Livin' La Vida Cachaca*

Our Lady of Goodyear

Hannah — Sun, 30 May 2010 02:28:56 +0000

on our drive through little towns in Boyaca

Hannah — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:55:14 +0000

The weather in Goshen was totally perfect for most of May! Warm and sunny – and in Bogota the sun sets at 6pm every day forever, so it was nice to have light late into the evening. Just right for dinner the backyard:

For variety, we also ate on the front porch. Lots of tastiness from the farmer’s market & rachel’s breads:

Hannah — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:16:27 +0000

some big & exciting job interview in Baltimore in DC plus, cuteness in Baltimore. Only took photos of the cute part…here’s fun with swings:

Lizzy has become much braver since the last time I was there and is ready to be friends — good news for all her doting relatives who’ve been hoping to be able to play with her for a long time. Jacob is still ready to be friends with everyone.

Hannah — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:37:51 +0000

some friday afternoon cheer: Thanks to Michelle for sending me a great website by a New York artist — as an experiment to see how people would react, she made cute little robots that roll forward in a straight line and set them down on sidewalks or parks in Manhattan with a flag giving their destination. She assumed they would get damaged and probably never make it all the way to the destination — but, something totally different happened. Here’s what she says:

“The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months…the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, ‘You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.’”

Here’s a photo of the bot from her site – check it out, she has a little video and whatnot…

Hannah — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:11:57 +0000

Despite the fact that I’m currently in Goshen and not in Colombia at all during May, must still post these photos that I uploaded awhile ago. Perhaps I will manage to take a picture of the lovely spring weather we’re having (most days) while I’m here. Anyway…

The very elaborate Good Friday procession we saw in Popayan:

Lonely Planet Colombia says that these processions have been happening in more or less the same way since the 1550s – and all the statues – and the lace and embroidery on their clothes – do indeed appear to be very old.

Just the feat of carrying these around is pretty impressive – each one is carried by 8 people and it takes them about 3 hours to make their way around the town center (it took about and hour and twenty minutes for everyone to pass by us). We chatted with some carriers the next day who told us that this statue of Mary (plus the stand, enormous numbers of flowers, silver candlesticks, miscellaneous angels, the canopy held up by silver poles etc. etc.,) weighs about 1,100 pounds.

Carrying is a hereditary position, mostly passed down by Popayan’s elite families, but apparently some spots are also opened up to applications. There are all sort of other roles, including little kids, also wearing robes, whose job it is to use a long pole to scrape the wax drips off the lighted candles…and the candles, we learned, are made by a guy who spend all year collecting a long-burning wax secreted by a local tree.
wild – here’s a skeleton, angel, dragon/monster that we saw for Good Friday:

People were in the churches on Saturday morning re-decorating the statues for that night’s procession – on Good Friday they are dressed in dark colors and flowers for mourning, and in the parade celebrating the Resurrection they are changed to white clothes and brightly colored flowers:

Hannah — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:11:15 +0000

A very sad story in today’s New York Times talks about the increased pressure – through violence, killings and displacement – on some of Colombia’s many indigenous groups in remote regions of the country. As previously demobilized paramilitary groups re-form into new drug trafficking organization they are moving into indigenous territories (Indian groups in Colombia have the right to collective, ancestral territories) on the Pacific coast and displacing large numbers of people. The guerrilla groups in the same area not only clash with these new groups, but are have also committed displacements and massacres.

Wars for Drug Turf Threaten Existence of Colombia’s Indians

Here’s an excerpt from the article – there’s also an audio slideshow:

“…Up and down the rivers of western Colombia, a new breed of criminal armies is pressing deeper into the jungle, fighting with guerrillas who have been long in the Chocó region for control of the cocaine trade, and forcing thousands of Indians to flee.

It is the kind of nightmarish ordeal that is an all-too-common feature of Colombia’s long war: peasants being terrorized by gunmen seeking dominance in the backlands.

But as Colombia’s war for control of the drug trade intensifies in frontiers like this one, with new combatants vying for smuggling routes and coca-growing areas where Indians eke out a meager existence, it is adding to the already grave toll on the nation’s indigenous groups. At least 27 of the groups are at risk of being eliminated because of the country’s four-decade conflict, according to the United Nations, and human rights organizations worry that the new violence is pushing even deeper into the Indians’ ancient lands.

