What I left behind

1. Compost Piles

Nicaraguans burn their trash – plastic, organic, or otherwise.  Some of it gets picked up and taken to the dump, where it’s burned or buried.  But most of it is burned.  The heavy hot air in Leon is at any given point tinged with the smell of burn, something that I rejoicingly noticed the lack of the minute I stepped out of the car in New York.  Compost is an unknown concept – there is no real spanish word for it, the university calls it composta.  I don’t know anyone – not even the agro-ecology professor with a nursery where I lived for three months – who has a backyard compost.  Except for the hostel where I lived and Nick’s house, where I started them.   They are both working really well, and the heat in Leon helps them decompose so much more quickly than I am used to!

The scraps from the kitchen get mixed with dirt and dry leaves from the patio. It composts rapidly in the Leon heat!

Two days after planting the young banana tree with pounds of my compost, the core started emerging rapidly. It's now about five feet tall with four large green glossy leaves.

2. A group of inspiring hard-working Micro Credit professionals.

I am so grateful to CEPRODEL for making the internship with them work.  They went above and beyond what I expected all the time, up to the last minute when they made me a little booklet with a report of my project with them and took me out to a festive dinner at one of my favorite restaurants.  Many of these guys travel three hours one way to work, and spend over 12 hours a day away from their families in order to do their work.

The group of CEPRODEL officers that took me out to dinner. The dinner helped me realize that many parts of my project were a challenge for different reasons, for example, not only speaking a new language and coming from a different background but also being the only female in a very male work environment.

3. Puestos para Plantas

An excellent project run by a British NGO mimicking Paul Farmer’s Village Health Network model and using it to create a Plant Health Network.  The project uses already existing avenues of resources to small farmers, such as cooperatives and university extensions, to create a national system of data collection and standardized advice for farmers.  The system uses an approach called MIC, or Integrated Cultivation Management.  MIC emphasizes  improved cultural practices like good weed management and soil fertility that play a large role in preventing the onslaught of diseases and the need to use chemical applications.  In Nicaragua, the project is part of a national campaign to reduce pesticide dependency.

Tecnicos from the Cooperative Juan Francisco Paz Silva with representatives from the British NGO CABI and UNAN Leon Agroecology.

4. The worlds most handsome and intelligent kitten, Theo

He can climb in and out of the house windows, he gets out of the house using the storm drain, and happily plays with and eats the cockroaches out of the bathroom.  No cat doors, minimal effort on our part, and a huge return for having a happy purring sometimes snuggly mouse eater in the house.

Theo also provides endless entertainment for all our guests, as my little friends Ale and Fabricio demonstrate.

 

A pre-Thanksgiving

There are alot of differences between our meal Monday night in Sutiava, Leon and Thanksgiving.  Supposedly the first Thanksgiving was a welcome to the arrival of the pilgrims from Europe to the new land, my dinner was a farewell after ten months of living in Nicaragua.  The original Thanksgiving might have had pigs feet and chicken tacos served as well, but if it did that part of the story was lost in history.  Our cranberry sauce didn’t have any cranberries in it, but we ate turkey.

My friend Melaña came three hours from a little village outside of Achuapa for the dinner. She seems like quiet shy person, but always seems to show up at the best parties!

Ceremoniously taking the turkey out of the oven - along with the supermarket chicken we bought after we saw how skinny the turkey was.

The turkey was clothed in bacon, a good decision since it didn't actually release much juice while it cooked.

There ended up being a nice variety of traditional Nicaraguan, American Thanksgiving, and English Sunday Dinner dishes.  The chompipe was a big hit and appropriately there was lots of recipe swapping happening during dinner.  There was a nice selection of people who I know from CEPRODEL, UNAN Leon, the Olla Quemada, and of course Melana from Achuapa.  Any excuse to eat good food brings folks together.

 

 

 

Me Engaño!

Sadly I have no valient and gory photographs of the great Chompipe slaughter, because Mama Lily, the nice little lady who agreed to babysit our chompipe got up early and slaughtered it literally while I was at my house on the phone with my mom confirming some turkey details from the joy of cooking.  When we arrived, knives and details for boiling water all worked out, the bird was in in a pot and in the fridge.  And all without letting us know.  At least she didn’t cook it for us too!  So we just got on with our day, went to market, and celebrated a birthday party.  Making pumpking pie tonight to get everything ready for a nica thanksgiving tomorrow.

