Making Bread

Two days latter, as promised, I arrived at El Porvenir to make bread with the women from the Caja Rural. When I arrived, the house was empty… a few shoeless kids playing in the muddy yard. It had rained a lot the day before and I had a hard time walking trough the yard without getting my shoes and legs dirty. I was escorted into the house by a teenage girl (last Wednesday had been the “Día del Estudiante”, or student day, and kids got the whole next week off from school to commemorate the occasion) and asked to sit in the living room and wait until the women arrived. I sat and waited, a little worried they would not show up to make the bread after all.

Fifteen minutes or so later, the owner of the house showed up with some of the ingredients. Soon after, the rest of the women showed up with the other ingredients. Some of them apologized for being a little late; they had woken up earlier than usual that day to do their pottery work before joining us to make the bread and the morning had been especially hectic. They divided tasks amongst themselves and started working. I didn’t get any task assigned to me (not that I would have been able to do anything) so I resolved to see how they make the bread and also thought that I could later help to sell it.

I first joined the group working in the preparation of the ingredients. The kitchen was about five feet long by three feet wide and five of us were standing in it. I tried to stand in the corner to not disturb their work. There was a stove, a small cabinet where glasses were kept, a table that serves as a counter. The dishes were stacked on the table and covered with a cloth to protect them from the flies. The “stove” is a mound of adobe about three feet high with a shallow hole in the middle that is covered by a metal sheet. They placed pieces of wood in the hole, lit it, and waited for the metal sheet to get hot. Delmi, my counterpart, was clearly leading the group. She told the women to open some plastic bags of a white pasty content and then put it in a pot. Once the stove was hot they placed the pot with the pasty white stuff on it. I asked what was cooking and they explained the white stuff was lard and it was being melted before being added to the mix. They were melting five pounds of lard for the ten pounds of bread they were making. I secretly told myself I would not tell my fellow Peace Corps trainees what was in the bread when I sold it to them.

I decided to go and see the women preparing the oven outside. The oven was a beehive shaped unit, made of brick and adobe. It had one opening on either side, used to put things in and take things out of the oven. The women were loading the oven with burning material: a few pieces of wood, old clothes, lots of old plastic shoes, any piece of garbage lying around. Every time a new plastic bag was used (bags with lard, sugar, flour) it was also tossed into the oven fire. I looked for the direction of the breeze and noted it was flowing in the direction of the house. The smoke from all the plastic would be headed straight into the kitchen where the rest of the women were working. I pondered what to do for a few seconds but quickly realized they had no other burning material and didn’t say anything. Once the oven was filled with trash, they lit it. They would let the material burn for about an hour until the oven was hot, brush it out and then use the remaining heat to bake the bread.

Back at the kitchen the lard was almost melted. The women were breaking eggs and pouring them into a huge plastic container. While they were being battered they added flour, sugar, yeast, and orange juice (it gives the bread a better flavor than just adding water). Slowly, they added the lard and a few of the woman used their hands to mix all the ingredients together. In the meanwhile the smoke from the oven was coming in everywhere. It was a black smoke that made your lungs hurt. It went in our eyes and made us cry. We laughed as we cried and named our bread “pan llorao” (cried upon bread).

I spent the rest of the morning keeping the kids away from the smoke. They were all a little sick already and I thought I could be most useful by helping the kids stay healthier.

Soon after the bread was in the oven, the Peace Corps driver came to pick me up and I had to leave. Unfortunately I had to go back to class and couldn’t stay around to wait for the bread to be baked. I promised I would find a way to come back in the afternoon and pick some of the bread up to sell it the next day to the PC volunteers, gave them kisses and left.