Wanderphilia

Salsa Cubana

2011-12-28T15:27:00.000-08:00

For me, one of the greatest benefits of living in Managua as opposed to a village is that there are lots of opportunities to dance. Although salsa is not a big part of Central American culture - in the town where I spent my first two years the traditional dance was actually the polka - there is a small but growing salsa scene in Managua. For some reason, most people who learn salsa here start with Cuban style - as opposed to in the US where we tend to start with a style called salsa en linea (salsa in a line).

Cuban style salsa is cool. It evolved as a schoolyard game. To play, you learn series of steps, all of which have funny names - things like Give it Some Flavor, The Finger, Festival, Roller Coaster, Tell Her No, etc. Some of the steps are flirtatious - Touch Her T (in which the man puts his arm awkwardly across the woman's chest), Punish Her (which involves slapping the girl's hand), and The Kiss (in which the man leans in a plants one on his partner's cheek).

Once you know the steps, you can dance in a circle with other people. A caller yells out names of moves, and you try to do each one correctly without making a mistake. Every time the caller says ''Dile que No'' (tell her no) you change partners.

I couldn't find a video that really does justice to how cool the circle part of the dance is, but here is a video of me dancing salsa at a recent event in Managua.

Pole Corner

2011-11-20T08:37:00.001-08:00

At itsbest, life abroad is full of unexpected, wacky, hilarious moments. It’s thiselement of the ridiculous that keeps me enjoying being here, even absent manyof the comforts and conveniences that the

has to offer. In the

, Igenerally understand what is going on around me. Even after two and a half yearshere,

Nicaragua

has not lost the ability to surprise me. Though not understanding can make lifefrustrating – as when the lady at the post office told me that envelopes withtape on them couldn’t go through the mail – in the right frame of mind, day today life here provides plenty of opportunities to shake your head in wonder andlaugh at the sheer absurdity of it all.

If you areopen to seeing them, bizarre moments occur every day. Just to give an example, yesterdayriding on a ferry I saw a salsa video from the 90s that randomly featured a dragon.While I was watching the video a guy walked past me wearing a shirt that said, “Ibuy, I try, they die” next to a picture of a dead flower in a pot. If you enjoycomedy of the absurd, then living out of the country can be as funny as astand-up routine.

Even athome I can find things to laugh about, like the fact that the number on myhouse looks like 219A when in reality it should read 279A – because whoeverinstalled the number wasn’t used to seeing a 7 without a cross through it. Andbecause this is Nicaragua,the orientation of the number has never been changed. Not to mention, that thehouse numbering system is random to begin with, so it hardly matters whetherthe house is 219 or 279 anyway.

Or the factthat the other day my roommate came home to find a group of guys installing ametal pole in front of our house, when there were already four poles right onthe same corner. Our landlord had come out from next door and he stood shakinghis head. “I don’t know why they need to put another pole here for just onewire. It’s not like the other poles are full.” Then he paused and laughed. “Iguess this is just going to be pole corner.” Our landlord’s response to thesituation is an approach I have found useful for dealing with the unexpected,inexplicable events that happen constantly here: I don’t understand it, I can’tdo anything to change it, might as well laugh about it. The more I take thisapproach, the happier I am.

Office Culture

2011-10-17T17:33:00.000-07:00

I am now in my third month working in Managua. In my new assignment I am splitting time between the offices of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Peace Corps offices. I have a nice mix of tasks, and I am enjoying getting to see another side of Nicaraguan culture. My Spanish is really being put to the test, too. I am learning how to write formal letters and emails, how to give professional presentations, and how to make business calls. I’ve also noticed certain differences between office culture in the US and Nicaragua. Here is your primer on the Nicaraguan workplace:

What to wear to work

In Nicaragua you can never go wrong with jeans and a polo shirt. Almost every professional organization has its own polo, and often employees color-coordinate, so that everyone is wearing the blue polo on Monday, the yellow one on Tuesday, etc. It is also acceptable for women to wear some pretty flashy, sexy getups to work. As well as impossibly high heels. Think Latin night at the club, and you have an idea of what some women wear to work.

Working hours

The standard work day in Nicaragua is 7:30 to 4:30, with a leisurely lunch hour. This makes sense, given that the sun is shining brightly by 6 am and it is completely pitch black by 6 pm every single day of the year.

The Pecking Order

In general, Nicaraguans are more formal than Americans. This generality certainly holds true in the workplace. My first day at my new job, I made the mistake of referring to my boss by his first name without adding a title of respect – Don – in front. Luckily he is a really nice guy, and he laughed about it. But in another office, it could have been a major faux pas. Most Nicaraguan workplaces also have a very well-established chain of command. Luckily, Peace Corps has the culture of an American workplace. Any volunteer can speak directly to the Country Director, without going through his or her particular sector boss. In a Nicaraguan organization, this type of familiarity with higher-ups is uncommon.

Getting Around in Managua

2011-09-03T10:03:00.001-07:00

I’ve been living in Managua for a couple of months now, and I must say that it is not my favorite city. There is nothing particularly charming about the place. It is a maze of illogically placed streets without names or addresses, punctuated by traffic circles governed by the oddest rules (literally, you leave the traffic circle from the inside lane, crossing incoming traffic).

Supposedly before the earthquake of 1972 levelled the city, Managua was one of the more beautiful Central American capitals, but that was before the city was rebuilt from a pile of rubble. Now, new malls, condos and gated communities rise alongside ramshackle neighborhoods, incongruous against the bedraggled backdrop.

But I am grateful to be here. I like my job, I like my apartment, and to be honest, I didn’t want to make the big a leap from a rural Nicaraguan lifestyle to a US lifestyle all in one go. In my personal journey through the stages of development Managua seemed like the next logical step. How can you go from hauling water and using a latrine to air conditioning and elevators and iphones all at once?

Despite its inconveniences, I am finding some things to love about Managua (e.g. salsa classes). By comparison, though, Managua has nothing on other cities that offer safety, convenience, and beauty as public goods. Here – and in many others cities around the world – only people with money can afford safety, beauty, and convenience within the urban environment. Those are luxuries you can find within a mall complex, or behind the gate in a gated community, or inside your Toyota Hilux, not out on the street.

In Managua you can’t safely walk anywhere. It’s just not done. There are plenty of things to do in the city, and great night life, but you can never just walk comfortably from place to place. Nor are there parks – or at least not any that are safe enough to venture into. There isn’t even public transportation to speak of. There is a bus system, but foreigners are advised not to use it, even if we could figure out the routes. Instead, we are told to take “taxis de confianza”, trusted taxis, to avoid the possibility of being “express kidnapped” (i.e. having your bank account cleared out while you are held hostage in the back seat).

In my old life, choosing to walk was the virtuous thing to do – it’s good for your health and the environment – but here that type of civic and personal responsibility doesn’t even cross my mind when I decide whether to get into a car. If anything, walking is a guilty pleasure, a risk I take every once in a while even though I know it’s dangerous. Being able to walk out my front door and get somewhere on my own two legs tops the list of things I miss about the US.

Live Like a PCV Challenge

2011-08-13T07:58:00.001-07:00

The website Live Like a PCV Challenge invites people in the US to give up certain conveniences for a week as a way of approximating what a Peace Corps volunteer's life is like. Participants in this challenge choose a country and a level of difficulty (from 1 to 5) and then let the people running the website know that they have signed up. Nicaragua doesn't have its own rules, but both its neighbors - Honduras and Costa Rica - do. The whole thing is kind of silly, but reading the challenge levels definitely made me laugh.

Costa Rica's rules included things like 'Do nothing straight for 3 hours' and 'Kill your power and roll the dice to see how long it stays off.' Honduras had 'You cannot watch television but may watch soap operas and soccer at a neighbor's house' and a rule that your daily diet for the week must include two cups of coffee per day with at least 4 tablespoons of sugar per cup.

If we ever get around to making a set of rules for Nicaragua I'm sure it will include similar elements. If I were to design our challenge based on my experience I might add things like:

- The only activities permitted after 8 pm are watching soap operas and sleeping.
- If you drink beer, only drink Miller Lite or Bud Light (these beers approximate the national beers of Nicaragua in terms of flavor and alcohol content).
-Only attend social events if you can get a ride.
- Convince your neighbor to set off fireworks at least 3 times during the week, at unexpected moments.

Let me know how it goes!

What I Learned

2011-08-01T11:22:00.001-07:00

Finishing the first two years of my service with Peace Corps has given me cause to reflect. I came into this experience with certain questions, which I suppose I am now in a position to answer. In one of my first blog posts (May 5, 2009) about Peace Corps, entitled “Why I’m Going”, I wrote the following:

I want to face head on some of the fundamental questions I have about life:

How can a person who has grown up with privilege find ways to give back?
What kind of work is worth doing?
How will I define myself while existing outside of my own culture?
What kind of comforts can I live without?
And what will giving up those comforts teach me about what is truly
important and meaningful?

Here are my thoughts after two years in the field.

1. How can a person who has grown up with privilege find ways to give back?

It’s harder than it seems. PC is the second program I’ve done that involved stepping outside of my own economic class (and race and ethnicity) to give back to the larger world. (The other was as an urban bilingual school teacher with the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows.) In both programs I have felt frustrated with how difficult it is for a well-intentioned person to have a meaningful impact.

Now I think the best, in fact the only way to truly make a difference – whether you come from privilege or not – is to be a full member of a community, for the long haul. The people who can have the most impact are those who are where they are to stay. So it makes sense to find something you can commit to – a school, a town, an organization – and stick with it for longer than a few years.

This is not to say that I didn't have an impact at all during my time in my site, only that my impact was necessarily limited by the short-term nature of my stay there.

2. What kind of work is worth doing?

I have had plenty of time to think about this question during my service, especially as it relates to my own career choices. I have come to the conclusion that it might not be so bad to work in an office, doing something administrative or organizational. I used to only want to work in the field, directly with needy populations; now I wouldn’t mind being a bit higher up the totem pole, where I have the opportunity to influence what gets done and how it is done. I realized that my particular strengths - in analysis, writing, organization, strategy, teaching and training - can perhaps be put to better use in an office environment.