The man who sharpened our knives had a shop full of interesting trinkets made from old tin cans and aluminum.

black beans at the market

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carola (in the center with the sideways face) is the owner of the Olla Quemada, my favorite Leon bar, where I go salsa dancing every week.

 

Tortilla Days

The handiwork of Maria from La Rinconada, a village in the north of the department of León

In the villages the tortilla is one of the main staples in the Nicaraguan diet.  It is also one of the main jobs for women.  In the two villages where I visited this past weekend, one woman in every house spent hours a day preparing corn and making tortillas.

The corn for tortillas is prepared the day before.  The white kernels of dried corn are boiled in water and ashes, which, as you can imagine, results in a large unappetizing gray lumpy mess.  This age old process is called nixtamalization. The alkaline ashes free an amino acid called tryptophan which makes the corn digestable and more nutritious.  The process also causes the outer husk of the kernals to split and peel off.

Mixing in the corn and ash at Melaña's house, also in La Rinconada.

The following morning the corn is washed (the waste water with the kernal peels fed to pigs or dogs) and hand ground.  Tina, in Lagartillo, always uses a metate (a kind of stone morter and pestle) to further grind the masa, but some people skip this extra step, or send the masa through the grinder a second time.  Each tortilla is hand formed, first into a thick pancake and then patted out slowly into a thin smooth disk.  Every tortilla has a face – the side

Many Nicaraguans, even in the city, cook over open fire. This is a more effecient and healthy wood stove, as it burns less wood and has a chimney to carry the smoke outside. The fire is underneath, and the two griddles are resting on open holes. Pots are also put right on the open fire, or ontop of a griddle to simmer.

you pat on.  When you put the tortilla onto the comal (a ceramic griddle used exclusively for tortillas) the face has to go down.  When there is steam escaping from the center of the tortilla, it’s time to flip it.  Tina has a special method of flipping, where she puts the back of the tips of her fingers on the edge of the tortilla.  They stick slightly, just enough for her to life her hand and slip her thumb underneath, grab the edge, and flip.  I’ve managed to do this once or twice, but not without getting a nice blister on the back side of my middle finger.  After another minute the tortilla is flipped one final time.  This is the test flip – if the masa separates and the tortilla puffs up like a balloon, you’ve made an excellent tortilla!

Making tortillas with Maria. I'm grinding. Maria grinds eight mill-fulls of corn a day for her large family.

There are endless varieties of tortillas.  Every household seems to have it’s signature.  Tina’s are medium sized, very finely textured, and have a wonderful flavor from the corn her family grows.  In another village called La Rinconada, Maria’s tortillas are nearly twice the size.  Her hard working sons and husband eat two in each meal, six a day, and that makes for an enormous amount of tortilla making.  She speeds up the process by skipping the ‘fine grind’, which changes the texture but they are just as flavorful.  In the city many people use Maseca, a pre-processed fine corn flour for tortillas.  I’ve used this in the states because it’s available almost everywhere, but after eating the real thing I definitely notice the difference.  A flat, sourish taste and smell.  Fresh ingredients and the extra work of starting from scratch definitely make a difference.

 

Travel Blog

Social Enterprise Associates just published a piece I wrote for them on their website.  You can read it here.  The pictures aren’t mine, they must have gotten scrambled, so come back here, facebook me, or look at my flickr site (link in the side bar) to see pictures of Nagarote and my work.

The Fulbright Student Blog also published virtually the same piece, slightly different, but with my photos and captions.

