Corn Queen

The other day my host mom, who is a teacher at the local school, asked me if I would be willing be a judge in a contest to choose a queen of the school. I was intrigued. "You'll want to dress up a little bit, too," she told me. "And wear some make up." On the appointed day I put on a cute little sun dress and gobs of eyeliner and arrived at the school, uncertain of what exactly I was going to be asked to do.

My Host Mom

I went to sit at the judges' table and was handed a sheet the listed several categories, each of which had a point value attached to it. The categories were as follows:
Fantasy Wear - 25
Evening Wear - 15
Modeling - 15
Presentation - 15
Response to Questions - 15
(and the enigmatic) Expresivity - 15



Each grade level, from first through sixth, had chosen a girl to represent the grade. The grade-level princesses paraded by the judges' table in outfits made from local materials - corn husks, banana leaves - and adorned with the basic grains that are the root of rural life - coffee, cocoa beans, red beans, and of course, corn. In their hair were hibiscus flowers and beads and feathers, and of course each girl was fully made up like a beauty queen.




Nicaraguans love pomp and circumstance. Each girl, as she approached the judges, stopped and made a speech that started like this: "Good morning esteemed judges, teachers, students, and assembled public. I am here representing the my grade and the school. As you can see, my dress is decorated with cacao beans. These represent the indigenous people of Nicaragua, who used cacao beans as currency..." and on and on.

Next was the evening wear competition, followed by questions about the founder of the school. As is typical of the Nicaraguan education system, the responses to the questions were all memorized. The questions all focused on the dates and facts of the life of the man for whom the school was named.


I tried to take my role as judge seriously, as did the other three members of the panel. When it was time to compare our scores, we put our heads together and debated the merits of each girl in each category. Finally, we agree that the 4th grade princess would be crowned queen of the school. The other judges asked me if I'd ever participated in an event like this when I was in school. "No," I told them. "We didn't have anything like this at my school." They looked surprised.

Passed through my own cultural filter, the school beauty pageant seemed completely strange and possibly damaging to the self-esteem of the girls involved. But in general, I am trying to experience as much of Nicaraguan life as I can, while passing as little judgment as possible. Overall, I had fun being part of the panel, and I felt honored to have been asked to do so.

Weeds

During my training, my host mom was fastidious about maintaining the area around her house, aka the patio. She had several beautiful flowering bushes, a couple of pepper plants, and some fruit trees. But everywhere that she didn’t have something planted, she liked to have bare dirt. Any little speck of green that appeared was summarily removed. As a child of the grassy-lawned suburbs, I didn’t really get it. Why would my host mom want to surround her house with dust in the summer and mud in the winter? I watched with fascination every day as she weeded and then swept – with a broom – her dirt patio.

Now that I have my own patio to maintain, I have come to understand the beauty of the bare dirt. It all started with a visit from my boss. He complimented my garden, and then he said, “You see all of these weeds around your garden? All of them have a virus. See how their leaves are turning yellow? You should pull them out or cut them down because this virus can spread to the plants in your garden.” Suddenly, I saw these little plants in a whole new light. No longer did they seem innocuous; in fact, they were deadly killers. I set to work with a machete, cutting down all the weeds with yellowing leaves. I felt like Buffy, slaying vampires, battling the undead. Even infected, they were tenacious. I gained a whole new appreciation for the Spanish word for weeds – maleza – which means something like “badness.”

The next week a neighbor was passing by my house. He commented on another part of my patio, where I had allowed an uninfected variety to grow rather tall. “You know,” he said, “snakes like to live in maleza like that.” Since that day, my battle with the wild parts of my patio has grown more intense. I am out there every day now with a machete or my bare hands, cutting down the weeds or pulling them out from the root. How I long for a clean, bare dirt patio like the one my host mom had in my training.

