Week 34 - Food: It's What's for Dinner

Food holds special significance in a person’s life. Whether it’s that recipe that reminds you of your mother’s cooking, or that single, sinful dish which makes you feel like a happily atrophied bag of goo, it has the ability to transport you to other times and places.

In Peace Corps, food hold special meaning for us, too, though perhaps in a way that is unique to expats and long-term travelers alone.

“Bacon?!” I exclaim, “Someone in your town knows a guy who knows a guy who can find you bacon? Wait there, I’m coming over!”

Never mind that from my current location to theirs was separated by six hours, four camionetas and untold physical discomfort: It was bacon.

While bacon itself can be interchanged with just about anything we can find only in a US supermarket (sharp cheddar cheese, Sriracha brand hot sauce, waffles, anything from Trader Joe’s…) the message is, there are virtually no hurdles too great to stymie our quest to consume it. It leads to some odd care package requests, and a reevaluation of what constitutes luxury: Familiar items are worth their weight in gold, while more expensive—and arguably rarer—items are overlooked. Give me a huge jar of Jif peanut butter over caviar; Kraft mac ‘n cheese packets above white truffle oil.

Hanging out in another volunteer’s site is always a treat, and Jaron R. is known as an especially good cook. Camionetas are a small price to pay to live like a king for a weekend.

“So I vote we cook the bacon first,” she paused for effect, “so that we can fry the pancakes in the grease, and maybe a fruit salad to go with it? To drink I have real Starbucks coffee I got in a care package…or Aveda tea.”

I was at a loss for words. Pancakes, while simple, are a luxury afforded only to those near the cosmopolitan cities—Xela, Antigua, and perhaps Panajachel. I had snagged the only box of mix in San Se several weeks ago, wiping the patina of grime from the unopened carton the way a doting parent might their child.

“That sounds like it might work.” I tried to play it cool, but I’m pretty sure my voice cracked with eagerness.

We cooked together: One of us looked to bacon while the other made sure the music was ever-flowing. I doubt it’ll be hard for you to guess which job was mine.

Three large pancakes, a half dozen strips of bacon, and the must succulent pineapple I’ve ever tasted later, I was temporarily sated by Jaron’s eleemosynary inclination.

But breakfast is just a single meal, and there are at least two more worthy of consideration on any given day. It would border on sacrilege to ignore them with such quality resources at hand.

A few hours later, with the dinner hour approaching, we began brainstorming about what to cook.

“You know, I make a pretty decent mango curry,” I offered. I’m not as good of a cook as she is, but it was edible and filling, arguably two of the most significant characteristics of a nightly meal in San Se.

“Mmm, that would be good.” Jaron’s reverie was broken at virtually the same instant as my own by the practicalities of what I was suggesting: Mangoes are out of season, and have been so for some time. It will be another few months at least before they become common once again. It would probably be possible with pineapple, but it just didn’t seem the same.

“What about Chicken Parmesan?” She was staring at the small box of seasoned bread crumbs on the shelf. “Chicken Parm with broccoli florets and a tomato-based coulis? I can’t puree, but we can sauté diced vegetables with some butter, onions, and maybe some oregano and basil; keep it really simple.”

My mind raced to remember what the meal tasted like: That time a housemate had made it while we were all living together for the summer during college; the kindly Jewish mother of a friend who let me and another stay at their house while road tripping to a music festival. It was a magnificent dish.

“That’ll work.”

Again we divided the tasks, and while Jaron started boiling water and preparing the sauté, I tried to filet the chicken. Having very little experience in butchery (except in matters of Goldfish crackers), I messily went about my task. She shot a raised eyebrow in my direction as I awkwardly attempted to slide the knife along the breastbone, running into resistance at every rib, but said nothing.

When I was done, there was only enough chicken for one, so I ran to the little corner tienda (store) for more. Unlike the meat in my town, it seemed well-preserved and disease-free, and at 12Q ($1.50) per pound, we could essentially afford as much as we wanted.

