Elaboración de Miel de Caña, or Making Sugar Cane Honey

I set out this morning to a neighboring barrio (rural collection of houses with an elementary school) to find out how long I´ve committed myself to hiking to teach a new set of English classes. It took an hour and fifteen minutes, uphill. I admit the uphill was only one way, but all the same, I will be forced into shape.

As I arrived back in my barrio, legs aching and feeling the effects of the sun, my neighbor called me over and invited me to help out in some sort of project involving a pile of sugar cane and a machine. The engineer instinct took over and I hurried around the fence. It turned out my neighbors (many were filtering through to assist) were making sugar cane honey. The first phase, harvesting the sugar cane, happened elsewhere, as the caña is thin on the ground in my dry area. However, in the well irrigated places or valleys hugging rivers near me, the stuff grows well and I´m used to seeing it. Up close, it looks a bit like bamboo (see the pile to the right).

To make the honey, you cut the end at an angle, then feed through a mechanical press, slanty-end first. The press devours the caña, shooting dry-ish sticks out one end and lots of juice out the bottom. The juice at my neighbor´s poured into a 15 gallon kettle, from which it was seived into buckets and transported to the "stove," two concrete basins atop a leña (wood) fire (see picture at right). The juice was boiled down to a syrup, and then it´s ready. The miel de caña is sold throughout Ecuador as sweetner either in the honey form, or reduced further until it´s solid and called panela. Panela, when shaved, is the brownish sugar that Starbucks puts in the "natural" colored wrappers labelled cane sugar. Here, it´s the norm. Even the white sugar comes from sugar cane and is simply processed further (the smaller the pieces get, the whiter they appear – I think much of Michigan´s sugar comes from sugar beets and am not sure what color the sugar from these begins).

I got to feed the sugar cane into the press and have the picture to prove it! OSHA, I´m outside your jurisdiction and have no comment on the gear that may or may not have popped out of the press two times in thirty minutes.

After elaboración de miel de caña, I put in some quality hammock time with the gatita before setting out around two for the canton capital to help at a middle school English club. My camioneta initially only had one other woman in the back seat, and I rode in comfort for ten minutes. Then a woman got in with her one-year-old and seven-year-old. With five squished in the back seat, the comfort quotient took a big hit, and then the baby started crying. Even I could tell the kid was doing his "my tummy hurts" cry (he sounded a bit like the moaning I associate with hugging toilets) and sure enough, he projectile vomited all over his mother and the seat that was mine until the vomit claimed it. I spent the remaining 15 minutes of the trip clinging to the driver´s bench to avoid backsliding into the mess, head straining towards the only open window. I was pretty glad to get out of that truck.

English club was a blast – we drew floor plans of our houses and learned all the words to label the rooms and furniture in English. If you´ve ever seen my notebooks, napkins, or placemats, you know that this activity was right up my alley. Now I´m writing to all of you and will be back in miel de caña land in a few hours. All in all, a fantastically Peace Corps-ish day.

Attempted Coup!

Sorry for the delay - life sin computadora has been a bit trying, and September was a busy month! Since posting last, I've attended a Reconnect Conference in Quito with my Omnibus, said goodbye to one COSing (regular end of Peace Corps service) and four ETing (leaving early) volunteers, attended my host cousin's quincenera (15th birthday party), spent a little over a week stuck in site on account of national police strikes and an attempted coup, got some good news on future work projects, and taken my first by-myself nightbus to Quito for a long weekend, from where I am writing this post.

I'm saving more details on the quincenera and work developments for another post, and will devote this one to the attempted coup. Last Thursday, September 30, Peace Corps sent out a message telling all volunteers to go on standfast, the first phase of our evacuation plan. Standfast entails pinpointing all volunteers' locations, then telling them to stay put until either consolidation in provincial capitals and possible evacuation, or an all-clear returning us to normal life. The standfast was enacted in anticipation of unrest likely to arise because of a planned national police strike.

I awoke Friday morning to the usual quiet laziness of my rural site, but shortly thereafter received a text from my mom asking "Did u hear about coup attempt? Is everything ok by u? Has pc said anything?" The text was the first I'd heard of the coup, and I had run out of saldo (phone minutes) the day before, so I couldn't call anyone to find out quickly. I was scheduled to help prepare the soil at one of my schools for a new garden, but decided to head into the town where I lived with my host family to buy saldo and hear the news (this sort of travel is allowed on Standfast - I have to go into town to buy food). The camioneta (pick-up truck) driver and high schooler with whom I shared a ride were discussing the coup and I learned that the national police force kidnapped Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, in a quasi-coup attempt on Thursday night (I'm unsure if the goal was to take over the government or just force Correa to repeal a new law they don't like). The kidnapping was short-lived and by my Friday morning camioneta ride, the military had already rescued him from the police kidnappers and the South American and international communities had expressed their support for the elected president.

Because of the coup, school across the country was cancelled, so my day was free and I spent time on the internet, then went over to my host parents' house and watched the news with my host mom. I really enjoyed talking with her about the coup. She was feeling shaken by the coup attempt, and not terribly proud of Ecuador, but I actually helped her feel better, pointing out that the coup's failure was probably a good sign for Ecuador - that the country was stable enough to withstand such an assault. She reflected on that and agreed, remembering the occasions in the not that distant past when Ecuadorian governments did not fare so well when faced with affronts to their power.

The country was placed under an "exceptional state" following the coup, meaning that the military took control of security throughout the country and retains it until tomorrow, Saturday, when the police force is scheduled to return to its normal duties. I'm not sure what the difference between an "exceptional state" and marshal law is - they seam awfully similar to me - but the official name for the state of affairs here has been the former. In Quito and Guayaquil the military was roving the streets picking up groups bigger than 2, at times, and there were a few gun fights and a big uptick in robberies. Out by me, life was unchanged except for a few more people from the ejercito (army) walking around, though there wasn't any obvious unrest for them to contain. Friends in Ciudad de Loja said all they heard of happening was a bank and mini-mart robbery. My province is super tranquilo, as they say in Spanish, and when it comes to political instability, I'm happy with things this way.

So, that was my experience with a coup attempt. Interesting in a far-away sense, but pretty unevently in my physical relm. Let's hope things remain calm!