que vive el huerto…de nuevo!

The end of the dry season is here, finally the heavy hot humid nights have a chance of breaking into real rain.  Two nights ago we fell asleep to such a pleasant soft rain – a gentle beginning to what we know will be months of torrential downpours and dramatic lightning storms.

The dry season here is s o  d r y  that we had just about given up our back yard garden. We could keep a few pots of herbs in the courtyard, but watering behind the house became so time consuming and difficult to coordinate with all of our business trips up to the coffee region. The courtyard thrived, the ornamentals enjoying the pure sun, and we’ve enjoyed a few more heads of those heavenly little banano rosas.  Everything changed when we installed a drip irrigation system with a battery run timer in the back garden.  Amazing.  Irrigation is a life and farm changing technology here. I knew that theoretically, but now I have lived to see and feel the difference a good system can make in a gardeners life.  Finally we can have a green garden out back, with basil and eggplant and tomatoes and garlic and ginger. Drip irrigation systems do not, however, resolve the leaf-cutter ant and iguana pest problems, and they continue to devour anything that isn’t smelly or spiky.

Along with our little chicken coop and garden, we have managed to cultivate such a sweet relationship with our next door neighbors.  Luisito, who is five, is in charge of our chickens when we leave on a trip, and has done such a good job that he has been promoted to garden-waterer and protector-of-the-garden-against-iguanas. Which he usually does with his little rubber slingshot.  Although I haven’t witnessed a successful hunt, I often get long rambling accounts of which trees and holes the iguanas came out of while I was gone, and how many piedras Luis slung to scare them all away. When we left for the states for a short trip last month, Luis promised to be extra attentive.  The morning after we returned I glanced out the back and stopped, thinking someone was in our yard.  No, Luisito and his grandfather had built us a “scare-iguana” in the back bed!  Now we just need to figure out what a “scare-leaf-cutter-ants” looks like!

Ginger is one of my favorite things. Period. To watch sprout, to grow, to grate, to eat, to drink.

 

On its way to unfurling into an impressive 5 feet tall orange cactus flower.

 

A Sacuanjoche tree, the national flower, unfurling new leaves

 

Gallon water bottles cut in half make excellent seed trays along the sunny wall in the courtyard.

 

Last week we celebrated my birthday with lots of tropical flowers, fruits, and friends.

 

 

Castaña, or Breadnut

The boiled nuts are high in protein and low in fat.

Every now and then I have come across some nuts in the market, tied into plastic bags.  In León it’s rare to find them.  They have a brittle brown shell and are wet, clearly boiled, and the inside is creamy and dry and tastes vaguely like a chestnut.  People sell them as castañas, which actually is the spanish word for chestnut.  They are a rare treat to find here – one of a handful of traditional fruits that don’t really have a market and many people are unfamiliar with.

I recently discovered the tree that the nuts come from at a place that I’ve been to frequently.  One of the sesame coops that I work with through the Social Business Network founded a local vocational highschool.  All the agricultural coop offices – and the school – have gardens with carefully selected ornamental and edible plants: hibiscus flowers, roses, plantains, mangos, avocados, achiote, mint, and almond.  I have always admired this one tree in the front of the yard.  It has huge, beautiful glossy green leaves with scalloped edges, and a straight tall trunk.  I assumed it was an ornamental, until I once saw a spiky green round fruit the size of a small melon.

Artocarpus camansi fruit and leaves.

At first I mistook it for a breadfruit tree, which I have seen on the Caribbean coast.  Actually it’s an Artocarpus camansi tree, cousin of the breadfruit known as the breadnut, and produces those hard-to-find nuts.  I found that out when the secretary of the cooperative took some of the brown, fallen fruit and dried it to get the seeds out and bring to some friends who liked the tree and wanted to plant some.  As we tore open the spiky fruit, I recognized the seeds, and collected some to cook.  The woman who lives at the school and cooks had heard of castañas but had never seen them before, and was a bit sceptical but game to try them.  We boiled them for a half hour and then cooled them down and they were exactly like the ones in the market – creamy nutty flavor.  Not exactly like chestnuts – but I bet they would be good roasted.

