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.