Casave in the Sun
April 27, 2010
Jennifer Temmer

This past week has been filled with many new experiences. Two of these experiences included the casave making process and a hike up the mountain to help clean a plot of yucca. Casave, as I recently learned, is a large, flat, cracker-like food that is made from yucca. The whole process is incredible.  Women grate pieces of yucca on special wooden boards. They then squish the grated yucca into long braided tubes. The tubes are then hung from the rafters and a stick is connected to the bottom so they can squeeze the water out of the yucca mush. Two sacs of yucca take about a day to prepare for cooking. The next steps are to dry the yucca, roll it out in to a thin layer and cook it on a large flat top wood stove. Once the casave is cooked, it is scraped off the stove like a crape, cut in half and ready for sale. The price for one “torta” of casave in Ciriboya runs about 25 Lempiras or just over 1 Canadian dollar.

Before the casave is prepared, the most difficult part of the whole process takes place. These are the daily trips up the mountain to tend the yucca plots. I hiked up into the hills with some women on the weekend, leaving at 5:30 am. This, by the way, was a relatively late start to the day. By the time we arrived I was already tired and we had not yet started working. When we finally arrived, with machetes in hand we started cutting back the weeds that had grown under the yucca. Little by little we moved up the side of the hill with the sun, ever hotter, beating down on our backs. By 10 am it was time to head back. Conversation was considerably less on the way home but the women were still in good spirits. When I got home I realized that I still had all my washing to do (by hand) the house still needed to be cleaned and I had to make lunch. This is a very typical day in the live of Garifuna women. It is long and tiring. I experienced just one day, do not have a family and children to take care of, or community responsibilities. It is experiences like this that help put things into perspective. I admire the strength of these women. They struggle everyday, fighting to provide for themselves and their families. Through all this, they still find the energy to laugh, spend time with each other and try to better their lives.