In Russia: it's vodka. In Turkey: it's coffee. In England: it's tea. In many places it's a cigarette. It's the way you ritualistically share an experience with another person. By giving, you gain. You share your thoughts, your good humor. The process of lighting, steeping, or stirring becomes an extension of the conversation. In many cultures, participation in this ritual is more important than speaking the language or wearing the dress. A man from Senegal once told me, "you never refuse a cigarette in Africa". In Argentina, you never refuse yerba maté.Pronounced "sherba matte" in Argentina; it's herbs in cup. Yerba comes from the Spanish "hierba", meaning herb or grass. Maté comes from the Quechua word for cup. You drink it in a wood or metal cup with a metal straw that's called a "bombilla". Not bitter, it tastes like green tea mixed with grass. Not impressed? The magic of yerba maté, in addition to it's stimulating qualities, is in how quickly you begin to associate the taste with new friends.
Over the weekend I jumped into the maté stream. While I'm not sure whether to blame the maté or my new friends, my sleep schedule was ruined. Maté can be steeped many times without loosing its flavor or becoming bitter. As a result, it's an extremely social drink. At dusk, I sat in a small trailer on the edge of a cornfield in Las Flores with Raul, his father, and two other farmers.
After heating the water on a small gas stove, Raul took a beat-up yerba cup and filled it with maté, which looks like grass clipping. He poured the water through the maté and passed it to me. I drank it all and passed it back. He filled it and passed it to his father. His father drank it in one sip and passed it back. Back and forth, we repeated the process until the water was gone.
Rule number one of matéando: don't say thank you. That seems to be a common thing in Argentina. Saying gracias usually elicits: "the heck are you saying thank you for?" I've struggled with it.
As the sky got darker behind old tractors and planting machines, conversation became livelier and more friendly. We spoke of politics and the difference between North and South America. They asked me about farm policy in the U.S., I told them we tend to subsidize farmers. They were agape. More on that in a later post. The social atmosphere broke only once. After several rounds of sharing the same maté through the same bombilla, the group turned to the lone American: "How common is swine flu in the US...?"
