Fiambre

The best blog posts are always about food, right?

Today is the day of the dead.  I've heard that in other parts of the country they fly giant kites today, but here the primary form of celebration seems to be eating an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink salad, Fiambre (fee-ahm-brey).  This one was made and brought over to my house by the wife of Victor Hugo, who runs the computer lab I worked in/studied for my first six months here:

Having heard much about fiambre over the past few days from excited Guatemalans, I was both excited and a bit scared to dig in.  I decided to try to identify ingredients as I ate.  Here's the list I came up with:

boiled egg

pickles 

green olives

asparagus

white cheese - crumbly/salty

white cheese - soft

cheddar/american cheese

pickled garlic 

baby corn

pickled onion

lettuce

cauliflower

fava beans

beets

green onion

ham

some other cold cuts

radish

tomato

peas

sweet corn

carrots

green beans

beef

broccoli

pacaya

red pepper

blood sausage

at least two other kinds of sausage/chorizo

herbs (oregano? mint? others?)

brussel sprouts

chicken

some kind of unidentified light-colored veggie, turned bright pink by the beet juice

I am positive that I'm still missing at least five ingredients - of course, I only made it about halfway through before tucking the rest away for later, so who knows what secrets the second half holds.  And I have to say, even after eating, I am still both excited and a little bit scared.

La Niña de Independencia

Long time no blog!  This update has been on my to-do list for months and months now, but last week I had a particularly blog-worthy moment, so now that I'm all caught up on my fieldnote writing I've finally managed to write something up for you all as well.

I spent last week out in the community of Uaxactún (wah-shak-TOON), a village of a little less than 1000 people tucked out at the end of 23km of rutted dirt road past Tikal National Park.  The community has a sustainable forestry concession here inside the reserve, and is set smack on top of a major archaeological site, flanked by an ancient mayan solar observatory on one side and a grouping of temples on the other.

One night after dinner at the local comedor, a casual restaurant set up in the front of Doña Mirna's house, Mirna and a friend of hers announced that they'd like to speak with me, and sat down very seriously across the table from me.  I was nervous as they began speaking, until a moment later I realized they were asking me to take part as part of the judge's panel for the following day's "niña de independencia" pageant.  "Sure!" I answered happily, "sounds like fun!"

I began to wonder, however, when Daniel - one of my coworkers during the visit - reacted the next day to the same invitation with an "ohhhhhh no, I'm not doing that again!"

"No, it's different now," insisted Mirna, "there's no money involved anymore, it's just for simpatía."

They explained that in past years, the girl who won the annual contest would receive a cash prize, as well as the honor of representing the community at various fairs and functions throughout the following year.  In the past, the whole community had voted on the winner, but each year scandals erupted as families made alliances and bought votes for their daughters, and the pageants were always followed by accusations and community-dividing fights.  Daniel, it turned out, had been in charge of vote counting in a previous year, and after the results came in, half the people in the town turned on him, accusing him of throwing the vote.  After some goading from Mirna, he reluctantly agreed to take part in the new system - no money involved, and only a panel of community-outsiders like ourselves judging.

So, against all odds, the next night I found myself - a white, Canadian-American feminist science studies scholar - seated alongside four Guatemalan men, judging the outfits, artistic technique, and charisma and expression (our three criteria categories) of a group of rural elementary school girls, ranging in age from 6 to 12.

The evening's festivities commenced with a formal, almost solemn, series of patriotic demonstrations.  Two flags made a slow procession through the room to the stage, followed by the endless (12 verses!) national anthem, then a pledge of allegiance to the flag, and finally a remarching of the flags back again to the back of the room.

