Several years ago I lived several days as a guest in the home of Dona Vicente in Xetonox, a small hamlet about 20 minutes down a dusty road from Tecpan, in Guatemala.
I am thinking so much about Vicente and her husband and their family. I know that my age is within a few years of their ages, we laughed about that.
In my life, here in Racine WI, my husband are working hard to get ready this weekend for a party to celebrate the graduations of two of our children from high school and from college.
Vicente and Jorge are dealing with the aftermath of the torrential rains that followed Hurricane Agatha. What I have heard, through MayaWorks, is that some members of their extended family perished in mudslides. That their home, the place where I stayed, was perilously close to a slide.
In honor of the struggle of their lives– here is something I wrote after staying with them.
This is how Doña Vincenta, and a million other Maya women, make breakfast for their families every morning.
First you get your husband, your sons, or yourself to grow a milpa of corn. Milpa is the word for a smallish plot of land owned by the family. It may be passed down from your parents or you may have purchased it. A milpa is, more or less, the size of a basketball court.
Most likely your primary farm equipment is a hoe, a machete, and knee-length rubber boots. You may own, or perhaps your neighbor does, a backpack sprayer with which to spray fertilizers or pesticides on your crops.
Some farmers own oxen and a plowshare.
I'll never forget watching the neighbor walking behind his oxen, guiding his plowshare, while the music of the Backstreet Boys poured from a boombox.
When the corn is ripe, go out and pick it by hand. You'll select out about 30 excellent ears to hang from the rafters to save for seed corn for next year. The rest you put in your hand-made slatted corncrib.
Oh, in your spare time, after harvest, you will hack down every cornstalk in your milpa. You slice off all the leaves of the stalk. That will be feed for animals. The stalks will be used as fencing.
We were talking about breakfast, right?
Every afternoon fill an empty seed sack with corn from the corn crib. Measure out about a half laundry basket of corn.
Hopefully you have a man about who will spend about 5-10 minutes beating the bag of corn with a stick to knock kernels off the cobs. Empty the whole bag of corn and cobs into a basket, pick through it to pull out all the now empty cobs. If there are kernels of corn left on the cobs, peel them off with your thumbs.
You will end up with a dishpan of corn kernels. Burn the cobs as fuel in the stove in the kitchen.
I didn't see the following part happen, but I'm pretty sure it did. Take your basket of corn kernels to the one neighbor in the neighborhood who owns a molina - a generator-powered grinder/mill. That person, for a few centavos, will grind your corn into cornmeal.
Bring the cornmeal back home.
Now it's time to cook, which you do in water laced with lime. Lime is from limestone, you can buy chunks of "cal" in the market. Powdered cal is -- get this -- what we call "calcium supplements."
Lime helps corn soften, helps it cook faster. Though now you see why Maya, who rarely eat dairy, don't get osteoporosis. They eat trace amounts of lime in every tortilla.
The cornmeal in limewater must be boiled and simmered for an hour until it turns into mush. This is done outside over a wood fire because the pot for this job is too big to heat up over an inside stove.
Stir the pot from time to time. It's not easy to keep this "masa harina" cooking while not sticking or scorching, especially when it rains.
After it's cooked, pull the pot off the fire. Cover it with a cloth and put it in a place where animals can't get it. Let it cool overnight.
In the morning you must make tortillas at least a half-hour to an hour before your husband and/or sons leave for work. Many men work an hour or two away, so leave they leave the house by 6:00 to 7:00. You have to have enough tortillas made by then so your men can fill their bellies, plus have another dozen or so tortillas for each to take with to eat during the day.
Bring the heavy pot inside your little house. The fire under your kitchen stovetop must be quite hot, you'll have stoked that already.
Mix the cooled corn dough some more with your hands. Now pull out a golf ball-sized lump of the dough, mix it in the palm of your hand. From time to time, dampen your hand with water from a little bowl. Pat the lump flat, round off the edges, slap the tortilla on the hot flat surface of the stovetop. When it's cooked just enough, flip it over. Be careful to not burn your fingers.
Keep doing this until you have made between 5 and 25 tortillas for every member of your family. The bigger the nutritional needs of each family member and the fewer other foods you have to give them -- this determines how many tortillas you make.
There are 12 people in Doña Vincenta's family. This includes her family, plus the wife and 4 small children of their oldest son. Marta, Vincenta's daughter-in-law, helps make the tortillas.
Doña Vincenta told me she makes tortillas for two hours every morning. She makes more than 100, puts them in a basket, covers them with a cloth. That is her pantry of tortillas for that day.
She will make harina again that evening for the next day's tortillas.
The tortillas are delicious and filling. They will be accompanied by a few beans, perhaps a salsa made of tomatoes and greens, or chilies. One topping I was served was several hotdogs sliced very small, mixed with cooked tomatoes and onion.
I don't think I will ever buy instant oatmeal again.
