Tinum...9 Days Of A Novena

A good percentage of the population of Tinum is Catholic. Sometimes when a prayer is answered unexpectedly for a family, they celebrate every year afterward by holding a weeklong prayer session and making a huge feast for everyone that comes. In this particular case, the family had a son born premature, and promised that if he grew strong, they would have a Novena for him every year. The whole town is invited (of course not everyone comes), and every evening for 9 days, all the women gather in the house to chant, pray, and sing following the example of a knowledgeble older woman. The men sit outside and drink beer, and the children run everywhere and make a nuisance of themselves as children always do. After an hour of chanting, the formal part of the evening is over, and neighbors take turns serving a light snack, usually with a glass of Coke as well. This continues every night of the Novena until the final two weekend days, and then the feasting begins.

At 6 in the morning on Saturday morning, the pig (which has been fattening for months in the backyard pen) is killed and cut up into all the uses that a pig can have. This process takes hours, as the pork rinds are cooked over a huge fire, the intestines are cleaned out to make blood sausage, and the rest of the meat is hung to use later. At midmorning, hordes of other people show up to start working, and there is enough work for everyone. The men start digging a huge pit, called a Pib, where the food that is being prepared will be slow-cooked overnight in an underground oven. The women bustle in and out of the kitchen preparing lunch for all the workers, and also preparing the food that will be going into the huge pots in the Pib. The meal that will be served tomorrow is called Mechado, and is a rich soup of multilple meats, spices, and vegetables.

I find myself peeling the shells off of boiled garbanzo beans, and then picking rocks out of black beans, while others toast onions and prepare the spices, and a whole slew of other tasks necessary to prepare such a meal. By early afternoon everyone is hungry and ready to eat, so luckily other women have been working to prepare food for everyone today. Lunch on such a day is always black bean and pork soup. On the side are the freshly cooked pork rinds, with cilatro, limes, onions and chiles to throw in the soup. And of course, there are a never-ending supply of hand-made tortillas from a circle of women sitting around a fire patting them out. I join the circle of tortillas makers for a while, as they continue literally all day to supply fresh hot tortillas to the many workers. Soon after lunch, it is time to prepare the turkeys and chickens for the Mechado.

The men finally get back in the mix, as they kill the birds, dip them in hot water, and set to work plucking 3 turkeys and 7 chickens. All the meat is cut up and grilled over an open fire to add flavor. In the backyard, the men start to burn huge logs in the pit, adding rocks as well to make the coals hot enough to last all night. When all the food is ready and gathered together, and the master cook divides it all evenly into 5 huge kettles, and finally they are filled to the brim with water, and carried over to the Pib. The men set them carefully onto the coals, and then they are stirred with long poles until they are hot, and then everything is covered with banana leaves, logs and finally dirt to cook overnight. On Sunday morning, the kettles are uncovered, and people are fed all day long with superb bowls of Mechado and yet another stream of fresh hot tortillas courtesy of women slaving over a hot fire. The final prayer session is held that night, and then finally the family can relax, after a week of hard work and good eating, and of course a promise upheld.

Tinum...Our House

I know that there are a few of you out there that have been asking for years for pictures and descriptions of our house down here in Tinum. I have been busy painting the bathroom and ceilings and applying varnish to the shelves and doors in the living room, and Rob of course decorates the house with a master's touch. And since we had a longer time here this year, we got into a few cement projects as well. So now I have finally taken some good pictures of our newly upgraded abode, and I will give you a tour of our refuge amidst the madness that is Tinum. The front of the house can only be entered by the gate, which we just replaced with a new, strong wooden one, or by the front door, which opens to the kitchen. In the kitchen we have a small refrigerator and a gas stove, and several mesh-sided cabinets to keep bugs out of our food. Outside the kitchen is a small thatched palapa, were we can sit and eat in the shade.

The main room is where we hang out, entertain guests, and sleep. At night I hang my hammock out and sleep in it, otherwise it is out of the way. Almost half of the main room is a walk-in closet, which is our only closet, used to keep everything we have off the floor and out of the reach of animals. The inside of the house stays cool by using a unique system of air holes in both the roof and walls, and rain is diverted from entering because of offset openings. The windows to the front of the house are old glass mayonaise jars, which offer light but no direct view of the inside. In fact, there is no way to see out to the front without opening the front door, which handily defends us from many curious kids outside.

Off to the the side of the main room is the garage, so named because somebody once upon a time kept a car in there. Now the huge doors are rusted and we never open them, and it has become a storage area for the tools and misc stuff that has accumulated over the years. To the rear of the house is our biggest room, which we call the sala, and it was the original house that Bettina lived in while the rest of the house was being built. We keep our bikes on one end, and sometimes guests sleep on the other end, otherwise it is a good place to take a nap in the heat of the day. There are two huge openings on each side of the sala, each with three wide doors that swing up to let the breeze in. The carpenter in town just recently built new mesh doors to replace the original vine-covered ones, which after 30 years were slowly falling apart.