In addition to maleza, Nicaraguans have another word for unmaintained wild growth – monte. People will talk about wild animals – poisonous snakes, armadillos, rabbits, spiders, etc – having come “from the monte”. There is no direct translation for “monte”, but I like to think of it as wild growth that occurs in the absence of human intervention. I was visiting one of the older women in my community the other day, and I asked her about what was here in our town while she was growing up. “Nada,” she said. “Only monte.” I asked her about roads, wells for water, schools. Over and over she said, “No habia nada.” There was nothing. “Solo monte.” Only wild land. “Things have gotten a lot better since then,” she said.

I’ve often heard people in the US say, “I love nature.” They use it to indicate – I don’t know what, exactly – maybe that they love camping, or that they believe in recycling. I’ve been thinking about that phrase because I might have once been one to use it. But no longer. First of all, saying “I love nature” is kind of like saying “I love living on Earth”. It may be true, but it’s obvious, and it means practically nothing. What else is there besides nature? Where else would you live besides Earth? Second of all, many parts of nature I don’t love at all; in fact, many parts of nature I actively dislike. I don’t love scorpions, or intestinal parasites, or tarantulas – all of which, by the way, I have had encounters with here in Nicaragua.

As one who holds a degree in geography - the study of how humans interact with the natural environment - I have spent a lot of mental energy considering how we in the Western world relate to nature, especially those “nature-lovers” who are part of the environmental movement. Too often, I think, the subtext of environmentalism is that the world would be better off without people. The rhetoric goes something like this: human beings have thrown off the natural cycles, interrupted the workings of Mother Nature, and generally made the planet an uglier and unhealthier place. If we weren’t here, things wouldn’t be this messed up.

Now, all of that may be true, to some extent; for the first time, humanity is realizing that it is possible for us to make an impact on the natural world on a global scale – not just on the scale of the patio. But despite how much damage it is possible for us to do, I don’t believe that all human intervention necessarily leaves the natural world worse off. The key is balance. In the case of my patio, I honestly believe that there are benefits from my intervention. And more importantly, I believe that as a human being I have a right to live in this world and to take steps to change my surroundings so that they are safer, healthier, and more beautiful for me. Even if that means that I am making those surroundings less hospitable for other species. Scorpions? Tarantulas? Virus-infected weeds? They’re fine out in the monte. But not in my patio.

Working with Youth

In all of the Peace Corps programs in Nicaragua, working with youth is a major priority. Demographically speaking, Nicaragua is a very young country – more than 70% of the population consists of people under the age of 30. I haven’t started a formal youth group yet, but I have acquired some groupies among the youth in my town.

One in particular – her name is Gema (pronounced HAY-ma) – likes to accompany me on whatever I do during the weekend days when she is out of school. Together, she and I formed a small informal cooking group that meets every Saturday to try new foods. So far we’ve made banana bread, soy milk, and sweet potato soup. This past Saturday, we decided to make a chocolate cake. As it turned out, a volunteer friend who lives in the nearby town of Namanji is finishing her service this month and was also planning make a chocolate cake for her going away party, so the two of us teamed up. We bought the ingredients and borrowed cake pans, and we spent Saturday morning working with the kids to bake the cakes. The deal was that we would eat one and the other Sarah and I would bring to the going away party.

Fortunately, the house where we do the cooking class has a barrel oven, which is much easier to use than the old-fashioned ovens that most people have. Still, most Nicaraguan baked goods are cooked at very high temperatures, so we ended up burning the crap out of the tops of both cakes. We scraped off the burned parts, and one of the kids had the idea of making a frosting to cover up the parts where there was cake missing. This kid – his name is Pipe (pronounced PEE-pay) – totally took charge of the icing, and ended up saving the cake that Sarah was bringing to the party.



The plan was for me to spend the night at Sarah’s site, since there are no buses at night and it’s generally not a good idea to travel after sundown. We would go to the special dinner her community members were throwing for her and then to the big going away party. When we got on the bus, there were Gema, Pipe, and another teenager, Laura. “Hey guys, are you coming to the party?” we asked them. We assumed that they had family in the other town and had made arrangements to spend the night. But when we arrived in Namanji it quickly became apparent that they hadn’t made any plans. That’s when things got a bit awkward, since we didn’t have anywhere for three extra people to sleep, and the dinner was by invitation.

