A candy-maker and future photographer: Lineth Ramos-Lovo
Posted on personal blog December 23, 2011
Together they lift the wooden pole, extending it towards the green, swollen prize. Each time they jab, they create small punctures, and white milk seeps out. Lineth Ramos, 13, and her sister Gabriela, 9, make one more stab and succeed in knocking down a third, fat papaya from which we are going to make candy. The girls hoist the fruit onto their hips and we march home. Lineth all the while taking photos with my camera slung about her neck.
Photo by Celeste Ramos-Lovo
Behind their house they dump the papaya into the same washing table the family cleans plates, freshly killed chickens and dirty feet. Lineth appears with a knife for each of us and we slash the still-green papaya skin, allowing the fruits milk to ooze out. Is the milky stuff poisonous? “Es malo, it’s bad,” was the only explanation I got. With skill I’ve never seen in kids thirteen and younger, the girls set about peeling and gutting the fruit at an incredible speed. Flicking the scraps and seeds to swarming chickens, they finish in half the time I do.
In the few home stays, hostels and general people watching in the past ten days in Nicaragua I’ve noticed how much children contribute to the housework and income. In the Ramos house the women dominate the kitchen. Celeste, the oldest at 17, is hauling in branches to stoke feed the open fire that every meal is cooked over. Grandma, who doesn’t remember how old she is, maybe 80, is putting on beans and rice to simmer. Lineth, Gabriela and I are grating the papaya to toss into a boiling water. The neighbor’s girl, Moya, comes in to return the manual corn grinder and help out with the candy. There are six of us in an 8×10 smoky room.
The strengths it takes to complete the daily chores in a campesino Nicaraguan home wear on me. I wake up just before six to find Grandma already grinding corn for tortillas. The corn kernels have to be passed through the manual grinder twice. My arms tire. We then slap out dozens of tortillas, enough for three meals for eight people. My wrists tire. The neighbor comes by with his cow and he giggles at the small stream I succeed in extracting from only one udder. He lets me struggle for twenty minutes before shooing me off so he can fill the rest of the milk jar. My hands tire. The wood smoke that fills the house burn my eyes and the fleas chew on my ankles.
But this is a good living that the Ramos’ make with the dad’s coffee plots, his job in the mayor’s office and a small store. “We feel for the poor in the community,” he said as he gives a guy sitting alongside the path a cigarette, never considering himself impoverished. Yet, he works three jobs and has recently been hospitalized for kidney issues and still thinks he’s much better off than many others. He has passed his work ethic onto his children.
Lineth is especially good in the kitchen. With the papaya candy boiled down, she adds cup after cup of sugar and stirs the concoction for over thirty minutes before it begins to congeal. I take a turn while Lineth hikes down to the family’s garden to pick up some calabasa yote, a type of squash, for dinner’s soup. She makes sure to document her short walk with my camera.
Once Lineth determines the sugary mass of papaya is thick enough, a bit of red food coloring and cinnamon is added. We scoop out the still boiling goop and form little mounds on the wooden counter top to cool. While waiting, we watch Indiana Jones in Spanish and people are soon showing up at the window to buy the sweets for one cordoba, four cents, apiece.
Lineth is big for her age and self-conscious. Her round form and ease in the kitchen paints her a typical tortilla-slapping, baby-producing Nicaraguan mamá to be. But she has bigger plans. “I really like taking pictures,” she said and questions me about what Mike, my fellow traveler and photographer, had to do for school and how he works. (I could have translated a conversation between them, but Mike had been puking all night and passed out most of the day thanks to some unfiltered water.)
Her sister is preparing to go to college. Hopefully Lineth will make it there too.
