Village Day!

Fair warning, this is another long post! But it is my favorite one so far, I think. It was a new experience for us and something we learned so much from.

On Saturday, we headed out to a local village to see what it's like out there. It's very different from the city that we live in, but it was still great fun. John and Jenny live in a village about twenty or so minutes outside of the city, and Jenny planned a whole day for us to experience village life! We did all sorts of fun things, and we learned so much about the indigenous people that we have come to love since living here.

For our first adventure, we attended Jenny's English class in her village! There were about 18 or so kids there, and we heard lots of phonics and sounds. It was very lively too!

Jenny's class

The next adventure was definitely one of my favorites! We made tortillas BY HAND!! How cool is that?!? Jenny's sweet next door neighbor, Mary Magdalena, taught us how to make them and let us practice in her kitchen. It was probably the neatest thing I've been able to do.

Getting it all ready!

The metal bucket originally held corn, and earlier that day, Mary Magdalena had taken it to the market to get her corn ground and made into the white stuff. The white stuff on the stone is called masa and it's what we made the tortillas out of. 

So, here's the process in pictures:

Natasha was the guinea pig. Step one: Pinch off masa and check with  our teacher to ensure we had the right amount, not too much, not too little. 

Step two: After rounding, then flattening the dough, place it on the presa de masa (tortilla press), and  make sure the dough is correctly placed between the two pieces of plastic.

Step three: Close the VERY heavy press and squish! Use those muscles, Natasha!

Step four: Very carefully peel back the plastic on one side, then flip it over and repeat.
Step five (not pictured): Carefully flip the super flimsy tortilla onto your dominant hand and head toward the comal.

Step six: Quickly and very gently kind of roll the tortilla onto the comal (that super hot looking cooking surface with the fire under it) while trying not to wrinkle it or burn the snot out of yourself.

Step seven: THE SCARIEST STEP. You gotta flip that tortilla....barehanded. That's right. We picked up hot tortillas and flipped them with nothing between us and the hot comal. You would let the tortilla cook for a minute or so and then Mary Magdalena would point to a spot and you would have to take the tortilla there and flip it. Talk about new experiences. My mama always taught me to stay AWAY from hot surfaces and never touch them....

Needless to say, the whole process was pretty amazing, and we greatly enjoyed it. Once you go over the I-think-I'm-about-to-burn-myself moment, it was such fun. Mary Magdalena was an awesome teacher, and she knew exactly how to teach us white girls all about tortillas. And because it was much more difficult than it looked, we all cheered when someone got it right. Even our sweet teacher smiled and congratulated us as we achieved our goal of A) not burning ourselves and B) successfully working with the tortillas.

Sorry for the video not being great, but I thought I'd show you how it goes!

Forming the dough

Putting the toritlla on!

My first tortilla!

Check out these mad tortilla skills!

Hot, handmade tortillas with a little salt makes the best breakfast!

Even John got in on the tortilla making! And, just so you know, typically men do not make tortillas by hand in the villages. Sometimes, you'll see men in town working at tortillarias in town, but most of the time, the handmade ones are done by women. And it's quite obvious that they have been doing this their whole lives!

A better look at the peel and flip step.

John tried to make a tlayuda-sized tortilla. It didn't go well.

So, we girls were making normal sized tortillas, then John came in and wanted to outshine us girls by making a tlayuda-sized one. Tlayudas (pronounced just like it's spelled. Tly-u-da.) are basically the Oaxacan version of a pizza. They're considered to be a dish representative of the state, particularly of the city of Oaxaca. It's a tortilla with beans spread on it and then piled with quesilla (cheese), lettuce, tomatoes, avacados, meat, and whatever else you want. The only difference is that tlayudas are MASSIVE. They can be bigger than a foot in diameter in some places. So, you can imagine that if we were having issues with the little ones, the tlayuda-sized ones are even more difficult! Mary Magdalena's press wasn't big enough for John to show off that much, he still made bigger ones than us girls.

Everyone was freaked out by getting THAT close to the comal with our not-used-to-the-ridiculous-heat fingers.

A normal tortilla on the left and a tlayuda-sized one on the right. 

The tortilla-making group!

Mary Magdalena also makes tapetes or rugs. Sometimes they're used as wall hangings and sometimes they are used as rugs. Unfortunately, she didn't have any made that I could take pictures of, but she did show us her loom!

So complicated! And I later found out that this was a SIMPLE setup! She weaves with cotton, and some other people in her village use wool.

She uses this to spool out what she's weaving with.