The MC of the evening's event was one of the teachers from the local school, whose stern and disapproving manner started out a pale shade of nasty, but only worsened as the pageant wore on, the corners of his lips pulled further and further down in disappointment with the conduct of audience and judges alike.  He announced the entrance of the first contestant, and a six-year old girl danced her way towards the stage in a two-piece shimmery outfit, with a green headdress made out of the leaves of the local xate palm - harvested from the local forest and exported to the US and Europe for floral arrangements, xate is the "daily bread" of many families in the community.  With her cheeks sucked into a heavily rehearsed fish-face pout and arms twisting side to side in practiced choreography, she made her way down the aisle, up onto and around the stage, then took up a spot at the back, as her seven co-contestants followed her one by one in order of advancing age.

As this first girl took the stage, I glanced down at the score sheet that I had been given, and realized that I would be required to assign points to little girls for how well they pranced around in cute outfits.  I was suddenly uncomfortable, wanting to back out, or to just give all the girls a full 100 points in everything.  I noticed, too, that each of us judges seemed to be making up our own idiosyncratic point systems, not to mention disagreeing about what exactly "artistic technique" meant in this context.

In their first 'presentation,' the girls each wore outfits symbolizing some aspect of the life, history, or culture in Uaxactún: xate palm, the local archaeological sites and mayan ruins, a character from a classic colonial-times story, maize, forest conservation, etc.  For their second presentation, they came out in their school uniforms, and performed a group dance number.  This was by far the most uncomfortable moment of the pageant for me, as the girls strutted in their short plaid skirts and knee socks with tiny hips swaying, blowing kisses to the crowd, a disturbing juxtaposition of performed sexuality and stylized schoolgirl innocence.  I tried to shake it off, and to pay attention to which girls were smiling (charisma points!) and which lost their way in the more complex choreography of the second dance (artistic technique!), but I was glad when they sashayed back away to change for their final act.

Six of the candidatas in their symbolic outfits

This final presentation involved the girls coming out in evening gowns, as their favorite colors, school subjects, pastimes, etc, were announced by the MC.  The girls tottered awkwardly on high heels, such that another student was posted to help them up the three steps onto the stage.  They lined up along the back wall, posing in a standard one-hand-on-hip stance, and one after the other approached the front of the stage to give a short speeches touching on patriotism, local pride, or the future of the community and country --- their 'message' as candidates for independence day queen.

At the end of their speeches, the girls retreated to chairs which had been arranged for them along the back edge of the stage, to await our official judges ruling.  We were instructed to consult with each other, and determine the first place (niña de independencia) and second place (niña de Guatemala) winners.  As we huddled together to compare, it turned out that the winner I picked - the third grader, who blew the others away in "charisma" on my score sheet, as she was the only one with a big, genuine smile - was different from the winner the others all agreed on: one of the two sixth-graders.  I agreed to let my first placer go, especially since the older girl had come in a very close second on my score sheet.

Deciding on second place was much tougher, as at this point we all had different choices, and after much discussion we ended up tallying and taking the average of all of our scores for all the girls.  As we complied all our different scores, I realized that all the girls had come out within about a five point margin on my sheet,  a reflection of my earlier sympathy and resistance to scoring them at all.  The men  had all docked far more points from the girls, leaving more clear differentiation between the winners and losers.  Of course, in the end, this meant that when averaged out, my opinions ended up weighing less than the other judges in the final decision.

Still, my favorite came out in third place, only 0.4 points out of 100 behind the second place candidate from fourth grade.  We argued back and forth over minor details of presentation and the younger girl's clearly winning charisma, unable to make a final call for second place, until finally one of the judges went up and whispered to the teacher that we had a tie for second place, so he announced to the audience that they would officially declare a third place spot, the niña monja blanca (Guatemala's national flower), so that we could get on with things.

By this point, it was almost 11:30 at night, and the audience of unruly kids had gotten noticeably more ruly as they grew more and more tired.  Throughout the contest, the kids had been chided by the stern and serious MC, who gave pointed speeches on the values of order and discipline between acts, as the audience squirmed and squealed and pressed up against the stage, laughing and running around and spitting orange seeds onto the floor.  The teacher grew more and more exasperated and severe over the evening, chiding not only the kids but their parents for letting them get out of control, and at one point marching across the floor to twist the ear of a boy who had committed the crime of sitting down on the stairs up to the stage instead of the floor where he belonged.  Daniel and I exchanged skeptical looks at his disproportionate sense of outrage at the conduct of his compatriots, but at the end we too were chastised gruffly for how long we were taking to make our final decision.