When I walked in the front door to her apartment, the aromatic tendrils of garlic and frying onion led me up the stairs and back into the kitchen. Everything was bubbling, sizzling, and smelling as it should.

A few minutes later we sat down to our meal in the same space in which we had prepared it. While she has more living space than I do, a problem endemic to Peace Corps is the chronic lack of diversified furniture.

We stared at our plates for a moment, admiring the soft browning of the breadcrumb crust enveloping the chicken, the vibrancy of the fresh broccoli and how it complimented the soft reds and golds of the sauce. The contemplation lasted only a moment, and then the growling of our stomachs took over.

With a grin we began.

Food took precedence over photos, but I still managed to snap a few. See them here: https://picasaweb.google.com/114291229338134891582/Week34?authkey=Gv1sRgCOaUt971ov7zuwE

Week 33 - My Immortality is not Immortal

Guatemala feels like it is getting worse. The violence (perpetrated by gangs), the restrictions to personal sovereignty (perpetrated by Peace Corps), and the sense of being useless (perpetrated by a mixture of the continuing teachers’ strike and my own impotence) are all weighing more heavily.

As I mentioned in Week 30, I have been having some trouble with my teeth. Namely, little pieces keep committing sedition. I’ve now had 4 or 5 dental appointments in the last two months, with varying levels of success. They keep fixing the cracks and chips, but a few days later it reoccurs. I now am the proud owner of prescription tooth paste (extra fluoride), prescription tooth spray (extra potassium nitrate), a second night guard (extra grinding protection), and  prescription muscle relaxants (extra…relaxing?). My nightly routine has ballooned to about 45 minutes.

However, there is a reason for this recapitulation of an earlier post. When I went to the dentist most recently, last Friday morning, it required me to arrive in Antigua Thursday evening, a pretty typical scenario.

Shortly before embarking upon my 6 hour bus ride from Huehue to Antigua, I received a call from the volunteer a year ahead of me, a friend who also lived with La Familia Loca (The Crazy Family), the name we fondly bestow upon the host family we both lived with during our respective training periods.

She was calling to check up on me, partly at the request of La Familia. They had written me a text message a few days ago and I was slow in responding. After a short conversation, we both realized that we were headed towards Antigua, and she suggested I stay with her at La Familia’s house in San Lorenzo. The family, for their part, always loves surprise guests.

“Why not,” I reasoned. “After all, it’s been some time since I’d seen them, and it’s free room and board.” It would mean that I wouldn’t get to meet any other travelers at the hostels in Antigua, something I greatly enjoy, but the pros outweighed the cons.

It’s a very good thing they did.

I only know myself. I cannot speak with certainty about hypothetical events, but in knowing myself, I feel pretty confident in how my night would have gone:

In San Lorenzo, with La Familia, I ate a meal of fried chicken, spaghetti, tortillas, and a single pickled jalapeno.

In Antigua I expect I would have ingratiated myself with a group of single-serving friends—tourists—and brought them to my favorite, dirt-cheap, hole-in-the-wall felafel joint.

In San Lorenzo, I washed my meal down with a wineglass full of Pepsi.

In Antigua I would have been convinced by the starry-eyed novices to help the food settle with a few beers, some dancing, and a late walk home.

 Meanwhile, not far from Kafka, the hostel I most typically frequent, someone was getting mugged, and then. as an exclamation point to this traumatic crime, they were stabbed. This someone was not Guatemalan, but a gringo that was targeted for that reason. This someone who was probably just like me.

And then it happened 6 more times around the city over the next few hours.

The crime rate in Guatemala is perpetually high, but the truth is, security incidents against Peace Corps Volunteers in Guatemala are grossly under-reported. We are—imprudently I might add—more concerned about potential judgment or administrative separation (getting fired) from Peace Corps than the actual crime or safety issue that has taken place. On several occasions I have heard of volunteers unwilling to report being robbed at knife- or gun-point in a place frequented by other PCVs because they had not called out of site. It is more important to know where the dangerous places are than to punish people for administrative transgressions.

