I recently held a baking class at one of my schools. The school is one of my smaller ones with only 15 kids in two grades. Last year all of the 7th graders dropped out all at once which basically cut the school in half. As a result of that, the school has been running with only two teachers and has a very laid back feel. Working there is a pleasure and the teachers are happy to have anyone helping them out and the kids love to have a distraction from their normal routine.
This year the students had a guest teacher come once a week for a few weeks to teach them how to bake some of the local breads (the names of which I can pronounce but haven’t the slightest idea how to spell). When the class ended the students were still very excited about baking and asked me if I could teach them anything else. I was happy to inform them that baking was actually my strong suit and that we could start with banana bread and go from there.
The school is located in a very small village named Pachaj and it is probably my furthest school. It takes me about 45 minutes on the bus and then a 20 minute walk to get to it. On this day I had a lot further to walk. Margarito, one of my seventh graders, met me at the school and told me I was to follow him, then he pointed to the distant hills and to a cell phone tower and said that was where we would be going. It had rained all night and there was mud everywhere. As we came to the end of the paved road there was a crew of men who were working to unload a dump truck full of sand that was to be used to repair a large section of the road that had washed out with the recent rains. As we walked around the worksite there was a marshy area that upon closer inspection contained hundreds of tadpoles. I asked Margarito what the word for tadpole was in Spanish and he told me it was frog. I wasn’t too happy with his answer.
After walking for a good 30 minutes Margarito suddenly veered off of the perfectly good road we were walking up onto what looked like an animal path. In two minutes we were there. The house was a two-story work in progress, most likely being funded by family members in the States who were paying for construction bits at a time. Although the family had a fairly large cinder block house that was partially finished, everyone seemed to live in the small wood and tin shacks that surrounded the large house. In one of the unfinished rooms on the ground floor there was a group of around 15 indigenous women taking turns on one of 3 functioning sewing machines (all of which were the foot pedal powered variety, the kind of antique machine that my mom has at home as a novelty item but never actually uses.). The other women worked on hand embroidery while they waited their turn at the machine. They were making blouses to sell at the nearby market of San Francisco el Alto. At one point I took a break from the cooking class to see what they were working on and I felt like the greatest comedian there ever was. Every word I said to these women was greeted with enormous amounts of laughter and anything that they said to me was drowned out by embarrassed laughter. When I employed the 5 words that I know in K’iche, the local Mayan language, the women just about lost it. The ringleader of the group (the one pictured below showing off her embroidery with great embarrassment) joked around with me and kept asking when her bread was going to be ready.
The students were quick learners and one of them, Hugo Timoteo (who has a big name for being the smallest student by far) helped his family run their bakery and was very excited to offer his wisdom to anyone who had a question. I especially liked his hands on approach to mashing the bananas, although I wished I would have watched him wash his hands prior to mashing them.
The class was split into 3 groups and while certain members of each group were mixing the bread, others were supposed to be starting the fire in the oven (which I had been told was a normal oven, which I of course took to mean a gas powered oven with multiple racks that would only require preheating and not starting a fire inside of said oven. I was tipped off to this when Margarito greeted me and he was carrying firewood that hung out of the top of his backpack.). The fire did not start easily. For a people that survives by making fires to cook their food on a daily basis, I was not impressed with their fire starting abilities. The banana bread was mixed and ready to go and still there was no fire. After several tries and different fire starting demonstrations given by each of the male students, the teacher was finally able to get things going and an hour later (2 hours into the overall process) we were finally able to put everything into the oven.
The bread and muffins eventually finished baking and the students went to the task of dividing up the bread evenly between them and then washing the dishes. The women from the sewing cooperative hovered around hoping for a piece of the bread but the students were not too keen on sharing their work with others. I gave the ring leader one of the muffins that the students gave to me and she quickly devoured it and asked when I could teach her and her friends how to bake. This could be the start of my first women’s group…who knows. The activity was a lot of work and fun, so we are planning to make carrot cake the next time we meet and pizza after that, we have a brick oven after all, might as well put it to its best possible use.
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| One of the teachers with some of the students |
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| Me and the boys |
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| A nice segmented view of the in progress house |
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| My oldest students |
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| The Ring Leader with her embroidery |
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| Measuring out portions of bread |
