The third day started with breakfast at 9:00. We had breakfast at the hotel again. This time, I had the huevos rancheros. It was a much better choice than the pancakes.
After breakfast, we walked to the bus station, which was a 15-20 minute walk from the hotel. The bus ride was... interesting. The bus driver stopped all over the place and drove over the median to pick up some people. But it was interesting for Dave as well, so I don't know what to think of the bus system. One thing I found interesting on the bus was that there was a pregnant woman placard by the front row of seats. There was a point at which some guy with a guitar hopped on and started playing. I assume that he was trying to make a little money.
We got off the bus at a dirt road.
It's hard to see, but right in the middle of this picture you can see two blue colored buildings. Those two buildings lie on a 10 meter by 30 meter plot of land. The larger building is a one room home and the other building is an outhouse. There was a woman working the land, tending to her small garden. I have a mixed understanding of what this was about. On the one hand, it looks like a woman living in an extreme level of poverty, as that seems to represent the entirety of her life. On the other hand, my memory is that plots of land cost $10,000 US, so she must have a substantial source of money from somewhere. So I'm not sure what's going on.
The larger buildings off to the right belong to Pastor Chable. Well, saying that they "belong" to him probably isn't quite right. He's running the ranch. I feel like I should know who actually owns it. Maybe it belongs to the Baptist mission organization. I don't remember. Upon our arrival, Pastor Chable walked us through a number of different projects that he had going on.
The first stop was the fish farm. I believe that they were trying to learn how to farm tilapia. Unfortunately, their timing was bad this year and they lost a lot of fish due to the water getting too hot. Nevertheless, it's still an interesting project. There is a solar panel on top of the structure that runs a pump. The pump moves water up to the two top containers. One of them contains rocks and plants. The main purpose of this is to filter the water. The other contain contains vegetation that I believe will eventually be for consumption (as well as some filtering). The water was a little green, but apparently not bad enough that it's harmful to the fish.
Pastor Chable also has a greenhouse. But his is much larger. Unfortunately, you can see that there's a hole in the roof. Apparently, wind and rain tore open that part of the structure. You can imagine that if the wind and rain is rough enough to do that, the plants inside probably stand no chance if exposed to the elements. He had some plants growing that were very early in the growing season. I think they were tomatoes as well, but I'm not sure. The water is gravity-fed out of an elevated tank on one side of the greenhouse. A tomato plant requires 1 L of water per day for the first 45 days, then 1.5 L of water for the next 45 days, at which point the fruits can be harvested. Each plant should generate about 6 kilos of fruit, and it only takes about 4 kilos of fruit to be meet the costs. This creates a fairly reasonable margin to work with.
On a farm, what might you expect to find in abundance? If you said something along the lines of "animal waste" you would be correct! Animal waste can be good fertilizer, but it also runs the risk of spreading disease. However, if you have earthworms to process the waste first, you eliminate the problem. It's also a self-sustaining product, as the worm population is stable (and can even grow) as long as you have a sufficient supply of waste to feed it. My notes are a little bit lacking here, but my memory is that the pile you see in the plastic on the ground represents the amount that was processed by 1 kilo of worms in the span of a three weeks. It's not a huge amount, but it's enough to be mixed into the soil to increase the quality substantially.
This is the "cute" portion of the show. Cute rabbits mean healthy rabbits. Healthy rabbits are a good source of lean protein. Sorry. "Rabbits are pets for rich people," says Pastor Chables. For poor people, it's food. Some of these rabbits are sold to families who are looking to start farming. Pastor Chable is part of a larger organization of rabbit farmers, so his work is recognized by others as being of a sufficiently high quality. In the third picture, he's showing us how their rabbit breeding has led to sufficiently docile animals, which is good because it allows children to participate.
A typical rabbit goes from birth to... ummmm... harvest in about 80 days. A rabbit can also have 6 litters per year, and each litter is 6-8 rabbits. So by using good farming practices, you can generate a good amount of meat for a relatively small amount of money. Also, extra rabbits can be sold at the market. As an interesting side note, rabbits sold at the market must have their ears. The reason is that rabbits look a lot like cats when they're skinned. Since this is an issue, I presume that cats are not a part of Mexican gastronomy.
Cows are used for plowing fields. Usually, it takes 18 months to get a cow from the first picture to the second picture. However, by feeding the cows correctly, Pastor Chable can do this in 6 months. The reason it takes so long for others to do this is because they're feeding cows scraps and less nutritious things. Pastor Chable mixes some alfalfa into their food and also gives them molasses sometimes to help with their digestion.
The sheep actually stand as a case study in true ministry. Pastor Chable talked about how some communities would have sheep, but only 40-50% would make it to maturity. This is a lot of dead sheep, and a sign of bad practices. People kept coming to him to ask him about it, so he decided that he needed to learn. "We don't do what we want. We meet the needs" (Pastor Chable). The first herd he had was a different breed. The litters were larger, but the sheep were smaller. But there were some problems with those sheep, so he got a different breed from South Africa. The litters are smaller, but the sheep are larger, and I think that combination leads to a better feed conversion ratio.
There were some other animals on the farm. There were a couple pens with chicken and some ducks. But we didn't really talk much about those. I do have a note that says 3 chickens per family to generate eggs. There was also some corn growing around the ranch as well. But that's about it.