 

Clinics for Plants and Farm Animals

Since May I have been participating in a series of workshops run collaboratively by UNAN Leon department of Agroecology and several other agricultural government programs and NGOs.  Every month about thirty agronomers working for NGOs, universities, and government programs from Masaya, Managua, all over the Occidente, and parts of the northern Segovia region get together for workshops.  The series is intended to grow and strengthen a network of Plant Clinics throughout Western Nicaragua.  A Plant Clinic is a place, usually a stand at the local market, where farmers can come and get free advice on how to properly treat pests and diseases in their crops.  While not strictly organic or agroecological, the workshops promote a method called Integrated Crop Management (MCI).  MCI somewhat resembles the system recently promoted in the states, Integregrated Pest Management (IPM), in that it strives to reduce the chemicals to absolutely neccessary situations and promotes using alternatives, but doesn´t eliminate them altogether.  MCI goes a step farther than just disease and pest management, and adresses all farm managment practices, such as planting living fences to attract beneficials and using crop rotation.

Although the main focus of the series is on fitopathology, or plant diseases, last week the workshop theme was animal husbandry.  I was particularly looking forward to this workshop given that the vast majority of SosteNica clients I know are primarily cattle farmers, and it´s an area of agriculture that I have virtually no previous experience in.

We started talking about general animal sanitation practices, the importance of keeping feeding areas clean and not contaminating drinking water (potentially spreading eloptirosis, a bacteria that lives in water after being deposited there by feces).  A chicken farm of decent size should work in batches, and only have birds of one age at a time to prevent epedemic diseases.  The importance of changing or sterilizing needles and thermometers.  Basic stuff.  The presenters then chose three diseases to focus on: Brucelosis,  a cattle disease the affects the respiratory system and causes aborted pregnancies; Newcastle disease, a avarian virus that got its name when it travelled to Newcastle, England from Indonesia in a ship in 1926; and Cattle Tuberculosis.

UNAN Leon has some excellent resources for hosting conferences. Note the large air-conditioner, which may be a reason that some people travelled so far to sit in a classroom for three days!

One of the most interesting parts of the presentation was when the Veterinary Profesor strayed from medical terminology and talked about how international regulation of Brucelosis affected the cattle market.  According to the presenter, since 1992 when Nicaragua began exporting cattle en pie, or alive, the numbers of cattle shipped annually have grown to 70,000.  The primary buyer is Mexico.  Since the adoption of NAFTA, Mexico changed its import regulations to those of the U.S., which require 99.9% of all cattle shipped to be tested and certified according to a standard of procedures that differed from what Mexico had accepted before.  Although Nicaragua had controlled the disease and had an excellent track record with Mexico, they were forced to rapidly implement a new certification program in order to secure the market in Mexico.  The program cost the government millions of dollars to implement, and was at first only available to larger ranchers, cutting small farmers out of the export market.  Currently, there are a variety of commercialization avenues designed to access small farmers, but they are often still left out due to the inaccessibility, or cost, of these certifications.

The presenter then offered his controvertial opinion that cattle was only profitable on a medium scale, and that a small farmers was better off to sell his two cows and buy seeds to plant agricultural crops than continue maintaining such a small number of cattle.  The room erupted with contrary opinions – hello FOOD SOVEREIGNTY???!!!  A cow is one of a poor family´s most secure sources of protein!

My next project: to publicize the dates, times, and locations of all the Plant Clinics in all the CEPRODEL offices for the rural clients to know about.

The professor showed us how to hook a cow up to an IV to administer antibiotics or saline solution for dehydration....

...and then we did it ourselves.

 

An early day, dry fields, and Nicaragua Lesson 2

Driving to Managua today during the wee hours of the morning was a treat.  My friend Nicolas and I set out from León in starlight, racing a low hanging and brilliant planet to the north.  The volcano Momotombo emerged gradually from its dark cloak, and as the sun emerged giant rays of golden light literally appeared against the blue sky.  As we passed the mirador that looks out over lake Managua at the entrance of the city the view was breathtaking.  The misty islands and turquoise water tantalized us like a mirage of an imaginary paradise as we entered into the gray industrial and commercial strip of highway that leads straight to the airport.

Coming back alone was also a treat.  If there’s anything I like as much as riding in the back of a pickup it’s driving one.  Really any pickup is fun to drive, but it’s much better when it’s a bit beefy and a standard.  The day was incredibly hot by 7 am.  It’s a long dry winter here.  Everyone refers to El Niño and shakes their heads lamentably while watering their patios three times a day as if it were April.  The familiar fields between Managua and León were showing signs of stress.  The cane for cattle forage is yellowing and still stunted from being cut months ago.  Even the conventional peanut farmers are apparently having trouble keeping up with the lack of rain, and patches of fields were laced with wilting plants.  Where did the infamous Nica thunderstorms I heard so much about go, and when will they come back?

