Aiung

I’m writing from Mosteiros, Fogo’s second largest community. Apparently it’ll gain city status before long. When I came to CV, there existed five cities: Praia, São Filipe, Porto Novo, Mindelo, and Assomada. Pedro Badejo on Santiago will soon join their ranks, if not already. Jonny and I are planning an accounting class, which we’ll give in February. It’ll complement an entrepreneurism class he gave to prospective business owners over a few months ending in November.

I came to São Filipe from Chã on Saturday morning in the back of a truck filled with apples, pigeon peas, several Chã residents, and a goat. We went to a football (soccer) game, in which one of São Filipe’s teams, Académica, beat Mosteiros’ Cutelinho in a match that went to overtime. We baked in the sun snacking on raw peanuts and downing freshquinhas, little plastic bags filled with frozen juice, in this case tamarind. We rested awhile, then went to a going away party for two nurses from the Portuguese NGO Assistência Medical Internacional, which is active on Fogo. Finally we headed up to everyone’s favorite São Filipe discoteca, Faixa de Terra (Piece of Land).

Today we left São Filipe at 10:45 am, and started the walk to Mosteiros. As it’s about 25 miles away, we hoped to panha un boleia (hitch a ride). Shortly after leaving the São Filipe city limits, we hailed an empty work truck heading in the right direction. As luck would have it, it was headed to Mosteiros, so we jumped in the expansive bed, normally filled with Fogo’s black sand, used in construction when mixed with cement. We got to Mosteiros very quickly, and importantly for PCVs, without spending a single escudo.

Sitting in the sandy bed, flying through villages, watching the rough sea pound the cliffs, I thought of Fogo’s beautiful black sand beaches which are legally stolen to build concrete block buildings. Near Ribeira de Barca, on Santiago, what was once a similarly beautiful black sand beach has been reduced to a rocky strip of land where few swim anymore. However, each day locals wade into the surf with buckets, dive to the bottom, fill the containers, and struggle back to shore with whatever sand they glean from the sea floor. When São Filipe’s beaches Fonte de Vila and Praia da Nossa Senhora disappear over the next few years, no one can say they didn’t see it coming.

Up in Chã I’ve been working mostly at the winery. I enjoy working there, which can mean anything from helping with bottling to having excellent conversations about business-related things like pricing and the IVA (value added tax). Two relatively unpleasant things occurred there recently, but nothing to dissuade me from coming back.

We bottled the 2009 red one day, a high quality and very popular product. The winery can’t produce enough of it. I took my turn at the corker, which unlike in a more mechanized winery, involves manually loading a cork and depressing a long lever with both arms to force the cork into the bottle. Sometimes the bottles have hairline cracks in them, missed by the factory, the people who wash them at the winery, the person filling them, and finally the corker. One such bottle made it to me. I put it in the machine, slammed down the lever, and the top half of the bottle essentially exploded, covering my leg and several workers with red wine. Fortunately no one was cut by the splintered glass. Even a Cape Verdean woman probably can’t get half a liter of red wine out of a pair of jeans, let alone a comparatively lazy American.

The next day, wearing a clean pair of pants, I came back. Having finished bottling the red the previous day, white wine bottling continued. Around 10 am two workers came with a cabrito (baby goat), which clearly indicated a delicious lunch. Cabritos are very cute. You can play with them like puppies. For Thanksgiving 2008 we made the mistake of getting two cabritos Wednesday, playing with them until Thursday. Anyway, the guys showed up with the cabrito, and began to search for a slaughterer. “You guys don’t want to kill it?” “No, look how cute it is! We don’t want to kill it.” Eventually I volunteered to do the deed. I’ll spare the details, only noting that the formerly clean pants got blood on them, and that lunch indeed was delicious.