My OperaI'm taking you to the campo...
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 11:58:18 PM
Since I met Fernando he's been telling me stories of how his mother would wake him at 4 am when he was a kid, waving her machete, force him to drink down a glass of tomate de arbol juice, and then drag him up the mountain with his brothers and grandfather to work the land. They'd walk an hour or so to get to the land, and then have to work hard harvesting, planting, taking care of things...and then pack it all on the donkeys and back over the mountains they'd go.
So since he loves me so much, he wanted me to experience that toruture with him.
Just kidding, there's a road now. So we drove, in a car, me, Uncle Demeccio, his Mom, and his aunt, over to Chade. We stopped in for lunch at Aunt Mercedes house, and she lent me a machete. Though they totally gave me the small one. We put on our knee-high rubber boots to protect us from mud and snakes and head for the hills.
His families land starts just up the hill and its no farm with neat rows of crops, but its more like a forest - well no, it is a forest - with banana, mangos, papays, mamay, guayabana trees and yucca and coffee plants growing in their shade. His mom would harvest a yucca, cut off a chunk of the root and replant it in a different place. Same thing with banana trees. Now that's some sustainable agriculture.
As his mom was hacking down a huge thing of bananas she said, oh so casually, "Oh, a tarantula", and kept on hacking at the tree. Of course he and I went running up the hill with our cameras gawking and squealing as she flicked it out the trunk and we argued over whether to kill it. They're poisonous so the "kill" argument won.
Those mountains and his families beautiful land was some of the most amazing forest I've ever seen....further up on top is the cafetal - all coffee trees, 200 hundred years old, with little budding green coffee beans just showing up. All in the shade of these tall, smooth, almost green barked trees that stretch their branches wide and tall over the forest.
So since he loves me so much, he wanted me to experience that toruture with him.
Just kidding, there's a road now. So we drove, in a car, me, Uncle Demeccio, his Mom, and his aunt, over to Chade. We stopped in for lunch at Aunt Mercedes house, and she lent me a machete. Though they totally gave me the small one. We put on our knee-high rubber boots to protect us from mud and snakes and head for the hills.
His families land starts just up the hill and its no farm with neat rows of crops, but its more like a forest - well no, it is a forest - with banana, mangos, papays, mamay, guayabana trees and yucca and coffee plants growing in their shade. His mom would harvest a yucca, cut off a chunk of the root and replant it in a different place. Same thing with banana trees. Now that's some sustainable agriculture.
As his mom was hacking down a huge thing of bananas she said, oh so casually, "Oh, a tarantula", and kept on hacking at the tree. Of course he and I went running up the hill with our cameras gawking and squealing as she flicked it out the trunk and we argued over whether to kill it. They're poisonous so the "kill" argument won.
Those mountains and his families beautiful land was some of the most amazing forest I've ever seen....further up on top is the cafetal - all coffee trees, 200 hundred years old, with little budding green coffee beans just showing up. All in the shade of these tall, smooth, almost green barked trees that stretch their branches wide and tall over the forest.
