Noted with Translation - Frienship Law 82

Dedicated to people I dearly miss who will soon be crossing the equator to come see me.

Friendship law 82

If your buddy
can't come
You will go see him.

Artistic competition at the parish

These pictures are from a friendly competition between the 3 Jesuit-run after school programs of the Quispicanchi valley that took place a month ago. There were prizes for poetry declamation, music performance, and dancing. It is always beautiful to see how fully the youth participate in their culture's artistic tradition. 

JV Life - The Chancho bucket

JVs tend to be save-the-world types, trying to do everything they can to make the world better and not mess anything else up. So naturally, many of them feel an urge to compost.

But here in the Mountain House, composting would be a bad idea. A compost heap in our tiny patio would smell, and that smell would climb up through my bedroom window and make my nightly time to ignore the world a less pleasant experience. Plus, we wouldn't have anything to do with the dirt anyways. We have flower bed, but they get almost no sunlight so we don't actually grow anything in them.

The solution is to look to local culture and see what people here do with vegetable scraps. They feed them to livestock. Some people have guinea pigs, some people have chickens. The school has dogs that  eat my lunch when it's got things like tripe* in it. We don't have livestock, but we live in a farming town so there's plenty of animals around. We give our scraps to our friend's chancho. Chancho is Quechua for pig. Somehow it's a word that survived the arrival of the Spanish (the Spanish for pig is cerdo).** As far as I know, it's only a Peruvian word. So don't go to your Mexican restaurant and ask for chancho tacos.

Sunday Song - Vienen con Alegría

 After last week, it certainly seems to be "a world full of anxiousness." Let's hope that "those who walk for life...sowing peace and love" can lead the response to the Paris attacks. Becaues if not, we're looking at the last verse of this song as a scary prophesy.

Translation after the jump.

Sunday Song - Sobreviviendo

The world's messed up. And, "the hardest thing in this world is living it." How do you keep going when there doesn't seem to be a point? How do you face the fight when you're pretty sure you'll lose? You survive. 

Translation, as always, after the jump.

The WHO and the JV diet

WHO Meat guidelines

The WHO freaked a lot of people out last week. I'm not one of them.

That's partly because I understand how percentages work. But it's also because I eat so little meat. I've mentioned before how little meat we eat. Without really trying, we're following Michael Pollan's 3 basic guidelines for people who want to eat healthy.

1. Eat food
2. Mostly plants
3. Not too much

DISCLAIMER: The following discussion of how Mountain House JVs' diets relates to Michael Pollan's diet guidelines is not based on my having read his book, In Defense of Food. My father read the book. But, as anyone who has had dinner with him knows, he's an excellent explainer. He's like a human cliff notes. So I feel like I got the key points down.

Making Bread

I haven't been able to get online most of this week. There was another fire on a different mountain, the mountain where all the antennas are - so there was no internet anywhere for awhile. Thankfully this week's fire wasn't as big as the one on Qoriorko, and the internet is running smoothly (or as smoothly as it runs here) once again.

Last weekend was a packed weekend. It was all saint's day, día de la canción criolla, Halloween, and day of the dead. One of the traditions for the weekend is for kids to make special breads. The girls make pan wawa (baby bread) and the boys make pan caballo (horse bread). Afterwards I think they just eat it. Offerings for the dead are usually different foods.

I was invited by Mari and Bobby to join their family* at the oven for bread making. It was a joy to step inside the work room and see a long wooden table covered in flour, a stand mixer sitting in the corner with bits of dough stuck to the sides, and small chunks of bread dough sitting on the table waiting to be shaped. Maybe I was thousands of miles away from 27 Corinth Street, but I was right at home. I washed my hands and got to work patting the chunks of dough into flat circles to make the round single serving bread typical to the Andes.

There was also the nice surprise of seeing Sra. Estella. She's the head of the kitchen at the parish, so I see her most days, but I don't see her outside of work all that often. Bobby is her son, so she was there overseeing her children, grandchildren, and daughter-in-law as they shaped their various breads.

The breads came out delicious, and Bobby filled a small plastic bag with breads for the Mountain House. It was a wonderful day with my favorite family in Andahuaylillas.

More pictures after the jump.

 *This is the family I talked about in my last Quarterly Review

Halloween

Ok, so I lied yesterday. To Peruvian adults  it was día de la canción criolla, but commercialized Halloween has made some inroads with the kids. Trick or treating did happen in Andahuaylillas. Though the went to the stores to get free candy instead of houses. While American kids would be highly disappointed with the hard candies being given out, my students were very excited to run around in costumes in the dark to take free candy in their tiny pumpkin baskets.