We continued to argue for another few minutes about which girl would come in second vs third place, and when one of the judges finally got up to announce the winners (they wanted me to make the announcement, but I quickly and resoundingly refused) he told the room that the only reason we had chosen one over the other was that we gave the second-place slot to the slightly older girl, age being the final determining criterion.  The three selected girls came up to the front, beamed out quick thank yous while everybody snapped pictures, and I tried my best not to look at the faces of the girls left sitting along the back of the stage, quietly waiting while the winners got their moment of glory.

Las Reinas

Even though we judges had been selected from outside the community - a fact repeatedly emphasized by the MC throughout the proceedings - the next day there was still plenty of gossip about who had won, and why.  When Daniel and I showed up for breakfast at Mirna's the next day, it was the sole topic of conversation.

"I really thought the girl in the purple dress (one of the fifth graders) was going to win," Mirna said, "she spoke so well!  And everybody I've talked to was surprised it wasn't her.  And, I'm a little disappointed at who did win, only because people are now talking... the girl who won is one of my son's students, and since you two and two of the other judges eat here with me, people are talking, you know."

It didn't matter that we were outsiders, that we didn't know about this obscure connection beforehand, rumors and speculation were still flying.  "Still," she reassured us, "it's nothing like it was before, it's really not such a big deal."

Aside from all this pageantry silliness, the best part of the night was actually one of the side acts. Between each of the girls' presentations, students from different classes in the local school performed short dances, the vast majority poorly-choreographed shuffles to pop songs.  One group of four boys, around 7 years old, clumped themselves, giggling, on one side of the MC while another teacher set up the music off to the side of the stage.  When the song started pumping - a bass-thumping, latin-rhythmed top 40 song - the four boys started wiggling and bouncing along to the music.

In the green - the John Travolta of Uaxactún

But when the skinniest boy in front started dancing, the whole room went wild.  He shook his hips like Shakira and circled his arms to the beat, his flexibility and rhythm accompanied by a cool, nonchalant, muy tranquilo facial expression.  He was just chillin, doin his thing.  But all five of us judges burst into laughter, it was so unexpected and wonderful.  The other boys, wiggling awkwardly, started shifting into a line directly behind the boy, trying to hide, but he turned and waved them out again, and they shuffled back to the sides, awkwardly grinning.  The boy kept up his dance while one of the judges commented to me, "he moves more than las candidatas!" and another declared him "the john travolta of uaxactún!"   I thought quietly to myself, laughing hysterically all the while, "that kid is not going to have problems finding girlfriends later in life!"

¡Pacaya!

I tried pacaya the first time I was in Guatemala, back in 2007, and might have forgotten its existence except that I have a little picture scribbled in the notebook where I was keeping all my Spanish-learnin notes back then...  

Pacaya - an example of comida amarga (bitter)

Pacaya, so the internet tells me, is actually the male inflorescence (that's bunch of flowers to you non-botanists) of a certain kind of palm tree, eaten primarily in Guatemala but a little bit in adjoining countries.  The inflorescence is a bunch of long skinny strands of tiny unopened flowers, but they come encased in tough, fibrous pods.

So when I spotted a couple of women selling little bundles of it in the market a couple of weeks ago, I decided to pick it up and give its cooking a shot myself.  I asked them how to cook it, and which were better, the skinny or the fat pods - the same, they answered, although I'm not sure I'm convinced... in any case, I picked skinny.  

Pacaya in its pod

The first step is to cut away the pods - underneath the little strands look a lot like a bunch of extra-skinny, extra-long baby corn, held together at one end by a central stem.

