Kosher For Passover in Venezuela

Passover (aka Pesach) began last week, and Jews worldwide celebrated their ancestors´ freedom from slavery in Egypt.  As part of the holiday’s tradition, they abstained from eating leavened bread for an eight day period. To many readers of this blog, this is not groundbreaking news. Far less obvious, however, is that my Passover in Venezuela has been one of gastronomic plenty; I have not gone hungry despite abstention from leavened bread. This is my third Passover in a Latin American country–the previous two being Chile and Mexico–and my waistline surprisingly has not diminished by any means. Access to my own kitchen during the past week has played a huge role, granting me the liberty to prepare my meals at home. But regarding meals outside, I can thank a few other key factors that make this holiday’s eating less complicated: the presence of Jewish food stores in Caracas and a few traditional Venezuelan foods like arepa, pabellón criollo and yuca.* 

Unaware of my good fortune to come, I prepared for the worst during the preceding weeks. The past offered reason to worry: I had struggled to find kosher-for-Passover meals in Chile and Mexico previously. In the case of the former, Chilean breakfasts overwhelming depended on leavened white bread. In the case of the latter, I had overdosed on corn tortillas –my one viable alternative to bread– by the time that the Pesach rolled around during my stay in Mexico. My complicated experiences in Chile and Mexico encouraged me to better stock up on matzah, the infamously bland cracker permitted during Passover.

Fortunately, I had the opportunity store up my matzah cache. A few weeks ago, I was in Caracas – the nucleus of the Venezuelan Jewish community and a city where Jewish food stores abound. Relatively speaking. It was not exactly easy to get my hands on the necessary Passover food items such as matzah, gefilte fish, horseradish, matzah meal, etc. To obtain these items, I spent two hours schlepping through Caracas and passed through three different specialty food stores.  The final Jewish food store (a whole-in-the-wall gem called “Galipan”) was fully stocked with everything I needed. They even sold six-pound packages of matzah from 2008–at a discounted price! What more could one want? I left Caracas with enough kosher-for-Passover carbohydrates to make it through the imminent eight-day period of no bread.

Yet the holiday leaves me surprised, for this week I have fully realized the wealth of Venezuelan alternatives to leavened bread. First, one must consider the most common of unleavened starches in this country: arepa. This staple food looks like an English muffin, but Venezuelans make it with cornflower and without yeast. One can find arepa on almost any street corner in the morning, so it serves as an omnipresent last resort in case matzah ever runs out.

Second, Venezuelans often serve pabellón criollo, one of the country’s favorite dishes. It includes black beans, rice, seasoned minced-beef and fried plantains (seen in the picture above). This bread-free meal is not a traditional seder plate, but it will sate a person’s most desperate hunger any day.

Finally, the Venezuelan kosher-for-Passover diet would not be complete without the nation’s most popular root vegetable: yuca. Peeled, chopped and boiled, this vegetable has the waxy texture reminiscent of a russet potato, but it exudes many subtle differences in taste. Boiled and well-salted yucca often accompanies braised beef or finds its way into chicken or fish soup. Or, Venezuelans can mash it up, turn it into a flat round, and bake it into a thick cracker known as casave. To my comfort, all yucca-made delicacies are 100% unleavened and, therefore, kosher-for-passover.

In the end, the bounty of kosher alternatives made the bread-free holiday easier, but they did not alter my regular Passover meditations. I still thought of every year’s traditions on the first evening of Pesach: the stories, songs, and traditional foods.  I still considered the symbolic significance of the holiday too. And I thought of my family. There was only one difference: I pondered this year’s Passover meditations as I chewed on a piece of boiled yucca. It was most definitely a Venezuelan Passover.

*Note: Ashkenazi Jews of eastern European descent –such as me– traditionally refrain from foods containing corn and rice during Passover. Given my consumption of these ingredients, the strictest of Ashkenazi Rabbis would chide me; my shtetl born grandmother would probably raise an eyebrow. For those critics, I respond: tranquilo, poco a poco (“relax, little by little”). In other words, new countries require flexibility.

Other updates from the month of April

Recent Photos

Diving for Pepitonas on the Araya Peninsula

East Break Travels

Passover Meal Cooking Lesson

ALBA in Cumaná

This week in Cumaná, President Hugo Chavez hosts a summit meeting for ALBA (Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de nuestra America). Ten heads of state from various Latin American countries will convene in Cumaná for the affair. To the surprise of many, state education authorities suspended academic and administrative activities at the primary, secondary, and university levels. On the bright side, this gives me time to update the blog a little bit.

