Honey Wine and Women

Last Thursday my counterpart and I crossed the equator and went north to Cotacachi to learn how to make vino de miel – or honey wine. There´s an organization up there in the province of Imbaburra called UNORCAC. I have no idea what the acronym stands for, but I know that they help indigenous communities around Cotacachi work in cooperatives and earn more money for their products – alpaca wool, Andean fruits and vegetables, musical instruments, etc. They have an apiculture operation that consists of over eight hundred bee colonies – lots of bees! In order to increase profits, they´ve been making value-added products: wax, pollen, propolis, and honey wine.

Rafael and I went up there because we have a community in Amaguaña – Recinto de Pasachoa – that wants to start an operation with vino de miel similar to UNORCAC´s. The honey harvests haven´t been so great the past few years, so creating a product like honey wine could really help beekeepers earn a lot more for their honey. They´ll basically be able to double their profits. Why they haven´t already started a project such as this is a question that would take a long time to answer. I would simply say that American creativity and ingenuity is something I underappreciated before.

So, we met with UNORCAC´s main beekeeper, and he took us through the whole process of how to make vino de miel. He even gave us the recipe, which is unbelievably simple. You basically mix honey and water in a bucket and throw some yeast in. The yeast is the same you would use to make bread. Put a lid on the bucket with a tube attached (the end of which you secure in a bottle of water to let air out of the bucket but not in). Let the liquid ferment for about two months and you got yourself some mead. Okay, so this is in no way a detailed description, so don´t blame me if you try to make the stuff at home and wind up hugging the toilet. But basically it´s a simple process, and hopefully Rafael and I will be able to support the efforts of Recinto de Pasachoa.

Things have been going really well here in general. Homesickness is a beast, but I´ve been learning how to live with it. Also, work is starting to pick up some. I´ll start teaching school groups about water conservation once the school year starts up in a week or two. My counterpart organization receives funding from FONAG, the water ministry of the federal government, so we focus a lot on water in our environmental education activities. Also, I´ve started working more with a women´s group whose main focus is organic gardening. This has been great because they want to learn things I can actually teach – compost, raised beds, planting with the lunar calendar, greenhouses, etc. So, starting this month I´ll start giving workshops on topics they want to learn about. The group is made up of women in their 50s and 60s and they´re a lot of fun – always cracking jokes and making fun of each other. My joining the group has given them a whole new range of jokes to spin. Also, they gave me my own garden bed, so I´ll be able to grow some of my own food, for which I´m grateful.

Music

I have an addiction. I don´t know how to stop collecting musical instruments. And it doesn´t help that I live in Ecuador. I struggle enough with resisting the instruments we´re used to – guitars, horns, violins, drums, etc. – but they have an array of homegrown instruments here that are so attractive I don´t how I´ll be able to leave the country without them.

Two instruments in particular have caught my eye: the zanaphonia and the chorango. The former isn´t too foreign. It´s a pan flute – common in the Andean cultures in both Ecuador and Peru. It has a beautiful wooden, foresty sound – kind of haunting. I think I probably heard it first in Penn Staion in NY, actually. There always seems to be a group playing them in between the entrance to the 1, 2, 3, and 9 subway trains and the booths where you buy tickets for the Long Island Rail Road. A cool thing with the zanphonias is that it can be hooked up to a device similar to a harmonica strap (think Bob Dylan) so that a musician can play it simultaneously with the guitar. I saw this on the bus from Quito today – cool.

I`ve only seen the chorango in Ecuador. It´s kind of like a mandolin with its double strings, but its body is a little smaller. Traditionally the body was made out of armadillo shell, but now they´re made of wood. They´re played wicked fast and the musician only uses the top part of the index finger. A very percussive instrument.

A couple of weeks after I moved to site I started taking guitar lessons from my counterpart´s uncle, Manuel. He´s a good teacher. His deep laugh tells you that he sings second voice in his folk trio, and like most Ecuadorians his knows almost all the national/folk songs of the country. He tends to laugh a lot during our lessons, mainly when I struggle to learn a new strumming pattern. Apart from the fact that I really enjoying learning Ecuadorian tunes, I figure it´d be a real waste to be down here for a couple years and not learn some local tunes.

I guess the point of the previous paragraph was to explain why I bought a classical guitar today. I felt like in order to really jump into the music I had get what the locals have. But it´s the second guitar I´ve bought while down here. The acoustic guitar I got a few months back so I could practice my traditional Irish/contradance music while here so as not to let down Daphne (of the group Daph and Dan). Trying to pick a jig on a classical guitar is as futile as trying to play a mazurka on an acoustic. So, two guitars – fine, yeah? How about a fiddle? I got one of them, too (only $80). I guess I figured two years would be enough time to start to get a bit of a handle on it. And it´ll be an especially important instrument when I move back to the northeast after I complete my PC service.

Hopefully this trend won´t get too out of hand.