“Do you have any family members here that you can stay with?” we asked them. The kids were quiet. “Tell me,” Sarah said, “where were you expecting to stay tonight?”
The kids looked at each other sheepishly, and finally Gema replied, “With you.”
I would have been annoyed (well I was a little bit), except that it was just so cute that these teenagers wanted to spend the time being with us, and they were so obviously embarrassed to have assumed that they could just jump on to our plans without asking. In the end we were able to find places for them to stay, we arranged for them to be able to go to the dinner, and we brought them along to the party. And it was great. I was really glad to have them with us. The three of them danced all night, they had a great time, they borrowed Sarah’s camera and took great pictures with it, and it was especially nice for me to have some people I knew with me at the party.

The next morning we drank our coffee and ate sweet bread, and the kids and I decided to walk back to my community instead of waiting for the bus. To make the walk go faster, I whipped out all of my latent camp-counselor skills – we played word games and math games and guessing games. We played a version of a game I used to play with my mom – A my name is Alice, and my husband’s name is Albert, and we come from Alabama, with a basket full of Alligators! We went through the entire alphabet in Spanish, laughing the entire time. Then, I decided to work in a little bit of English practice. Students here take English class, but they learn just by writing and translating; they almost never practice speaking. So I got the kids all excited about the fact that my family is coming to visit in December. Then I had them practice what they were going to say to my mom and my dad and my brother when they come.
“What do you want to say to them?” I asked the kids.
“Hello, how are you? What is your name? Do you like Nicaragua? What do you like to eat?” We practiced all of it, with me pretending to be each family member that’s coming to visit. They had a great time with it, and it was just adorable.

Again, as continues to happen to me here, I was overwhelmed with joy at being able to connect with people, and it happened in a completely unexpected and unplanned way. I am starting to see that, most likely, the biggest impact I will have here will come from just being with people, from spending time with them in informal situations. Furthermore, I didn’t come here expecting that I would find my greatest fulfillment from working with young people, but the time I spent with my young friends this weekend gave me cause to reconsider.

The Food Security Volunteer’s Dilemma

My charge as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nicaragua is to work to improve the food security of the people in my community. One way to do that is to use food that would normally go to waste and process it into products that can be sold either here in this town or in one of the larger cities nearby. Assuming that the farmers are able to plant vegetables this season (we’ve been suffering from a terrible drought that has nearly dried up the river that the farmers use to water their crops), a goal of mine is to take all the tomatoes and peppers that can’t be sold in the market and turn them into sauces. We can make tomato sauce and pepper sauce and salsa and ketchup. I’d like to even teach some people to make pizza. There are a lot of bakers in my town, and selling slices could be a great business. In addition to having other sources of income, I’d like to encourage people to add more variety to their diets – above all to incorporate more vegetables and fruits. I’m excited about finding all kinds of value-added products that people can make and sell – jams, jellies, sauces, dried fruits, herb teas, etc.

But things here start slowly. So far I’m working on building enough confianza – trust – to be able to propose such projects. One of the easiest ways I’ve found to get to know people is to come and cook with them in their homes. In the past three months, I’ve made a ton of banana bread, some oatmeal raisin cookies, and even some sweet potato pancakes (those were really delicious). I’ve also taught a lot of people how to make soy milk and soy meat. A couple of weeks ago I made a first attempt at a value-added product. A group of women I’ve been cooking with decided to try to make orange marmalade – it’s orange season, and so oranges are practically free – and sell it at the school.