Crossing the Orinoco River

On April 26^th, I will participate in a 3.1km swim across the Orinoco River near the City of Guayana. Don’t worry: I will not be alone. Approximately 900 swimmers from the entire republic and abroad convene to partake in the swim. Suffice it to say, I am quite excited. Be ready at the end of the month for an entry about my experience.

English and Biology Collide

With gusto, the group of ten Venezuelan marine biology researchers broke into the warm up song at the start of class. It happened to be the Beatles´ “Octopuses Garden”. As they learned the lyrics to Ringo Starr´s cephalopod-staring ditty, the researchers practiced their pronunciation, worked their listening comprehension, and simply had fun. These researchers participate in a weekly English workshop that I run at the Oceanographic Institute of Venezuela, located at the Universidad de Oriente (UDO) in Cumaná, Venezuela. The workshop is secondary to my main job at the university: I spend most of my time working with students in the Department of Modern Languages as an English Teaching Assistant (ETA). Much to my surprise, however, one of the most meaningful components of my job at the UDO has been my secondary project.

I could not have predicted this opportunity to work in the Oceanographic Institute during the days preceding my arrival in Venezuela, much less when I was finishing my university studies two years ago. As an undergraduate student, I studied ecology and environmental education. My college studies and English teaching did not have a strong relationship at face value, yet I applied for the ETA program to gain teaching experience in a university, experience the many facets of Venezuelan life, and improve my Spanish. I applied, won the grant, and serendipitously ended up at the UDO. Upon arrival, I immediately began to search for a secondary project related to ecology. This quest provided me with an early opportunity to see Venezuelans –savvy at social-networking– in action: an English teacher in the Modern Languages Department was about to get married; her fiancé had studied marine biology; the fiancé’s thesis advisor knew an ecotoxicology professor, Dr. Mairin Lemus, who was in search of an English teacher trained in the biological sciences. As this example illustrates, fortuitous social networks rule in Venezuela.

At our first meeting, Dr. Lemus described the research station that she directs, explained its pitfalls related to English, and voiced a proposition. The research station, titled El Centro de Investigaciones Ecológicas de Guayacán (CIEG), lies nestled in the small coastal town of Guayacán, a boat ride plus a one-hour car ride away. The workshop participants usually work from the CIEG and, logically, aim to publish the results of their research in academic journals. Even journals in Spanish require an English translation of the title and the abstract of each submitted article from researchers. All of the UDO biology researchers had received some level of English study. Currently, the biology department requires all students to study basic English, training them to read scientific works and arming them with fundamental biology vocabulary. Yet students are not prepared to write clear, grammatically correct scientific abstracts in English by the end of this rudimentary class. With this level of English training, the researchers translate the abstracts of their scientific papers before sending them off to academic journals. For a scientist who wants her work published, this is like a matzo ball that has fallen right into the lap; it is a mess. Dr. Lemus admitted that the grammatical errors of a poorly translated abstract are oft-cited grounds for rejecting a research paper. This is a serious problem for any researcher with a less than stellar command of written English, and thus a problem for the CIEG researchers, some of whom last studied English when they were in high school. Dr. Lemus wanted a remedy for the problem and asked me to lead a weekly English workshop for the ten researchers.

I would have been meshuga* had I said no; it has greatly enriched my experience in Cumaná.

Unexpectedly, the workshop participants exhibit an incredibly cogent desire to learn English, making my teaching experience enjoyable. The researchers´ reasons to learn English are urgent, concrete, and related to their respective areas of expertise that they each adore. I noted this quickly when we held the first workshop in a university classroom back in January, but it is most evident when I travel with them to hold the occasional class in Guayacán. The town faces the Caribbean ocean and is backed by arid mountains. The wind constantly sweeps through this place, where the town’s artisanal fishing-based economy lends itself to a rustic way of life. As I accompany the researchers outside, they exhibit the least of inhibitions and ask question after question: ¿Cómo se dice laboratorio de ambientes acuáticos? (How do you say aquatic environments laboratory?); ¿Comó se dice area de preparación de taxidermia? (How do you say taxidermy prep area?); ¿Cómo se dice campana? (How do you say fume hood?). Truth be told, my heart lies in the natural sciences, so I feel ecstatic at each of their questions.