About 50 feet from the house is the bathroom. The bathroom is where we do the laundry, wash the dishes, and of course take showers or sometimes bucket baths. The only running water we have is a faucet in the middle of the yard, and the city water comes on in the morning and again in the evening. When the water is on, we fill buckets and carry them up to the roof of the bathroom to fill the tank, which we use to take showers. We also keep many buckets of water inside the bathroom to flush the toilet. The wood outside the bathroom is used to heat a small tank of water, which pipes hot water to the shower. Out in the back yard we have many flower beds and cactus gardens, which we are always slowly filling with various plants. Each year in the dry season many plants die if we aren't around to water them, and of course in the wet season the undergrowth takes over and makes it a jungle again. It takes days of chopping each time we return, to clear out the weeds so we can see the plants and flowers again. But overall it is a lot of fun for us to create a little beautiful space that we can call our own. So there you are...our house. Come see it for yourself someday!

Tinum...Let's Have Chicken For Lunch!

A big part of what makes the food taste soooo good here is that it is usually very fresh. Fruits and vegetables are picked straight out of the garden or the trees. In several places around town, men get up before dawn every day to kill a pig, and the meat usually sells out shortly after daybreak. In most people's yards there is either a chicken coop or just poultry and turkeys roaming around loose. However, not everyone keeps chickens, and so there are also several women around town that sell chickens, not at dawn, but really anytime of day. Doña Sari is one of those, and we followed her through the process of selling a chicken. Several times a week, a truck comes around and refills her small chicken coop so that she always has more to sell. Then she waits for someone to show up and want a chicken for lunch.

They know that they will have to wait about ten minutes for the finished product, but they also know that it is worth the wait. Many people in the village have grimaced and shaken their heads after hearing that in the United States, it is typical to buy all kinds of meat either frozen or refrigerated at the grocery store. Anyway, Doña Sari heads out to the chicken coop, grabs a chicken, and ties its feet to a hanging rope, and deftly slits its throat or cuts out its tongue with a knife. We set the timer on our watch. After it bleeds out in a few minutes, she removes it from the rope and dunks it in a pot of hot water that she always has heating over her fire. After it is good and hot, she dunks it in a cooler pot so she won't burn her hands. On a small table, she plucks all the feathers, removes the entrails, toenails and whatever unedible pieces that there are, and then gives it a good wash. On a different table, she chops it into halves, and weighs out the amount that the customer wants. Into a clear plastic bag, and out to the customer, fresh chicken in less than 10 minutes.

Tinum...Taking Out The Stones

One of the coolest things here is that all of the materials that it takes to build a thatched hut are out in the forest, waiting to be found. Many families here proudly bring us into their houses and show us that they have used only what they can find or make from natural materials, and in some cases, the natural stuff lasts longer and works better than imitation materials. Of course, some houses are made from cement blocks with tin roofs and are nailed and cemented together and everything must be purchased from the city. But a palapa, or thatched hut, can be built from felled trees, topped with palm leaves, and tied together with vines. Even the floors in many cases are still just dirt. And it was the floor that we were going to help with at a neighbor's house down the street. This particular family had plans of having a big party at their house spanning a whole week, and needed more room for guests to work and eat in, so they were hurrying to finish the roof and floor of a new palapa. The frame was already there, consisting of four poles supporting an oblong roof with rounded ends. The floor was mostly just an empty space, and around the edges of the would-be floor were large rocks, meant to be a boundary for the floor. To help keep it flat and even, strings had been run around the edges and across the middle.

Our job was to fill this 10ft x 20ft space with about 8 inches of rocks, first larger rocks on the bottom, and then smaller and smaller ones, until finally it would be topped with just dirt. A corner had already been filled in to show us the correct method. When we asked where we would find such rocks, the women pointed around their yard, and said "Take whatever rocks you can find." So we set out to gather rocks, using a couple of old 5-gallon buckets to transport them in. The yard was on a small slope, so the back was maybe 10 feet taller than the front. The slope was entirely one huge porous limestone rock, so we literally just pulled rocks out of the ground to fill our buckets. One of the men helped us out, placing and leveling the larger rocks around the edges. We pulled rocks from everywhere, even their old burn piles and around the pig pen. As finding the loose rocks got sparse, he actually took a pickaxe and started chopping into the dirt and stone to pull out more and more rocks of all sizes. It was backbreaking work, and we were soon hot and sweating from the sun and the weight of the filled buckets. As the morning wore into afternoon, our breaks started getting longer just to recover our strength and stop sweating so much. But, after four hours of work and probably 100 buckets full of rocks, the floor was level full with rocks and ready for the dirt top. And even better, lunch was ready...we had watched and smelled the process of killing and cleaning and grilling the chicken, and cutting vegetables to cook in broth over the fire. I even tried my hand at patting corn tortillas, because that is something every woman must know how to do. So for our starving tired bodies, chicken soup with handmade tortillas and a sweet rice drink was the best food we had ever eaten, plus the knowledge of a job well done.