We washed and peeled the oranges, we boiled the peels and added the pulp. And then it was time to add the sugar. We put in a little bit at first, then each person tasted it, and after each tasting we added more. And more. And more. At the end what we had was more sugar than orange. Which I guess is fine; that’s what marmalade and jelly and jam are all about, I suppose. But what was really appalling to me was how people wanted to eat it. When I said “orange marmalade”, I was thinking of something that you spread on bread or crackers, something that you use in small amounts. When the women I was working with said “mermelada”, they were thinking of something that you eat by the spoonful, like jello.

At the end, as I watched the women I had worked with enjoying their creation and talking about selling it to their children and their children’s friends, I felt disheartened. What am I doing besides finding more creative ways for people to eat sugar and white flour and grease? The honest truth is that almost nothing I cook with people would I actually cook for myself - deep fried banana pancakes saturated with sugar, treacly soy milk (4 tablespoons of sugar to the glass), soy burgers dripping with oil, marmalade so sweet I can feel my teeth rotting just taking a single bite. Maybe there’s some sweet potato buried in the greasy pancake, but does eating more pancakes really helping anyone’s food security situation?

So here’s my dilemma: I can either present the kind of food I believe is healthy – whole grains, low sugar, high fiber, lots of veggies, nothing deep fried – and have people dislike it, or I can present the white flour, sugary, salty, grease-laden version and maybe slowly start to coax people to work more veggies and fruits into the mix. For now, I’ve made my choice, but I still don’t feel entirely comfortable with it.

Michael Pollan and Nicaragua

As you might imagine, I live in somewhat of a media dead zone. The only time I get caught up on the news is when I am sick enough to merit a hotel stay. Then I can watch CNN and the BBC to my heart’s content. But thanks to my wonderful friends, I am receiving a fairly consistent supply of good magazines, so at least I’m getting high quality media, even if it is old news by the time I get it. Recently I received a New York Times Magazine (August 2, 2009) from one of my aforementioned wonderful friends. The magazine contained an article by Michael Pollan bemoaning the state of American cookery. In it, Pollan plots the trajectory of American cooking from 1963 to the present. Basically, he says, over that period Americans have been cooking less and less, eating more and more processed food, and spending more time watching cooking shows on TV than we spend in our own kitchens.

Pollan links these patterns to the rise in obesity in America. At one point he sites research that shows, “the more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income.” The average American, he says, now spends only 27 minutes per day cooking. Another study finds that “the rise of food preparation outside the home could explain most of the increase in obesity in America.”

Now I’m not one to hate on Michael Pollan. But I look around me, and I wonder, What gives? I don't know any statistics on obesity in Nicaragua, but from my informal observation there is definitely a problem here. Many of my community members have diabetes, and by visual inspection, a majority of women over 15 are very overweight. A lot of men and children are too. Yet, none of what Pollan talks about in his article applies to rural Nicaragua. People here eat very little processed food; they are too poor to afford potato chips. And women here spend all day cooking. Every day they make tortillas, which involves manually taking the corn grains off of the cob, boiling them and stirring vigorously to remove the hull, walking to the mill to grind the corn, and then patting out each tortilla by hand. The whole process probably occupies about three hours out of every day, more than six times as much time as Americans are spending cooking. And that's just for one food item.

At one point in his article, Pollan quotes a food marketing research who says, “A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking, and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy!” Maybe in the US, but here that’s still the way people prepare chicken. Nobody in my community knows what a Happy Meal is; they’ve never eaten a TV dinner or a microwave pizza. Not only is the bulk of the food people eat not processed, they actually grow it themselves. And there are definitely no cooking shows.

The weight problem here is something that Peace Corps Volunteers talk about a lot, in large part because we (especially female volunteers) want to figure out how to avoid getting really fat ourselves. In what I believe is a holdover from the Atkins days, many volunteers blame the high-carb diet. Indeed, it is not uncommon for meals to be composed solely of carbohydrates. On a single plate you might find potatoes, rice, beans, tortillas, and plantains. But people here have been eating starch this way for hundreds of years, and I doubt obesity and diabetes were as big a problem 100years ago as they are now. Other hypotheses include a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables, an abundance of fried food, the effect of childbearing on women’s bodies, and lack of exercise (this does not apply to most men, who work in the fields).