When I think about this, it makes me pause. Antigua is the beautiful city, the safe city. Antigua is the oasis in Guatemala where violent crime does not occur. I’m not saying that it wildly reforms my notion of the country—I know that the country in which I live is dangerous—but it forces me to be more reflective on what I do to be safe and, more importantly, the wanton randomness of street crime. Simply put, I could be doing everything right and it still might not matter. My sense of immortality, which I’ve carried with me since I was old enough to know what “hubris” meant, is dead.

Week 32 - Vertical Endeavors of a Mediocre Mountain Man

I came back into the tent after peeing off the side of the mountain. The rainy haze-infected darkness gave me more privacy than I get inside my bathroom in San Se.

“Is it 3:45 yet?” Alicia asked me groggily as I began to unzip the tent flap. The timbre of her voice suggested that she hadn’t actually been sleeping.

I checked my phone, the luminescent numbers uncomfortably bright to my unadjusted eyes. “No, it’s not quite midnight.”

“Damn it.”

It’s a rare occurrence when an alarm goes off well before dawn and it’s met with an enthusiastic response, and yet when the hour finally came there was no complaining, no attempts to hide from the world for a few minutes more; rather, it was received with a collective sigh of relief.

The seven of us crawled out of our sleeping bags, donned our warmest clothes, and set about getting ready to summit the highest peak in Central America. We were on the Tajumulco Volcano, 13,000 feet above sea level, and within an hour’s climb of the top.

Still, the trek it had taken to get to this point was far from luxurious. Most of us had suffered almost 7 hours using camionetas and a single, absurdly overladen taxi to get to the base of the mountain. More than that, we had endured 4 intense, though enjoyable, hours of climbing overgrown goat paths and bushwhacking before we reached what would become our base camp.

As we began to set up our tents, a four-person and a two-person (that would ultimately be stretched accommodate 3 of us), we noticed crucial items were missing: We had no rain flies and, in the case of the smaller tent, no poles. There was little we could do about the rain protection other than hold our breath that canícula (essentially, a week-long drought in the middle of rainy season) would hold out. It didn’t, and parking ourselves in the middle of the cloud layer would prove to be a poor choice. The smaller tent was held aloft by the reappropriated drawstring to a backpack tied to a low lying tree branch. It wasn’t great, but it kept everything roughly triangular.

The rain began pouring shortly after we finished our unheated dinner of beans, corn, and tortillas. A fire would have been a welcome comfort, but the dampness from the omnipresent clouds made keeping one lit unsustainable. We retired to our tents by 6:30, though the cramped quarters, growing puddles, and impending altitude sickness made sleeping next to impossible. Every time I was able to get my nausea and racing heart rate under control enough to doze off, a new source of water or rustling from an equally uncomfortable companion would awaken me.

And so, when 3:45 hit, it was a relief rather than an onus. Finally we could quit this tiresome charade of sleeping and set out to do what we had intended.

The temperature had dropped since we had gone to bed, and now hovered in the low 40’s. The beams from our headlamps were reflected off the moisture in the hyper-saturated air, showing not just the surface the light hit but, like lasers, the linear path it took from its source. We laced up our boots, donned our outer layers, and wrapped our sleeping bags around ourselves in one final, desperate attempt to stymie the seeping cold.

Our goal was to make it to the summit before dawn, so that we could watch the birth of the new morning in complete detail. We set off just after 4:00, initially playing leapfrog with a crew of tourists and their surly guides before outpacing them midway up the trail.

The way was difficult, certainly far more so than at any point earlier in the climb. Where our route had initially been fairly obvious and gentle, we now had a path that led over loose, irregular boulders, made all the more treacherous by the rain and darkness. A single misstep meant a broken bone or worse. We trod carefully upwards, sometimes just a step or two away from the void.

The oxygen deprivation and gale-force winds, relentlessly increasing since we left base camp, peaked on the unprotected final two hundred meters. The slope was such that I could only see a few dozen meters at a time, and each time it made me think that the end was at hand. If I just trudged a few steps farther, I would be at the summit. Then I would reach that point and see it continued for a few more steps. By the fifth such disappointment it was getting difficult to convince myself that I was making any real progress.