Living in a rural community also made me wonder more broadly about whether traditional agriculture – once the holiest of holies for me – is worth preserving, given the insecurity inherent in it. I’ve wondered whether it would be such a bad thing for the peasant farmers in Nicaragua to move through the same stages of development that American farmers went through, resulting in less farmers with more land making more money in an overall less risky system. A system in which more people move off-farm, and farmers become more like business people. For me, this is a really big question, since it gets to the heart of what the goals of development should be. I’m still not sure where I stand. On the one hand, it is amazing and beautiful that some people still live in pre-industrial societies, entirely dependent on natural cycles and seasons. On the other hand, it is heartbreaking when crops failures mean that whole villages go without. I have certainly learned what a blessing it is to be able to earn a steady pay check and not have to rely on the vagaries of weather and commodity prices for my food and livelihood security.

Certainly, two years as a development worker in the field strengthened my resolve to continue in this field. A friend of mine who is exceedingly smart and who works as a public school teacher told me that the reason she enjoys teaching is that the big questions in urban education continue to fascinate her. I feel the same way about the big questions in development.

3. How will I define myself while existing outside of my own culture?

I have found that as a foreigner – especially a blond-haired, blue-eyed foreigner from the most powerful country in the hemisphere – that other people are all too anxious to define me, and I have developed a lot of patience dealing with people’s misconceptions about Americans. I have also found that how I define myself is not nearly as important as how I interact with people – humility, sensitivity, sincerity, and showing interest in other people’s lives transcend cultural lines.

4. What kind of comforts can I live without?

I can live without a lot of things. I lived for the past two years without running water, air conditioning, a car, screened windows, a toilet, a kitchen sink, a couch, a real mattress, cell phone service, consistent internet access, etc, etc, etc. Whether I want to live without them long term is another question. If anything, I have learned how very difficult it is to give up the comforts of modern life and how unlikely it is that most people with access would willingly forgo such conveniences. Which is kind of a scary conclusion, really. I went into this experience excited to live as simply as possible. I ended up feeling worn down by the small, daily sacrifices of living like many people in the rural developing world and anxious to get back into the cultural loop. I am still pondering what this will mean for my personal consumption choices and what it implies for our common environmental future. (More on this in another post, perhaps.)

5. And what will giving up those comforts teach me about what is truly important and meaningful?

I discovered that any hardship is more easily borne with a sense that “we’re all in this together”, whether it comes from being part of a family, a community, a group of friends, or even – as in the case of fellow PCVs – from like-minded people with a common mission.

I saw the importance of being part of something larger than oneself, and I was inspired by the solidarity my community showed during flooding in 2009’s rainy season.

I learned that a good sense of humor is the most powerful tool for confronting frustration, loneliness, and disappointment. Like when your leather shoes grow an inch of green mold or when ants lay eggs in your underwear.

So, with this post I am closing one chapter of my Peace Corps experience – living and working in the field – and opening a new one – living and working in the capital city.

More on life in Managua to follow.

Adjusting to City Life

2011-06-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

I have been in the big city – aka, Managua – for one week now, and the transition has been rough. Upon my arrival, I instantly developed what is either a head cold or allergies. I’m not sleeping well, since my campo sleeping schedule clashes with urban life completely. And, on one of my last days in site I twisted my ankle coming down the hill from my latrine. So I am not in great shape. Still, I am really happy to be here.

I loved my community, but if I have learned anything about myself over these two years, it’s that I am a city person, through and through. I love visiting the countryside, but I am not cut out to live in it long term. I am so excited about all the opportunities the city presents – restaurants, dance classes, cultural events, and of course, new people to meet.

Still, getting used to city life again is a big adjustment. I have become accustomed to having a particular structure to my day, and adapting to a new schedule is jarring. In fact, I am a bit nervous about trying to adjust to working for 8 hours out of every day, at a desk! In front of a computer! In air conditioning! Will I be able to do it? So far, I have come home exhausted after every day, even though I am generally less active than I was in site. Maybe it’s the head cold or the insomnia, but I think it’s also the adjustment to a different work environment.

There’s also the over-stimulation of the city, which, come to think of it, may be contributing to my insomnia. In the campo, there was nothing to do after 8 pm. Ok, maybe not nothing. I could have watched telenovelas with my host family until 9:30. But after that, literally nothing. I don’t have many friends in Managua yet, but still it seems like there is too much to juggle. Do I want to have a drink with my friend from the European Commission? Or go with my roommate to see a concert at the Teatro Nacional? I am not used to having a social calendar at all, much less one that requires choosing one activity over another.

In July, I will be taking a month of Special Leave in the US – standard policy for PCVs extending service for a third year. Hopefully I will come back from my month in La Yunai having re-adjusted, at least somewhat, to a more urban way of being.

Peace Corps Reform

2011-05-28T09:20:00.001-07:00

I encourage all PCVs and RPCVs to look at this article by Gal Beckerman in the Boston Globe.

'The Peace Corps: What is it for?'

The article makes reference to a 20-point reform plan proposed by a couple of RPCVs who both served multiple stints with Peace Corps. The plan is obviously well-researched and crafted with loving hands, but the authors do not shy away from addressing structural problems with the Peace Corps that need to be addressed if the agency is to continue to be relevant 50 years on. Please read it and pass it along.

Here is a link to the plan on the Peace Corps wiki.

Ludlam and Hirschoff's Peace Corps Reform Plan

Apartment Hunting

2011-05-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

If all goes according to plan, I will be spending a third year in Nicaragua. My close of service date is set for July 29th, 2011, but I have asked for an extension of service until August of 2012. In my third year I will be splitting time between the Peace Corps office in Managua and the Nicaragua office of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN. In order to do this work, I will need to move to Managua. So I spent my last visit to the capital searching for housing.

Amazingly, two days of apartment hunting left me even more deeply infatuated with this country. At first I hadn’t a clue how to go about looking for a place to live. There is a Craigslist here, but it isn’t much used except for vacation rentals. So I started asking around.

First I talked to a friend from Esteli, who referred me to a woman she knows who rents rooms in Managua. I called her, and she told me that she didn’t have any rooms available, but she would happily escort me on visits to a few places that she was aware of. So I spent the afternoon driving around with this very sweet Esteliana, looking at rooms in people’s houses and apartments for rent in a neighborhood near the Peace Corps office. As we cruised through the neighborhood she asked people on the street if they knew anyone who was renting rooms nearby, and I started making a list of things that would never happen in the US while apartment hunting.

1. A person you have never met before offers to be your chauffeur as you look at different housing options.
2. You ask people on the street if their neighbors are renting rooms in their houses, and they tell you ‘Yes.’

The following day I had an appointment in our medical office. While I was there, I thought, I might as well ask this doctor if she knows anyone who rents rooms, since this seems to be the way it’s done. She referred me to a friend of hers who lives right down the street from the Peace Corps office. I went there, and the woman there showed me a very nice room with a private entrance, bathroom and kitchen. She told me that she could help me negotiate a good price for my laundry with the family’s maid. I added to my list.

3. Laundry service is offered as part of your rent.

The last place I visited was a beautiful, sprawling ranch outside of the city. I found it by asking the owner of a guesthouse I had once stayed in if she or anyone she knew rented rooms in Managua. It turned out that her brother and his wife had a big house with rooms available. Their children were all grown, and they were hoping to rent one or more rooms. I took a taxi to their house, where I added more items to my list of things that never happen in the US while looking for an apartment:

4. The taxi driver waits for you to look at a place without charging for the wait time.
5. Your landlords offer to be like a second family to you, should you choose to rent from them.
6. On the way back from the apartment showing, while stuck in rush hour traffic, you buy cashews from a street vendor out the window of the taxi.

I haven’t decided where I’m going to live yet, but the process of looking for a place has been unexpectedly enjoyable.

Birthday Party

2011-04-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

Computer Lab Inauguration

2011-03-21T07:09:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have been the busiest of my service so far. Since the computers were delivered in late February, the directiva committee members and I have been hard at work preparing for the lab’s inauguration and a fundraiser party. There were visits to the mayor’s office and the education ministry, to the hardware store, the grocery store and to Nicaragua’s technical institute.

But now I can breathe a sigh of relief. Our inauguration event went off without a hitch, notwithstanding a very inconvenient power outage on the day of the ceremony. (A loaned diesel generator took care of that problem.) The director of Peace Corps Nicaragua was in attendance at the inauguration and even came back the following evening to bust a move at the dance party. Thanks to the generosity of the owners of our town’s dance hall, El Rancho Silvestre (i.e., The Wild Ranch), the party was also a great success.

Perhaps the best news of the past few weeks is that Nicaragua’s technical institute, INATEC, is going to help us out with technical support and by certifying us as an official satellite institution. That means that we will be able to give computer courses that will include a certificate from INATEC, as though our students had taken the course through INATEC itself.

There is still a lot of work to do, and a few things we need to spend money on in order to have the computer lab fully functional – fans, curtains (for dust), CD reader/burners, paint (for a world map), plastic chairs, etc. - but this coming week we will be able to start giving classes as planned.

What Sexy Today Beauties

2011-03-03T12:38:00.000-08:00

Ladies, if you have low self esteem, come to Nicaragua. Here, you will not be able to walk a single city block without receiving recognition of your physical beauty, desirability, and overall hotness. My good friend Ashley has been visiting me this week, and we have been keeping track of the cat calls, or piropos, that come our way.

Over the course of this week, Ashley and I have gotten a lot of the standards- "Que guapa." (How hot) "Que rica." (How delicious) "Mi amor." (My love) - though some men prefer to speak to us in our native tongue - e.g. "Bye, baby!", "Pretty ladies!"

Sometimes one word is all it takes, as in the case of the man who called out from across the street - "Wow!"

By far the best catcalls are those that rely on the caller´s skills in English and innate creativity. The best call of the week: "What sexy today, beauties!" I think that one even rivals my favorite catcall I´ve ever received - "Wow! Wow! Wonderful lady!"

Meet me at the school wash

2011-02-21T07:09:00.000-08:00

This week my community will be receiving a delivery of 10 computers, 10 desks, a printer, and a projector. All the materials necessary to create the first school computer lab in the whole municipality of La Concordia.

It's pretty exciting. In preparation, yesterday we cleaned out the school building that is going to house the computer lab, which was also quite exciting.

First of all, one of the things I love about my little town is that the kids love the help. I can't imagine a group of six neighborhood kids in the US voluntarily coming to help clean a school on a Sunday afternoon, but that was exactly what happened. Once we started cleaning things got crazy. The Nica cleaning method involves lots and lots and lots of water. No surface is spared a thorough dousing. We brought a hose from the neighbor's house and completely soaked the entire place, walls and all. My job was to yell "Cuidado!" every time someone got the hose near one of the newly installed electric outlets. The whole thing was more like a car wash than anything else I've ever experienced. By the end of it, the kids who came to help were all completely drenched and were making soap angels on the floor of the school building.

