Chocolate Chip Cookies and COMUDE meeting

The evenings of posadas continued gloriously in true Christmas festiveness. I ended up eating for free most nights this past week with the generosity of tamales, sandwiches and coffee being offered at every hosting house. It’s quite mesmerizing sitting there listening to the chanting of the catholic prayers in Spanish all in unison monotone. I’m so amazed at how everyone has them all memorized and knows what to say and it just comes automatically. Same thing goes for the a cappella songs sung at every pitch. Everyone focuses on the lit up plastic christmas tree and images of saints on the walls while the incense burns strongly. It’s quite enchanting and I felt very Christmassy, even though I barely understood what was being said it was nice to take in the atmosphere.

My christmas contribution was to bake chocolate chip cookies and give away little plates of them to my co-workers and some of the families that I’ve gotten to know. What a task. Now in the states when I make cookies it can be a rather last minute activity to fill an hour on a lazy afternoon. Here, it took weeks of planning, many trips in search of ingredients, and difficult explanations.

Several weeks ago I decided to make them and knew that finding chocolate chips was out of the question in my site, so I purchased two bags of Hershey’s Chocolate Chips in Antigua for a whopping 33 Quetzales each…the equivalent of like 4 dollars….that could buy two nice big lunches here. I already had flour, eggs, salt, and white sugar on stock at my house. In several trips to the various shops around town I sought out a rather weak fake vanilla essence and a little unmarked baggie of baking soda. Butter is unavailable in El Chol, so I settled for a strange vegetable oil margarine that makes a poor substitute for real butter. Finding brown sugar was out of the question. After trying to explain what I wanted to several shopkeepers and receiving blank stares, I asked the women who live below me, one of whom is a rather avid baker. They told me you have to ask for the kind of sugar “that gets weighed here” because back in the day you would buy sugar in the raw by the pound, rather than the bleached white sugar that is now bought in sealed packages. Well, going back out at least the shopkeepers understood what I wanted, but most of them didn’t have it and one told me it was only available by the quintal, 500 pounds. I decided doubling the white sugar the recipe calls for would have to do.

After searching out several stores in search of cookie sheets and receiving head shakes, I concluded there were no cookie sheets to be had in El Chol, and settled on borrowing cake molds from the family upon which to bake my cookies. I did manage to come by styrofoam plates to put them on (no cute christmas pattern paper plates), aluminum foil to wrap them in, and curling ribbon to tie them up with.

Fully prepared with everything in my kitchen, I put on my ipod with some great Christmas tune classics and started mixed away. After mixing the butter, sugar, and vanilla, I added an egg, which upon cracking in the bowl, was evident that it was rotten. Needless to say I had to toss that batch and start over again. (And deal with the mess the next morning of the torn up bag of rotten egg batter that had been shredded by some sort of animal during the night). The lack of brown sugar, weakness of the vanilla, and strangeness of the margarine resulted in dough that wasn’t quite as tasty as I would have liked, but it sufficed and still tasted good.

The process of baking fascinated the kids in the family after showing them the dough and letting everyone sample. No one had ever tried chocolate chip cookies before. There was a parade of children in my kitchen as the cookies took form in my oven, which I am so lucky to have left there by the owner of the house. It was very exciting and they were all very curious about the ingredients and the whole process. Never have baking cookies been so eagerly watched. They took turns shining my flashlight in the oven to monitor the process. Luckily the oven functioned splendidly, being the first time I had used it, and there were no more gas explosions. When the cookies came out, many little hands reached for the finished product, which was received with big smiles. I took a plate down to everyone else to try as well and everyone was impressed with my efforts. I wrapped up the rest and tied up the plates with ribbon and took them around the next day to their recipients. All in all it was a fun process. Its funny how something that I’ve done hundreds of times in the states was turned into a whole new activity here with new challenges and the aspect of novelty.

Thursday morning at work was the meeting of the Municipal Development Council (Consejo Municipal de Desarrollo, COMUDE). Guatemalans REALLY like acronyms, but they’re always a bit tricky because each letter doesn’t necessarily stand for the first letter of every word, but posibbly 1, 2, 3 or however many are convenient. As I’ve mentioned before, there is a hierarchy of development councils in Guatemala as part of the decentralization process of the government. They going in ascending order from community level to municipal, departmental, regional, and national level. As I wrote about before, last week I had the opportunity to go to the departmental level one where the governor presides. This week was the municipal level meeting where the mayor presides. Municipal representatives from health, police, etc. are there in addition to the presidents of the community development councils (COCODEs). The mayor gave a review of the projects that have been executed and a summary of the year. Other topics covered were the need for strengthened parent councils for the schools and the problem of animal stealing in the rural areas. I was also on the agenda and given several minutes to introduce myself and explain my background, the Peace Corps, and my role here. It was a bit nerve wracking getting up and speaking in front of about 40 people in Spanish but it went smoothly and it was a great opportunity to make myself known and make connections with people. Several of the COCODE leaders were interested in working with me at the start of next year. That’s good news.

After the formal meeting everyone piled into whatever form of transportation was available and we headed out to an aldea (rural community) for a big lunch. Big it was, indeed. There was a whole group of women merrily hacking away at large chunks of cow and marinating it all in large plastic buckets. Everything was cooked on make shift fires built there on the spot and blood spilled onto the grass. After the first course of carne asada with beans, torilla, and tomato/radish salad I was full. Then they came around again with heaping bowls of fried pork skins with lime and more rounds of tortillas. It was quite the production. We went bumping down the mountain back to El Chol in the back of a pickup truck with about 12 other people. With a full tummy, stunning views, and wind blowing though my hair, I was quite satisfied and happy to be in Guatemala.

I decided to head to the beach on the Pacific Coast for Christmas and hang out with some other PC volunteers. I felt like I got some good festiveness in El Chol with the various posadas and other Christmas activities. I’ve had a lot of cultural integration this past month and am ready to go chill out and relax and be with other English-speakers who are away from their families for Christmas. Eat some extra ham, cheesy potatoes and pumpkin pie for me since I’ll probably be having seafood at the beach. WISHING EVERYONE A VERY, VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND ALL THE FESTIVENESS OF THE SEASON. MISS YOU ALL!!!!