And yet, like everything, the mountain too came to an end. With a final push I slipped over the lip of the mountain and found myself standing on a relatively flat natural platform of rock, 13,845 feet above sea level. The wind, stronger than any I have experienced, whipped at the sleeping bag draped across my shoulders, making it look more like a biblical robe than a sodden piece of synthetic fabric. I held on to it tightly; if I let go for even a second, it would literally blow off the mountain.

We had beaten the sunrise by more than a half an hour, so we sat amongst the boulders, doing our best to shield ourselves from the relentless onslaught of the elements. We had risen above the clouds, and thus most of the wetness, but the cold was exponentially worse. We huddled against each other inside our sleeping bags, voicing an expletive every now and again, as if the forcefulness of the word could warm our bodies.

When the sun began to rise, it was hard not to gasp. The discomfort went away—within reason—and was replaced by the sheer thrill of adventure. It felt like we were standing on the roof of the world, all other peaks preferring to bow in meek deference to our majesty. To walk from one side of the summit to the other took only a few seconds, but the views could not have been more different. The clouds that had made our night so miserable were spread out to the east of us like a roiling sea, so dense that it dared us to walk across. On the western slope the moon was still visible, the terrain bathed in blue gradients. We could see for dozens—perhaps hundreds—of miles in every direction.

I was alive, and the cold and the muscle aches were a small price to pay for that feeling.

The photos are truly amazing. Check them out at https://picasaweb.google.com/114291229338134891582/Week32?authkey=Gv1sRgCL6t39KixJXJwgE

Week 31 - Supermen and Crazy People

There’s a race in Huehue, called the Ascenso (Ascent) that runs from the center of town to the top of the Cuchumatanes, the highest mountain range in Central America. It’s approximately a half marathon and gains more than 5,900ft in vertical elevation. It has few flat sections to break the monotony of climbing, and not a single downhill. It was supposed to be this last weekend and I, considering myself an athlete, decided to check it out. However, before I go any further, we should get one thing clear: I didn’t run in it; Are you kidding? I’m not crazy.

…But a few of my friends are.

As I said, the race was supposed to be this weekend, and for months my compatriots have been training for it. Unfortunately, due to another epic fíjese que, the race directors changed it at the last minute to next weekend instead. For most people I’m sure this is not a huge problem. Then again, most people in Guatemala don’t book non-refundable flights to the United States for a few days after the race.

My crazy friends decided to run it this weekend anyway.

Despite my epic walks through the very same mountains, I am in no shape to run 13 miles, much less through the wispy air at almost 12,000ft. Instead, I offered to be not the thoroughbred but the mule. I raced up the mountain in relative luxury, toting the accoutrements of distance runners: Sweatshirts, pants, extra bottles of water, cell phones, wallets, cameras, and—because it was almost her birthday—clandestine candles.

They started up the road shortly after 7am, with me following at 8. I was bent on arriving at the top first so I could cheer them through the final meters and snap “victory” photos of their triumphant arrival. Unfortunately, the only available transport was a microbus with a maximum capacity of 15 passengers. Unsurprisingly, it contained 22.

Motivated by my task, I handed off my grossly oversized costál (tote made from reappropriated rice sacks) to the driver’s assistant and squeezed into a jump seat already occupied by 2 others.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” I smiled weakly. They grumbled but said nothing; these sorts of inconveniences are expected in this part of the world.

I received my just desserts as a woman behind me attempted to get out and then 3 others get in. Only two of them could fit inside, with one sitting on the armrest between the front seats, staring despondently back at the rest of the micro. The other remained standing, my knees and his lost in a tangle of unclaimed limbs. The third, along with the driver’s assistant, clung to the luggage rack on top of the vehicle, waiting for more space to open up as we began to trundle off.

As I started up, I palmed a camera, hoping that I could whip it out to get an action shot or two of the racers on their journey. The standing man was forced to keep switching his stance as we swerved right then left along the serpentine road. His jean-clad posterior kept blocking the only window available to me. After a few unsuccessful—and entirely awkward—attempts to position my camera towards the opening, I gave up. I’d just have to catch them at the top.