GDT Revisited

2011-02-14T12:05:00.001-08:00

It looks like I’ve already failed at my New Year’s resolution to write more on my blog. At least I have a good excuse – the second year in Peace Corps really is busier. I have been attending events almost continuously since the start of this month, while simultaneously trying to get a computer lab up and running at my school.

One of the events was a youth leadership camp for which I was part of the organizing committee. The event was held at a beautiful facility in the mountains of Jinotega. We spend the weekend climbing high ropes courses, teaching leadership skills, and introducing Nicaraguan kids to American camp staples like ‘smores. The last night of youth camp we held an impromptu dance party using music from a volunteer’s ipod. The kids had been begging for a dance party, but once the music was on none of them got up to dance. The Peace Corps volunteers showed no such restraint. As soon as we heard the first notes of Shakira’s new hit “Loca” we were out on the floor dancing away. I think some of the kids might have danced had we volunteers not been so overly enthusiastic; they were either too scared or too embarrassed to join us.

Back when I was in training I wrote about Gringo Dance Theater; it seemed that we trainees became the entertainment at any and all Nica gatherings. People were either interested in our style of dancing or downright amazed that we could dance at all. This dance party brought back vividly those early days in Nicaragua. Only by this time I not only love dancing to these songs, I know all the words too. At one point I turned to a volunteer friend and said, “You know, it must be weird for these kids that this group of gringos knows all their songs and gets so pumped up to dance to them. It would be like if a group of Chinese people came to our high school and started going crazy singing and dancing to Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.”
“Yeah,” my friend agreed, It wouldn’t just be weird. It would be the weirdest thing that ever happened. No wonder they aren’t dancing. They’re in shock.” Such is the transfixing power of Gringo Dance Theater.

Women in Education

2011-01-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

This year Peace Corps Nicaragua is running a 3-day youth retreat to foster leadership skills in 100 young people from around the country. The other day I was in the home of an 18-year-old girl from my community who I am hoping will be able to attend the event. While making the invitation, I got to talking with her and her mother about the other children in the family. There are three girls, of whom the 18-year-old is the youngest, and two boys. The girls have all either finished or are attending college. One studied in the US and now runs an English-language institute. In contrast, neither of the two boys finished sixth grade. They are currently working construction in Costa Rica, and over the years they have alternated between working abroad and farming at home.

I have seen this type of situation in other families, too. In my host family it is only my host sister who has gone to college. Of her two brothers, only one finished high school. They have both worked in Costa Rica and have talked about going to the US. The one who finished high school was recently enrolled in a veterinary program, but he decided it was too much work for too little payoff, and he will be going back to Costa Rica as soon as he has the money to travel.

When I’ve talked to other volunteers, they have made the same observation: in contrast to what you read in the development literature, here it is the girls who stay in school, not the boys. Anyone who teaches in a rural Nicaraguan high school cannot help but notice that the majority of the students are girls. Some time after sixth grade the boys start dropping out to work in the fields with their dads. Yes, there are girls who get pregnant and stop coming to class, but many of them come back once they’ve had their babies; some even manage to go on to college, while their families help take care of their children. Once they’ve left, though, the boys rarely come back to school.

This situation is surprising to me, since everything I read before coming to Nicaragua suggested that when resources are scarce it is the boys who receive an education. I wonder, what is going on here? Machismo is alive and thriving in Nicaragua, so I don’t believe that this educational imbalance has to do with valuing girl children more than boy children. Instead, I think the cause is that even with a college education a woman still has less earning potential than a man. Furthermore, the boys are needed out in the fields to help with the family’s primary income-generating activity.

A college degree is no guarantee, either. I have seen my host sister struggle to find employment and work a low-paying job (albeit in her field) for a manager who takes advantage of her. Another young woman in town has a degree in computer engineering and can’t find work. Working in agriculture as day laborers or on their families’ plots men can still earn more than college-educated women, and the work they do is more vital to the family’s overall security, given that in addition to earning money, they produce food. Also, men are more empowered to go to Costa Rica or the US (though women do it too) to look for low-wage work abroad that pays more than any jobs pays domestically.

Maybe a better question than why it is that women tend to receive more formal education than men is what the outcome of this situation will be in the long term. There, I am completely stumped. Will it turn out that the tables will turn and women will become emancipated, more able to earn good salaries than men? Will the boys get left behind? Or will the current situation persist, with education failing to be linked to higher earning potential (at least for men) and education remaining mostly the province of women?

I should mention that these observations probably do not hold for city families. Still, I think there is something going on here in the rural areas. I also find it ironic to note that in the US it is now the case that more women than men earn advanced degrees. Although the farming economy and the pull of higher wages abroad cannot be the explanatory factors there, I wonder if there might be some other underlying factor common to both Nicaragua and the US that is causing women to seek more education than men. Any ideas?

Keeping An Open Mind

2011-01-11T07:06:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Michael Lewis’s excellent book about the run-up to the housing and financial market crash of 2008, The Big Short. This topic is about as far removed from the reality of my community as anything could possibly be. Here, there is no such thing as housing speculation, and I doubt if the majority of the residents have even heard of the stock market. And yet, I found in the book’s epigraph a lesson that applies perfectly to my service. Lewis starts with a quote from Leo Tolstoy:

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted [woman] if [she] has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent [woman] if [she] is firmly persuaded that [she] knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before [her]. (Pronoun changes are mine.)

Certainly, when trying to understand something as complicated as the housing derivatives market it is helpful to have a supple mind, but it is just as important to maintain this mental attitude in any endeavor in which one becomes complacent. I have only six months (!) left in my service, which means that I have been here for a year and a half and have completed three quarters of my term here. Recently, I have noticed a tendency in myself to think that I’ve been here long enough to understand how things work in this community. So when one of my bosses sent out an email saying that all of us in the ag sector needed to find three young people ages 15 to 25 to work on a garden with a drip irrigation system, my first thought was, “That will never work here.” The reason being that all the youth I know are either working in their families’ irrigated vegetable plots or are planning to work as day laborers cutting tomatoes, tobacco, or coffee. In other communities, where there is not so much activity during the dry season - here we are lucky to have a river, an abundance of land near the river, and many people who own diesel pump systems – this project would be a great way to provide an income-generating activity for local youth. But in my community, I thought, there are no youth available for this type of thing. When I asked some of the young people who live near me, they confirmed my preconceived notion.

But then, I thought, maybe I should approach this opportunity as I would if I hadn’t already been here for as long as I have, as if I didn’t think I had this community all figured out. So I went to the northern part of town, where the people tend to be a bit poorer, and I asked a teacher I have worked with if she knew any young people who might be interested in working with me on a gardening project for the dry season. She thought for a moment, and then she suggested a 19-year-old who is neither working nor attending school. I approached him, even though I’ve never worked with him before, and within a half hour he had assembled a group and found a place for us to put the garden. Obviously, I still have plenty to learn about this community. My goal for the next six months is to remember that.

I want my mind to be as open as this girl's

Immaculate Conception

2010-12-09T06:55:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest holidays in Nicaragua is La Purísima, or Immaculate Conception Day, celebrated on December 8th. To understand how big this holiday is, you have to understand that Nicaraguans absolutely love the Virgin Mary. Mary is basically the patron saint of the country, the same way that the Virgin of Guadalupe is the patron saint of Mexico. La Purísima celebrates the event of Mary’s conception, which had to be pure so that she could go on to bear God’s child.

Purísima seems to me kind of like a mixture between Halloween and Christmas. The traditional way of celebrating it is that each family builds an elaborate altar to the Virgin Mary in their home. Then, groups of women and children go around visiting all of the altars. They do a call and response ritual and then receive a candy or sweets. I don’t know enough about Catholicism to know if there is a similar custom in the US, but I suspect there is not. What really gives it a Nicaraguan touch is that the tradition is called La Gritería, or The Shouting. As I’ve said before on this blog, Nicaraguans associate loud noise with joy. True to form, The Shouting is very loud and very joyful.

The call and response goes like this:

Quien causa tanta alegría? (Who causes so much happiness?)
La Concepción de María! (The conception of Mary!)

Por qué celebramos este día? (Why do we celebrate this day?)
La Concepción de María! (The conception of Mary!)

Dónde está María? (Where is Mary?)
Venida! (She is come!)

Dónde está Jesús? (Where is Jesús?)
Donde está María! (Where Mary is!)

María de Nicaragua! (Mary for Nicaragua!)
Nicaragua de María! (Nicaragua for Maria!)

As with any religious celebration, there is a lot of singing and praying. And fireworks. Lots and lots of fireworks.

Bus Driver

2010-11-13T05:59:00.000-08:00

If I had been born in rural Nicaragua, I think I would have wanted to be a bus driver. Now, hear me out on this one. First of all, the bus system in Nicaragua is not the tame, government-sponsored affair that it is in most US cities. Bus drivers here are cowboys. Basically, to start a bus route, you get a group of guys together, at least one of whom knows how to drive and at least one of whom can do repairs, and you buy an old school bus from the US. You paint it and decorate the crap out of it with stickers and religious iconography and anything else that strikes your fancy, you affix a metal rack to the top of it, you give your bus a cool name, and you go to work.

For those of us in rural areas, the buses are a lifeline. Not only are they good for getting into the nearby cities, they are also good for sending messages, refilling cooking gas, and hauling anything you might buy in the city. These buses also transport firewood, fresh milk, and live animals up to the size of a goat.

Fortunately for me, buses pass by eight times a day in either direction. In the morning there’s El Pitón (the Big Honker), the Red Bus, Úbeda, and Santa Inez. In the afternoon it’s Chico’s bus, Confite (Hard Candy), Wilo, and Chepita.

The reason I think I would have liked to be a bus driver, or at least an assistant on a bus, is that these guys are local celebrities. Everyone in all the towns along the bus route knows their names. The women talk about whether they are good-looking, trustworthy, flirtatious, or up to no good. Also, a lot of times these guys are ripped, since they spend all day climbing around on the bus, ferrying people’s heavy belongings up to the roof rack and back down again. Not only are they strong, they are also chivalrous. They hold babies for women as they find their seats and help old people on and off the bus. And they walk around with big wads of cash from all the bus fares they have collected. Basically, they are really, really cool.

