Ranchera Mornings

It’s another bouncing ranchera music morning in my kitchen, complete with sugary coffee and pale tortillas streaked with black patterns from being warmed on the crackling fire. It’s another morning of gathering the machetes, the donkey and the hoes to be taken out to the farm. It’s my host mother sternly, lovingly calling people in from morning chores to take their turns fueling up for the day’s work.

It’s her low “let’s just keep this between you and me” voice, confiding in me about worries with her family, health troubles, the latest news on the disappearance of the town’s token insane woman.

It’s my gentle old host father and his brother unraveling the secrets of the coffee farms and Honduran politics for me, celebrating the outcome of yesterday’s soccer game, reminding me proudly that Spanish has at least three different words for every object. It’s my host brother and his son hauling in red buckets of milk to be turned into four different types of cream and cheese. It’s the 2-year-old, seeing me with my backpack, asking me if I’m going off to kindergarten.

Through it all it’s the classic old-timey Mexican ranchera soundtrack on the radio which seems to have been written to accompany just this type of morning.


The World Needs More Weird People

Let’s take a putrid-smelling liquid from cow intestines and mix it into some perfectly good milk. Let’s take some ripe-looking berries, remove the fruit from the seed, dry them, pound them to remove the remaining skin, roast them, grind them up, boil them in water, and, after all that, throw them away. Let’s take some sedimentary rocks and chuck them in the pot with the dry corn to boil. Thanks to some weirdos a long time ago, we now have cheese, coffee, and tortilla flour. So if you get the urge to stir hair clippings into your oatmeal, or fry up your toothpaste with seeds of baby African-Violets, I say go for it! I’m sure when someone suggested grinding up horse bones and adding sugar, the last thing his friends were expecting was to be served Jell-o. We need to encourage creativity. Creativity, and the acquisition of very gullible sidekicks who will ingest or slather on your products.

If your invention doesn’t end up being appealing enough to make it in mainstream Western society, there’s always a market for witch-doctor potions, as long as they are backed up with a couple of convincing anecdotes. “That woman you saw walk out was here just last week with a similar rash, but after 12 bowls of this oatmeal (only $13.95 each) they disappeared in a flash! Of course she had to come back for a special follow-up hairball treatment, but doesn’t her skin just shine?” You can also demand livestock for payment if you like—you will seem more authentic. And if your cures don’t work, of course you can just shake your head and say you’re onto the person, and he’d best leave and never come back or you’ll tell his neighbors the truth about him (he’s a witch).

That was just a little bit of advice inspired by being involved in the bizarre processes that produce my food in Honduras, and witch-doctor mentality I encountered in Tanzania.