In the less dried fruit, the seeds were encased in a thick gooey flesh.

 

To El Salvador, for the Other Black Gold

Fresh picked El Salvadorian organic coffee

In December I had the opportunity to represent the Social Business Network on a trip to northern El Salvador to piece together the puzzle of helping a small coffee cooperative export their coffee directly to a coffee roaster in the US.  If you spend any significant amount of time working with social or community development you understand that organizations and movements work along sine curves.  At any given time they have better participation or worse communication; garner support from the greater community and put extra time into initiatives, or view their past struggles with a cynical eye and degree of despondence.  The cooperative we were headed to meet with has a long history of working successfully together but have slumped into a current low, resigning themselves to making ends meet through efforts necessary to keep the coffee farm running.  Our hope was that our presence would act as an injection of adrenaline, and grease the squeaky cogs of self-directed community development that have been working there in the past back into motion.

The cooperative  - of only 19 farmers – received their land in the Agrarian Reformation in El Salvador.  My understanding of El Salvadoran history is extremely limited, and their story of receiving their land was very moving.  The cooperative movement has evolved over the history of Nicaragua, but has remained a persistent force in the development of the country during the last three decades, and most recently has garnered incredible support from the government as well as private and non-profit sectors.  During the violent Nicaraguan revolution and contra-revolution, cooperatives were used as a social and political tool to protect the land in the hands of campesinos.  Although most cooperatives today function primarily as a business model, the movement still tends to embrace the Sandinista political agenda and retain it’s identity as a revolutionary model of society.  I admit that I was naïve to the particular context that agricultural cooperatives have played in El Salvador, and was very struck by the story of how the community struggled to gain legal possession of land given to them peacefully through legislation, but still faced potential violence and intimidation.  The cooperative movement in El Salvador has not been blessed with the same strong support that the movement in Nicaragua has received, and they have struggled with changing legislation and political environments.

Most important item on the business agenda – home cooked lunch with tortillas.

We spent two full, productive days with members of the small cooperative, a larger cooperative with a processing plant, a local NGO designed to bring together individual organic coffee farmers in the region, and representatives from the export company and coffee roaster interested in purchasing the coffee.  We each shared our visions, histories, took a short hike around the coffee land, shared a home cooked meal, and were surprised to find how well we understood each other.  If a feel-good energy building event to bring together the farmers and motivate them to improve quality and production was all that we had planned, the whole visit would have been a breeze.  Since the goal was actually to settle on a price and quantity to purchase, there was some tougher negotiation included, but in the end an agreement was met.  In the end the 11 hour drive from Nicaragua, crossing two country borders (with minimal hassle!) was entirely worth it.  The level of trust, understanding, and value of our shared experiences among so many links of the coffee chain would have been entirely impossible to achieve over skype.

Several things about the farmers’ situation in El Salvador struck me – often in the light of my previous experiences and knowledge of coffee cooperatives in Nicaragua.

Centralized processing has pros and cons – such as the cost of returning that mountain of coffee cherry pulp to the fields as compost.

The difference that on-farm processing can make on production management.  In Nicaragua, many small farms have their own de-pulping machines (either hand cranked or electric), and in general, the wet processing (taking the fruit off of the coffee bean,  allowing for a controlled fermentation and washing them) takes place either on farm or at a centralized location accessible to each farmer in the cooperative.  This in part ensures a higher quality of coffee (allowing freshly picked coffee cherries to ferment in their fruit is the first mistake in the processing chain that will result in lower quality coffee), but also allows farmers to maximize the re-circulation of nutrients onto their farm.  Every coffee farmer I have visited here – whether organic or conventional – composts and reapplies the coffee fruit to their fields as compost in some form or another, and some have developed systems to treat the water used in washing and return it to the land as well.  In this case, the particular group of farmers we are interested in helping improve their organic production methods sell their coffee in cherry form, meaning that they lose both control of the washing process and have to pay additional resources to transport their own composting materials from the processing plant.  As a rule, gaining control of as many steps in the process chain helps organized producer groups of any product gain control, raise quality, and benefit from increased margins.

