Yucan do it!
October 12, 2011
Shannon Crawley

It would be an understatement to say that yuca plays an important role in the Garifuna communities where we work. It's a dietary staple and a major source of income generation for the people here, and has been harvested for hundreds of years.

The cassava plant is commonly cultivated in the tropics, and Honduras is no exception. In Ciriboya, the majority of women in the community have some involvement in cassava production, either as their primary source of income or to supplement other types of work. The most common use of yuca in the region is to make casabe; a thin, dry, cracker-like food. The casabe is baked and flavoured, generally with margarine, salt, and garlic, and it is absolutely delicious. Ali and I can't get enough casabe, and typically have bags on hand for emergency snacking.

To get a better understanding of what harvesting yuca's all about, Ali and I made a date with our neighbour Mirna to accompany her into the yuca fields. We were fortunate enough to have our wonderful colleagues working in Guatemala visit, so the four of us got up bright and early and headed up the mountain. Clad in rainboots and long pants and covered in bug repellant, we trekked through the rain with Mirna, her sister, and her niece to a plot of yuca ready for harvest.

It didn't take long for us to feel completely useless. Mirna is a machine when it comes to digging the yuca out of the ground, hacking off the good parts with her machete, and throwing it into a big potato sack. It took less than an hour for them to accumulate two huge bags of yuca, which they tied shut and slung onto their backs, wrapping a band around their foreheads to steady the load. The bags must have weighed over 100 lbs each, as they were made for 50 kgs of potatoes. Two of us interns couldn't lift one bag, let alone hoist it onto our backs and carry it.

After finishing the harvest, Mirna suggested that we stop by the orange and grapefruit trees. Always eager for fresh fruit, we made our way under barbed-wire fences, over a small river, and through the lush, muddy, and buggy tropical vegetation of the mountain – with the yucca! It was impressive, especially considering how many times I almost fell carrying only a backpack. Mirna's family owns land with several big fruit trees, and it took them no time at all to knock down some ripe and juicy grapefruits and oranges.

This is only the beginning of the casabe-making process, which also involves boiling, grating, drying, and baking the yuca, but that's a blog for another day!