Yet the “teacher” learns as much as the students – or even more. In college, my studies almost exclusively focused on terrestrial ecology. Marine biology was out of the picture. Now I find myself working with researchers whose professional lives focus on marine organisms, ranging from bivalves to sea birds to sea snails. Never having studied these topics, I learn a great deal talking to workshop participants and reading their papers. For example, one researcher’s work shows that the bivalve Emerita portoricensis is capable of accumulating heavy metals (such as mercury) from its surrounding environment without dying. Scientists can take samples of this mollusk to the laboratory and analyze the levels of contaminants in its somatic and reproductive tissues. In this case, E. portoricensis becomes an invaluable bio-indicator of industrial pollution in the marine environment. Forgive my digression, but it never hurts to learn new things, albeit in unanticipated ways. And on a personal level, my unexpected project with the Guayacán researchers elucidates this.


*meshugah: mad or idiotic (Yiddish)

A Call for Questions

Dear Readers,

I want to interview Venezuelans using your questions related to Venezuela´s culture, economy and political climate. Please email me questions or write them in the comments section of this entry. These are some of the questions that I have received so far:

1. "How does the typical Venezuelan maintain close family relationships and raise adults with good values? Are they largely Church based in their approach to life or non-faith based?" -Marcia
2. "How well informed and concerned is the average Venezuelan about environmental issues such as global warming, loss of habitat for animals and plants, over population, ecological degradation, genetic manipulation of our food supply, etc. etc?"-Marcia
3. "Why this anti-semitic eruption. Are the people against the Jews-Israel or is this a political ploy of the government. What is the history of anti-semitismin V?" -Terry
4. "Overall, do you feel that the USA has been a force for good or a force for oppression within central and South America ?" -Richard

Please keep the questions coming! I would love my interviews to be as dynamic as possible. Thanks.

Un abrazo,

Jeremy

PS: Keep reading below in case you have not read my recent entry about Carnaval.

Dionysus Meets Calypso

The calypso-throbbing car ride was a prelude to the imminent madness as I traveled from Cumaná to Güiria – the hometown of my friend Chichi. In this large town, I planned to celebrate my first Carnaval. Not far from the island of Trinidad, Güiria lies to the east of Cumaná and boasts a prominent Afro-Caribbean culture. Every year, Güiria’s celebration includes three days of parades through its streets, and groups compete with themed floats and costumes to win cash prizes. This year, Chichi’s family chose the theme Reino Maya (“Mayan Kingdom”). Upon their invitation, I decided to partake in the family’s efforts and merrymaking and was ready to help with the preparations upon arrival in Güiria. I was in the car with Chichi’s cousin, Kathi, for Chichi had gone to his town a few days earlier to prepare for the festivities. As the music thumped from the car’s oversized speakers, Kathi warned me: “Carnaval will be pure calypso.”

I arrived at Chichi’s house to witness a mess of cardboard, foam, glue, colored paper, sequins, and glitter, representing the whole gamut of arts and crafts supplies. It was Friday evening, and precious little time remained. We had less than forty-eight hours to re-construct the Mayan kingdom. Sunday was to mark the beginning of the parades, serving as a short, introductory stroll around the town. The parades were to become progressively longer and more elaborate on Monday and Tuesday. As I arrived, most of the people at Chichi’s house had finished their costume making for the day, so the evening strictly involved introductions as I met family members and friends.

The next day’s work party was light-hearted yet focused. After early morning coffee, Saturday went by as a frenzy of supply shopping and costume making. We took unusually short breaks to eat between long intervals of work. Surprisingly, this operation was well managed and determined in order to maximize productivity; Venezuelans do not mess around when it comes to their celebrations. After calling it quits for the day, we had a quick dinner and then went to the central plaza to dance to Trinidadian calypso bands until 3:30 in the morning. Everyone considered this a well rounded day for the Carnaval season.

On Sunday morning, we continued to prepare for the first parade.

The majority of the twenty-five young women in our group had their costumes ready and began dusting their bodies with glitter by 3:00, yet most of the men had not finished their costumes. Those who were ready joined the parade as part of the gradual warm-up to welcome Carnaval. In this spirit, I attempted to get some pointers on calypso from the dancers in the group, braving many chuckles and befuddled stares. Nonetheless, the tutorial felt beneficial; I slowly felt more comfortable gyrating to the music.

