Saturday 4.17.2010
Today I helped kill my lunch; we killed a rooster for chicken soup. Usually we buy our meat at the market but once before I’d had soup made of a freshly killed rooster, though I’ve never had a hand in the killing myself. I have never been one to kill animals. I only recently started killing mosquitoes and I try to avoid that if I can. I’m that person that puts the spider in the corner of her room in a cup and takes them outside (to a minimum distance of 50m away from the house). I’m still this person, and I don’t believe in killing unnecessarily, but I do understand the fact that everybody that eats, eats something else. And if that something else is an animal than I believe it’s only fair to be involved in that killing, I think it makes you respect your food more.
I’m not so naïve to think that killing for food is wrong. It’s a part of life, it’s a part of evolution, and that’s just how it is. This isn’t always how I thought, though. When I was around 12 years old I decided to become a vegetarian. I didn’t like the taste of meat, but I knew this was not a good enough excuse for my parents so I told them I didn’t believe in killing animals for food when there was plenty of plant food to be had. A couple years later I think I started believing in this statement, and at one point I was dead-set on building my future house out of concrete so I wouldn’t have to kill any trees to make it. I obviously didn’t think this all the way through because I also tried really hard to figure out a way to eat without killing anything. I don’t remember exactly, but I think the theory was to only eat fruits that had already fallen from the tree. Bad idea.
Sometime during early high school I did a short presentation on the treatment of dairy cows where I learned a lot of hideous things about how livestock is grown. I then changed my reasons for being vegetarian from being opposed to the killing of animals to being opposed to the maltreatment of animals. During college, after taking numerous courses on evolution and ecology, and reading more about current events, I started thinking about the human’s role in the world-wide food chain. I read about how much energy (food) it takes to sustain animals for meat as opposed to how much energy it takes to grow plants. I read about how much water it takes to sustain livestock as opposed to plants. I started believing that it would be better, ecologically, for the world if I could be a primary consumer rather than a secondary consumer. The more paths energy takes to get from the sun to our bodies, the more is wasted.
I thought I could do my part to save water and resources by going straight to the energy source, and because I’m an animal and can’t photosynthesize, I became vegan for nearly one year and I ate only plants. I also tried to reduce my consumption of packaged goods, because cardboard and plastic and machinery only represent a different type of energy-wasting. I was pretty happy as a vegan, and didn’t really miss or crave any foods. I did indulge myself in a special vegan/tofu cream cheese, but since I had my bagels and cream cheese all was good. Overall, I think this was the most healthily I’ve eaten in my life.
However, I do believe that humans evolved to eat meat and that meat is a healthy part of the human diet: I just don’t agree with how it’s produced, how it’s bought, how it’s wasted, how it’s packed with hormones, and how the animal that provides the food is so disconnected from the animal that eats the food. My participation today included holding the rooster’s feet and wings as María wrung its neck. It was hard, physically and emotionally. Everybody’s heard the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off”, and this is because the body still does twitch uncontrollably for at least two minutes after its neck is broken and the bird has died. I wasn’t physically strong enough to hold the bird steady while it writhed and squirmed for those following two minutes, nor was I emotionally strong enough to actually watch the neck break. It’s just hard to watch death. But I believe it’s important.
It’s easy to waste food when you don’t know where it comes from, if all you know about your lunch is that it came from a box and the box came from the supermarket. But if you till the field, plant the seed, water the garden for months, then put your hard work into harvesting your crops, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to think lightly about letting that work go to waste. I think the sentiment around killing an animal is the same, if not stronger. If I kill an animal, if I understand what it means to be alive and to feel, to have breathed and eaten and now I’m taking that away, I’m sure not going to waste it.
I’ve been an omnivore now for about 6 months, and I think I’ll probably remain this way for the rest of my life. Though now the belief in killing your own animal is stronger than ever in my mind, and I’d like to continue killing my own food, if only to remind me where or who my food actually comes from.
Thursday 4.15.10
I have a piano! Well, it’s a 5 octave keyboard with a plug that is a little finicky, speakers that crack, and it doesn’t really belong to me…but I can play it. I’ve been playing almost an hour each day since my counterpart brought it out of hiding last weekend. I actually brought some sheet music with me, and they are all really impressed that I can read such complex stuff (I still know the basics by heart, and by that I mean Watermark). I started to explain a little bit about it, then realized how I don’t have nearly the musical vocabulary in Spanish necessary to explain how to read notes, key signatures, sharps and flats, quarter notes, eighth notes, crescendos, and especially why the treble and bass clef are different! My counterpart suggested that I start teaching the local children how to read music, because there are a lot of them who have their own keyboards and who can play; they just can’t read. I think that is a really great idea and I’m pretty excited about getting started. I told him I just needed a little time to get comfortable with the vocabulary and to write a couple lessons.