I felt increasing admiration for the runners as our micro ate up more and more road without seeing them. Finally, far later than I expected, we began to pass my friends, two walking during a particularly steep stretch here, a solitary warrior winding their way up there, until I had passed all 7.

With about 20 minutes before I could expect the first runner to appear, I got out of the micro, paid my fare, and trudged off towards the Mirador (Lookout) recessed from the road that marked the race’s conclusion.

I became antsy. I kept checking the settings on my camera to make sure that it was tuned to the proper capture mode, and then my watch to estimate how much time it would be before the first arrived. I propped the costál against a stone, within easy reach but out of the way of the runners who were sure to be stumbling across the final stretch.

Again I checked the camera. Again I checked my watch.

I continued this ritual for an interminable length (ironic, since I kept fiddling with my timepiece) when the first, the only male, rounded a bend and exploded into view. I waved to him like an idiot, as if his success was somehow the exclamation point to my own. As he approached I began fumbling with the camera, suddenly unsure how to get it to focus. I trotted alongside until he burst through the imaginary finish tape and bent over trying to catch his breath, hands resting sturdily on his knees. He stopped his stopwatch before looking at it.

“Huh,” was all he said at first. “Huh.”

I gave him some water.

“I just ran that in an hour and 24 minutes.”

“Huh,” I responded. “That’s fuckin’ crazy.” I was impressed by the bounds of human endurance.

We both sat on a cement embankment and waited for the next runners. Slowly, they began trickling in, until we were all there.

Two more PCVs showed up, bringing along a clandestine birthday cake to compliment my candles.

“Happy birthday!” we all shouted to the birthday girl.

Her eyes lit up, and she immediately began picking at the chocolate, a slave to the restorative properties of calories and cocoa powder after a long run. As she picked at it I tried to place the candles, but my unobtrusive aim was no match for her barbarism: She executed the dessert with extreme prejudice.

We lazed around at the lookout, partly resting, partly waiting for the thick cloud cover to lift so we could see Huehue laid out below us. It never did, and after an hour we unstuck ourselves from the ground and hitch hiked to a comedor (independently owned family restaurant) nearby. Two decided to run there as a cool down to their earlier workout.

When we got to our table I picked the nearest seat and slumped into it.

“What’s with you?” One of the others asked.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m exhausted.”

They laughed politely, thinking it was a joke, but I had meant it. The thin air, the excitement of the run, the crowded jockeying in the micro…I was just a normal man among a table full of supermen.

Jesus, I really should start running.

Find the photos here: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week31?authkey=Gv1sRgCJHe3d-n_fGkDA

Week 30 - Your Mouth Should Never Billow Smoke

Teeth, like good friends and certain venereal diseases, are expected to stay with you whether you want them to or not. Given this sentiment, I don’t think it’s out of order to feel a certain amount of betrayal at my own for their increasingly flaky behavior: Lately, they’ve been jumping ship like it’s cool. Or rather, little pieces of them are deciding, with hardly any warning, to spontaneously unstick themselves from the calcified majority and wander off.

In the last 6 weeks, I’ve had 5 teeth crack or chip. Naturally this has necessitated getting myself to a dentist, and that is where my story begins…

The dental office sat on an Antigua side street above the west end of the park, nestled between a tailor and a bed and breakfast. All three were named Ovalle, and it made me wonder if the family was as financially diversified as the location suggested. I walked in the front door of the clinic and announced my presence to the receptionist. She smiled, pointed upstairs, and indicated that the dentist would be with me shortly.

Wallpaper pictures of Pixar characters made a lazy rotation around the room. In a corner sat resilient toys made of impact- and stain-resistant plastic. A hygienist smiled and me and reminded me that the dentist would be with me shortly.

