Huanchaco, Peru
Sunday, January 31, 2016
I came here to help women cook. That was the plan and I hoped I would learn some peruvian dishes at the same time.
The OCN (Otra Cosa Network) HELP projects (Huanchaco Education & Learning Programmes) support 5 programmes around Huanchaco, the HELP Women project at El Comedor being one of them. This is a community centre set up to help the poorest women in the town and there are many of them as these stats show:
the following is taken straight from the OCN website:
Of the population of 60,000 in Huanchaco:
Population living in poverty 23%
Population living in extreme poverty 3%
Illiteracy rate among women 7%
Children under the age of 5 who are chronically malnourished 17%
Houses without access to running water 40%
Houses without access to sewage system/latrine 7%
Houses without electricity 20%
Houses with earth floors 53%
Houses with an internet connection 4% 
Deena
It is also where the children come from that Bryan takes swimming several times a week but you can read all about his project separately.
The Comedor group has a monthly budget provided by a large amount of sponsors from abroad. This budget provides the women with groceries to cook breakfast and lunch for the children and themselves and is supervised by an empathetic and sincere Peruvian social worker named Demetria. The Comedor also provides the children and their mothers with a safe space where they can play, do their homework, do crafts or just hang out with their friends. The mums share the tasks of cooking which provides them with an opportunity to go to work and/or help with the childcare on a rota.
Jody and Moresta
(which is where the baking lessons come in)
and training to support their education and personal and professional development. Many women in Peru are often unaware of their rights, live with domestic violence and many girls get pregnant at a very young age. Education and support for their basic rights, family planning and sex education is therefore also needed. The majority of the women have either no education or have only finished the first few years of school
So when i first started going to El Comedor, I thought I was going to be teaching the ladies some cooking but it turns out I was wrong.
is that a rat in mi kitchen???
The first couple of weeks were very frustrating. My Spanish was of such a low level I could not communicate easily with them verbally, although everybody was very sweet and they did try and talk to me. We reverted to the old fashioned method of mime, hand gestures and the good old fall back - the Spanish phrase book!
However most days I was just standing there feeling like a spare part waiting for the food to be delivered so I could at last chop an onion!
Or I could sit and play with the puppy that was often wandering around the kitchen peeing everywhere. At least if I played with it I could keep it out of the kitchen!
This was not the worst crime against kitchen hygiene though. Oh no! The children were always running in & out of the kitchen putting their dirty hands in the food that was waiting to be eaten, and coughing & sneezing everywhere. They also help lay the tables up and I spotted one small boy clutching the cutlery basket to his chest out into the dining room. As he went he gave a big fat juicy sneeze straight into the basket. Gross!
no it's a puppy!
However, I wasn't there to teach them western ways and change the world, by now surely they were all used to each others germs. I was just here to help and teach them some skills they could use to earn money.
And we had a plan up our sleeves to do that. We had held a fundraising night in a bar in the town and raised 1400 soles for projects (that's £286 - a remarkable effort). 200/s of this was to go towards baking classes - that's about £40 which goes a long long way here.
One day, Bibi & I set off on the bus to Trujillo & the market of Mayorista. This is an absolute rabbits warren of market stalls where you can buy anything you want. We got baking trays, a rolling pin, cake tins, some weinging scales and some ingredients. We were on our way.
Around the same time all the parcels started arriving. We were bowled over by the amazing array of things our friends and family had sent from England, Australia and the USA. Some of these friends I had not seen since school over 30 years ago - that's a scary thought!
Then with the help of Marketa, we were on the hunt for an oven. Sounds strange but the kitchen does mainly one-pot cooking on the stove tops. The first one we were offered - well you should have seen it. There is a photo here. It looked more like a plug in barbecue and apparently, that is what most families use here. Up in the shanty towns anyway. It was just an aluminium shell with a plu; no thermostat or place for a bun tin of fairy cakes.
So we discounted it and put the word out for another. We did discuss whether a local restaurant may let us used theirs during the afternoon if they were shut. But again we had to discount that plan too for one reason or another.
Then, one of the mums, Martha, said she had one in her back garden we could use. Ok strange place to keep an oven we know but one Monday afternoon, Marketa & I set off in a moto (small little covered taxi powered by the front end of a motorbike), up the hill to Cerrito de la Virgen.
Cerrito de la Virgen
Cerrito de la Virgen is something else - and where most of the ladies and children at El Comedor live. Again from the OCN website:
The shanty town area is called Cerrito de la Virgen and most of its inhabitants come from ENSO phenomenon (El Niño Southern Oscillation), a natural climatic occurrence that caused excessive rainfalls in 1997/1998 and resulted in US$ 3.5 billion economic losses in Peru. The Peruvian government didn’t have the capacity to cope with the resulting housing crisis that left millions of Peruvian families homeless. In La Libertad region (where Huanchaco sits), authorities located some of the ENSO victims on the very arid land of Cerrito de la Virgen.
These people had no choice and were made no promises by the government, there was not even electricity or water available for the new inhabitants. They were simply placed there and had to start making their lives again. As a consequence, the needs of the children, including their education were put aside while their parents were more worried about surviving.
Martha lives in Cerrito de la Virgen. It is a very dry, very dusty place. Even here though, some of the people show their pride in where they live by planting flowers and bushes to make it a little greener. Unfortunately such is the dust that it is a bit difficult to tell what colour the flowers are underneath it all. It must be very hard to live up here.
we found an oven
Marketa & I arrived at Martha's house. Her house was made from mud bricks and very crudely built. Martha is a lovely, sweet, funny lady and she invited us inside and made us welcome. The floor was bare dirt, she has no glass in the windows, no running water and 3 children, 2 dogs and a cat. Her house had many rooms actually which surprised me although I don't know why that should. I wasn't really sure what to expect.