I’ve been wondering about it since I got here five months ago, and the other day I was given a food product that I felt perfectly encapsulated what must have happened to the Nicaraguan diet. The food item in question is called a nuegano, and it is a large, thin, piece of deep-fried white flour, topped with a simple syrup made from white sugar and water. As I ate this piece of greasy deliciousness, I realized that none of its ingredients are indigenous to this diet, and all of them are processed outside of the home, unlike the rest of what people here eat. In fact, I realized, the only things people here eat in large quantities that they don’t themselves process all the way from farm to table, are sugar, flour, and oil. And those things are cheap and delicious. So even though the women are still spending the time cooking, these new ingredients are wreaking havoc on their health and the health of their families.

I think Michael Pollan makes a great point when it comes to American food culture, but based on what I’ve observed here, a decline in time spent cooking is incomplete as an explanation for America’s obesity epidemic. The pithy end to Pollan’s article is a quote from the same food marketing researcher who talked about the chicken. “Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want – just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.” But if my experience in Nicaragua is any indication, it will take more than returning to the kitchen to solve America’s food problems.

Tuesday in Esteli

I am in the habit of writing a poem about once every 2 to 3 years. I wrote one the other day, right on schedule - I think the last time was in 2006 - and I thought I would put it up here.

1. At least here it's not so g-d hot.
In Managua it hurt to go out
at midday. So I stayed in, reading
trashy novels, reclining on a
leatherette couch, slick and brown and cool.
The bus ride north was a slow ascent
through wispy clouds spritzing a fine mist.
Seven dollars and fifty-six cents,
or almost two-hundred cordobas,

2. will buy you a night in a clean place
with tile floors and a working TV.
For a strong cup go down the street. The
cafe is called The Light of the Moon,
in Spanish of course. A bacon egg
sandwich reminds me that this is not
America, as if I could have
forgotten. Gringos read guidebooks and
plan their next moves. I am planning mine

3. too. Dawdling in Esteli stop me
thinking about how alone I am
in my site, a tiny town too small
to even be called a village. It's
a pueblo - a pueblito, una
comunidad - of seven hundred.
There are no fruits or vegetables there,
which continues to surprise me. But
everything about Nicaragua

4. surprises me: How do the women
get so fat on rice and beans? And who
ever heard of riding six deep on
a rickety bicycle? What do
the dogs eat? Beans and rice, just like the
people. In this country I have learned
how rich I really am. On less than
ten American dollars I can
live comfortably for a whole week.

5. It hasn't rained in over a month.
Even as they laugh, the farmers wring
calloused hands. Even as they proffer
red beans, tortillas, coajada, the
women secretly wonder - is there
enough to make it until next year?
Who am I in the face of such a
calamity? With my salary
and my American bank account.

6. "I'll just join the Peace Corps" is something
you hear people say. Once they've signed up,
then what? The glamor is minimal,
I can promise you that much. Though time
does stretch out languorously in front
of you. Two years in a grass hut, or
a zinc-roofed cottage or a yurt will
teach you certain things about yourself,
some you might not want to know. But your

7. gratitude will save you. Or that is
my hope. A crappy bacon sandwich
and a cup of coffee are sometimes
all you need. An afternoon in a
foreigner cafe restores a sense
that one has had other lives and will
continue to accumulate more.
A chocolate bar, however grainy,
is still, after all, a chocolate bar.

8. With gratitude I eat the red beans,
the salty fresh cheese, the palmed out corn.
But I relish the days I can spent
not feeling responsible, the nights
in hotels, with pizza delivered.
It's not good pizza, but it's OK.
I was reading The New Yorker when
I found a poem written in nine-
syllable lines, nine lines, nine stanzas.