The importance of clear communication, leadership, and education.  One of the farmers more involved in the technical farming aspect of the cooperative told me that an organic certifier had told them using fresh cow manure in any kind of fertilizer (even fermented), violated the certification and so they are now purchasing chicken manure from a distance to use in a type of compost called bokashi.  This is probably a misunderstanding or miscommunication that we can easily look into and clarify with the cooperative, but it reveals the potential setbacks of a regulatory system that is entirely for the benefit of the intermediary and consumer and not designed to empower or address individual needs at the production level.

View of the nearby community.

Shade grown coffee can have a drastic impact on the local environment.  Besides coffee, corn is the main crop planted in the northern region of El Salvador where we were.  The surrounding mountains were strikingly beautiful, and from various points on our hike through the coffee fields, strolls through the small town nearby, and roads to the processing plant we enjoyed vistas overlooking verdant green – nearly entirely deforested – mountains.  As we travelled around the region it became clear – if you look across the valley and see trees, it is because of coffee.  Thank you, drinkers of shade grown organic coffee.  The wildlife and topsoil in coffee growing regions thank you too.

 

 

Black Gold

Yesterday (October 19th) was the United Nations’ designated World Toilet Day.  While it is maybe not the most appealing over-the-dinner-table subject, there are many many reasons to devote time to thinking about – and re-thinking the design of – our toilets.

There are sanitary, environmental and social reasons to dedicate time and resources to creating accessible and appropriately functioning toilets.  Proper disposal of waste prevents spreading contagious diseases, untreated and unprocessed raw sewage contaminates fresh water, and our society just doesn’t accept people  - especially women – just going anywhere.  Venturing out into the dark to find a place to relieve yourself can be a very scary venture as a single woman.  But while they have drastically improved our quality of life, toilets as most of us know them also have some serious environmental consequences.  Toilets help us reduce the spread of disease and contaminants in our own home and property, but the sewage systems in industrialized countries createa a  - not-in-my-backyard problem of many peoples small amounts of waste and bringing it all together in massive pools that then need chemical treatment to process and use billions of gallons of fresh water in the process.  There are in fact many other solutions to disposing of our waste – in our own backyards – and even turning it into products with net gain.  Composting toilets provide social and sanitary solutions to our waste issues and also have many potential environmental benefits.  And with some recent attention and funding from the Bill Gates foundation, toilets may soon earn us profits by creating electricity and producing high protein animal feed!

Here is a slide show of some of my favorite Nicaraguan composting toilets:

 This is a hand made seat for a dry composting toilet.  A dry composting toilet, or baño seco, separates the urine from solid waste and doesn’t use any potable water to operate.  Urine alone is a sterile, nitrogen-packed liquid, and breaks down quickly, so once it is separated it can be drained directly into a garden (best if the hose is moved around every now and then) or deposited into a bucket which can be emptied over a compost or fermented and applied directly to young crops.  The solid waste falls into a container beneath the toilet.  The container should be large enough to take at least a year to fill, and then the seat disconnects and moves over a second container.  The filled container is capped and left to decompose over another year, at which point any harmful bacteria is burnt up in the fermenting process and it is a dry, rich organic fertilizer.

The composting toilet is on a slope so the containers of dry waste can be accessed when they are full.

A distinct benefit to the dry composting toilet over the standard outhouse is that it is the presence of urine that creates the foul odor associated with raw sewage, and so this outhouse has an earthy, fermented smell but it’s not unpleasant.  Even though the design avoids any direct handling of contaminated waste, it is still recommended to use the finished fertilizer on perrenial crops or forage.  This particular dry composting toilet is in coffee country, and so the family has directed both the urine hose and the dry fertilizer to their coffee plants.

 

These dry separating toilets have become very popular in the region.  Raleigh International, a british based organization that has been doing water projects in the area for years, recently helped to build and install 40 more toilets in a nearby community.  This time they worked with a design that can be more easily mass produced than the hand built clay toilet seat – a concrete seat and base with metal walls.

