Chewing Coca Leaves..

The coca leaf has been chewed and brewed for tea traditionally for centuries all up and down the Andean region, specifically Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia and the habit is not going away anytime soon. Read HERE a good article about coca leaf myth and reality.

In other words, it’s a way of life for the outdoor workers of Molinopampa and for much of the manual labor (construction, mining, etc.) in Peru and other Andes countries.  Chewing is called ‘chacchar’ in Quechua, or ‘coquear’ in parts of northern Peru (though in other parts of the county, coquear might be understood as using cocaine), nonetheless, ‘echar una bola’ might be best and most colloquial because that’s basically what you’ll be doing, tossing a ball in your cheek.  Here’s how you do it.

1. Many by the coca leaves in bulk in quantities desired, even 1 sol or about 30 cents will get you a bag.

2. Separate out the small sticks and seeds and put a large marble to golf ball sized wad in the side of your mouth.  Some say that stripping out the center vein of each leaf with your teeth is best, but this is a tedious process and not necessary.

3. When leaves are moist after 1 to 5 minutes add alkaline material to the wad of leaves in your mouth to ‘activate’ the coca by changing the pH of your mouth to be more basic, allowing the coca alkaloids to be absorbed.  This should produce a bit of a numbing feeling in the mouth and chewing the mixture feels more like staying busy with chewing gum rather then any type of mood-changing drug.

4. You can spit mouth juices as they come (will be quite greenish), but most locals just swallow and work on the same wad for 15 to 60 minutes, sometimes longer; often adding a bit of leaves or especially a bit more alkali.

5. Toss the wad when you’d like, and rinse out the small leave pieces with water.  Once again, you never see locals rinsing because it’s a natural leaf that they just spit out completely or swallow.

But, the Alkali is the trick and there’s a couple substances based on where you are in South America:

Poporo, or Puro, or Calero

‘Cal seco’ on stick

Lejia (or ilucta)

Northern Peru / Ecuador: You’ll often see ‘cal seco’ or ‘cal mojado’ being sold cheap at the stores and used in people’s small ‘cal’ containers (called a ‘poporo‘ or a ‘calero’ or a ‘puro’ in Molinopampa).  Cal is basically lime that you would use for concrete or other industrial processes [some say pure slacklime, but I would guess more likely a mixture of quicklime (calcium oxide, CaO) and hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)_2].  It’s caustic and therefore gives you a bit of a chemical burn in the mouth, thus, the coca chewers like to put the stick with cal in the center of the coca wad and not let it touch the skin of the inside of the mouth.

Southern Peru (Cusco) / Bolivia: Is a real big fan of breaking off a pea-sized chunk of ‘Lejia’ or ‘ilucta’ (pronounced ‘Lij-ckta’) in Quechwa.  It’s often a thick, black (or grey), soft, tarry substance that’s made from ashes obtained by burning the quinoa grain (though ‘lejia’ in english translates to bleach or caustic soda or lye).  And lye or the strong alkali, sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is probably a big percentage of what the chewed ‘lejia’ is.  Sometimes the makers have a ‘lejia dulce’ or ‘menta’/mint after they mix anise and/or sugar cane with the ash that’s pressed into a black or grey chunk.

Either way, it’s an activity not to be missed should you be allowed or have the opportunity to try.

New Capture and Dam Clean..

Municipality is doing something to guarantee cleaner piped water in the future, because this month workers are putting the finishing touch to a new spring-box or water capture box from a little creek near where the normal dam capture is taking water for the community. The idea is that in times of highly turbulent water in the main ‘ojo de molino’ river (during the rainy season), the dam capture will be shut off and water going to the community would mainly come from the small creek. See pictures below..

 

Looking up creek, not really flowing towards the structure just being built, but should still be able to amass clean water.

Heber inside the box putting final touches on cement job.

Top part is the weir, or spillover if water level gets too high; the long tube will be taking water to the community, and the bottom hole is to drain the structure and clean it out at times.

Fresh new connection to the intake box of the dam now used to provide water to the community. A shut-off will be installed on the side that takes water from river for times of high sediment load.

Also, tons of sand and sediment get caught up behind the dam that’s used to feed into the sedimentation tanks. The only way to try to clean out from behind this structure is to first drain some of the water (see below), then go in with shovels and buckets.

Drain the dam to get at the sediment behind it. It all takes alot of time and folks willing to get messy.

Hidden Sand Mine and Quick Cottage Water Supply..

About a 40min walk up off the highway to Mendoza lives a down to earth family from Cajamarca who live without electricity, are not part of the waste-water system, put down big potato-rich meals, tapped into their own property water source, raise some of the largest ‘Flevish’ or Fleckvieh cows that I’ve seen, and are happy as ever.  I’ve been visiting this family since getting to the area and now that I’m tasked with putting an improved cook-stove in there cottage house, I’ve been there even more.

Need sand? Got to know where to look and start digging.

Just about 8in from the surface the owner knew that a vein of white sand was below. Enough for the cement we had to mix.

If you like cows, they have plenty of them. ‘Bron-swiss’ and ‘Flayvish’ mainly.. good sizes too.

Next to their cabin house, they dug a 2m by 2m pit to capture water from the topsoil and settle out some sediment.

Then leaves relatively clear from the 4″ tube in front of there house/cabin.

Safe water session with moms and kids..

Big thanks to Andrea for setting up and organizing the session in Huascazala back during the 1st Saturday of this month.  4 moms showed up and more then enough kids to fill to capacity the play-pens at McDonald’s.  Andrea presented good information on home hygiene tracking, then opened the floor to yours-truly.  I had a bit of statistics to present about the water quality in our district, but was real anxious to get to our activity.  What I had for the ladies was a taste test between different types of treated and untreated water from Molinopampa.  Without knowing what they were consuming, I had them rate the taste of these 4 types of water:

-Tap water treated by boiling and cooling
-Tap water treated with a couple drops of bleach
-Tap water untreated
-Bottled water (San Carlos)

And as expected the bottled water was most favorable and actually the raw tap water and bleach water got pretty high marks.  The boiled water was most unliked but maybe that was because the bottle I transported it in might not have been extremely clean.  Nonetheless, none of the moms fortunately got sick after the experiment and hopefully learned something.  Andrea and I had a nice time.