Please pass the guinea pig
At about 6:30 in the morning I woke up to the radio being played fairly loudly, right outside my room…oh man. Slept for a while longer and finally got up around 8 or 9. Elvis gave me some bread and cinnamon tea, which I thought was a fine breakfast. Then out came a huge bowl of soup, full with potatoes, pasta and veggies…again, I could not finish it all. After breakfast we left to go across the street to visit Mamita. “We’re going to stay awhile today. Mom’s going to make guinea pig for you.” Oh…how nice.
We approached the kitchen at Mamita’s house, and I felt reluctant to go in…not sure why. From the outside it looked like a little mud den, with a doorway I had to duck under, and with four people and a wood-burning stove, it was crowded and smokey. But I did go in, and Elvis’s mother made room for me to sit right on the edge of the guinea pig pen. Mamita was sitting in the corner on a little log stump…it was so low, it appeared as if she was stooping.
Elvis’s mom was boiling eggs on the stove. They passed over to me a bowl of potatoes, an ear of corn and an egg. I couldn’t eat anything more, but I watched them eating the egg and became curious. They had cracked open the top part of the shell and were eating the egg straight from the shell, using a spoon. Well, that’s interesting, I thought, and gave it a shot. I wasn’t sure if the egg was hard boiled or not, but suspected that it wasnt, so decided against trying to crack it open like one. Rendering myself inept, I eventually asked Elvis’s mother to crack it open for me and explained to them that I had never eaten an egg like this. Elvis translated to Quechua; I could tell by watching his hand motions of cracking open an egg and frying it in a pan. The egg was good, soft-boiled I think, and they all put a little bit of hot sauce on top. It saves on dishes, too…the shells just went on the mud floor.
Everyone left and I stayed with Mamita to learn some Quechua. I actually didn’t learn anything, though we somehow did communicate that morning. Between the little bit of Spanish Mamita and Papito know, along with some hand movements, we did manage to touch a few topics, including America (is it nice? Are there lots of jobs?), and some small talk about the family. A little girl from up the road joined us as we sat and talked. Mamita washed the dishes from breakfast (with a bucket of water and her hand), and immediately started to make lunch. Papito, sitting around for a while got up and said “Let’s drink chicha.” Oh my god. More chicha. At this point I really wanted a big bottle of water; it was hot and really smokey in there, but chicha would suffice.
Mamita ran out occassionally to grab some veggies from the garden, and she came back with corn stalks for me and the girl to suck on, spitting the chewed up part onto the floor. I felt strange doing it, but they were all doing it…just spitting chewed up corn stalk onto the floor. But everything just goes on the floor…all the garbage is natural (potato peels, corn stalk, egg shells), and is eaten up by the guinea pigs running around. (Most of the guinea pigs are in a pen, but there were a few running around as well.)
Mamita sent Papito out to get something and he came back with a basket-full of beans…lima beans, I think. I helped him peel them (there are 2 layers), but he was a lima bean peeling master, putting me to shame. I was very slow in the effort, but was very sure to watch what he was doing first before screwing something up. While we peeled beans, Mamita cleared off her smooth rock surface and put some sort of seeds on there (spice I assume), added some water, and mashed it all up with a rock to a paste. She added some garlic and crushed it up too, finally adding the paste to her pot of water boilding on the stove.
Finally lunch was ready (it was only 10:30, and I was hardly hungry!), but everyone came back to eat. Papito put his jacket on the tree stump for me, allowing me to eat from the little table (like an end table); everyone else ate from their laps. And how they slurped their soup! I almost felt rather conspicuous, not slurping my soup. But I was always told, “Don’t slurp your soup!” They were doing everything contrary to what I had been told…don’t slurp your soup, don’t let your little rodent pets run around the house (I had gerbils), and don’t spit your chewed up corn stalk on the floor! Of course, I was still full from breakfast and was having trouble finishing my soup, but didn’t want to waste Mamita’s food, so kept at it. Just as I was getting to a ridiculously full state, she gave me another ladelfull. Somehow I finished it all, and just as I was getting ready to leave, she offered me some chicha. Of course. I drank it and offered her some. I said my goodbyes and walked across the street to find Elvis.
I stopped in the bushes to pee, feeling slightly uncomfortable as a cow stared at me the whole while. I found Elvis and his mom in the field just beyond the bathroom area and started to walk out toward them. “Stop!” Elvis warned me. “You can’t go any further because of all the mud.” Elvis’s mom was irrigating the fields, digging little trenches amongst other little trenches to allow water to flow across the whole field. I walked around but still managed to find myself ankle-deep in mud. “Look! Look! Look!” Elvis cried to his mom as they both laughed at me getting myself unstuck. “Would you like to try?” Elvis was very good at letting me try all the different stuff out here. And so I did…I irrigated the field. I did nearly a whole row before Elvis took over while I got stuck in more mud. All this in a skirt I had decided to wear to the festival (I had nothing more with me.)