As I got into the rhythm of driving a now-familiar route for the first time, I thought about another lesson Nicaragua is teaching me.  Don’t shy away from chaos.  It only seems scary and awful from the outside looking it.  Get into the thick of it and figure it out, and don’t try to organize it.  I have spent months wary of the roads here, filled with every method of transportation imaginable.  Oxcarts, horse carts, motorcycles, buses, giant trailer trucks, cars, three wheeled moto-taxis, bicycle taxis, bicycles with whole families piled onto them and daddy pedaling, all weaving their way around pedestrians and meandering herds of cattle that blatantly ignore all yields.  But something has happened in eight months so that when I had my hands on the wheel I became part of all and instead of succumbing to my nervousness I just became part of the dance.

Photocopy shops that sell the best Guayaba fruit in town?  A little old grandma selling giant bottles of ice cold beer by passing them under the iron gate in an unmarked house on the corner?  Buses that just leave when they are full and don’t have a schedule?  Librerias that are not libraries and don’t sell books either, and pulperias that certainly don’t sell any pulpo (octopus).  Fireworks going off at 5 am to celebrate a saint that will heal you if you promise to rub black oil on your face once a year?  Directions and addresses that don’t have either street names nor house numbers, and often reference businesses long gone.   The water in your house will cut out at some point and it usually is in the morning but not always and sometimes is from 5am until 7:30 pm, but you never know.  Chaos.

But look what else the chaos means.  If you need a car mechanic at 8:30 at night on a weekend, you can find one!  Can I just break this package of plastic cups in the supermarket up and buy three because that’s all I need? Sure!  I had a nice and unexpected tour of almost the entire town of Telica while looking for an office half a block up and two north of town hall, and snooped out a sweet spot for lunch while looping around searching for the right town hall.   Well hey, check it out, a super sweet woman I know just was sent a mess of clothes to sell from the states so I can have tea with her while I buy the jeans I desperately need.  Chaos or convenience?

I realized while passing the colorful variety of travelers on the road this morning that I’m starting to really like some of the lack of rules here.  Like a good thrift shop, I never really know exactly what I’m going to find here, but there might be just what I need – or even a treasure – just out of sight.

 

Tiny saint, big crowds!

The festival of Santo Domingo in Managua starts the evening before August 1st and goes on for 10 days.  The image of the saint, which is a only about eight inches tall, is carried from a church south of the city through the streets to the church of Santo Domingo.  The festival is renowned for its wild crowds.  Throughout the year, people make pacts to the saint, promising to show their thanks by dancing with the procession for the rest of their lives if the saint cures their family members of an illness.  Some simply dance, others paint their bodies with burnt black oil or put Indian headdresses on, and many people get drunk. 

The little saint bounces along in the crowd

If I wasn’t already attuned to the very-alive pagan elements of Catholocism in Nicaragua, I would have to be blindfolded not to see them in this festival.  The television coverage featured a man talking about inheriting the duty of processing in black oil from his late father, a mother who has spent 43 years walking in the procession because her handicapped daughter learned to speak, and the palo lucio, a greased wooden pole that people attempt to climb up the night the festival starts. 

A man dressed in black oil.

The procession certainly topped the Easter processions in revelry.  Besides lots of drunk and blackened people, we saw people in traditional Nicaraguan folk costumes, a man carrying a toy of two monkeys fornicating, a man costumed as an Indian with a full feather headdress, and a group of drag queens out dancing in front of the procession, even in a downpour.  The police were out in full form, protecting the group of staggering saint-bearers and immediately quelling any drunken violence before it started.  It’s hard for me to imagine this as condoned church behavior, but also clear that condoning these rituals is a win-win situation.  The people can continue celebrating in the way they have for centuries, and the church can count them as catholic and not need to justify persecuting them.  A note in the tome that is the history of the spread of Christianity.

A small group of police, including the cheif of police, led the parade.