But the ministry doesn't stop there. Every summer, the ranch turns into a summer camp for kids. There's also a hospitality ministry. The hospitality ministry is the most interesting to me. When someone in a family gets sick enough to need to go to the hospital, it's not as if the family can just jump in the car and drive to the city. So instead they have to take some sort of taxi or other ride into town. And when you get to the hospital, it's not as if you can stay there if you're not the patient. So you need a place to stay. Pastor Chable will give anyone who asks a bed and food. So he will have people that just show up on the ranch, and he takes care of them.
What's fascinating about this whole ministry is that there is zero advertising budget. Everything gets out by word of mouth. In a sense, this is the ultimate expression of what it means to be integrated into a community. He doesn't need to advertise because he's such a part of the community that everyone just knows he's there and what he does. There are people from all sorts of communities in the area who just head on over to ask him questions about whatever he's doing. For the summer camps, children just start showing up. There are kids who go without even known when the camp is going to be held (just guessing based on the timing of the previous year). They had somewhere between 1000 and 2000 visitors over the last year.
That concluded the tour. Lunch time.
Take a close look at the first picture. You should download the picture and magnify it on your computer. It looks like salsa. It is. But there's something else that's red in there that's not tomato. They're chapulines! These were quite small, perhaps about a centimeter in length. The salsa had chapulines, tomatoes, cilantro, and onion. There might have been some sort of vinegar or maybe some oil as well.
The second picture shows spaghetti in a tomatillo sauce on the left. I don't know what went into it other than tomoatillos. But whatever it was, it was good. There is some cheese, crema (mexican sour cream), and chips, which all go into the black bean soup. (Once again, black beans. My new favorite food. Surprisingly, the soup didn't actually contain any whole black beans and was quite smooth and brothy. But it still had a deep beany flavor. I learned from Dave that the beans were just blended to the point that they had no texture. I'll have to try making this at some point.)
In the last picture, you'll see a kabob. That kabob has onions, pepper, bacon, and rabbit. The rabbit doesn't taste like chicken. It has a distinct flavor. There was some guacamole as well.
After lunch, there was a bit of comedy.
Pastor Chable's solar charged batteries were not functioning properly. So the three of us (none of us are skilled in the area of solar charged batteries) poked around this thing for something like an hour and a half. Unplug this thing and plug it back in. Try plugging this in the opposite way the instructions say to because plugging it in the right way doesn't work. Try not to electrocute ourselves. That's kind of how it went. Eventually, Mike was able to figure out that the fuses were not functioning correctly, and I was able to get the new device to activate. It's probably something that would have taken a knowledgeable person 5 minutes to figure out. But when you're out there, knowledgeable people are not always accessible, and you just have to figure it out.
After that, we all had some coffee and talked a while. I wish I could remember more of this conversation, but I was kind of tired and didn't write anything down, so I don't really have any recollection at all as to what was said. After this, we prayed together, and then headed back to town. The ride back to town took a little while because it was a Friday right after payday. So everyone was going to town.
When we got dropped off, we walked through the markets so that Mike could pick up a few things. I bought some Oxacan chocolate to bring home for myself.
And then we went for dinner at "La Olla" ("The Pot"). Dave called this meal a "Thanks for coming" meal, and this was kind of our last hurrah.
The meal started like this. The beer (yes, beer) was called 77 Agave Honey Ale and is a microbrew that can only be found in that area. I must admit that I liked it. Not being a beer guy, I don't really have a good reference point for it. But I'd drink it again without hesitation (as I would the beer I had the previous night). Of course, I also ate chapulines without hesitation on this trip, so I don't really know what it says.
The chips were good with a little Oaxacan twist. The chips didn't just have salt on it. It had sal de gusano. This is salt with ground up worm. I think the worm is the maguey worm, which you can look up on wikipedia yourself if you care. What's interesting is that this wasn't the first time I had that worm on this trip. The day before, I tasted some mole that had the worm ground into it. Just pretend it's Oaxaca's version of Lawry's Seasoning Salt. It's the same color. It makes things tasty. That's all you need, right?
This was Mike's dish. I didn't note what it was called, but it's basically stuffed chiles. The red chile in the picture is actually a stuffed dried chile, but I don't recall which one it is. The green chile is the same one featured pictured on day 1's report.
This is Dave's dish. I didn't write down what this was, either. But it's basically shrimp skewers with a mango sauce.
This is my appetizer. (Yes, I greedily ordered both an appetizer and an entree.) The appetizer was 3 memelitas. Memelitas are small corn tortillas served with black been puree (my friend), oaxacan cheese, and then a topping. The three toppings were nopales (cactus), tajaso (carne asada), and cecina (pork). My entree is not pictured, but was called alambres. It was basically like a taco with a Mexican string cheese. I remember liking the texture of the cheese and wishing I had bought some cheese.
To close the meal, we had some mezcal. (Yes, spirits.) I'm not a beer guy, and not a spirits guy. I'm still not used to the feeling of the alcohol evaporating up the back of my throat. I'm sure if I drank more, I'd get used to it. Dave tried to teach me a little bit about mazcal, that different types hit different parts of the tongue. But I think the lesson was wasted on me, which is a little unfortunate.
That's pretty much how Day 3 closed. We had to get to bed because we needed to be up the next morning at about 4:00 to catch our taxi to the airport to come home.