Raw pacaya, along with tomato and onion for salsa, and eggs for batter

Next step is to drop the stiff pacaya into boiling water, just for a minute or two, to loosen up the strands, and to start cooking up a quick n easy sauce of tomato and white onion --- a good bit of sweetness to balance the bitter pacaya fritters.

When they're good and soft, the pacaya get globbed into a simple batter of egg, a bit of corn flour, salt, and chile powder... I was worried the boiled pacaya would fall apart since they were so skinny and wobbly, but they held together quite nicely and sopped up lots of eggy goodness between the strands.

While the tomatoes and onions cooked up, I fried up the fritters in a bit of olive oil...

Check out the high-class kitchen - up to two burners these days!

 And voila!

The pacaya not only looks like baby corn, but has a similar flavor as well, except with a nice, sharp, amargo bite.  Soaked in tasty egg batter and topped with bites of the tomato-sweet salsa, they were a great lunch!!!  Next time I'm going to buy the fat pods and judge for myself.

In other food/drink news (we all know what's important in life, after all), this is what a bottle of wine looks like after I attack it with half-functional hands and a leatherman multitool:

But hey, it's open!!!  I am enjoying the fermented fruits of my labor as I write this... 

And in other other food news, mango season has begun!  Mangos have been available since I arrived, but now they're everywhere, perfectly ripe, and extremely cheap.  I picked up this bag of mini beauties for ten quetzales (about $1.25) at the market today... don't know how I'm going to get through them all before they go bad, but I'm sure I'll find a way...

Wine included for scale.  Note creative corking technique...

The Flores Soundscape

6am, Monday: A series of four rounds of bracingly loud fireworks go off, somewhere very nearby - in the alley outside?  It might be somebody's birthday.  I stick in one of my sound-cancelling headphones and go back to sleep.

6am - 10:30am, daily:  Rooster time.  Sometimes the rooster goes off at 4 in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, but mostly he is consistent and on schedule.  Flores is too tightly packed and paved to have many roosters-in-residence, so the fact that my windows overlook one of the few small yards that houses one is a special auditory privilege.  I guess.

7am, daily, and sometimes again shortly after 8: A woman circles the island selling newspapers, her voice mechanically repeating the same words, at the same volume, with the same inflection, day in and day out:  "¡Periodico, el diario, la prensa!  ¡Periodico, el diario, la prensa!"

Monday (Tuesday, Wednesday...): Somewhere just at the edge of audibility, Whitney Houston's I will always love you plays on repeat, all day long.  Sunday and Thursday it was unchained melody.  I wonder if I am going crazy.  I wonder how those closer to the music are not.

6pm, Saturday - All day Sunday: the plonking piano and unending, nasal, poorly harmonized singing of the evangelical churches.  Some of these sounds are from just up the hill, some carry from San Miguel across the water.  All are irritating.

Dusk (5:30ish), daily: the ugly, scrungy looking blackbirds come out and made a racket - honking, tweeting, clacking,  twippering, xylophloaming.  They are nothing much to look at but they make an incredible variety of noises, at incredible volume.  They gather in the park at the top of the island, lining the trees and the telephone lines, pooping on unsuspecting tourists, and singing their mad chorus, until a few short minutes later they flap off again and disappear until the next day.  This description pretty exactly matches that given to me by my grandparents who spend the winter on the Arizona/Nevada border... but they didn't know what kind of birds they were, either.

Always: televisions.

Always: people yelling to each other up and down the street, between rooms in houses, across rooftops.

Occasionally: the sound of keys clacking on a typewriter, or the jitter of an old dot-matrix printer.

Always: my fridge.  It is loud.  It sounds like it is trying to brew coffee.  At night, sometimes, I am thankful because it is a bit like white noise, and it drowns out the tvs and such still blaring nearby, but it switches on and off, so I can't rely on its soundblocking properties.

When everything else is quiet enough: the sound of lanchas bustling across the water, ferrying people back and forth to San Miguel.

Friday night: rain.

To market to market...