 

A few years ago a friend near us who owns the Barca de Oro Hostal on the Las Peñitas beach built four beautiful bamboo cabins with composting toilets in a lush green yard behind the hostal.  She worked with a local fiberglass craftsman to create a system that fit her needs.  Here is a rather glowing picture of the toilet, with the daylight dramatically lighting up the fixture in the dim light of the cabin.  In her system, there is a system of pvc tubes that take the urine to a point far away from the cabins.  A detachable fiberglass tank is fitted underneath the bathroom, so that instead of needing the space to put two containers in the bathroom, the filled fiberglass take is removed, capped and left to decompose and an empty one is attached.

The new methane producing systems have ceramic bowls and don’t separate waste.

 

 

 

Other than producing fertilizer, composting toilets can also produce methane, which can be used as cooking fuel.  Also created using animal manure in bio-digestors, methane provides rural Nicaraguan women with an alternative to burning wood fuel for cooking – eliminated smoke and soot from the kitchen and improving the family’s risks of respiratory illness.  One of the coffee cooperatives in the Jinotega has given members access to this type of composting toilet – and last Christmas when we went up to pick coffee for a few days we were treated to a breakfast cooked on fuel we helped produce!

The sealed tank outside holds all the waste and has space to collect the methane. When it fills the fermented solids can also be used as fertilizer.

Includes a clean new stovetop!

 

 

 

A Votar!

This year we weren’t the only vehicle offering rides to members of the village – so nearly everyone had a space if they wanted to ride!

The focus of the last few days for both Nick and I has been to fulfill our civic duties of voting.  Since Nick just got his Nicaraguan citizenship in April, this was the first time during his 20-something years in Nicaragua that he got to enter the polls and cast a vote.  Even though we live in León, he chose to register to vote in the town of Achuapa, a much smaller village in the northernmost part of the department of León, where he first came and lived.  Every election he makes a point of helping his friends in the rural villages get to the polls by driving a 4X4 truck to help the people who would have difficulties walking the 5km between the village and the polls, so it made sense for him to register to vote there too.

For me, voting was a very different struggle.  I anticipated being well prepared and voting months ago, since the information on absentee voting in the states said ballots were sent out 45 days before the election.  When I failed to receive my ballot I checked my local board of elections page – it said 35 days before the election.  So I held onto hope that it would come to my US address before I left for Nicaragua, but it didn’t.  When I got here and called my board of elections to ask what to do, they said they would express mail a ballot to Nicaragua.  That was two weeks ago.  It never arrived.  So, very concerned that even though I started working on this over two months ago I wasn’t going to be able to vote after all, I called the embassy here in Managua.  And they told me what I should have done two weeks ago: fill out a Federal Emergency Write-in Ballot.

The difference is that when you register for the write-in ballot, it only has spaces to choose candidates for president, senate and congress.  For all local candidates there are blank spaces to write in the names of the candidates.  Luckily my parents had by this point received the absentee ballot I requested two months before, and they sent me a scan so I had the names of the candidates for local judges, state senate, etc.  Among all my American friends here, I was the last to not have voted, and by Friday I knew it was down to the wire.  Since my county requires ballots to be postmarked by the US postal service by today, I decided to make the trip to Managua and deliver my ballot to the embassy where they postmark mail the day they receive it rather than risk sending it from a mail service in León.  I was a bit stressed and embarrassed to have let this go until the last minute, and very frustrated as the clock ticked by on Friday when the internet here kept crashing and preventing me from printing out the official envelopes and ballot I needed before the bus left to Managua.  I felt much better when I finally made it to the Embassy with my ballot all filled out and printed on time and found another 15 or so Americans inside, struggling to use the one computer available to vote and even register!!  So, if all goes well and the Embassy does its job of postmarking and getting the ballots to the states in a diplomatic pouch (est. 7-10 days to arrive), I will have fulfilled the requirements for absentee voting in my county and it will be counted!  Certainly the most stressful ballot I’ve ever cast, but it’s good to know now about the Emergency ballot – and that it works (hopefully!)

Nick, Marcelino, and Lencho before going in to vote. Look behind them at the gate for the poll – no line!