Everyone once in a while you see a female assistant on a bus, but it is rare. I have this idea that it would be really cool to start an all-female bus cooperative. The bus could be painted pink, and it could have a name like Mamasita. I would ride that bus. Hell, I would drive that bus.

The Clothing Cycle

2010-10-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

Life in Nicaragua is a full-bore assault on clothing. Between the mud and dirt, the hand-washing on rough cement, the tropical sun, barbed wire, and a myriad of stain-producing fruits, clothing doesn’t stand a chance. What I originally brought to wear here is now little more than a pile of tattered rags. I’ve observed that my clothing passes through a series of stages on its journey from dress to dishrag. New stuff is great for when I go to Esteli or when I have to look presentable in the Peace Corps office in Managua, though clothing can only last in this stage for a few months, maximum, before it is too holey or faded or stained. Next comes the community phase. When I walk around my community I feel fine wearing faded, stretched out jeans and slightly holey tee-shirts, since most other people do too. After the community phase is the house/garden phase. I have plenty of shirts that are too worn out to be good for much besides sleeping or gardening or working out. Finally, when an article of clothing is simply too far gone to even be worn, it becomes a trapo (rag).

This micro-scale clothing cycle is nested within a larger, international-scale clothing cycle. First, cotton is grown in India and the American south and other places. The cotton is turned into clothing by manufacturers in China or Bangladesh (or even Nicaragua). It then is shipped to the US, where people pay a lot of money for it, wear it a few times, and then give it away to thrift stores and other charitable organizations. When this clothing is not sold immediately it is packed into huge squarish packages known locally as pacas. The pacas arrive in Nicaragua and are distributed all over the country to small stores that sell ropa Americana.

Nicaragua is a vintage clothing enthusiast’s dream come true, though “vintage” is kinder term than some of these old clothes merit. If you’re looking for the hottest fashions from the eighties, look no further. One of my closest volunteer friends with a distinct sense of style struck gold at a ropa Americana store we affectionately referred to as “the mold store”. (You can probably guess why.)

There are also, however, ropa Americana stores that sell brand-name, very gently used clothing, like a consignment shop. One store in particular, Megaboutique, has become somewhat of an addiction for me. I don’t know how these clothes make it to Nicaragua. Granted, they are much more expensive than what comes out of the ordinary pacas, but it is worth it. I’ve found great pairs of jeans, dresses, collared shirts, etc., all practically new and for a fraction of what I would pay in the US. I plan on stocking up.

You, You, and You

2010-10-11T13:05:00.001-07:00

Those who have studied Spanish (or any other romance language) will recall that there are two ways of addressing a person; usted is the formal (like calling someone sir or ma'am) and tu is the informal (regular old "you"). In a handful of countries, however, including Nicaragua, instead of using tu people use vos. (1)

For the most part, conjugating vos is pretty easy. The harder part is knowing when to use it. In the south of the country and in urban areas, vos is used quite often, much the same way that tu is used in other countries - with children, with friends, and in social situations. In the rural north, however, people tend to be much more formal. I sometimes hear people call each other vos, but I also hear people use usted with friends, children, and even with animals. After having lived in my community for a year, no one calls me vos - not friends close to my age, not my host family, nobody. And being from a country where informality is the name of the game, it has started to bother me that everyone always calls me "miss". Why, I have started to wonder, after a full year in my community, does no one feel comfortable enough with me to drop the formality?

Recently I put this question to a new friend from the community. Basically, he said, it is about respect. People use usted to show me that they respect me. Vos is only for people with whom you are very close or for people for whom you have no respect. (This seems like an odd double-usage to me.) Maybe if I lived in the town for ten more years, people would have enough confianza with me to use vos, but barring a life decision to become a permanent resident, it probably won't happen. My friend also warned me that if I try to use vos with people in the community, they will probably take offense, or at the very least the word will sound weird coming out of a foreigner's mouth. I asked about tu, if that would be a more acceptable way of addressing friends and children. No, my friend said, tu sounds pretentious and stuck up. Everyone knows the word from soap operas, but it is not used in conversation unless someone is putting on airs.

Based on what he said and what I have observed, I interpret vos to mean something like dude or homey. It can also be used as an English speaker would use the expression hey you. For me, an outsider, to use it is considered too informal. But if I were to use tu instead it would be as though I were always calling people dahling.

English is a much more informal language than Spanish, and gringo culture is generally more informal than Nicaraguan culture, especially in the rural areas, where people are a bit more old-fashioned. I know that this is just the way things are, but I am frustrated with what I see as a linguistic barrier to forming close friendships. How can I make a friend if I am always calling everyone "sir" and "ma'am"? Then again, I don't want to sound weird, like a French exchange student who insists on calling everyone "homey", and dahling is obviously ridiculous. I need to get over it, and accept that friendships can form between sirs and ma'ams and misses, but to my gringa ear it all sounds much too formal.

1. Vos is different from the Spanish vosotros form, which is an informal way of addressing a group of people (kind of like y'all). Vos is easy to conjugate and only differs from tu in the present and the command tenses. The present-tense conjugation of vos is the same as the infinitive, substituting an -s for the -r at the end and adding an accent. The present tense of comer in the vos form, for example, is comés. For andar, it´s andás. The command form is even easier. You just drop the -r and add an accent on the last syllable. The command for venir is vení, for sentar it´s sentá. This difference in conjugation has the humorous (to me) but also unfortunate effect of making the name of Nicaragua´s leading brand of toothpaste, Colgate, synonymous with the command to hang oneself (cole-GAH-tay, from the verb colgar).

New Friends

2010-10-07T13:31:00.000-07:00

I have a new group of friends. Luis, Brian, Emel, and Junior – all between the ages of 10 and 12 - come to my house every afternoon to play desmoche, the national card game of Nicargua. Here is how we became friends: one day I was playing my guitar and singing in my house, when I had the sensation that someone was watching me. It turned out that someone was – four someones in fact. I sang “Oh Susanna” for them, and I showed them how I can play the guitar and the harmonica at the same time. Then they found out that I own a deck of playing cards, and that pretty much sealed the deal.

Now every day around 2:00 my new friends come over to the house. I clear all of my junk off my plastic table, and we sit down to play desmoche. Only four of us can play at a time, so the loser of each round has to give up his/her seat. Brian almost always loses. Throughout the game there is a lot of talking. “Dame algo bueno, hombre.” Give me something good, man. “Ay, vos, porque me jodiste?” Aw, dude, why did you screw me like that? “Que clase de juego que tengo. Van a ver.” I’ve got this game, you’ll see.

Overall, the play is pretty free-wheeling. If I hadn’t learned the game from other Nicaraguan friends, I don’t think I could have caught the rules from the way these boys play. Desmoche is kind of like a combination between seven-card stud and gin. You have to assemble a ten-card winning hand like in gin, but you don’t get to replace the cards in your hand. Instead you pick up a card from the stack. If you can make a set of three or four using the card you’ve drawn and two or three others from your hand, you do it. If not, you put it down, and another player can take it. Supposedly each person has a chance at the card, in order, but in our games it never works like that. Pretty much whoever grabs the card first gets it. Also, shuffling is not these boys’ strong point, so the deck sometimes turns up three aces in a row, or a run of hearts.

Desmoche also has a lot of arbitrary rules – e.g. cards have to be arranged black-red-black, and you can win outright by drawing four of the same card on the first deal or by having all of your cards be the same color. A friend commented recently that desmoche is a big brother game, in the sense that you might be winning and then your big brother would suddenly claim that you’d lost for not doing some silly thing like arranging your cards according to color.

I’ve taught my new friends some other games – Crazy Eights (Ochos Locos), Hearts (Corazones), and a dice game I had lying around – and they catch on very quickly, all except Brian, who always loses. The best part is that these boys are very sweet and polite. They talk a lot of smack to each other during the games, but they don’t usually use bad words, and they’re always very respectful to me. When they leave they always push in their chairs, thank me for playing with them, and as they file out the door not a one forgets to say “adios.”

Tropical Storm Matthew

2010-10-04T08:14:00.000-07:00

Tropical Storm Matthew hit Nicaragua last week. For the first time in my almost year and a half here, the Peace Corps put its Emergency Action Plan into effect. For me, this meant that for one night I stayed in a hotel in Estelí playing cards and watching reality shows. The storm turned out to be less dramatic than expected – at least during that first day. After we went back to our sites, though, it just kept raining. In my part of Nicaragua, the storm has been more dreary than dangerous. But in other places bridges have been washed out, and entire neighborhoods have been inundated.

Even here, though the river did not overflow its banks, it would be hard to overstate how wet it got. No one has done laundry in the last five days because absolutely nothing can dry. My yard has gone from jungle to swamp. All the weeds have turned brown and fainted into the muck. The ground is so soft on some of the little roads you can sink in up to your knees if you make a wrong step.

Although today was a nice day, the first without rain in quite a while, we Peace Corps volunteers been advised that we are not allowed to leave our sites due to the state of many roads and bridges around the country. Lake Managua is full, and many people living around the lake have lost their homes. Also, according to rumors that are flying around my community, there may be another storm system headed our way.

Ironically, everyone spent the whole year praying for rain. I have been here now for two harvests. The first one was bad because of a drought. This second one is even worse because of too much rain. It all leads one to wonder, do they ever have a good year? I asked one of the farmers I know when the last time was that they had a good harvest, and his reply was, “Ah, well, not last year, and not the year before that. I think it was---yep, it was three years ago.” Which means that in the past four years only one has been good for farmers here. To me, those do not seem like great odds.

The silver lining to this rain cloud is that even with a poor harvest, most families are able to scrape together at least enough to feed themselves for the year. I asked my neighbors (a family of four) how much they needed to put away, and they told me they like to have 8 quintales (800 pounds) of corn and 4 quintales (400 pounds) of beans. This year they just barely made it. However, since they didn’t produce enough to sell, they will have no cash to buy things like sugar, oil, coffee, clothing, shoes, and soap. Likely, the man of the house will travel to another community in the off-season to cut coffee or work in a tomato field.

No doubt, this has been a bad year, the worst in a long time, according to some. But what I realize from my conversations with people is that a bad year is really not out of the ordinary. Yes, it’s bad, but bad is normal. As I heard my neighbor Marina say to a friend from out of town when asked how her family is doing, “Estamos jodidos pero contentos.” We’re screwed, but at least we’re happy.

