The wisest way to make hot chocolate

 Wisdome,

We live in 3 rooms of a house with ARCHILLE Milien and his Mom but I don’t know her name.   I don’t remember if I/we ever learned her name.   She is a mother of 3 and grandmother of 5.  Two of the grandchildren live in Turks and Cacos the other 3 in Fort Myers, Florida.   Once a year her daughter calls her, like many Haitian diaspora daughters & sons do, to tell her when she can get on a plane to come visit.   She’s been a few times.  

At first I didn’t talk much to her, intentionally really, in the interest of establishing good boundaries b/t our families.  Then I called her Madame ARCHILLE when I realized that the son we were calling ARCHILLE was called Milien by everyone else b/c that’s his name and ARCHILLE is the family name, said first as is Haitian practice.   So in Haiti I introduce myself as DEGROOT, Esther.   

But Gabriela and Niko call her ”Gran” and they love to go sit outside her house with her while she prepares delicious food or treats like “dous”.   So yesterday I started calling her Gran too.  

Today, after we madly cleaned the house b/f Papa got home, I went to sit out with the Gran.   We talked about C-sections, breastfeeding, peanut butter, and chocolate.  Get this...she makes her own chocolate.   No I don’t mean that she melts down chocolate circles and drops it onto wax paper.  

She harvests cacao off her trees in Limbe.  

She hulls the cacao seeds.

She washes and dries the seeds.  

Drying takes a while. 

She roasts them.  

Then she pounds them into powder. 

She adds cinnamon.  

She forms a cylinder of chocolate with the pounded chocolate flour. 

She shows me a stick of chocolate that she’s made herself.  

I am in awe.  

We smell it.  

She tells me it’s full of vitamins. 

It’s divine. 

The other morning when it was only 25 degrees, she grated some of the chocolate stick into boiling water and added some sugar.   Milien brought it to Papa and Niko who were home.   Hot chocolate.   Chocolate.