My counterpart also has two guitars which I’ve been playing pretty regularly, though whenever I start playing somebody in the family comes to give me an audience, which only makes me nervous and not willing to sing so I haven’t gotten anywhere with that. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find some townspeople who want to play more than church music. Or maybe I could play the church music with them and find some way to slip in there how it’s not necessary to scream at the top of your lungs every time you’re singing. Either way I’m happy to be around music. I’ve always been able to just slip away a little from the world and get absolved in whatever piece I’m playing, and I’ve missed that the past three months where I didn’t have much access to playing an instrument. Listening to music is okay, but it just doesn’t have the same affect on me. Besides, in any given place in my town I’m almost guaranteed to be hearing music blaring from three different sets of speakers all at the same time. Right now: 1) US hip-hop, 2) Evangelical sung-by-a-6-year-old propaganda, and 3) some religious music that sounds like it is being sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks. You can see how listening to music is losing my interest more and more each day.
Wednesday 4.14.10
Sunday I went into Nebaj to meet up with some fellow Peace Corps Volunteers from around the area, buy food for the week, and more importantly, buy a newspaper. On Sundays the Prensa Libre, one of the more popular papers here, includes a couple magazines and a short selection of New York Times articles translated into Spanish from the previous week. Today is Wednesday and I’ve read about half of the articles in the Times section and I’m ready to move on to the Prensa section. I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down my other host family, but they just weren’t interested in reading the paper; they read the tabloid, photo-full version of the paper, but not much for current events and discussing things. In this family, both the mom and dad are currently attending the University of San Carlos in Nebaj and they are interested in reading, learning, and discussing. So for nearly all of Sunday afternoon we read together, talked about current events and our opinions, and just shared a lot about or beliefs and what we thought about the things going on in the world today. This is what I want every day. Besides the obvious benefits of increased vocabulary, better awareness of grammar, and plain increase in knowledge about current events, I believe that conversations with real people are better than any other benefit I could gain from any activity.
During my first few months in Guatemala I had a number of very stimulating conversations…with my gringo friends. I had some interesting talks with my host mom Dona Esperanza, but those were mostly just me talking and her nodding along. What I had been most worried about when moving to my new site away from English speakers was the ability to make new friends based on something substantial. “Hey, my name’s Katy, I like tortillas”. “Hi, my name’s Ana, I like tortillas too”. That was my imaginary dialogue of how making friends was going to go based on my interactions and conversations with Guatemalans over the past three months. Now I know that it doesn’t have to be like that. I’m sure I’ll come across plenty of people who really don’t care about having an interesting conversation. They’ll be content to ask me how many siblings I have, if I’m married yet, if I miss my family and if my family back at home misses me, and what I think of the Aldea so far. Most people I’ve met so far very rarely stray far from these basic questions. But, I’m going to make it my goal for the next few weeks to seek out those people who have the mental capacity and are comfortable enough with me to actually hold a conversation. The great thing about talking about a newspaper article I’ve read is I have already learned a good portion of the vocabulary I’ll need to talk about it. And I’ll actually remember the new vocab because I’ll be putting it into practice.
Today I talked with my counterpart about how to make moonshine. Now, neither of us really know how to do it, but he said he was interested in learning because it would be a good business, and I said I was interested in learning because it’s all about science. The only part of the process he understood was the boiling off and separating the alcohol from the other liquid at the end of the process, and he compared it to when you are boiling beans over the fire, the liquid that evaporates and condenses on the lid is always clean and clear and never has any beans in it. Then we had a little chemistry lesson. I explained about the three different states of matter, solids liquids and gasses;f that liquids evaporate into gasses and solids melt into liquids. When you boil a pot of beans, the liquids evaporate but the solids need a much higher temperature to liquefy which is why what evaporates is so clear: it’s pure water. I proceeded to explain that alcohol is a different type of liquid that’s more volatile than water, and each liquid has its specific boiling point. To separate alcohol from water, all you have to do is make sure that the temperature you boil the mixture at is between the two specific boiling points. I think he understood.
It was fun. And it was so typically Guatemalan for him to use “boiling a pot of beans” for his analogy. But, you’ve got to use what you know, and now I know exactly how to explain states of matter if I ever have to do so with kids. Use what they know and are familiar with. Use examples they see every day.
