Dona Lucas

4/20/11 - Alex Rangel

No, Dona Lucas is not another bird. Last Thursday after school, Amy, I, two other teachers, Lo and Tiffany, and Tiffany’s father Tom who was visiting from the states, started the one hour uphill climb to Llanatios, (pronounced Yanatios). Llanatios is an Aldea (village) up in the mountains behind the school. Following the dirt road, we passed through pine forests mixed with other typical tropical trees and plants, enjoying occasional vistas of the valley and the town of Copan below. Llanatios is a quaint little village nestled within the swales and hills of the mountain top. Dona, (similar to Senora but denotes a higher elevation of respect) Lucas and her esposo (husband) Napolean live on a hillside where they tend to their daily living activities.They are sixtyish and have a number of grandchildren, one of which is a student of Amy’s. It is evident that she loves them very much.The two of them are almost completely self sustaining on their land where they grow their own crops. Among the crops are bananas, pina (pineapple), cana de azucar (sugarcane), café (coffee), maize (corn), frijoles (beans), calabaca (squash), pollos (chickens), a fruit that is similar to passion fruit, mango, papaya, aguacate (avocado), and other things we don’t know. 

Dona Lucas is also known for her traditional pottery making. Not only does she make the pottery but she and Napolean mine the clay from a location near their home. If you want to have a lesson in pottery making, all you have to do is call to make a date and she will be waiting for you with smiles and outstreached arms. After your lesson, she will keep your piece, fire it for you and you can pick it up at a later date. Then the real treat comes after with the nice meal that she has prepared for you. The pottery lessons and meal are just 100 Lempiras, the equivalent of $5. Or you can travel up the hill like we did Thursday evening for just a meal and a visit for 50 lempiras. 

We arrived to see Dona standing under her porch waiting to greet us. The overhang of the porch at the outside edge is about five foot nine inches tall and even I have to duck to walk under the even lower support beam. Amy’s eyeballs are even with the end of the overhang. The house is made of adobe and consists of a couple of small rooms for living space and a kitchen that is a third the size of the rest of the house. Oh yes, and an outhouse. Her cooking areas, also made of adobe, are a wood fired oven with a place on top to burn wood for heating pots. On the other end is a permanently set clay skillet with a cubby for the fire below it. There is no ceiling in the house, only blackened open rafters with a tile roof. There is no chimney for the wood fire cooking, so it can get very smokey inside at times. We entered the kitchen to find a big pot of black beans simmering and some fresh corn masa that had been ground in her handcranked meat grinder.

Dona asked Lo if she would toast some squash seeds, so Lo put the seeds on the clay skillet and began stirring and roasting. After the seeds were nice and toasted, she put them in the meat grinder and ground them to a medium grind. Dona then took the corn masa and began grinding it by hand on her stone grinding pad that her mother bought fifty years ago. Dona does this to grind the corn masa a bit more fine. She places a big ball of masa on the back end of the grinding pad from which she pulls small amounts forward with the grinding stone. She makes about ten quick passes and then whisks it up with her hand to form it into a ball. She would then hand it to one of us to pat it out with our hands into a tortilla. After attempting to shape it into a nice spherical shape that ended up looking more like one of the continents, we threw the uncooked tortilla on the skillet for its one minute per side cooking time. After we had a nice stack of fresh tortillas, we sat down to eat. Dona served us each a big bowl of black beans and placed the bowl of toasted and ground squash seeds on the table. What are the squash seeds for? I asked. Sprinkle them on the beans was the reply. I did as I was told and what a treat. It was a new experience in culinary magic. Seconds? Of course. We ate until we were full and then were served Dona’s coffee grown on her plants, roasted on her skillet and sweetened from the residual sugar left from the pressing of the sugar cane for the jugo de cana (juice of the cane). This sugar is very brown, but is nothing like the brown sugar we know, and is 100% non-processed. We buy this in cakes at the market for our household sweetening. Last but not least, Napolean, brought us each a fruit from a vine outside the front door to have for dessert. Full and happy after our meal and visit, we said our goodbyes and started our trek back down the mountain, stopping at a view point to revel at the red orange ball of a setting sun in the western sky as it illuminated the red clay banks on the sides of the dirt road. A perfect ending to a perfect afternoon.