Extravaganza in the Campo!

 

 

First, we went out behind the rice fields to uproot some yucca!  It's a vegetable similar to a potato that grows underground with a tree as the plant. They used a machete to chop away part of the tree then pulled the trunk out of the ground, and the roots are the edible yucca.  I gave it the 'ole college try, but my efforts yielded no yucca.

Luckily, someone else was strong enough and we got a big bag full!  The yucca (looks like long potatoes) is boiled and served plain or mashed.  We ate this with the family, and it was particularly delicious.

A starfruit tree!  The family had a long pole with a basket at the end that they used to pick the fruit that was too high to reach.

Your favorite and mine....papaya...

An avocado tree, although I was disappointed to learn that despite their appearance, these will not be ready to pick for another few months, because the prime months for avocados here are January and February.

The flower from a passion fruit plant. Oh la la.

Mangoes Mangoes Mangoes!  Also, disappointingly out of season, but this was an impressive tree.


This weekend, my family invited me to go with them to what apparently is the family farm, about an hour outside of Santiago.  One of my dad's brothers still oversees it from the city, but for the most part, they hire out workers.  It was a really pretty part of the country, surrounded by mountains and rice fields.  I got to meet a lot of the family and also see some pretty nifty plants. There is a huge portion of the land filled with fruit trees of all types (i.e. bananas, plantains, starfruit, avocados, oranges, mandarins, papaya, passion fruit, breadfruit, cherries, some mystery fruit I'd never heard of...). It was really nice of my family to invite me, because (as I learned after we were already in transit...) the family was all gathering to remember the life of a cousin who had died 2 months ago.  Because he was living in New York, none of the Dominican family had had the opportunity to have a memorial service or anything.  So in the evening, we went to a baseball field where the cousin had played for years and years and they had some readings and a video projector with moments from his life.  The family was very welcoming, even though I barely knew what I was doing there, and offered me food, drinks, and a place to sit even though I had never met them before and they clearly had bigger things to worry about.  Okay this has turned into a formatting disaster and I'm not sure why... but i'm stopping now--here are some pictures.