Nick also knew he had to travel in order to be able to vote, and so he booked his flights coming home from a conference on Cooperatives in England with an extra long layover to reduce the risk of missing a flight.  It worked, and I met him at the airport at 9pm on Saturday to drive 4 hours up to Achuapa.  On our trip up for the presidential elections last year, there was tangible tension in the community and at the polls between members of the three main political parties.  Because of multiple ballots for different elections (presidential, representatives for the OAS, etc.) there were long lines and some people waited for hours before voting.  At some polls, there were skirmishes when the results were announced and in one of the 22 polling stations in the municipality there was an attempt to sabotage the case of ballots as they were transported from the rural voting station to the town.

Getting out to vote is a social event here. Even though there wasn’t much waiting on line this year, people who made the trip to vote still hung out afterward outside the polls. Here Nick and a whole score of voters show off their stamped thumbs – proof they voted!

This year, for the mayoral elections, the process was smoother and there was less tension and much less waiting in lines, although at the end of the evening the groups waiting in the dark outside the polls for the results still felt nervous about whether there would be a violent reaction to the results.  Instead of waiting for the results at the rural polling station, we drove down the mountain to the town of Achuapa, where there were crowds outside the house there they wrote the results of each polling station up in marker on big pieces of white paper.  The news was – peaceful elections across the municipality.  With the results in from about three quarters of the polling stations there was a clear majority of votes from the Sandinista party, which meant that the current mayor was re-elected for another 4 year term.  In the San Nicolas polling station where Nick voted, of 505 votes cast 66.53% voted to reelect David Figueroa, and in the total municipality of Achuapa of 6,956 votes cast he won with a 61.34% majority.  The reports for the national elections were delayed, possibly in an attempt to prevent violence among the crowds still gathered at polling stations intil after midnight.  The result – an overwhelming sweep across the nation of Sandinista mayors.  Of note – one victory on the atlantic coast for a mayor from the Yatama party, an Miskito political party whose name means “Children of Mother Earth”, that have participated in elections here since 1990.

Nick waits on line to vote for the first time along with friends he has known for over twenty years!

Again, for several reasons the process of voting in Nicaragua impressed me.  The number of volunteers needed to run the polling station is enormous – members of the village left at 4am to walk in the dark for two hours to volunteer as back-up poll workers – essentially to sit around all day and wait until someone else who is checking off names or stamping fingers to take a bathroom break.  The primary poll workers were required to arrive the night before, and to sleep on mats in the polling stations in order to safeguard the ballots and get set up to open at 7am the next day.  In the village where we were, every single eligible voter who we spoke with made it to the polls, regardless of age, disability, or illness.  This young democracy is energized – the civic right to vote is taken very seriously, and just the sheer undertaking of making voting accessible in rural communities that have no electricity, no phone signal, and nearly impassible roads requires an enormous amount of organization and training.  As in all democracies (including my own!) there are many opportunities for improvement.  There are always those stories of voters names missing from the list, dodgy management of polling stations or ballots, and even more concerning death threats of candidates – and apparently the mayor of Achuapa received such a death threat a week ago as he was running for reelection for the first time since the amendment two years ago which allows for reelection.  As I have heard many people here say, elections are really a type of peaceful warfare.

Back in the village, a “yay peaceful elections (and riding in trucks!) are so much fun” celebratory dance to traditional Nicaraguan folk music.

An interesting result of being in a developing country is the unequal access to information available due to rapid – but uneven – advanced in technology.  Three and half years ago when I first visited the rural villages in Achuapa, there was no electricity and not even solar panels.  The houses were all illuminated with kerosene lamps, and battery powered radios brought the national and international news.  About two years ago each of the 26 houses of Lagartillo received a solar panel from a municipal project, and then less than a year later the government installed a new electrical line and now the houses all sport light bulbs, blenders, and of course – televisions.  This year after voting, many villagers returned to their houses and turned on the news, like most of us will do tomorrow.  The difference being that here the infrastructure for instantaneous communication hasn’t reached all parts equally.  So in the village, families could watch the instantaneous results from the mayoral election in the capital city on the national news, but with no local TV station and still no phone signal in the village the results of their own local mayoral election were still hours away from arriving.

