Together they depict a sort of Mexican Romeo and Juliet, or many a modern marriage, perhaps. She lies sleeping (/dead), while he fumes.
Anyway! Back to today, which began both with the view shown above, and this too, below:
Today, we were visiting an NGO, Proyecto de Desarrollo Rural Integral, that works with farmers in a small municipality in the north of Tlaxcala state, to see if we might be able to work together to understand the social, economic and environmental implications of rejecting chemical pesticides and harvesting chapulines (grasshoppers) - just like everyone used to do before monoculture took over.
Vincent Guerrero is a village of 573 inhabitants, named after a revolutionary general, where the morning serenity is broken by fireworks summoning people to church/work. A bit of a contrast from the jingles transmitted by loudspeaker in the Japanese countryside, but I was sold.
Speaking of Japan, check this out:
Anyway, back to the grasshoppers. Here they are up close:
The harvesting season in this region is Sept-Oct, depending on the weather, so they're not ready just yet.
For the time being, they'll be left to explore any food source they can find among the fields and their borders. Meanwhile, we'll try to figure out a way of addressing the research questions mentioned at the beginning of this post... and perhaps by the time autumn arrives, we'll have both a plentiful grasshopper harvest AND a strong protocol to celebrate!
(Actually, it was such a successful day that we began our celebrations early. Grasshoppers cannot be harvested in Vicente Guerrero yet, but Pulque - a milky, mucilaginous cactus beer that tastes about a hundred times better than this description - certainly can...)