Took a little sunday wander over to the market today planning to take home nothing but photos, and somehow came away with a bag full of small, perfectly ripe mangos, a bag of peanuts, three giant beautiful avocados, and some bananas.

Produce stands line the street up to the edge of the mercado

Considering I only spent about US $3, I figure no harm no foul. Also no fowl - I walked past several people selling chicken so fresh it was still alive, stuffed into net-covered baskets:

This girl selling the chickens plainly found it hilarious that I wanted to take their picture.

The market is like some kind of escher drawing where the space between the stalls branches into narrower and narrower little alleyways until there is just barely enough space to squeeze two people past each other moving in opposite directions.  The pictures above are from the very edge, located on a street with plenty of space (and traffic zooming by), but around where the chickens appear you turn into alleys just wide enough to squeeze a delivery truck through, and that's only when the people are flattened up against the edges trying not to get run over:

From there, occasional dark spaces open up between two stalls that lead into even tighter corridors - I didn't even realize these existed the first few times I went to the market years ago, until I noticed enough people coming in and out of them.  There, out of the sun, are cramped hallways lined with stalls selling shoes, clothes, dried goods, fish, meat, cloth, random household items, whatever your heart and home desire that is cheap and easily carried.

Disclaimer: I took this picture in 2009, and didn't actually go into the corridors today.  It was too hot.

After picking up the unexpected fruit and a few pictures, I hopped into a tuk tuk to go over to "Maxi Bodega," the large, clean, well-lit, relatively expensive mega grocery store owned by Walmart.  It's hard to imagine a greater contrast to the grungy little mercado, which I would almost always prefer if it weren't impossible to find a few precious items there.  Decent yogurt, for example, or the sneaky bottle of french pinot noir I found hidden down on a bottom shelf between boxes of horrid looking sweet grapey booze.  The Guatemalan's aren't big wine drinkers, but hey, more for me!

I didn't take any pictures of the Maxi, because I figure you've all seen a supermarket before, but I did snap this shot of a couple of families riding motorcycles back in Santa Elena.  Not the greatest picture, but in it are two people with tiny kids balanced on front of them on their bikes.  If you look closely (or click on the picture to enlarge it) you'll see another little set of legs behind each adult.  At least those kids in back are big enough to know to hold on.  I hope.

Safety first, kids!

A plague of flies

Today my delightful little apartamento has made me feel a bit like I'm going mad. Partially, perhaps, because I've spent the day lost in the book Room, but mostly because of the sudden appearance (...and disappearance ...and reappearance) of a swarm of buzzy black houseflies.

OK, perhaps "swarm" is overdoing it a bit... it was only three flies. But after a delightful two weeks with nothing but a few spindly spiders in the bathroom and occasional ants so microscopic I can barely tell I'm being invaded, three flies - all at once, and all out of the blue, mind you - is quite an intrusion.

They appeared earlier this afternoon, just as I was finishing up a lunch of some quesadillas and green mango with chili-salt. Three flies, making a terrible racket, not pausing on the walls or windows like regular old insects, oh no, but flying constantly and erratically around the room, zapping up against the ceiling, just generally being horrid. I tried rolling up a magazine and swatting at them, which was not only ineffective but seemed to make them angrier. I tried opening up the door to my room to shoo them out somehow, saw one pass through the door into the cooler air outside, and then was met by a quiet no-fly-zone just as suddenly as they had arrived. I stood by the door for a moment more, peering around the room to see if they had just paused momentarily, but it seemed that they had all somehow indeed disappeared completely.

Fine, I thought. I don't much care where they went, as long as they're not driving me crazy.

I spent the next few hours reading - basically all I've done today, despite mild work guilt. But hey, I don't actually have a space in the office where I'll be working until Monday, so while I have some projects I can be working on, it doesn't matter whether I do them now or later tonight or Saturday... or so goes the rationalization. Also it's a very engrossing book.

I did manage, eventually, to take a shower.