She led us out to the back to a yard that was full of 'stuff'. Underneath a sheet of plastic was her oven. She said the top didn't work so that's why it was outside. She had no use for the oven.
It was absolutely covered in dust. The dust here is like fine sand and my first thoughts were that all the jets will be blocked so will it ever work and that it will take ages to clean it.
But actually when we opened the oven door, it was dust free inside. Amazing! Looking good so far.
oven on its way by moto
So between us we loaded her oven onto a moto and the little oven went off down the road to El Comedor.
There is no piped gas here all gas appliances are fed by a cylinder which you can buy fairly cheaply and it has to stand next to the appliance. So we contacted the gas man and 10 minutes later he was here fixing it up.
The man needed 10 /s to pay for the connector which OCN had agreed to pay for out of the money we had raised. But then the dust played it's part. My fears were realised and the jets were full of dust. But no problem, Max the gas man offered to take it back to his house and clean it all out. We could have the oven back later that day all working and ready to go.
This was good news as our first lesson was booked for Wednesday afternoon.
So off the oven went again strapped to the back of a moto (it does look funny)
Then later came the bad news from Max. He rang Marketa to say it was too blocked up and he would have to change some parts. It was going to cost 60/s - that's £12. A big chunk of our money but at this stage it was still cheaper than a new oven. Ok but worse news was that it couldn't be finished until Thursday.
trying to mend the oven
A glitch yes but it wasn't going to stop us baking tomorrow. Nope we would still go ahead with the lesson but I would just have to make something really simple so I could bring it home and bake it in my own oven.
I had heard during my time here that they had had baking lessons before. But what had actually happened in practice was that the teacher made a cake whilst they watched, then the cake got taken away to be baked and was brought back finished for them. I didn't want to do this. I was determined it was going to be all their own work and they would take all the credit for what was produced. So having to take something home to bake for them was a real knock back to my plan.
So the following day was the inaugural lesson and I decided we were going to make shortbread biscuits.
Well there was lots of laughter as they got stuck in. I tried to set some firm rules too. "Lavan manos" before every lesson. Wash your hands!
The biscuits were a big success and the oven arrived back the next day all working and we were good to go.
cutting out the shortbread
Over the next few weeks a couple of the women shone out as being naturals and it was great to see that thair interest had not waned. As their skills grew so did their confidence and their artistic flair came out.
We made chocolate cup cakes for Valentine's day which was great as for the first time in their lives they got to do some piping which they had a good giggle over.
Another week we made a Victoria sandwich cake, of which we decided, they would make two. One for them and the other one we would sell at the next fundraising evening to show them they COULD make money.
Well you should have seen their eyes light up when we took the money into them the day after the fundraising. The cake had cost 9.8/s to make (just under £2). We gave them 24/s back. That was 2/s per slice and suddenly you could see the cogs start turning and they were doing the sums themselves. We told them there was a lady by the beach who sold her cakes for 5/s a slice. That really got their interest - although they have a way to go yet before they can command those sorts of prices!
the finished cake
So when we announced that OCN were taking them out on a day trip on february 25th, we asked Demetria if she wanted to bake something for the trip. As they were not going to be selling these we decided upon some biscuits - cheap to make ones not like the all butter shortbread we had made on our first lesson, and easy to transport.
As this was my last but one lesson with them too, we were joined by Kelsey; a new volunteer from the States, and she was going to take over my classes when I leave. Can't believe it's almost time to leave!
It was a great opportunity to introduce Kelsey and announce that i would be leaving soon.
So with extra help today, we were like a little production line of biscuits being rolled and cut, into the oven, cooled and the tray going back in the oven with more on. Using gas cylinders is much slower than using an oven on mains gas. For a start the pressure is a lot less and the ovens don't really get hot. it is also very difficult to regulate the temperature easily. But we got there and they made 70 biscuits in the end.
Mathilde looks like a real professional
I decided they should decorate them a bit so we knocked up a bit of icing, made a piping bag and after a small demonstration, I let them loose with their designs. We had a few wonky ones but that didn't matter. They had fun which was the main thing. One of the ladies; Mathilde, had a real knack for it and she stayed and finished the majority of them off. She did really well!
The biscuits were a huge success on the day trip and were actually used as a bribe to get the kids out of the water and back on the bus to go home. A very good strategy if you ever need one!
My final lesson was all geared up to go with more shortbread at Demetria's request. Then as all things Peru, their changed their mind as I arrived to take the lesson. No they wanted a cake. A big cake and no filling. Ok we can do that.
me & Demetria
Luckily I had made a folder to keep all the recipes in and had my recipe for the Victoria sandwich in it. Then as we have finished making the cake, the ladies said they wanted it chocolate. No worries we can do that too!
This cake wasn't quite as successful as the first, mainly due to the huge size and slow oven and we had a bit of a sunken top but Kelsey explained to them that should this happen, just fill it with fruit or cream and no-one will ever know. But apart from that it looked good and tasted great.
This one they very carefully divided it all up between them and I'm pretty sure it was devoured quite quickly by them and their children after we left.
Well I have loved working with these ladies. They have so little to work with but most of the time they are smiling, not complaining (even with my limited Spanish I know this to be true) and just getting on with it. There's many people in the more developed world that could learn a lot from the people here. I have huge respect for them and I will remember this experience forever.
Adios mi amigos nueve!
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