The battles are unfolding far from largely pacified cities like Bogotá, where a newly confident government acclaims recent military advances against leftist rebels and the demobilization of thousands of paramilitary fighters….

…these new armed groups, stripped of their old ideological bents, are forging alliances with rebels in some parts of the country while going for their throats in others, like this swath of Chocó, according to security analysts. Either way, their objective remains the same: dominance over coca-growing areas and routes to ship cocaine abroad, predominantly to the United States.”

gastronomic tour

Hannah — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:52:47 +0000

As always, feel compelled to photograph what we eat…
We stopped on the highway on the way to Cali for breakfast and ate Juan’s preferred breakfast item: changua. Changua is basically hot milk with lots of cilantro, cheese, and a whole egg that’s dropped in and cooked in the milk. Then you put some bread in it…it’s a lot better than it sounded to me at first, but I think to really love it you have to be like Juan’s whose grandmother made it for him when he was little.

In our tour of Valle de Cauca we had a giant sancocho de gallina lunch – it was delicious. Sancocho is a chicken soup – the broth is also made with yucca, plantains and potato (ratio depending on the region of the country) and is always brought out with additional chicken, yucca, plantain, rice, etc.. and you add as desired to your bowl of soup. A little hard to see there, but you can see our giant platter of chicken and platanos.

Our travel diet involved a large number of empanadas – in Popayan we ate tasty, tiny empanadas de pipian, which are made from little yellow potatoes and peanuts with additional peanut hot sauce added when you eat them. We then had an in-depth comparison with some very good meat empanadas from Cali, at traditional empanada consuming spot:

The fruits were mostly the same as what we can get in Bogota – although there are lots of concord grapes in the area, so we drank a lot of delicious fresh grape juice (and sampled some fairly bad local wine)…I did try zapotes - I didn’t love the flavor, but it looks great when a big pile of them are for sale on the side of the road because they’re a very dull, bark-looking brown on the outside and an outrageous bright orange inside. (here’s a photo – even though it doesn’t quite do justice to the extreme orange). Also tried these delightful, tart, little berries whose name I have totally forgotten:

days of prayer and action

Hannah — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:52:51 +0000

Several US and Colombian NGOs and churches sponsored the Days of Prayer and Action to promote peace in Colombia -some good friends of mine have been involved in the organizing. Today they’re asking people to send President Obama a message for “change Colombia can believe in” to urge changes in US policy towards the country. Here’s a link to the Witness for Peace page for more details (you can still send a message even if it’s after April 20).

To go with this news, here’s a few very good materials that have come out recently on the futility of the current way the US is approaching the “War on Drugs” –

Plan Colombia and Beyond, a blog which does a very fine job collecting information and discussing policy and events related to the Colombian conflict, created this Compendium of Drug War Statistics showing the most recent data on drug fumigation/cultivation etc… in Colombia through easy to read graphs. It demonstrates pretty clearly that despite ever increasing military aid from the US used by the Colombian military and police, as well as for manual eradication (digging up coca plants) and fumigation, little has changed in terms of cocaine production and sale.

This excellent Witness for Peace video called “Shoveling Water” talks about the impacts of aerial fumigation with pesticides that is currently done to combat drug cultivation. If I were more tech saavy, no doubt I’d be able to imbed the video here, but, instead, you’ll just have to click here to watch it and afterwards you can sign their petition asking the US government to stop fumigations in the Amazon.

Welcome back, science!

Hannah — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:50:04 +0000

Hooray! It looks like the EPA gets to make decisions based on science again after 8 years of wandering in the wilderness…

In today’s New York Times – EPA to Clear the Way for Regulation of Warming Gases: The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday formally declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants that threaten public health and welfare, setting in motion a process that for the first time in the United States will regulate the gases blamed for global warming. The E.P.A. said the science supporting its so-called endangerment finding was “compelling and overwhelming.”

Hannah — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:39:45 +0000

rainbow o’ yogurt flavors

at our favorite bakery in Cali where you can buy yogurt by the glass.

(i’m not sure what the green is…the flavors were rum raisin (yes, strange), strawberry, pineapple, plain, green, peach and grape).