After the introductory procession finished, late night dancing in the plaza followed again until 2:30 am.

The dozen or so men finished their costumes by the Monday afternoon, ready to complement the female dancers. We arrived at the starting-point of the parade on time around 4:00, and the parade began a short while after Chichi and his parents directed us into our formation. Lubricated with Venezuelan-made Cacique rum, our mini-Mayan kingdom shimmied, trotted, gyrated and boogied through the whole town, following a truck decked out with six large speakers that blasted the same three Calypso songs over and over again. Despite the constant dancing, the body pays no attention to fatigue under these conditions. The revelry ended five hours later, and my exhaustion hit me hard. We came home to change out of our costumes, and, though Chichi and his friends went back to the plaza to continue, I plopped my pseudo, Mayan-clad body onto my bed. I became a corpse that was not about to move anytime soon.

That evening’s solid nine hours of sleep helped me recover, and we all needed sufficient energy for the final parade. The festival’s judges were to evaluate the different groups, so this day counted the most as far as the competition was concerned. Yet so much work remained because we had not finished our group’s most elaborate costumes. Moreover, the glitter, sequins, and shiny paper had begun to fall off my costume’s cardboard skeleton, requiring ample treatment with the hot glue gun. The fervent day progressed from governable madness to frenetic insanity as dozens of people ran around the house shouting for help, fishing for stray supplies, and dousing costumes with the final reserves of glitter. Yet by mid-afternoon, the fiasco had barely begun.

The following is an abridged chronology of the final day’s nine-hour debacle:
3:00 – Parade groups must arrive at parade origin; Reino Mayan is still at its headquarters (a.k.a. Chichi’s house).
3:30 – Half of the Reino Maya is ready while the other half completes “finishing touches.”
4:30 – Individuals of the Reino Maya who are ready – approximately 70% of the group – depart and find a spot in the parade near the center of town.
4:45 – Chichi´s parents decide that we must wait for the rest of the group, so we leave the parade.
5:30 – The rest of the group arrives, including our group’s drag queen (see adjacent photograph), and we find a new spot in the parade.
6:30 – The Reino Maya passes by the judges, eking out smiles despite our collective exhaustion. Loop number one around the town is completed near the plaza.
7:30 – Our group gets mid-way through loop number two. Despite the continual calypso music, my hips cease to gyrate.
8:30 – Completing loop number two, we arrive at the plaza, and I am near the point of physical collapse.
8:45 – The judges announce the top five groups. The Reino Maya goes unmentioned.
9:15 – Defeated, we disrobe our regalia and kvetch. My feet are numb.
10:00 – Chichi and his friends decide that they want to continue the rumba (“party”), which brings us back to the hoards of calypso dancers in the plaza.
12:00 – Carnaval officially ends, prompting the calypso music to stop. Finally.



Having experienced four and a half days of preparation and celebration, and I can now comprehend a few of Carnival’s major attributes with greater clarity. Attribute number 1: the inescapability of glitter. We used glitter abundantly to decorate our costumes because dullness has no place in Carnaval. Yet the omnipresence of glitter was absurd. Despite bathing twice a day since arriving at Chichi’s house, glitter adhered to my hair and skin. I found it in my bed. I found it on the bathroom floor. All of my clothes were speckled with glitter. Attribute number 2: the mesmerizing and sensual singularity of calypso. Calypso music and the accompanying dance support the Venezuelan saying, “Carnaval is carnal.” See the video clip below to better understand this phenomenon (click here). Attribute number 3: progressive exhaustion. Besides a lack of sleep, my body experienced soreness from the pelvis down: hips, thighs, hamstring and feet. Upon moving my body in ways I had never attempted, I utilized new muscles that began to ache. Most of this fatigue undoubtedly resulted from the three, four or five hour periods of straight dancing during the afternoon parade and the nighttime concerts in the plaza. It appeared as though the town of Güiria tried to kill me with so much dancing, and I thought to myself by the end, “At least I’ll be lightly dusted in glitter if I die.” Yet out of all parties that I have ever attended, this was the most fun, absorbing, and Dionysian of them all. It would be a shame to never spend another Carnaval in Güiria ever again.