I busied myself by trying not to wonder about the dentist’s qualifications. If the Peace Corps had sent me to her, then she was certified by the U.S. State Department as equal to the care I would receive at home. Still, a lot of uncertainties bubbled through. It’s hard not to think about all the things that can go wrong in a third world dental clinic. That it’s a common fashion statement for Guatemalans to have their teeth pulled and replaced with some combination of gold, faux pearl, and star designs only made it more so. I’m rather attached to the natural elegance of my front teeth.

After a few minutes a different hygienist directed me to the chair where it would all take place. The big show.

The dentist turned out to be a dentista, and she immediately began questioning me about my teeth and brushing habits. I answered as best I could, but when it came time to describe why I was there, my equal mix of academic and countrified Spanish began to fail me. My previous language education had never prepared me for the possibility of tooth decay.

“Well, uh,” I began, “My teeth are…breaking…little pieces.”

As I started to falter, she held up a single latex-covered palm.

“Stop,” she told me, “and let’s switch to English.” She spoke it with a sizable accent, but was quite understandable.

“Right. Lately my teeth have begun to chip. There are little pieces missing out of the cutting edges, and I want to get it dealt with before any more damage occurs.”

“Ah, yes; I see,” she began as she poked delicately with her mirror and hook probe. “Unfortunately, the damage has progressed too far and we’re going to need to pull these two.” She indicated my top front teeth.

I nearly fell out of the seat as she began laughing. Apparently she was no stranger to the aversion gringos held towards obvious prosthetics.

“I kid, I kid. This is easy work.”

I settled back into the deep recline of the dental chair, heart still battering itself against my ribcage. I was ready at any moment to flee if I saw the slightest flash of gold.

She picked up a drill with a flat, saucer-like attachment at the business end. “Don’t move,” she told me, all humor aside.

She pressed the power button and it began to whir. Like a bad horror movie, it inched closer to my face. My eyes bulged, but I was too afraid of what additional damage turning away might cause. It became lost inside my mouth, the sensation a dull vibration that resonated along my jaw and into my eardrums.

“At least it doesn’t hurt,” the relentlessly optimistic part of my psyche chirped.

My teeth began to heat up, the way they do when you hold hot coffee in that space between your teeth and lips. Smoke—honest to goodness smoke—began billowing out of my mouth. I closed my eyes. My optimism, already in the gross minority, was beaten almost to death by my increasingly powerful neuroses. Somehow I just knew that from this day forward I would never be able to smile in public again.

A few more minutes of drill work and the dentist asked one of the two hovering hygienists to fetch the composite. When it came, she slathered some on my filed teeth and began forming them into approximations of what they used to be. I couldn’t tell how good of a job she was doing, whether it would dry clear or white, and how it would hold up to the daily rigors I put my mouth through.

“That would make a great ‘that’s what she said’ joke,” my cowed optimism whispered, not looking for another pummeling. My pessimism left it alone, just this once.

Opening my eyes, I peered up into the orange safety goggles the dentist had donned. She was using the UV light to harden the composite. I wondered what the likelihood was of getting mouth cancer from such treatments. Was it like a CT scan, dishing out carcinomas to one unlucky patient in every thousand? I believed my optimism when it said it was less.

She pulled the ray gun out of my mouth and stuck a piece of black electrical tape in instead.

“Bite,” she commanded.

I bit.

She looked at the strip. “Do any of your teeth feel larger than they should?”

“The top left one feels longer than normal.”

She nodded, as if this statement confirmed what she already knew. Out came the drill again. Out billowed the smoke. Out boiled my neuroses.

When she was done, I ran my tongue along the offending incisor. It felt more normal.

Again she stuck the black electrical tape in my mouth and told me to bite. Only then did it occur to me that she was checking that the pressure of my bite was equal along the strip. Equal pressure meant equal tooth length.

Out came the drill twice more, and each time I winced in expected mutilation. When she was finally done she handed me a mirror. My teeth had a different texture, somehow more rough and plastic, but the mirror told me that no permanent damage had been done. Aesthetically they looked no different than they had a month ago.

Somewhere, deep inside, my narcissism breathed a sigh of relief.

Find the accompanying pictures here: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week30?authkey=Gv1sRgCOWiw92E3ev5Dw