Hundreds of Tamales

Wednesday, December 12

In class, Rysen was not acting himself and Sonia picked up on it.  We spent the next 30 minutes discussing Rysen’s eventful evening last night hanging out with some of the locals.  We also tweaked our presentation a bit. Then we moved on to learn past tense verbs.  I am excited that we have started book 3, but I am also nervous because I don’t feel like I know everything from book 2 yet.  I know I still have time to learn and that I will be practicing all the time, but I feel like my brain is getting stretched to the limit… I guess that is a good thing, right?

Sonia told us a story today about how her aunt adopted her cousin many years ago.  She had to take the train to get the city from the farm she lived on.  One day, a woman she didn’t know handed her a baby through the window of the train and said “Here is a gift for you” and the train left.  She went to her house with her brand new healthy baby boy.  Can you even believe it?  She believes it was the hand of God giving her a child because she and her husband were unable to conceive.   It is hard to believe something like that could happen, but this country is a lot different than America and our God is bigger than I can comprehend.

After class, we headed home to help Samia make over 200 tamales.  I have never even eaten a tamale before, so this was a brand new experience for me.  Eddie helped by cutting wood for the fire with José Pablo.  

They got to use a machete, so Eddie was pretty excited (although he developed a blister and when Freddy got home he asked them why they didn’t use the saw that was on the back porch).

 My first task to help was to wipe the banana leaves with a wet cloth to clean them off because they are used to wrap the tamales.

My next task was to help mix the potatoes, corn flour, butter, lard, seasonings, and liquid from the pork in a huge bucket with our bare hands.  That was interesting to say the least.

My next task was to help assemble the tamales.  Gabby put the potatoe mixture on the leaves, added rice and meat.  Then she passed it to me where I added one green bean, one slice of red pepper, one slice of carrot, 4 garbanza beans, and 3 other beans I don’t know the name of.  I then passed it to Samia who folded the leaves to wrap the tamale.  She passed it to Kerlim and Freddy who tied two tamales together with a string.  Then they were ready to cook over the fire in a huge pot of water for over an hour.

Each "pina" has two Tamales tied together

 Each "pina" has two Tamales tied together

 We tasted one in the morning for breakfast... it was delicious... but it tasted like something I would eat for dinner (not breakfast).