In Nuevo Progreso, life has become a hybrid of the traditional and the modern. Shawi people love their meat gamey and their fermented yuca strong; these preferences are not likely to fade. They also share modern desires with the outside world, most notably they want their kids to attend school. To achieve this, they must make tradeoffs, such as converting traditional farmland to cacao fields. Luckily, there are aid systems working to alleviate some of the strain associated with compromise. Here, to highlight the dualities of life that modern Shawi face, external food aid is contrasted with traditionally harvested foods.
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Food aid is distributed to kids at school in the form of breakfast and lunch. That being said, many can't access this aid when they are unable to attend school, an unfortunately common scenario. Strong floods are increasingly preventing kids from attending school, and as such, they miss out on their rations.
Typical Food Aid
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When eating from their own farms, the food is starkly different. Dishes range from fish to meat to mushrooms to grubs. From the farm, the jungle, and the river, these foods are home. People of Nuevo Progreso take pride in food they have created themselves.
At the heart of this cultural pride is winú. This drink is essential to life in the community; any discussion of the Shawi people would be incomplete without it. Every batch, made by fermenting yuca, tastes different. The taste could be described as a starchy, sour yogurt, thin after the fiber is filtered out. Winú comes in three varieties: yellow, white, and purple, depending on the ingredients used. From dawn till dusk, the drink is offered to anyone passing by in the day's heat. For the people of Nuevo Progreso, winú provides calories, refreshment, and community bonds. It is shared in a way of those who truly rely on each other.
As shown further in this website, many aspects of Shawi life are being altered in response to outside pressures. A farmer may decide to grow cacao, giving him the money to send his child to school, but sacrificing some ability to grow the foods he loves. A hunter may spend his small earnings on bullets, because it's harder than ever to hunt and he loves the foods his grandparents ate. A fisher may use more toxins to snare a sufficient catch, because she knows the river is being fished like never before. And when a community member, a father, a mother, a child, is doing all three, it's a community adapting.