100 Things

2010-09-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

I first heard about the 100 Thing Challenge while traveling in Belgium two years ago. Since then, the idea has grown much more popular. (See this website http://www.guynameddave.com/100-thing-challenge.html) Those who accept the challenge strive to reduce their stock of personal belongings to only 100 things. I find this idea appealing, though whether or not it is possible depends entirely on how you count (i.e., do you count every fork and every t-shirt, or do you count ‘forks’ as one item and ‘shirts’ as another?). On the website, the originator of the challenge says to count only items that are mostly or entirely yours, not shared by a family or roommates. Since I live alone, these rules mean I would have to count everything in my house. For fun, I recently made a list of everything I own, just to see how many things I have. It turns out that if you include multiples of any item – food, books, pens, cups – you will quickly reach 100, no matter how minimalist your lifestyle; whereas, if you don’t count multiples, it could potentially be very easy for anyone to get under 100 things.

I have never owned what I consider to be a lot of things. I move often – in fact, if I stay through the end of my service in the house I am renting, I will have lived here longer than in any place in the last 12 years – and so it behooves me to be able to fit all of my belongings into a mini-van. I came to Nicaragua with less than 100 pounds of stuff*, a fraction (though a significant one) of my total belongings. I have acquired many items since arriving here, mostly necessary household things: a stove, a mini-fridge, dishes, a broom, a hammock, etc. My life here feels quite modest – I don’t have a single rug, a television, or any upholstered furniture - yet I am amazed at how much stuff I own in comparison with many of my Nicaraguan neighbors.

Stuff clings to me like burrs. It seems every time I leave the house I come back with more. Be it books from the Peace Corps library, groceries, used clothing from one of Esteli’s Ropa Americana stores, care packages, new pens or markers, whatever. It amazes me how my house seems to fill up on its own, without any conscious effort on my part. I thought this process was particular to the developed world and that it would not be part of my life in Nicaragua. However, I now think that this tendency to acquire things is a cultural attribute that comes with having grown up in a materialistic society. It’s not even necessarily that I am spending money to acquire these items. Many times they are gifts or things someone else is throwing out.

I am planning to come back to the US with almost nothing, and it gives me great joy to think about all the stuff I will be giving away or selling at the end of my service.

*This might be a more accurate way of counting how much stuff a person owns. It would certainly be much less open to interpretation than ‘100 things’. Though depending on the weight goal, it might be impossible to own things like a piano or a refrigerator or, for that matter, furniture. Maybe one ton of stuff would be a good goal.

Flooding of the Rio Viejo

2010-09-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

Here are some images of flooding in my site this rainy season. This first one is of me standing in the road that passes in front of my house after it rained yesterday.

Here you can see where people will be losing part of the corn harvest, on top of the beans they've already lost due to excessive rains.

This river went completely dry during last year's drought and subsequent dry season.

What looks like a creek here is actually a road.

The water level rose high enough to enter many people's houses, some up to knee deep.

Rainy Season Blues

2010-09-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

I am getting pretty sick of the rainy season. It has been a rough one so far. Last year many farms lost their harvests due to drought; this year the farmers are losing again, only this time due to excessive rain. It has rained so much that the river actually changed course, overflowing its banks and taking over a dirt road as its new channel. Some families downstream have had to leave their houses for fear that they will be swept away in the night.

My yard is a complete swamp. My garden has drowned, and in its place a jungle has grown, practically overnight. Almost every other day I have to blaze a new trail to the latrine with my machete. I don’t even consider leaving the house without putting on rubber boots. And because there are so many places for mosquitoes to lay eggs, mosquito-borne diseases have been especially bad this year all over Nicaragua. Several of my neighbors have had fevers I’m convinced were dengue.

But the thing that is really making me hate the rainy season is that all of my clothes, my shoes, and even my bed smell like an old lady’s basement. I feel singularly helpless about the situation because on top of the excessive rains, we’ve had power outages. And when there’s no electricity, there’s no running water either, since our water system requires electricity. So ironically, we’re suffering both from too much and not enough water. Even if I could do the wash, there is a high probability that my stuff wouldn’t dry before it rains again, which would just start the mold cycle all over again. Just this once I would love to throw everything in a washing machine and then dry it in a dryer – even my pillows, my mattress, and my hiking boots, all of which are being taken over by mold.

I am grateful not to be among those who have lost their houses or their bean crops, of course; but I seem to forget every time I pick up a shirt and realize it’s too stinky to wear even though I’ve just washed it. Everyone says September and October are the rainiest months. We’ll see what they bring this year.

Talk at Ethical Society St. Louis

2010-08-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

While visiting my family in June of this year I gave a talk at the Ethical Society of St. Louis. I spoke about my experience thus far in Nicaragua. The talk is now available online as a podcast from the St. Louis Ethical Society's website. If you'd like to listen, you can find it here:

http://www.ethicalstl.org/res_libraryaudio.html

Fernanda

2010-08-12T08:19:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I finally visited Dona Fernanda, the old lady who always stops in the street to talk to me. I usually see her when she is on her way to church, dressed in old-fashioned pastel colored dresses, usually with a scarf over her hair and a large cross around her neck. When she sees me she calls out to me, we embrace and air kiss, which is a bit awkward since she stands about four feet two inches tall. No matter how hot it is outside her cheek is always powdery and cool. She blesses me in the name of Jesucristo and tells me to come visit her at her home.

Yesterday afternoon I was walking home from a visit to one of the teachers in the school when I saw Fernanda sitting outside of her house. She was wearing a bandana and her hair hung down in two long, skinny braids. She was sitting on a rock smoking a cigarette. I walked over to her and sat down on a rock facing hers, and we had a lovely conversation, punctuated by Fernanda dragging on her cigarette and spitting into the dirt. “Soy grosera, no?” she asked me several times. I’m crude, aren’t I?

I asked her who lived here in this home with her, and she said she lived alone. But she isn’t afraid, she said. She proceeded to tell me that even during the war she wasn’t afraid, when she used to cross military lines in order to deliver babies. She never feared, she said, “porque para Jesucristo y una partera no hay fronteras.” For Jesus Christ and for midwives there are no borders.

Listening to her talk about her life was like reading a Gabriel García Márquez novel, all magical realism. She told me that she learned midwifery directly from God – no one here on earth taught her the trade. She learned how to sew in dreams, she said. “Son las cosas que Dios regala a una.” These are just things that God gives to you.

She has five children and nine grandchildren. Most of the grandchildren she delivered in her dirt-floor home. “They were born into my hands,” she said. I asked her if she was ever married, and she said no; her children were gifts sent directly from God.

Fernanda’s father taught her how to play guitar, and she used to write songs, she told me. But after he died she never touched the guitar again. I asked her if she could sing me one of the songs she had written, and she said no; she remembers the lyrics, but her voice doesn’t cooperate anymore. She could, however, recite for me a poem that had occurred to her as she saw me walking down the path to her house.

“Muchachita, que bonita
Me alivia mi corazón.
Espero que venga para una visita
Y le doy un apretón.”

Translated:

Such a pretty girl
Makes my heart feel light.
I hope she comes for a visit
I’ll give her a big squeeze.

As I was leaving, she did just that, and I promised to visit again soon.

Back in the Day

2010-08-09T06:56:00.000-07:00

Before I was assigned to my site, I was prepared to handle almost anything. I was willing to live an hour’s trek from a bus route, I would have been fine in a village without electricity. I did request to be placed in a place with running water, but a well system would have probably have been just fine. While I was still in the US, the idea of using a latrine for two years freaked me out, but by the end of training I had decided it wouldn’t be too bad. My one wish was that I wouldn’t have to live in a dirt-floor home.

When I got to my site I was pleasantly surprised. For an Agriculture volunteer, I’ve got it kind of cushy – we have running water for at least two hours every day, so I don’t have to haul water from a well; my house is wired with electricity; and best of all, I live right on a road – newly paved – along which pass eight buses a day. I can’t receive calls right in my house, but it is possible for me to find pockets of cell coverage in my community.

I sometimes think about what it would have been like to have been placed in this site back in the old days of Peace Corps Nicaragua, i.e. the nineties. At that time, the community had not yet gotten electricity, nor was there a running water system. And the country did not as yet have any kind of cell network at all. The road was a rutted dirt track that became impassable during the rainy season.

The odd thing is that one year ago I was prepared to take it, whereas now I don’t think I could. Contrary to what I expected before I got here, as time goes on, I am less, not more willing to give up comforts of any kind. I am accustomed to using my computer almost every day and listening to my ipod whenever I’m in the house. I download podcasts whenever I go to Esteli, which thanks to the easy bus transportation, is about twice a week. When I talk to my host family, I realize that they feel the same way that I do about modern conveniences. My host mom lived the first 39 years of her life without electricity. Now, when it goes out for one day she’s bored without the television. And she can’t imagine going back to hauling buckets of water – sometimes six trips a day – up the steep hill to her house.

I think the point of this is that it is very difficult to go back, no matter if you have a lot or very little. For those of us, like Peace Corps Volunteers, who choose to give up (at least for a time) many of the comforts we are used to, it is possible to prepare for that moment and to make the transition willingly. But once you’ve settled in to a simpler life, it becomes just as hard to give up anything that you’ve come to depend on as it was the first time, maybe even more difficult.

Note: Ironically, just after I wrote this the charger for my laptop stopped working, so I am currently without the ability to download podcasts, write blog posts at home, or watch DVDs. Hopefully the situation will be resolved quickly.

Snake Oil

2010-07-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

During my bus ride home yesterday, a man got up, went to the front, and started to speak to the passengers. These bus speeches are pretty common. Ninety percent of the time the speaker is either talking about Jesus or selling something. This guy was selling medicine. He started off talking about how we need to take care of ourselves, how we get tired and run-down, we can have nervous attacks or trouble sleeping, or just feel worn out. “Well,” he said, “I have a solution for all of you, ladies and gentlemen. Here in my bag I have a wonderful cure for what ails you.” He pulled out a small box. “This, my friends, is what you have been looking for. Inside of this box you will find a syringe, a fresh syringe with a new, clean needle. Inside the syringe is a powerful vitamin.” This man is selling do-it-yourself intramuscular injections of vitamins on a bus. What?!

