The challenge with baking is that we do not have an oven, we use a wood stove to cook all of our food. Because we have electricity, I bought a very cheap, U.F.O shaped oven, which is literally an Easy Bake Oven for grown ups. With its electric plug, my lovely little oven reaches only one mystery temperature, but this seems to work fine to bake cookies. Finding ingredients to bake and paint sugar cookies turned out to be quite a scavenger hunt in Huaraz. Although every stand and every tienda sell exactly the same thing, it turns out that they keep up the competitive edge by carrying one different ingredient at any given time. Between about 25 feet of walking and three separate tiendas, I searched and found at each one powdered sugar, food colouring, and all purpose flour. Huaraz never disappoints, you just need patience.
Back in Huashao on Christmas eve, I plugged in the oven and began baking sugar cookies, as well as made white chocolate walnut fudge, chocolate oatmeal peanut butter cookies and old fashioned banana pudding. For Christmas eve, I baked cookies while sitting with my extended Peruvian family in the kitchen and eating boiled corn, Panetton (fruit cake),
drinking hot chocolate and watching the Polar Express. After we all decided to call it a night, I went to my room with trays and trays of sugar cookies to paint. I do not recommend painting sugar cookies in your bedroom to anyone. Although it turns out to be fun, it is equally disastrous, resulting in powdered sugar all over your body, frosting on your blankets, and kicking
over glasses of mulled wine, that are much better drank than dyeing the cement floor. As well as destroying my habitation, I decorated my 1 ½ foot Christmas tree with recycled ornaments I made, and watched a Muppet Christmas Carol, in Spanish or course.
Christmas morning I slept to the robust, late hour of 8:00am, and went straight down to my rock (where I have cell phone reception, sometimes) and called my family in the U.S. to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. On my walk back to my house, my neighbors pulled me into their home, and proceeded to feed me a large bowl of chocho, a tasty, yet dangerous, white bean salad, a large bowl of wheat soup and a fermented corn drink called chicha. I call chocho dangerous because it most certainly is one of the more dangerous food items you can eat when keeping your gastrointestinal system in mind. In order to prepare chocho, it takes three days of sitting in running water, in this case, in the river. When considering that any untreated water here is home to at least giardia, this prospect will make you cringe with every delicious bite you eat. Ah well, being polite sometimes means inviting in the parasites. After escaping more food from the neighbors, I went to my Peruvian grandmother’s house, to eat a huge lunch, including more chocho of course, before the annual Navidad procession.
The Navidad procession is the parade in which the entire community reunites, with a baby Jesus statue on a platter of flowers, to walk it about 1 ½ miles down the main (and only) street down onto the church. Each community member is invited to carry Jesus on his platter for a period of time, and I was not an exception to this invitation.
On Christmas 2009, at about 2:00pm, I carried a statue of baby Jesus (wearing of course a silver dress that reminded me of David Bowie and aliens) on a platter covered with flowers, as my fellow community members threw flower petals in my path and encouraged me to drink chicha out of a rusty bucket with a communal mug. After the procession, we all poured into the church, and although I am not Catholic, or
anything for that matter, I attended my first Christmas mass. Christmas mass in a rural Andean community is held half in Spanish, half in Quechua, to make sure that everyone understands what is going on. The church can only sit about 20 people, which resulted in it being mostly a standing room audience. To finish off my first Christmas in Peru, we all went back home to eat a large amount of potatoes (a Peruvian delicacy and staple) and piccarrones, pieces of fried dough that is soaked in sweetened sedron (a lemon balm like herb) water.
The next morning, from the combination of large amounts of food, parasite infected protein rich beans, fermented corn refreshments from rusting buckets, and the gifts from the three wise men, I was sick for the day. Merry Christmas, from Peru.
I brought out the Yule log, to the enjoyment of my fellow volunteers. While in Huaraz, I took advantage of the opportunity to head to the market, and decided that my gift to my host family would be baking them a large amount of Christmas cookies. The challenge with baking is that we do not have an oven, we use a wood stove to cook all of our food. Because we have electricity, I bought a very cheap, U.F.O shaped oven, which is literally an Easy Bake Oven for grown ups. With its electric plug, my lovely little oven reaches only one mystery temperature, but this seems to work fine to bake cookies. Finding ingredients to bake and paint sugar cookies turned out to be quite a scavenger hunt in Huaraz. Although every stand and every tienda sell exactly the same thing, it turns out that they keep up the competitive edge by carrying one different ingredient at any given time. Between about 25 feet of walking and three separate tiendas, I searched and found at each one powdered sugar, food colouring, and all purpose flour. Huaraz never disappoints, you just need patience.
Back in Huashao on Christmas eve, I plugged in the oven and began baking sugar cookies, as well as made white chocolate walnut fudge, chocolate oatmeal peanut butter cookies and old fashioned banana pudding. For Christmas eve, I baked cookies while sitting with my extended Peruvian family in the kitchen and eating boiled corn, Panetton (fruit cake),
drinking hot chocolate and watching the Polar Express. After we all decided to call it a night, I went to my room with trays and trays of sugar cookies to paint. I do not recommend painting sugar cookies in your bedroom to anyone. Although it turns out to be fun, it is equally disastrous, resulting in powdered sugar all over your body, frosting on your blankets, and kicking
over glasses of mulled wine, that are much better drank than dyeing the cement floor. As well as destroying my habitation, I decorated my 1 ½ foot Christmas tree with recycled ornaments I made, and watched a Muppet Christmas Carol, in Spanish or course.
Christmas morning I slept to the robust, late hour of 8:00am, and went straight down to my rock (where I have cell phone reception, sometimes) and called my family in the U.S. to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. On my walk back to my house, my neighbors pulled me into their home, and proceeded to feed me a large bowl of chocho, a tasty, yet dangerous, white bean salad, a large bowl of wheat soup and a fermented corn drink called chicha. I call chocho dangerous because it most certainly is one of the more dangerous food items you can eat when keeping your gastrointestinal system in mind. In order to prepare chocho, it takes three days of sitting in running water, in this case, in the river. When considering that any untreated water here is home to at least giardia, this prospect will make you cringe with every delicious bite you eat. Ah well, being polite sometimes means inviting in the parasites. After escaping more food from the neighbors, I went to my Peruvian grandmother’s house, to eat a huge lunch, including more chocho of course, before the annual Navidad procession.
The Navidad procession is the parade in which the entire community reunites, with a baby Jesus statue on a platter of flowers, to walk it about 1 ½ miles down the main (and only) street down onto the church. Each community member is invited to carry Jesus on his platter for a period of time, and I was not an exception to this invitation.
On Christmas 2009, at about 2:00pm, I carried a statue of baby Jesus (wearing of course a silver dress that reminded me of David Bowie and aliens) on a platter covered with flowers, as my fellow community members threw flower petals in my path and encouraged me to drink chicha out of a rusty bucket with a communal mug. After the procession, we all poured into the church, and although I am not Catholic, or
anything for that matter, I attended my first Christmas mass. Christmas mass in a rural Andean community is held half in Spanish, half in Quechua, to make sure that everyone understands what is going on. The church can only sit about 20 people, which resulted in it being mostly a standing room audience. To finish off my first Christmas in Peru, we all went back home to eat a large amount of potatoes (a Peruvian delicacy and staple) and piccarrones, pieces of fried dough that is soaked in sweetened sedron (a lemon balm like herb) water.
The next morning, from the combination of large amounts of food, parasite infected protein rich beans, fermented corn refreshments from rusting buckets, and the gifts from the three wise men, I was sick for the day. Merry Christmas, from Peru.
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