La Casa De Josefina

Such a busy day yesterday with so many new experiences that I don´t really even know where to begin. But here it goes....

We were invited to the house of Jimena yesterday. Josefina is an Ecuadorian woman on the farm that is in charge of all the gardening and so we have spent every day here with her. The occasion of the day was for her grandmother. She died about a month ago and they were putting her tombstone in her grave. I don´t really understand the tradition totally, but it is a Catholic tradition. So she invited us to help her cook during the morning. We arrived at her house after a 2 minute bus ride and about a 45 minute walk.

When we arrived she was so warm and welcoming. She showed us around her home. In the largest front room she has two industrial size bread ovens and racks for bread. Her husband makes bread and sells it in the local communities. She promptly tells us to "descansan" or rest, and gives us fresh bread and makes us tomate de arbol juice which is delicious but made from tap water (which she assures us is fine, even though we boil all water we use at the house for at least 2 minutes). Not to be rude, we drink up, and it is delicious!

During our impromptu second breakfast of the day, we hear cats in another part of the house. Josefina quickly grabs a whip that was laying on a table in the front room, opens the side door and quickly whips the cats standing there. Let me say this again, she grabs a whip, the handle of which is a goat leg, and whips the cats. This will soon become a theme of a the day!

After we have finished as much bread as we can muster, and quickly put the rest into our backpack, Josefina takes us into the little back room of the whipped cats and shows us our jobs. There is a huge gas oven with two compartments and two shelves in each. One wall of the room is a wood-fired oven for pigs, she says. There are two full grown cats and one kitten in the room. As soon as we enter, they scatter, one finding solace in a corner window and the other literally climbing the walls and curtains. Josefina takes the first pan out of the oven and there is 5 cuy on it. Cuy (kwee) is a traditional meat in Ecuador and is spanish for guinea pig. The only thing you do to prepare the cuy is take off their hair. Skin, little claws, eyes and teeth and left totally intact. Now, I am holding the basket steady that the finished cuyes are going into. Andy is holding the pan of cuyes, and Danielle (another woman from the farm) is scraping the cuyes off the pan with a knife as their little feet and jaws tend to stick. I am also given the whip, to fend off the cats from getting into the cuyes and the raw chicken in a container on the ground that will go onto the pans after the cuyes are taken off. One of the more surreal moments in my life. As cuy feet are getting stuck and coming off and I am whipping cats away from chickens on the ground, it is all I can do to keep it together!

With the cuy in the bag (literally garbage bags), Josefina shows us how to lay out the chickens on the pan. It went something like this: Get a chicken, slap the cats away, get a chicken, slap the cats away....and so on. We then were to let the chickens cook for 20 minutes and then spread "colored butter" on it. A butter that was orange, which we found out was colored because of some pig product in it.

We continue the process of preparing the chicken, whipping the cats (and also some of the dogs that got into the house) and generally lounging around Josefina´s house for the day hanging out with her 4 year-old daughter and her 28 year-old brother. We have lunch which is a small piece of cuy, a salad, boiled potatoes and carrot juice with tap water. The piece of cuy we are given is a foot and leg. OK--cuy meat. First off it all has a tough dark skin on the outside that turns a burnt reddish color. All of the meat is dark meat, and as Andy said it tastes like a mixture of tuna and dog (not that we have ever had dog, but it seems most appropriate). We eat only about three bites of meat, and all of the veggies. As we are eating an uncle shows up and Josefina brings a plate of food to him. This is where we learn, you literally can eat ALL of the cuy. As he is talking to us he is tearing into the skin of the cuy and when he is finished literally eats the crunchy little foot and leg of the cuy, which seems a lot like eating a pork rind--crunching and munching as he is talking to us.

As we are feeling a bit queasy from the tap water juices, and cuy, we wonder into the kitchen to talk with Danielle who is cleaning our dishes. She informs us that she was told to cut the salad on the counter, not on a cutting board or plate, but on the counter. This wouldn´t be so bad, had the containers of raw chicken not been sitting on the counter earlier. I´m not entirely sure what to say about this, other than that there was nothing we could do....so we swallowed the vomit rising in our throats and luckily it was about time to go.


We walked into town and that is when we realized part of the ceremony was attending a Catholic mass. My first one ever. Couldn´t understand a word, except "sins." At the end of the mass, they said a few more words and then the tombstone of Josefina´s grandmother was carried through the church and out into the streets to the cemetary. Everyone in the church followed. When we get to the cemetary, they put the tombstone in, and we commence having snacks (crackers and hard candy) and fruit wine and a local fermented drink. Men and women would come around with a box of the fruit wine and one cup. They would pour a small amount in the cup, you would take a drink and hand the cup back, they would then fill it again and hand the cup to your neighbor. In this way, I am sure I got to know most of the community of Picalqui through the sharing of our saliva. All in all it was a good time. Ironically, while I am afraid to step into unknown showers without flip flops, or sleep in unknown sheets without my sleeping sack, I have no problem sharing glasses or passing drinks with others.

After the cemetary celebration, we decided to call it a day, and opted to not go to the dinner in Picalqui where the cuyes and chickens we had prepared earlier would be served.

All in all an absolutely incredible experience! I could not have dreamed up the day even if I tried. And, not one of the four of us who went got sick. We should probably give our stomachs more credit than we do, but more likely we just dodged the bullet on that one!