Mud-oven Chicken Dinner

There are easier ways to cook a chicken, but can anything compare with dinner baked in a mud oven?

Recipe:

Catch, kill and clean the chicken. Stack some spare adobe bricks into a small oven.

Stoke it with firewood for several hours.

...And while waiting, prepare mud.

Rake the coals flat when they have heated the adobe walls white hot.

Slide in the tray of potatoes, camote (sweet potatoes), carrots, and bananas.

Then the pan of spiced chicken - covered with newspaper.

Close the oven and seal with mud so not even a wisp of smoke escapes.

In an hour the aroma of the chicken will beckon you to break open the oven

and strip off the yellowed newspaper to reveal the golden chicken dinner.

A dinner made exquisite by pleasant company.

Our muddy - handed hosts were Willie and Fabiola Aliaga, former students of the University

and good friends of Paul since he lived here in 2000.

Willie manages a large pig operation. Together they raise and sell their own pigs and chickens.

Willie is the designated community leader of the pueblo of Carmen Pampa this year.

In that role he has participated in small group meetings at the capitol with Evo Morales, the Bolivian president.

Working Together

Carnival time in Bolivia is a time of fiesta for most, but not all. Many UAC students cannot afford the long bus trip to their pueblo. Some took advantage of the vacation days to earn money by building the new womens’ dormitory.

For a meal and a good daily wage ($7) they toiled like ants on the hillside to excavate foundation holes and transport the rock and earth down the slope.

The indigenous people of Bolivia have centuries-old traditions of community work.

Students from the countryside here retain the custom of community work.

They labor together naturally, each seeming to know his role with little explanation.
Wheelbarrows and picks are in short supply so each takes his/her turn in quick succession – young women as well as men.

. They call for the wheelbarrows as others are returning them at a trot.

Those who have no tools invent them...

making slings to carry the soil and passing rocks by hand.

The boss, Herman, exhorts and instructs. “When you swing your pick, know who is behind you! We don’t want anyone with a pick in the chest like a vampire.”

In the first day, they excavated 14 holes – 4 ft square by 7 ft deep.

I doubted they could climb out of them without help ...

....but I need not have.

Who are they? ...Students of agronomy, nursing, education, tourism, and veteranary science who struggle for their education. They work together to construct the school that will help them build a better country for their families and pueblos.

Working Your Way Through School

High school students: Would you be attracted here for college? Every student works 4 hours a week to improve the school. If he or she has a scholarship of any sort - 8 hours a week.

But you never know what your assignment will be on a given day. Maybe demolishing an adobe building,

........ and discovering interesting things.

Could be joining Johnnie to feed the hogs.

The second year nursing students are clearing the drainage ditches in the rain.

Which merits a little hot tea.

Gracia processes pork products.

....and there is always grass to be cut. This is not the only way to cut grass here, of course. The horses, the mule and goats assist.

Luis Angel volunteered to paint the bell tower roof - wearing his leather "Chacarero" hat with the turned-up brim.

And so over the 15 years since Sr. Damon founded the college, much of the building and maintaince has been done by students.

Volunteer's House

In the picturesque Coroico valley, in the town of Carmen Pampa we volunteers live in more luxurious fashion than the nearby rural Bolivians.




We live in the historic adobe hacienda of the former owner of this entire valley. Local people remember those days before land reform in 1952 when they were indentured servants.

Jose Tintia recalls his father emerging from this house bloody after being whipped.

Here we volunteers live in relative comfort...

Instead of a wood-fired clay oven we use a gas stove.


Instead of an open fire on the ground we use a grill.


















We boil all our drinking water
and strain the mud out
with a clay-filter pot.















The only hot water in the house is in the showers. This hot-water-on-demand electric 220 volt shower head is a real comfort.







We wash dishes indoors.....






....and clothes outdoors.

The volunteer's room

might look like this one.

And may have a sunrise view of the pueblo of San Juan de Miel across the valley and the homes and tiny farm plots of the Bolivian campesinos who struggle to make a better day for their children.