After our amazing lesson with Mary Magdalena, we headed over to another villager's house to get ready for the next adventure! John and Jenny attend the local church and their pastor and his family make tapetes as well. They were sweet enough to let us in on the whole process and feed us lunch! Macedonia, Namacio, Flor, Cenon, Marianna, and a few other people from their artisan's group came in to show us the whole process.

This was lunch! Entomatadas are the reddish section, frijoles (beans) are the brown stuff, and the last thing is verda lago (It's eggs mixed with a spinach-y flavored herb).

We also drank horchata. It's a rice/water drink that I liked more than expected to. It has sugar and  cinnamon in it. It tasted kind of like Christmas to me. 

And this is how horchata is made. The rice is ground into a paste and then the paste is dissolved into a pitcher  with water, sugar, and cinnamon. I liked it but some of my table-mates loved it. 

Macedonia hard at work on the horchata.

After lunch, we went out into the yard to see how they make these beautiful tapetes. Here are just a few of the ones they had up for us to look at. I wanted to buy them all. They were so beautiful. 

Look at the artistry of these things! (And see those adorable wallets down there? Yeah, I couldn't resist. A few went home with me.)

After we checked out what they had up, we gathered around for the first step....

Shearing the sheep! And yes, they did it right there for us! Sadly, we found out that this cute sheep was headed for the barbacoa (I'm sure you can guess what that is...) after it gave up the wool...

Now on to step two!

Washing the wool. It came out super dirty the first time, so Marianna rinsed it twice. (Side note: Check out her beautifully braided hair! A lot of the village women here do it, and I think it's the coolest looking thing ever!)

Then step three: Plop it on the ground to dry!

Step four: This one looked rather painful! Mariana picks through ALL the wool and gets out all the sand-spurs and plant fibers that she can. As she picks through it, she sorts it into colors to help with the dying process

Sorted wool.

Step five: Beat the tar outta the wool. This loosens the fibers and makes them more stretchy.

Step six: Carding the wool between those two paddle-looking things.This gets the fibers aligned into the same directions for spooling.

Then you take off this fluffy stuff and head over to....

Step seven: Spindling!

The spindle! Just like in Sleeping Beauty!

Macedonia showed us how it worked for a few minutes. You hold the wool in one hand, then you spin the wheel, which turns the spindle, and it spins the wool into yarn!

 Step eight: Then you wind the yarn into these big loops for dyeing.

Step nine: Then you wash, wash, wash again!

Then step ten: Dyeing! We headed over to their dyeing area to see how it's done. They use only natural dyes found in plants to dye the wool. They have a vast number of colors that they can make by combining things or using one particular plant. It was amazing to see even the artistry in how they dyed everything.

This is Flor grinding up the cochineal bugs to make red.

These bugs are pretty expensive because they're difficult to harvest. They come off of a certain cactus plant. They grind these up to make a beautiful deep red color.

The dyeing area.

They have to set the red color with lemon juice, so Macedonia was squishing the lemons!

This is Cenon. He was really sweet, and he lived in the States for a long time, so he spoke good English! That was awesome when this guerra had a bunch of questions about the process. He's holding the flower they use to dye the yarn yellow. After much discussion among all of us there, we determined that we think this is a marigold. 

The red dye bath on the left, and the yellow on the right. 

They showed us how you can dye different colors of wool to get different colors of yarn. The one on the left was originally gray and the one on the right was white.

Aren't these colors beautiful?

And all of that was step eleven!

Now for step twelve: Winding the wool onto the loom and weaving!

This is a hand-built loom that they use to weave the tapetes.

See all those knots? Yeah, those are hand-tied. All four hundred and something of them. 

This is made of bamboo, and it helps keep the yarn straight.

Cenon and Namacio were winding the yarn onto the loom for us. It looked very difficult.

Cenon was keeping them straight while Namacio wound it on and fed the yarn in.

This sweet guy whose name I cannot spell, showed us how they actually weave. It was very complicated. He had these pedals he stepped on, while making sure that his yarn was straight, and keeping it all very tight. This was just a one-person loom. But then they showed us....

The three person loom! Look at how big it is! They said that it can take them up to two weeks working eight hours a day to make a tapete on this loom!

Namacio and Flor showed us how to do it. They said that they can work this loom with just the two of them though.

Namacio and Flor joked that it kept marriages in the village together because if you work on a loom together, you have to talk and work with each other a lot!

All in all, we had probably my favorite day since coming here, and we learned so much. It was neat to learn about the tapetes and for them to show us the process. They were so excited to explain it all to us and teach us about their livelihood. And we were so thrilled to meet some Zapotecan believers. That just made the day even more exciting and memorable.