The procession in the morning was a stark contrast to the one in the afternoon, which is a hípico, or kind of rodeo parade where people dress up and show off their thoroughbred horses.  The parade passes in front of the CEPRODEL office, so we made our way there and then walked down to meet some friends closer to the lake.  We happened to stop to watch the parade start right in front of one of the tent cities where banana and sugar cane fieldworkers with serious health damages from overexposure to agro-industrial chemicals have been squatting for years, demanding recompense.  The contrast both between the carousing morning parade and the formality of the afternoon was stark, and then watching the thoroughbred manicured horses walking past shacks made of plastic bags dampered the elegance of the parade a bit. 

We left the parade to visit the Small Businesses Fair that is also running for the duration of the Santo Domingo festival.  It was the right way to end the day.  We sampled Nicaraguan-made fruit wine, tried on handmade clothing, and generally felt good about so many small independent businesses having a place to strut their stuff.

 

Crunching numbers

Luis Rivas, the Reforestation project coordinator, and I are sorting through all the information we have for each client in the project, checking for inconsistencies and gaps before we send it all to the CEPRODEL headquarters in Managua.  Among other uses, the information we collected is going to be used to analyze the long term effects of this project on the farm diversity, diets and incomes of the participating families.  The diagnosis, an eight page questionnaire, was the first project that our student interns worked on with us back in May.

Luis showing Oscar, Bering, Orlando and I the diagnosis the first day of the students internship with us.

Luis looks through the paper copies, recalculating annual incomes from milk and firewood sales, and passes them on to me to enter in the computer.  We agonize over illegible handwriting and inconsistencies in numbers of cattle.  We make a best guess or circle the query in red with a note to our technical assistant to sort it out on his next visit.

Questions about the long term sustainability of pastureland mingle with whether a family eats more plantains or tortillas and how much they spend on agricultural chemicals annually. Honestly, what we are doing is an impossible task.  How do you evaluate the quality of a family’s life in a statistically accurate way?  Are we really going to be able to show how five hundred trees are going to change the lives of these families with our invented numbers?

One of the aims of this project and SosteNica’s work with CEPRODEL is to

Harvesting Lumber in El Guayabal, Nagarote

emphasize to our rural clients the alternative value of the natural resources they have.  To value the shade that Genizero trees provide, the nitrogen fixing qualities of the Leucaena, the added nutrition in the family’s diet from a grove of orange trees, and the retention powers of the roots of the Guanacaste trees planted along the river banks.  Not everything has to translate into cash to have a benefit and improve your quality of life.  And yet after lecturing on the ecological, ideological, and invaluable qualities of the natural resources they all have and are entrusted to take care of, we spend hours trying to show that they are benefiting from them using the same empty numbers we are trying to get them to think outside of.

Several years ago I went to a lecture by Joshua Farley, a professor from the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, who talked about the importance of adding economic values to natural services.  We won’t be able to get the developers and governments of our world to take conservation seriously unless we speak in their language, he said.  If we subtract the value of fifty years of carbon sequestration by fully grown trees from the value of the house intended to be built on the forested property, how much is left?

His argument is not to think outside of our system of value = income, but to incorporate natural services into our system of values by translating them into virtual income.  Nothing physically changes if you put a value on the cooling effect of solid shade over a tin roof, or the money and labor saved by having a year-round river to water cattle.  But some people – and companies or banks – might look at these farmers differently, might put them in a different social class, might give them more opportunities, and might give them more reason to be proud of what they have.  I don’t know if that makes me feel hopeful or sad.

What is the best stretegy for changing the mentality of "poor" and "rich" to add value to natural resources and rural life?

 

From the office

Back to entering data in the CEPRODEL office, beautiful quiet town of Nagarote.  A breath of practical work before the next wild adventure with more family who are arriving in a week.

We have hired a technical assistant who is a graduate of the UNAN Agroecology department.  He will work with the project for two years, following up with the twenty four clients who are still working to plant between 3 and 4 hundred trees on their farms.  He is a serious, responsible worker, who already moved from Leon to Nagarote and is renting a room here to avoid traveling daily, and so that he can leave easily at 5 am to get to the farms in the morning if needed.

The internet here is too weak to allow me post the pictures I’m itching to share.