The first reports from the Supreme Electoral Counsel report a national participation in the mayoral elections of 57%.  Last year they reported above 80% participation for the presidential elections, an election which compelled many Nicaraguans from abroad since there is no absentee voting here.  Tomorrow we will find out how the US compares with participation.   For all you at home, and especially those in the Northeast who, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy are maybe facing logistical difficulties to go vote, take some inspiration from our Nicaraguan friends who don’t think twice about walking for kilometers on dirt roads before dawn to participate in their democracy, and make it a priority to vote tomorrow!

 

Excuse me?!

Teasing is an important part of Nicaragua humor. Sometimes people say the opposite of what they mean, and if you are lucky they’ll accompany it with a smile or a wink to convey it’s a joke.  Usually I get it – it’s fun to joke around with friends this way, and sometimes a creative way complimenting someone.  Like most types of humor it generally works best among close friends or coworkers, people who you know well enough to be able to detect the double meaning!

This is a type of humor I have learned well here, and can really enjoy.  For example, while I was serving plate after plate of food from a giant pot of carne en baho this weekend, every now and then I would look up from the monotonous task of selecting the right proportion of yucca, plantain, meat and salad to put on a plate and handing it to the next person waiting and see an old wonderful friend who I haven’t seen in a very long time.  “Hi!!! Que bueno que veniste, pero que lastimo que ya se acabó la comida y no hay nada para ofrecerte….disculpe…”  “Hi!!!  So nice of you to come, but such a shame the food just ran out and there is nothing to offer you…” All while standing obviously in front of a giant pot of steaming dinner.  And smiling.  Of course it’s a joke, and received with a good laugh and a hug.

Sometimes the humor is a bit harder to detect, though.  The following day we delivered plates of leftover baho to some of our neighbors, and friends who couldn’t make it to the party.  I walked a heaping plate of food down the block to where a family has a small pulpería (corner store) that we always shop at.  We don’t know the family very well, but we see them nearly every day (sometimes several times a day if our shopping is disorganized!).  There are so many little stores scattered around the town, that almost anything you want is dangerously convenient.  It suddenly becomes an incredible nuisance to have to walk the five blocks to the nearest supermarket for something because the pulpería a half block away doesn’t stock it!

The older señora who is super sweet wasn’t attending the store at the moment, so I left the food with her grand daughter and asked her to just hold on to the ceramic plate and we would pick it up later.  An hour later I was walking down the street and the older señora waved me over.  “Su plato!” she called to me.  I went over to get our plate, and she said thank you for the food and asked whose birthday we had been celebrating.  Then she said, “Gracias, pero fue muy poquito, fue solo poquito.” “Thanks, but it wasn’t very much.  It was just a really little bit.”  She said it so seriously, and wrinkled her brow just a bit, and I was totally taken aback.  We don’t even really know them, they aren’t really friends, and she was complaining that I didn’t give her more than one plate of bah0!  “Well, we just divided up what we had and gave it around to everyone, to all the neighbors, even the drunk who is always on the corner you know….” I was kind of flustered and felt silly making excuses but was also a bit offended.  Man, some of the people here sure are hard to please.

Nick laughed when I explained that I was a bit offended by her reaction.  Apparently, saying that food is “just a little bit” is a common way of saying it was really delicious and they could have eaten much more of it!  Well, come to think of it  I guess she was smiling after she said it, and thanked me again, but I was so caught off guard by her words, I didn’t pay much attention to that.  Even after several years here, it still pays to talk things over with a person whose been here longer before getting annoyed at someone.  Imagine if I hadn’t, and stopped shopping there or chatting with this nice woman because I thought she had been so ungrateful.  The layers of culturally specific information cast over a simple phrase can so easily obscure its true meaning!

 

Baho Reprise

     To celebrate Nick’s birthday this past week he decided to do another Carne en Baho, a traditional Nicaraguan dish that we first tried making two years ago.  The party was planned in a casual, informal style – word of mouth, calling friends, making sure that we invited everyone we ran into out town – but there was no facebook invite or big email sent out.  As the date got closer, friends of friends began asking us what they could bring, and we realized that the word really had gotten out!  So the baho plans became more ambitious and in the end we made the most enormous single pot of food I’ve ever seen.  Possibly too big – although passing out all the leftovers to neighbors and friends was fun and earned us quite a bit of social capital points in the neighborhood (and maybe helped to mend any bad feelings left after having played loud music until the wee hours of the morning).