I spent the better part of the afternoon hanging out with the ladies, sitting on the grass next to a few cows, drinking more chicha. They told me they normally just drink chicha for festivals…I guessed that this was an extension of Carnaval; there was really not all that much going on at this point. I was greeted by all the old ladies who came over, though mostly they just sat around talking Quechua, so I didn’t understand anything. The little girl from Mamita’s house was there, along with a little boy, so I made an effort to break them out of their shells and talk with them, since they could talk Spanish. I taught them how to use my camera and played with them a bit, spinning them around until I became dizzy and tired.
A little while later Elvis told me we were going to where some people where working to bring them chicha. He got on a bicycle and told me to get on – side-saddle on the bar. They ride bicycles like this everywhere, with the women getting a free ride (you hardly ever see a bicycle with only one person in Nicaragua, for example), though I was a bit hesitant. Luckily the ride was mostly downhill and not very far. We stopped in the middle of the road, with nothing around. “We’re here.” Here? I didn’t see anything. “Climb up this hill.” I followed Elvis’s lead, and sure enough, there was a little crew of people (mostly men, but a few women) digging a trench to bring water to the area.
“Would you like to try?” Elvis asked, again, very good at involving me. “Of course!” I picked up the pick-axe (I think that’s what it was) and started into the ground…it was pretty hard. Of course, I had flashbacks of working in Guatemala after the mudslides, but this was pure earth, and had been here for a while. We drank a little chicha and worked a little. “How long have you been working on this?” I asked one of the guys. “A year” he said, obviously misunderstanding me (or I misspoke), because there was not a year’s worth of work to show for. “A year! I think you must be drinking more chicha than working!” I joked, rousing a little laughter from the crew. Actually, they had done all the work in just that day, which was rather impressive. The whole project would take a year. We hung around for a while and I got to chew some coca leaves. You just put them in the side of your mouth, you don’t really chew. It tasted like tea, more or less, and I didn’t really feel any effects from it.
After about an hour they called it a day and we went back to the house. “Smell that? That’s guinea pig,” Elvis assured me as we got back to the house. I guess I had missed the killing and skinning of them while we were digging he trench, which I had mixed feelings about…I would have liked to have seen it, but it was convenient to have missed it as well. I tried to prepare myself for this, but it was next to impossible. Besides that, I wasn’t even hungry after all the food and chicha I had consumed during the day. Elvis’s little sister seemed to be the one preparing the meal…she’s like 15. I asked her how they kill it…”cut it’s throat. See, there’s the blood.”
I sat on the edge of the guinea pig pen as Elvis’s mom served everyone. With the bowl of food in my lap, before I could eat I turned around to the guinea pigs playing just behind me and offered an “I’m sorry” in Spanish. With that, I dug in. I admit I ate a little bit of the potatoes and rice before actually tackling the guinea pig. “Hmm…what’s this piece? Must be a leg. I can tell by the claws clenched at the end. It’s like you can picture it extending, tensing every muscle while getting its throat cut.” And so I bit in. Yeah. Chicken. The difference is that it’s smaller…everyone somehow was coming up with little bones from everywhere and I could hardly seem to get any meat. Another piece was a breast, I think…I could only tell because there were maybe 2 lungs attached – 2 darker pieces with some sort of tube leadng from them. I didn’t eat that part.
The skin was thick and a little slimy, almost fatty. The fur had been removed, though I did find an occassional hair sticking out every once in a while (which clued me in that that was actually the skin). With all the food in front of me (5 potatoes, a huge portion of rice, and 3 pieces of guinea pig), I was never going to finish. Everyone was cleaning their plates and I was less than 1/2 done. Then Elvis’s mom gave me another leg. I picked at the new leg a little bit, but finally had to excuse myself because I was so full…my first plate of guinea pig, and I couldn’t finish it all.
“Let’s go drink,” said Elvis’s mom, grabbing a bucket of chicha. We went out to the same spot we had been during the afternoon and met Mamita, Papito, Elvis’s dad, and a few others. Mamita and Papito finished off the rest of the guinea pig while we passed around chicha. Nearly everyone was picking the guinea pig out of their gold teeth with blades of grass, so I joined them. As I got up to grab my other shirt (it was getting cold), Elvis’s mom walked right up with a fleece and a blanket for me…she later brought me an aguayo to sit on, which is the cloth the women use to carry babies and other things.
We sat and talked until it got dark out, when Elvis’s parents suggested we go inside because it was so cold. My chicha buzz from the night before had returned…as we went inside, I tied the aguayo around my back in typical Bolivian fashion. “Look! I could be Bolivian…” Inside we found Elvis sleeping. “Look Elvis! I’m Bolivian.” No. “Yeah, look!” “Ugly,” he said, peeking his head from under the blanket…he hates the Bolivian dress, he later explained to me. The rest of Elvis’s family thought it was hilarious. Elvis’s mom gave me a skirt to try on. Everyone laughed. Then a shirt. More laughter. Elvis’s dad topped it off with a hat, and I finalized it all by braiding my hair.
Well, we all got a kick out of it, them seeing this American chick dressed in Bolivian clothes, me playing dress up. We sat around for a while drinking more chicha, spilling it right there on the bedroom floor, watching a poorly recepted news program. After a bit, I could drink no more chicha. I took off Elvis’s mom’s clothes, said goodnight and went to my little mud room to sleep.
Tags: Bolivia, Tag Index
Tania