As soon as I turned off the water, the fattest mama fly I've ever seen came hurtling over the top of the shower curtain and buzzed around my head. Zipping back the curtain, it flew away, but then began running wild circles around the apartment, always returning to the bathroom and to what I can only assume was the sweet nectary scent of my freshly washed hair. Waving my arms around my head like a crazy woman, I heard the apartment filled with buzzing again - I roughly dried myself off and ran out to find three bigger, blacker, more relentless flies than before, zooming and bumping on the walls making an incredible racket.

I grabbed a shoe and jumped up on the bed, swatting madly through the air to no avail. I ran and opened the door again - just barely remembering to throw on some clothes first - and stood there watching vigilantly to see them all fly out. I didn't see a single one pass through the door, but again, within about 30 seconds, the room was all quiet.

Next care package request: venus fly trap seeds.

In the meantime, I did see a little gecko running across my walls last night... here's hoping that chirpy little friend takes care of any more intruders!

Address!

Hello! Just a quick post to let you all know that I now know my address, so let the letters and care packages begin!

Yes, it seems strange to be requesting letters when the internet here has improved so much that I'm basically as connected as I was in the US... but who doesn't like mail? I promise real mail will be answered in kind.

Anyways, here it is:

Micha Rahder
c/o Rosa Baños de Gongora
Calle Fraternidad
Avenida 15 de Marzo
A la par del Juzgado de Paz
Flores, Petén, Guatemala

For those of you who can't read Spanish, the address is basically just directions to my landlady's (that's Doña Rosa) house: take Fraternidad street, turn up onto 15th of march avenue, then stop at the house next to the magistrate's office. Small town livin!

Third time's the charm

So, here I am, back again, for my third - and by far my longest - trip to the Petén, Guatemala. Having been here a couple of times before, and gotten to know the place and a few key people in it, this is also by far the easiest trip so far. At least in terms of getting established - ask me again in three months when I'm confused and exhausted and still frustrated with the language barrier...

Despite not haven spoken any Spanish in a year and a half, I've picked it right back up again where I left off - which of course was far from fluent, but at least it's something. I still can't understand everything - especially when people are speaking very quickly, or when they're not speaking directly to me. It's strange, actually, how much more I understand if a person is facing me and speaking to me directly, vs standing right next to me and speaking to somebody else. Apparently I have a linguistic inability to eavesdrop... rather unfortunate, given that part of my job here is to pay attention to the different ways that people speak and the things they talk about in casual situations. Oh well, it'll come.

Other than this minor linguistic barrier, though, things are going quite well. I looked all around the island of Flores for a place to live, and considered looking in a couple of nearby towns as well (cheaper and quieter, but either a little bit less safe or too far across the lake), before eventually settling on a room in the same building where I lived last time I was here. The room has a doesn't have a real kitchen, but has a mini-fridge that I've supplemented with a little one-burner plug-in stove and a crock pot, and I might add a rice cooker to the arsenal if I can find one...



You can see my pseudo-kitchen off to the left in this picture, as well as the fabulous light that my room gets from its two giant windows. There are currently two beds in here, but I'm going to get the owners to take one of them out so I have lots of space to do yoga, or just lie on the cold tile floor when it gets too bloody hot outside :)

Work seems to be off to a good start, too, in terms of the organizations I'll be working with (and studying) being welcoming and eager to have me, as well as to help me get set up in whatever way they can. In fact, everybody I've encountered has been ridiculously welcoming and helpful - one of the heads of the organizations I'll be working with has been helping me set up a way to get my IVIG treatments here without having to travel, my friend America (who also works for the Wildlife Conservation Society, one of the groups I'm studying) helped me find a place to live, and Vinicio, an old friend from Yale, has put me in touch with his extended family, who immediately became incredibly warm, inviting me to stay at their house if necessary, offering to help me with my house hunting, etc.

Like I said, we'll see how I'm feeling in another month or two, but for the moment, it's looking like it's going to be a great year!