9. So I decided to write one, just
to pass time in this cafe, over
an egg-toast-bacon sandwich and a
cup of coffee, milk not included.
The bus leaves at half past one. I'll be
home by three. But how I wish for one
more night with fresh clean sheets and cable
television. Tonight it's back to
the mosquito net. Oh, lucky me.

Project Update

A lot of development organizations work in the Nicaraguan countryside. Most of the time, they come through with tangible things to give out to people – a new latrine, materials for a garden, a pregnant cow, water barrels, even houses (e.g. the house I live in). The Peace Corps does not give out anything. We come with just our experience, our time, and our willingness to work. More than anything else, we are community organizers. Our job is to help the community get organized so that it can take on projects without outside assistance. I believe in the Peace Corps’s philosophy. But when every other gringo who comes through is handing out goodies, it makes my job pretty tough.

For example, I want to continue the sewing group that the last volunteer started. There are about twelve women who received sewing classes. However, there are only two machines between the twelve of them on which to practice. I am trying to get the group to pool its resources – maybe start a small savings bank, or hold bake sales, or whatever – to raise the money for more machines. It’s been hard to get anyone to commit to working on this project, though. Most of the women in the group are convinced that the only way to continue with the sewing is for the mayor’s office to give each woman a sewing machine. I’m not buying it. But everything must go at a Nicaraguan pace, which is to say, slowly. So for the time being, the group is going just meeting every week or so to do something – next week we’re making orange marmalade – with whoever happens to show up that day. I’m hoping that over time a committed group will emerge and that one of these little projects will turn into a small business proposition which we can use to raise money for the machines.

Another example: several weeks ago the mayor’s office asked that all the communities affiliated with this municipality make a list of community priorities. Two of the items on the list my community made were loans for women and financing for farmers. Great, I thought, here’s something I can really help out with. Part of my training was on how to start up a small community bank. Basically, each person brings a certain amount of money each week (the amount is determined by the group), and then that money is made available for small loans for a period of time and at an interest rate also determined by the group. At the end of the loan cycle – usually six months to a year – the money is divided up evenly or reinvested in a community project. It’s a great way to foster a culture of saving, which is decidedly absent in the Nicaraguan countryside.

My idea was that we could form two banks in the community - one for women and one for producers. The producers’ bank could ultimately turn into a seed bank. By next planting season we would have enough money to invest in disease-resistant seeds, which the farmers could take as loans and repay in kind at harvest time. When I held a meeting to discuss the idea, some people seemed interested. Mostly what they said, though, was that the mayor’s office or an NGO really should be giving the women interest-free loans. The federal government should be giving the seeds to farmers. Some people reluctantly agreed to come to a second meeting to form a bank, but on the day of the meeting no one showed up. Supposedly we’re going to try again this Friday, but I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve never been a super gung-ho capitalist, and I believe in the duty of a society to take care of its poorest members. Still, the longer I am here the more aware I become of my American capitalistic values, my entrepreneurial spirit. Everywhere I look I see a small business opportunity. Rotting tomatoes? Looks like a ketchup project. Cow poop? Looks like an organic fertilizer business. I also believe in being frugal and saving money. When the community members told me they didn’t have a dollar a week to put into a savings bank, my first thought was, “Okay, but you do have money for popsicles and chips?” I know people are buying them because the wrappers are all over the ground.

Volunteers who have been here longer all say that it takes a good six months to a year to get any bigger projects up and running. I’m trying to be patient. In the meantime, there’s my garden to take care of, my chicken coop to clean out and find chicks for, and lots and lots of books to read.

Into It:
Making super-spicy hot sauce with my neighbor
Eating fresh greens from my garden every day
Going to bed at 7:30pm and sleeping for a luxurious 9 and a half hours a night

Over It:
The heat of the mid-day sun at 12 degrees north latitude
A wasp colony hell-bent on having a home near mine
Cat-calls from the road crew that is currently working outside my front door (but soon there will be a paved road, meaning much shorter bus trips into town. Yay!)