He went on, “When you inject yourself with this vitamin, my friends, you will feel 100% better. You will feel fresh, young, healthy, and happy. And how much, my friends, do you think this injection would cost in a pharmacy? I invite you, friends, to go and ask. Ask them how much an injection like this will cost. They will tell you, my friends, they will tell you $140 cordobas. That is how much this medicine will cost you if you want to go out and buy it in a store. But I am offering you this wonderful injection, this amazing cure, for only 50 cordobas. And if you buy two, my friends, I will throw a third one in for free.”

Then he pulled out a pamphlet. “But please, my friends, if you’re going to use these vitamins don’t do it until you have cleansed yourself of parasites. I want you to look here at this drawing. This worm, my friends, he lives in your stomach. He has five mouths, he eats and eats and eats, and he never gets full. And this little animal, this is the amoeba. He attacks you when you drink milk. And this one, this one lives in the flesh of the pig. Those who have epilepsy, who suffer from nervousness, they have this worm. And there are many others, my friends.” He indicated a plethora of other drawings of worms and microbes. “So if you are going to take this vitamin, please, please, kill these parasites first. This medicine here” – he produced another box – “will rid you of all these creatures. Do I have any takers? The senora here, yes, and here this man, anyone else?”

He went walking through the bus handing out the boxes. I took one of each, just to look and see exactly what he was selling so I could look it up later at home. The injection was a vitamin B cocktail – B1, B6, and B12. The parasite med was called albendazole. When I got home I went straight to my shelf and pulled out the book Where There Is No Doctor, which is a great medical reference manual for places like where I live. The parasite medication this man was selling works for a variety of worms, which I guess is good if that’s what you’ve got. But it doesn’t work on the two most common parasites in Nicaragua – amoebas and giardia. Not to mention that a lot of what he was saying about the parasites he did mention was flat-out wrong.

But the vitamin is the truly appalling part of his package for wellness. Let me quote from several sections of Where There Is No Doctor. First, from the part about vitamin B12: “This is mentioned only to discourage its use. Vitamin B12 is useful only for a rare type of anemia that is almost never found except in some persons over 35 years whose ancestors are from northern Europe…Do not waste your money on vitamin B12 or let a doctor or health worker give it to you unless a blood analysis has been done, and it has been shown that you have pernicious anemia.”

And from a section called “The Most Dangerous Misuse of Medicine”:

“The common belief that injections are usually better than medicine taken by mouth is not true. Many times medicines taken by mouth work as well as or better than injections. Also, most medicine is more dangerous when injected than when taken by mouth. Injections given to a child who has a mild polio infection can lead to paralysis. Use of injections should be very limited.”

Later, in a section entitled “Medicines Not to Inject”, the first entry is “Vitamins.” “Rarely are injected vitamins any better than vitamins taken by mouth. Injections are more expensive and more dangerous.” Just below, B12 is given special mention. “Injecting [B12] can cause abscesses or dangerous reactions (shock).”

To bill this medication as a cure-all, to suggest that it is good for people to buy a few packages and inject away, is absolutely unconscionable. I can’t believe it is legal (and I’m pretty sure it is. Even if it isn’t, it is quite common) for any old schmo to buy a carton of vitamin B injections and hand them out willy-nilly to unsuspecting poor farmers. It doesn’t help matters that people around here tend to be injection happy. I wanted to stand up myself and tell people not to waste their money or put their health at risk by listening to this snake-oil salesman. Maybe next time I’ll work up the nerve to do it.

Hot and Cold

2010-07-24T10:38:00.001-07:00

Many local health beliefs in Nicaragua have to do with avoiding the mixing of hot and cold. For example, if you’ve just been working outside, you shouldn’t bathe right away or drink cold water. If you’re eating hot soup, you should have a hot drink with it instead of a cold one. If the floor is cool, you shouldn’t walk on it with your warm bare feet.

And people are fastidious about it. When my neighbor bakes, she gets “agitada” (agitated from heat) and cannot come outside for the rest of the day. Sometimes she’ll call me over to accept some rosquillas (corn cookies), and she’ll be standing in the doorway with a towel over her head (to keep the heat from escaping her body too quickly, I presume) holding out a dish of baked goods that I have to go over to get, since she can’t come out into the cool air. And it’s not even cool out. It never is.

On a “cold” day during “winter” the temperature may be around 75 during the day. Still people complain about how cold it is, they put on sweaters, they have respiratory infections, they drink soup, the works. I wish I could explain to people how cold it can get where I grew up. “You can put a glass of water outside and it will turn into ice. That cold,” I say. But it doesn’t seem to penetrate. How could it? How could you understand true cold if you’ve never lived in a place where houses needed insulation or central heating, or even a fireplace (apart from a cooking stove)? How could you understand a North American winter if the coldest night you know of is one that requires two thin blankets instead of one?

I laugh when people warn me about going to the colder parts of Nicaragua (mainly Jinotega, one of the nearby cities). “Oh, bring a sweater. Jinotega is ‘helado’ (icy).” Which is a joke, because nowhere in Nicaragua is icy, ever.
“I think I’ll be okay,” I say.
This word “helado” makes me laugh because people use it strange ways. I’ve heard people say that a fire is “helado” when food isn’t cooking fast enough, or even that the sun is “helado” on a cooler day. Clearly, we do not share an understanding of what constitutes iciness.

Often people describe illnesses according to hot and cold essences, sort of like humors or energies in the body. One day this week I saw my host mom with a piece of a plant tied around her ankle, and I asked her about it. “Too much heat,” she told me, and she explained that she had recently come down with an illness in which her left foot and ankle become inflamed, and she gets a fever and nausea. She told me the name of the illness in Spanish, but it was nothing I had heard of. “I have to put cold things on my foot to get rid of it. This is aloe. It’s very helado. I got this sickness once before and you know what cured me? Something even colder than aloe.”
“What?”
“A toad. Wilmer (her son) is out looking for one right now. One time he found me a toad that was so cold, it was heladísimo! I rub it right here where my foot is inflamed.”
“And that works?”
“Yep, but the poor toad, afterwards he dies. Too much heat for him. He’s cold, and it kills him, the poor guy.”
My only response was the one word everyone teases me for saying constantly. “Wow.”

Nica Time

2010-07-20T08:43:00.001-07:00

Nicaraguans, especially those that live in the countryside, have the tendency to be less than punctual. In Peace Corps we call this “la hora Nica” - i.e., plan for activities to start an hour or so later than scheduled - as opposed to “la hora Gringa” – things start right on time. It can be hard to count on people to be where they say they’re going to be at the time they say they’ll be there. Even when you make a concrete plan with someone, they’ll often throw in the caveat “si Dios quiere” – if God wants it. Basically, with all commitments the idea is that people will show up if they can – provided it’s not raining too hard, they didn’t feel lazy that day, or something else didn’t come up. If a meeting starts at two, the majority of those that are coming will probably be there around three. Some may show up even later.

I am getting used to this part of the culture. I padded the agenda of the community meeting I held recently with ample time to make up for the late arrival of 90% of the participants. You learn that it’s necessary to schedule things for an hour earlier than you actually want to start. You also learn not to try to do more than a couple of things in the day – one activity for the morning, one for the afternoon. And even that may be pushing it.

Yesterday I got a better idea of why people have this mentality. I was going around inviting people to another meeting to discuss the computer center idea, and I had to go out to the farthest house in the community – the last house on the other side of the river. I went with two chavalos (kids) from my neighborhood. We crossed the bridge and started trekking through the mud. I was wearing hiking boots, luckily. The farther out we got away from the bridge, the deeper the mud became. We ran into an older lady resting by the side of the road and offered to help her carry a jug of milk and a bag of tortillas back to her house. The mud got deeper. One of the kids had on sandals, and by this time you couldn’t even tell he was wearing anything on his feet. The bottoms of my jeans were caked with mud.

Finally, we got to the last house. We sat on the lady’s porch for a minute to rest, and we chatted about the meeting. “Well, I’ll do the best I can,” she said. “But I don’t use the bridge, and the water’s up to my waist now.”
“Why don’t you use the bridge?” I asked.
“It makes me dizzy.” It’s a suspension bridge, and it does bounce a bit, but I’m still surprised to learn how many people in the community prefer to ford the river rather than use it. Talking to this lady, I started to understand a bit better why people consider all plans tentative. If it has rained a lot the river may be un-crossable. Also, if the path gets any muddier, even the bridge might not be a good option.
“Ok,” I said, “Well I hope to see you there.”
“I’ll be there,” she said, “Si Dios quiere.”

Community Meeting

2010-07-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

This weekend I held a three-day workshop on community project design and implementation. With the help of a counterpart, I invited 25 people who are considered leaders in my community. Over the course of the three days, we talked about the resources of the community - the river, arable land, many educated young people, and some rockin' fiestas patronales (happening next weekend) - and we came up with ideas for ways that the community could be improved.

Before the meeting started, I was really nervous about whether or not it would work. For starters, a prominent man in the municipal head died on Thursday, so on the first day of the meeting only a dozen people showed up. And of course, they showed up about an hour late, so for the first hour I was fretting that we wouldn't have a meeting at all. But even that fist day, things went well. We made community maps and talked about all the positive things about our area, and we discussed past successes of the community.

The second day went much better. All twenty-five invitees showed up. We spent the day imagining how the community could be improved, and we ended up with four project ideas:
1. A new seconday school
2. An expanded health center
3. A recreation center
4. A computer lab

At the end of the third day, we chose two projects to continue working on - the computer lab and the health center. Now I am excited - and nervous - to see what will happen next with these ideas. Tomorrow we are having our first follow-up meeting, and my boss from Peace Corps is coming to visit. Unfortunately many good ideas fall apart for lack of support from the mayor's office or from the community itself. But for now I am optimistic that in my second year of service I can help my community get something concrete done.

When the Power's Out

2010-06-30T15:36:00.000-07:00

Lately the electricity has been going out every night around 7, just after dark. My host family hates it when the power goes out because it interrupts their soap opera-watching routine. I don’t watch soap operas, but I hate it too. By day, I feel like the master of my home. For the most part, I decide who comes in and out, be he man or beast (unless he happens to be a fly – I have no control over flies). But as soon as it gets dark, the equation is flipped. At night, the animalitos are boss. As long as I have the power to flood a room with light, I feel okay about the situation. I can see who’s around, and the guys that don’t like the light tend to make themselves scarce. But when the power goes out, it’s just me and my headlamp against a whole world of creepy crawlies.