From the Sidelines

“So what do you think of Chávez?” I cease to count the number of Venezuelans who ask me this question, one that provokes most Venezuelans to either venerate or curse their controversial president. Neither sheepish nor self-censored in his conduct, Hugo Chávez and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) run a political machine that has decimated the power of the fractured opposition, allowing Chávez to garner power. His efforts continue as he calls the country to vote on a constitutional amendment that, if passed, would end presidential term limits. Political views are extremely polarized in this country, manifested by an omnipresent politicized culture that is electrified and sometimes volatile. This culture, which I see every day in one form or another, gets closer and closer to the breaking point in light of the upcoming vote.

Campaigners set up posts throughout every neighborhood of Cumaná. At these sites, groups of red-clad PSUV party members promote the president’s constitutional amendment in preparation for the vote on February 15th. The amendment would allow President Chávez – as well as governors, mayors and senators – to run for the same elected office without term limits. The current two term limit requires Chávez to end his presidency in 2012, though this amendment would allow him to run for a third presidential term. His campaign’s force upon the senses cannot be overstated. The masses of his supporters wear red shirts that state: “Chávez Sí,” “¡Uh! ¡Ah! Chávez con el Pueblo Sí Va,” to name a few. One also encounters shirts bearing the images of Chávez, Che Guevara, and the ubiquitous star of the PSUV. And behind every large group of supporters lies a pickup truck with large speakers. At full volumen, campaigners play salsa, joropo and samba music commissioned by the president. This bizarrely political tropical music extols the virtues of “el comandante Chávez” and socialism, arguing that the president must stay.

Of course, no political campaign would be complete without sufficient literature, and one can find plenty. For example, a member of the local port workers´ union handed me a pamphlet to promote the amendment. It posits that the amendment would “strengthen and consolidate the internal unity of the Bolivarian forces for the leader of the Revolution, being a forceful message against the enemies of the patria inside and outside of Venezuela." In the case that the amendment were to fail, the pamphlet continues, “Varied forms of political retaliation and vengeance against the people would be committed by the oligarchs. Their truly fascist essences remain withdrawn as they wait their moment,” The rhetorical tone of chavista (pro-Chávez) supporters is noteworthy; they take advantage of the polarized political scenario and impart a pressing sense of urgency.

While the campaigners don their red shirts, disperse their pamphlets and play music encoded with subliminal socialistic messages, a less coordinated and more subtle manifestation of discontent pops up in many places.

At the university’s Department of Modern Languages, most English professors with whom I work readily denounce Chávez, blaming nearly all of Venezuela´s domestic problems (e.g., rising delinquency, inflation, unemployment, etc.) on their president. For example, one co-worker sends her friends text messages that joke about the president. Others lament that it is difficult to find a job unless one has PSUV membership. Suffice it to say, red is a color rarely found within the offices of the Department of Modern Languages.

While waiting for the bus last Tuesday, I overheard an elderly man as he harangued his wife about the government: “Este país está arrecho,” essentially meaning fouled up beyond all recognition. He continued to argue that the country cannot function with so many days off, referring to the previous Monday and Tuesday that Chávez declared a national holiday. The president intended to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of his “revolutionary” government but declared the holiday less than forty-eight hours before on Saturday evening. The gentleman added that Venezuela will probably shut down for a whole week if Chavéz wins his constitutional amendment.

However, those who oppose the current government fail to muster any cohesive voice against the petroleum-dollar spending political machine of Chávez. In downtown Cumaná, the only opposition slogan found painted on the walls is “No is No.” I noticed this painted on a few walls compared to the thousands of murals and posters that promote the amendment.

The abundant posters, chants, songs, reproachful comments, graffiti and t-shirts make me dizzy at times. I felt this effect last Tuesday having heard the man at the bus stop and then passing by hoards of chavistas on the street during the bus ride. After hoping off the bus in the historic downtown, I strolled past the remains of the old capital building (see picture above), once the office of the Sucre State governor. A group of students firebombed the building years ago during protests. Ironically, the remaining façade and the vegetation within the ruins present a numbing yet eloquent image; it is a stark local symbol of political clashes at their worst. I recalled the question: “So what do you think of Chávez?” “Neutral,” I tell myself. It is best to stand on the sidelines when confronted by Venezuelan politics.

Impact of Falling Oil Prices in Venezuela

Check out this New York Times article. It addresses the impact of falling oil prices on the political and social agenda of the Hugo Chávez government (Read it!).