Putting together the baho is an creative endeaver.

     My favorite part of making baho is actually layering all the ingredients into the giant pot.  It’s a very artistic endeavor, and the aesthetic of packing all the ingredients in to the pirol as tightly as possible is visually very pleasing!  The colors of all the raw ingredients are vibrant and beautiful, but when you open the pot after steaming them for 4 hours they have all faded to a dull brown in the meat juices.  But if you’ve done it right, the smell that then fills your whole house makes up for the not-as-pretty-anymore dish.

     We have learned some things since taking on this endeavor  - this time we sat down before hand with our Nica friends and worked out the ingredient list in weight and volume measurements rather than in prices, so we didn’t have to worry about getting ripped off at the market and coming back with less than what we needed.  In the end, we ordered 50 lbs of salted beef from our neighbor across the street, and got a half a sack of yuca, 50 ripe plantains and 20 green plantains, 5 lbs of onions (enough for salad and chili sauce too), a bucket of tomatoes, a bucket of big green peppers, two dozen each of sweet and bitter oranges, three big bunches of mint, a head of celery, and four heads of garlic at the market.  Don’t forget the plantain leaves to line the pirol too – they need to be shiny green and fresh.  The first batch we bought in a hurry as a thunderstorm began at the market, and when we opened the roll of leaves they were moldy so we had to go find more.  We didn’t add up what we spent, but it probably came to around $150 with the meat included, which is a really good deal considering we served at least 150 plates of food in the end!

Our little friends Naomi and Yulisa, relaxing together after actually helping us with a lot of food prep and sweeping!

     Everyone loves a good party, and thank goodness some people love putting together a good party too!  Two of our good friends Melania and Maria Jose spend the whole day helping us chop and prepare and clean, giving us the space to run some last minute errands.  Hooray for our village.  They have been very supportive!  Somehow we managed to create a space that all sorts of people could enjoy – early in the evening our friends with small kids came and had popcorn and played with balloons and helped with last minute setting up.  Some of them left when the house really started filling up and we opened the Baho.  We asked the DJ from our favorite salsa bar in town to come play, and he has such good taste in music that everyone danced – the real Nica indicator that it was a good party!  At the very end of the evening (er, that is, pushing 4am!) the DJ stopped and some of the guests who are musicians played piano and sang, which was a super sweet ending to a rather exhausting but fun evening.

Oof, just barely too much food even for such a giant pot….

 One of my main objectives was to throw a big party without creating a load of awful plastic and styrofoam trash afterward.  I think we were quite successful at that – we shopped at the market using canvas bags instead of buying packaged produce from the supermarket, and also got a few dozen re-usable plastic cups and plates that are light and pack tightly together so we can store them away easily for most of the years.  We served the Baho on the re-usable plastic plates on top of a banana leaf, so after a person finished the leaf could be put in our compost bucket (oh man, our chickens are having a three-day post-fiesta feast now!!!), and the plate could just be rinsed quickly before another leaf was put on and Baho served to someone else.  We were definitely short overall cups, but when someone asked for a cup we just asked them to find an abandoned one and we (or they) would wash it, and no one ever failed to find a used cup sitting under a chair to grab.  With the largest party that has ever been thrown at this house (probably 120 people in total!), at the end of the night we generated – one giant tub of compost for the chickens to enjoy, one large sack of empty plastic soda and rum bottles (which will be recycled), and one medium kitchen garbage bag of paper and plastic trash.  Not bad!

     As before, we were reminded that it’s important to make extra, because it’s customary here to ask for a plate of food to bring home to the person left watching the house while everyone else is at the party.  Some of our neighbors even came the next day asking for leftovers – a true compliment!  My favorite response was from our next door neighbor, when her daughter remarked to her that the baho was really tasty: “well, my goodness, he (Nick) has lived here in Nicaragua for long enough to have learned something useful by now!!”

Can you smell it?!