I always seem to have my most intense encounters with the lesser beasties when the power is out. Last night, for example, I was contemplating watching a DVD on my laptop, when the lights went. It was about 7:30, so I decided to just go ahead and call it a night. I fumbled around the dark house for a few moments looking for my headlamp. When I lit it up and shined it around my room, a flash of activity in the area where I store clothing caught my eye. I came closer and saw a bunch of large ants crawling among my bras and panties. Uh-oh. I’ve dealt with these ants before, so I sort of knew what to expect.

Cautiously, I lifted up a pair of underwear, then threw it down on the floor violently. It was covered in giant ants, and underneath it was a pile of what I assume were eggs – round, white, bean-shaped things that the ants were now rushing to grab onto and cart away. I began to lift up underthings with two fingers, throw them on the floor, and smash ant eggs with my feet, all the while praying that none would fall or crawl down inside my rubber boots. I don’t know whether or not these guys bite, and I was hoping they wouldn’t give me a chance to find out.

Some of the ants on the floor were scrambling furiously to move the eggs to safety. Others looked shell-shocked. They had grabbed onto eggs and were sitting stock still, holding them. I grabbed a bandana and swatted the remainder of the eggs off of the shelf where my clothing was. Then I left the whole mess for the morning and went to close the doors.

I’ve developed a fear of snakes since I’ve been in Nicaragua. It’s funny, as I’m here longer, I find more things frightening, not less. I have this image of a coral snake – highly poisonous – coming in under my door during the night to get out of the rain. In this vision, the snake sneaks into my bedroom, slithers up a bedpost, somehow gets under my mosquito net, and nestles in among my covers, where it wakes me up, gets startled, bites me, and leaves me to die alone in my house, where no one finds me for days.

I realize that this scenario is unlikely, but nonetheless I have taken to shoving plastic grain sacks under the doors at night. Last night, as I lifted up one of the sacks, out from under it wriggled a millipede, also – according to what I have read – potentially poisonous. Luckily I was still in my boots, so I stomped that guy good. Another enemy vanquished, I got the bags under the doors and went back to my room, where the ants had mostly finished carting off their precious babies. I got in under the mosquito net, checked for scorpions under my pillows, and said my nightly prayer asking the powers that be not to let any chagas bugs (aka assassin beetles) bite me. Then I went to sleep.

US Trip

2010-06-25T07:08:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the gap between posts. This is one I wrote while traveling in the US. Since then I've been witout internet access. I'm trying to get back into the groove now that I'm in country and have a more or less normal schedule.

I am in the US right now. Actually, at this very moment I am in an airport waiting for a flight to Miami. I’ve spent two blissful weeks in this country enjoying the comforts and conveniences of the developed world. It’s kind of funny, I expected to experience some sort of reverse culture shock after having spent a full year away. But I think two things are at work here keeping me from feeling too weird.

First, the Peace Corps has conditioned me to be incredibly adaptable to all kinds of situations. Over this past year, I have often been faced with the unexpected and had to just deal. I’ve gotten pretty good at switching modes, since I move from the country to the city with some regularity. Yesterday, I was supposed to have been back in Managua, but I missed a connection and got stuck in New York. After a brief moment of stress in the airport, I got on a bus and headed to my brother’s apartment unannounced, called some friends, and ended up spending a great night in the city. I barely even missed a beat – even when I found out that they had sent my luggage to Atlanta. I think getting used to an alternate reality in the countryside of Nicaragua – and then going back and forth from there to Esteli and Managua – has just prepared me generally to accept my surroundings without getting too bent out of shape.

Second, I think over this past year I have become more, not less, materialistic. You might expect that living more simply would make me think, “Wow, we in the US live with a lot of unnecessary stuff. We waste a lot, and it really is possible to live quite happily with much less.” While I recognize that this is indeed true, in this past year, I have become more inclined to think, “Wow, we in the US have so much great stuff. I feel so lucky to be of the part of humanity that gets to have access to it.” Throughout this trip I found myself appreciating all kinds of ordinary US luxuries - bike lanes, consistent cell phone service, air conditioning, cars, supermarkets, food safety standards, customer service, fast internet connections, well-made shoes, and the list goes on and on.

I think a lot of my friends have always considered me to be a bit crunchy. I didn’t own a car for my last several years in Philadelphia, I shop at farmers’ markets, I even kept a worm composter in my basement. I didn’t own very much stuff, but I never felt deprived. I still don’t own anything of value, but now it is common for me to fantasize about the fancy things I’m going to buy at the end of my service. I can really start to drool thinking about iphones and laptops, or about a well-fitting pair of dark jeans, or Italian leather boots. I don’t know how to explain it, other than that when you live with less not because you want to but because you have to, something happens to your brain. You start to Want.

Maybe it’s part of my acculturation to Latin America, but I also care a lot more these days about how well I am put together before I go out of the house. I use more beauty products than I ever did before. I feel naked if I’m not wearing nail polish. When they lost my bag, my first thought was, “Well, at least my makeup is in my carry-on.” What?! Who is this person? And what have they done with the old urban hippie version of me?

Perhaps I will feel more of a shock when I come back to live in the US for good. This time I was on vacation, so maybe it wasn’t an accurate test of how I’ll feel being back in my homeland. Also, I wonder whether this materialistic streak will grow or diminish over time, if it is a permanent change to my values or if it’s a temporary effect of living in semi-self-imposed poverty.

When It Rains

2010-05-28T04:40:00.000-07:00

The rains have arrived. Last week I came back from a trip to Managua, and it was like I came home to different place. Where the hills were brown and barren, they had turned a dazzling green. My yard went from being a patch of burnt-looking scrub to a full-blown jungle of weeds.

You’d think the farmers would be happy, overjoyed in fact. And they were at first. But then it kept raining. For the past five days straight we have not seen the sun. Sometimes it drizzles, other times the rain falls down in fat drops, and at night it rains hard. All of this rain is bad for the newly-planted corn and beans, now drowning in marshy fields. Where people plant near the river, the fields themselves have in some cases been submerged.

Last night my neighbor invited me to come with her to take a look at how much the river had grown. When we got there, I was positively shocked. If you have been following this blog, you will recall that the river in my community had dried up completely. As in dry as a bone. As in no agua. Where that dry trough was a month ago, there is now a rushing river, too deep and wide to cross. We joked a few months ago that just when the municipal government had finally put in a bridge, the river had disappeared. Now, people are worried that the bridge is going to fall down because a couple of big uprooted trees crashed into it full speed during the flood.

I’ve been tromping around in botas de ule (rubber boots), even to go to my neighbors’ houses or to the latrine. I feel lucky because so far, the trench around my house has prevented the water from coming in. Others have fared worse. In one part of my town, where the houses are right next to the river, there is some concern that the river may erode away so much land that the houses themselves will fall in.

In talking about this flood, people often bring up Hurricane Mitch, which caused the worst flooding anyone in the community can remember. At that time, numerous fields were destroyed, turned into giant rock piles that have never been recovered for planting. This flood has been mild in comparison. And hopefully with a few days of sun, most people’s crops will not be lost. But whether they are dealing with floods or droughts, price fluctuations or political instability, the people in my community live much closer to the edge than most US Americans that I know.

One Year In

2010-05-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

Last week I passed an important milestone in my service. On May 14, 2010 I completed a full year in Nicaragua. In that year, I left only one time, and that was to go to Guatemala. That means I have spent more than a full year outside of the US, something that at one time I listed as a lifetime goal to accomplish before turning 30. Just made it. The day of my one-year anniversary in Nicaragua I was participating in the orientation activities for the new group that just arrived, Nica 53. It was especially nice to be able to reflect on my year in country while welcoming the newest additions to the PC Nicaragua family.

The new trainees asked a million questions - Will the language training really make their Spanish better? Do I feel safe in my site? What is my housing situation like? Do I feel like I'm making a difference? Did training prepare me to do my job? Do I like it here?I felt very fortunate to have almost all positive things to say - yes, the language training is amazing. Yes, I feel very safe in my site. Yes, I have a great housing situation, close to a host family but in my own place.

As to whether or not I'm making a difference, I still think it's a bit early to tell. But one thing I am happy to realize is that regardless of what kind of tangible results I am able to point to at the end of my service, the cultural exchange element is enough to make me feel that being here is worthwhile. Many Peace Corps volunteers are the only US Americans that people in rural Nicaragua (and in many places where Peace Corps works) will ever really know. And although I am sometimes asked what could have possibly possessed me to give up the advantages of living in the US, even for a couple of years, most Nicaraguans that I meet and get to know are impressed that so many North Americans would willingly choose to spend two years living at the same standard as some of the poorest Central Americans. My friends here have become real friends. We cook together and eat together, we talk about our families, we even have inside jokes - ask me sometime to tell you about 'pelo de cusuco' (armadillo hair). I honestly believe that this kind of interpersonal cultural exchange makes the world a better and a safer place, maybe even more than an improved oven or a family garden.

Okay, one more point before I get too mushy. Have you ever stopped to think that American English lacks a real term for our own nationality? In Spanish, they have the word 'estadounidense', basically United States-ian. We call ourselves Americans, but that term could apply to anyone living on either of the two American continents. I make an effort when speaking English to say US American, but that sounds kind of weird. American from the US is too long, United States-ian is kind of strange. Gringo is okay, but it only works in Latin America, and it has negative connotations. Any other suggestions?

Vagando

2010-05-17T13:02:00.001-07:00

Whenever I come home after having spent time out of my site, my host family tells me I am being "vaga", which means something like "vagabond". This month I have been extra-vaga. Between my mid-service medical and dental exams (no cavities this year), a workshop on program design, and the fact that I'm participating in the new Ag group's training activities, I have not been in my site for a full week since mid-April.

I mention all of this in part to explain why I haven't been keeping up with this blog. But it's also an interesting reflection of Nicaraguan rural culture that people are not used to the kind of constant motion that North Americans are. There are many people in my town who have never traveled farther from home than the two major cities that are two hours in either direction from where we live. Many have never seen the ocean or any of Nicaragua's natural and cultural wonders. To me, it's mind-boggling to think that there are people who leave our tiny community of 700 people no more than a couple of times a year.

In two weeks I'll be heading back to the US for my first visit since I started this adventure. I wonder how it will feel to be back in what Thomas Friedman calls "the fast world" after having spent a full year here where things move at a much slower pace.

