Ricas Baleadas!

Passing by the Bodega Mabel at 7 am on Sunday, a market regular would have noted a new addition to the retail landscape: a crowd of ninth grade bilingual school students selling baleadas.

We had intended to assemble at 5:30 am, but when I arrived at 5:31, the only other person there was a fellow teacher. Students trickled in for the next hour, with two of the students with the most important components—the beans and the portable gas stove—arriving last, and only after several cell phone calls. There was quite a bit of chaos in the assembly of the operation..... “Do we have a table?” (We took a laundry room picnic table that was in use as an ironing board.) “Sugar? Milk?” (Students sent out to buy.)

Then there was a minor issue with the actual tortilla making—when we tried to fold the first tortillas, they cracked. The boy of the duo who had made the masa immediately avowed responsibility—“I just brought all the ingredients”—and the girl involved just shrugged her shoulders and bought the first cup of coffee. But several mothers quickly swung into action to help out, and with the addition of some more flour, the consistency was greatly improved. My fellow teacher and I wanted to help make the baleadas, but we were only allowed to be in charge of supervision and the money. As one student said rather untactfully, “But miss, if you make them they will be deformed! People will not buy them!”

Our first potential sale turned out to be a non-sale, since the waiting couple who had approached requesting two baleadas became discouraged when they realized that the beans were not even on location yet. (They were being heated nearby at a students’ house.) When asked to wait by an excited student, they turned away in disgust. Ah well.

Fortunately, the students ran off to grab the beans, which were indeed hot, and the mothers began to turn out quite perfect circles, so we soon had a steady stream of baleadas being made—not necessarily in the most efficient way, but slowly and surely. (It went much better once we sent someone to buy plastic wrap instead of messing around with plates—and that was all the better for orders to go.) While the students were not aggressive about hawking the food, enough people approached us to keep the sales going, and we sent out groups of students with five at a time to sell them to folks along the main street and in the heart of the market. I don’t have any proof that they weren’t just taking money from their parents and pitching the baleadas in the gutter, but they did return every time with the correct amount of money!

The limeade, made fresh from limes growing at one of the students’ houses, was N.’s personal project and made for the most enthusiastic sales of the day. Three boys traipsed around the market with the huge blue cooler, yelling to everyone to buy their limonadas. In less than an hour, they had sold out. If we do it again, we will definitely have to include that as one of our main products. Coffee, however, was much less successful.

There were so many beans remaining around 8:30 when the tortilla masa was all used up that the mothers urged us to send students for more ingredients to make more tortillas. They whipped up some more and sales continued to be pretty brisk, despite our slowness at bulk orders. I did feel savvy when one man ordered five and we asked him to go about his shopping in the bodega and then swing by on the way back for his food. He did just that and I was happy to be prepared to give somebody their food without a scramble for once.

Around 9:30, we sold our last baleada and closed up shop for the day. All together, the students had earned about 1,000 lempiras, or about $50. The money the students are raising is going towards a pre-graduation trip to Roatan—the first ever, and possibly first-annual? While the students tired at times of the venture, they were really excited to have sold so many baleadas, in defiance of some parental doubts, and suggested that we do it again some other time. Okay, maybe not next Sunday, they amended, but perhaps the one after that.

It was great to see them working as a team, and so even though it was an early wake-up, I was glad to have been there for it. I think it was fun for me and for them to be a part of the Sunday morning market action. It also helped me put in perspective what a typical Honduran life is like. Our town feels so suffocatingly small to me that I forget sometimes that for many other people, from the mountains, for example, this is actually a big place. Tons of families make a big trip here on Sundays to buy the food they need for the week—stacks of corrugated cardboard filled with eggs, sacks of flour and rice, bunches of vegetables.

Exam week starts tomorrow, and then we enter into our fifth and final bimester. I’m feeling ready to be home in the States, but I’ve got at least 2 ½ more months of soaking up all the Honduras experience that I can. While I’m very worn out at this point by life here, I’ve also been feeling a bit more connected to some members of the community, which is really nice. (I do love having a cafecito after school.) After the school year ends, I will possibly be traveling around for a while...if anybody has any interest in some Latin American adventures in July, definitely let me know.