Happy Birthday to Me

2010-04-26T14:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I completed another year, as they say in Spanish, and I decided to take stock with a list of things that have happened since my last birthday. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. I visited two new countries - Guatemala and Nicaragua - and lived in one of them for the majority of this year.
2. I learned how to make tortillas by hand.
3. I got really good at speaking Spanish.
4. I acquired two new families, one in the south of Nicaragua and one in the north.
5. I ate beans almost every day.
6. I rode a horse exactly three times.
7. I had my first experiences with intestinal parasites. Verdict: not as scary as they sound.
8. I read a ton of books.
9. By some miracle, I did not get a sunburn one time.
10. I ran a 10k race, my first ever.
11. I taught my first yoga class in Spanish.
12. I paid a sum total of $200 in rent.
13. I spent a full month with my younger brother - more time than we have spent together since our childhood.
14. I grew a vegetable garden.
15. I picked dragon fruits, lemons, and guanabanas from my backyard.
16. I learned that living without running water is not as difficult as it sounds.
17. I got good at washing clothing on a cement slab. (I even think they actually get cleaner that way.)
18. I made several new close friends.
19. I learned to tell time by which bus is passing by my town, e.g. The Big Honker at 6:30, The Red Bus at 7:30, Santa Inez at 11:00, and Chico's Bus at 1:30.
20. I developed the habit of washing my shoes after almost every use.
21. I ate a lot of fertilized eggs, aka huevos de amor, and I came to believe that they are many times superior to unfertilized eggs.
22. I learned to make soy milk from scratch.
23. I slept most nights underneath a mosquito net.
24. I saw 3 scorpions - inside my house.
25. I felt cold twice.

Overall, it was a great year.

Home Shopping Network

2010-04-13T08:25:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school my mom’s side of the family took a vacation to a resort in Mexico. One of the things my cousins and I enjoyed most about that trip was that while we were lying on the beach any number of vendors would pass, selling silver jewelry or wraps for our hair or tee shirts. We loved looking at all of the wares, bargaining with the vendors, and purchasing souvenirs, all without moving from the beach. My aunt called it “The Home Shopping Network”.

At my home in Nicaragua, something similar happens. For the most part, you can’t buy anything in my town. There are a couple of houses that have makeshift shops that sell basics – soap, sugar, homemade popsicles – but for anything else I have to travel an hour and a half to one of the bigger cities. Sometimes, however, people will come through town selling items out of a truck or out of a pack.

In front of my door have passed people selling used shoes and clothing, electronics, DVDs of American movies, ice cream bars, and pots and pans. The best is the fruit truck. For some reason the fruit guys always make the biggest commotion when they come through. They’ve got huge bull horns mounted on their trucks, and they advertise their prices as they roll through town. “Avocados three for twenty cordobas! Papayas cantaloupes watermelons! Bananas ten cordobas a dozen!” Only the acoustics are really bad (and it’s in Spanish) so it sounds like that unintelligible voice that comes through the speaker at a drive-through window. “A-WA-wa ba-ba-TA-ba dee-bee-bee-BA-ba”. You can hear them coming long before you can see what’s in the truck, so I always have to ask my neighbor if it’s the fruit guys or the guys who come by to pick up old car batteries. (Which, by the way, is somewhat of a mystery. The car battery guys seem to come through quite a lot considering that no one here has a car.)

I always go overboard on the fruit. The last time the pineapples were on special, four for a dollar. “What if I only want one?” I asked. “A dollar,” the man said.
“Let me get this straight. It’s four for a dollar, and if I only want one it’s still a dollar?”
“Yep.”
That week I ate four pineapples.

Drought

2010-03-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

The change that has come over the landscape astounds me. When I arrived, the hills were lush and green. Now they are brown, brown, brown. Everything is brown except for the sky, which is bright blue, not a cloud in sight. In the dry season, this area is a veritable desert. At night it sometimes gets chilly, but by mid-day you could fry an egg on my zinc roof.

This has been a particularly bad year for dryness, but people tell me that the winters (rainy seasons) have been getting worse and worse (less rain) over time. Less rain means smaller harvests, less food, and less money. This year’s drought has meant that for the first time the Rio Viejo, which flows through my site, has gone completely dry in places. And that is bad news for the farmers who use the river for irrigation of their vegetable fields during the dry season.

When I ask people why they think the winters have been so bad, they say, “It’s because so many trees have been cut down,” they say. And in part that’s true. These hills were forested before the trees were removed to make fields for pasture and farmland. The trees by the banks of the river used to help keep the level of the river more constant. Without them both floods and droughts are worse. And yet people keep cutting down trees. Of course, there are larger forces at work – global warming, el Nino – but local climate change here has been profound.

People are certainly aware of the problem since the drought affects their livelihoods. And the solution, at least part of it, is obvious - don’t cut so many trees and start planting. But it doesn’t happen. What I wonder is, why not? What would it take? I’m working with high school students to make a tree nursery, but what is really required is a concerted reforestation effort on the part of every family in this town. I understand why people cut so many trees. When you’re cooking with wood, you pretty much have to. For that reason, I’m trying to start a solar oven project in my town. But I’m baffled as to why people aren’t more serious about replacing what they’ve cut.

Worldwide, water is a big deal, and getting bigger. Even conflicts such as the one in the Darfour region of Sudan are based in large part on scarce resources, e.g. water. In my area the local farmers argue with the people in the town upriver from ours; they are damming the river and restricting how much water comes into our area. As a result, in our town the river has vanished completely in spots. Where there is any small pool left, motorized pumps are sucking it dry. Everybody with a vegetable field has a straw in the river, or what is left of it.

The weather people are predicting that this year the rains won’t start in earnest until August, which if it comes to pass, would spell disaster for Nicaragua. The rains are supposed to start in mid-May; if they don’t come until three months later these farmers would lose another planting season. The experts say that it’s impossible to pin individual weather events on global warming. But one thing is certain: there are some areas that are more sensitive to changing weather patterns than others. I saw a map the other day in a copy of National Geographic showing the predicted changes in rainfall due to global warming. Northwestern Nicaragua was in one of the areas that can expect to see a fifty percent decrease in rainfall over the next 25 to 50 years. If this year is a harbinger of things to come, the outlook for northwestern Nicaragua is not good.

Own It

2010-03-15T09:18:00.001-07:00

I am a big white alien baby. I’ve spent the last nine months trying to come to terms with this fact. I am the tallest woman anyone in my town has ever seen. I tower over almost every person here. My skin is paler than anyone else’s. I have strange habits – I eat greens, I go running, I wear glasses, and I read books for fun. I have more years of formal education than anyone else in the community, and yet I am singularly helpless when it comes to things like killing mice in my house, doing my laundry so that there are no stains on my clothes, cooking beans, making tortillas, and knowing the bus schedule by heart. But what can I do? I am a weirdo, and there is nothing that can change that. No matter how well-adapted I become, and no matter how good my Spanish gets, I will always be immediately identifiable as a gringa. In the most physical sense, I cannot hide.

Nor can I escape the obvious fact of my privilege as a person from the developed world. I have much more stuff than anyone else in my town – clothes, books, electronics, packaged foods, and all kinds of other things. It is easy for me to travel to this country and to work here legally, easy for my parents to come and visit me here, easy for me to travel around Nicaragua, easy for me to spend $20 without having to make sacrifices. When people see me, they see money. And even though I wouldn’t consider myself rich (especially now that I am earning a Nicaraguan salary), it is true that I have far more resources at my disposal than anyone else in my community.

Here’s what I’ve discovered: because it is impossible to hide, the best thing that I can do is to own up to who and what I am. My mistakes in Spanish, my freakish height, my relative wealth – I can’t pretend that any of these don’t exist. (And no one around me will let me forget it either.) The best I can do is be upfront and honest. I answer people’s questions when they ask them – what’s it like to fly in a plane, how much did those shoes cost, why do you have so many moles and where did they come from, etc. – I laugh at myself when I make a mistake, and I don’t try to pretend that I am anything I’m not.

Long Term Effects

2010-03-09T07:48:00.000-08:00

Before you travel to a developing country, people will warn you, “Don’t drink the water.” It’s a good idea to try to follow that advice, since third-world water systems are notorious for harboring bacteria, viruses, and parasites. But in practice it’s nearly impossible to limit your exposure to zero. The longer I’ve been here, the more I am aware of all the ways I am being exposed – eating off of plates that have just been rinsed in the water, drinking juice in people’s homes, eating at restaurants, etc. – and the more comfortable I feel knowing that I am getting some small dose of whatever is in the water on pretty much a daily basis.

Still, I have been shocked more than once by hygiene practices that I consider appalling. The worst was in a public bathroom in a bus station in Jinotega City, where the toilets have to be flushed with a jug of water. Nothing gross so far, just the norm. To flush, you use a gallon milk jug with the top cut off to scoop the water out of a big metal barrel. Here’s the gross part: people then use the water from this same barrel to wash their hands – by dipping their hands into it and splashing them around for a second or two. Clearly, there is nothing sanitary about this system. The only thing it’s good for is mingling your poo germs with everyone else’s.

This brings me to a discovery I have made here, which is that in general, people’s grasp on germ theory is pretty weak. The idea that germs are what cause disease, that you can’t see them, that even if your hands feel clean they can still have germs on them, these concepts have not made it into the popular worldview. Among poor people, the general belief seems to be that water equals cleanliness. So after simply splashing their hands with water – even dirty water – people feel confident that their hands are clean. This explains why sometimes fruit vendors carry their fruits in bags filled with water, supposedly so that they will be ready to eat without the need for additional washing. It also explains why people feel comfortable washing their hands with water that another person (or people) has already used to wash their hands. And why people feel just fine washing both their clothing and themselves in rivers that cows and horses wade through.

But these are no longer the kinds of things I worry about, at least not for my own personal health. When I first arrived in my site seven months ago, the volunteer down the road came to visit me. At that time I was still preoccupied about the hygiene practices (or lack thereof) that I had seen, so I asked her if she’d gotten sick a lot during her time in Nicaragua. She said, “Well, I did at first, but now I have a cast iron stomach.” By now my stomach has gotten pretty strong too (though I wouldn’t want to jinx it by comparing it to cast iron).

Now instead of worrying about whether the last meal I ate will make me ill, I find myself worrying about the long-term health effects of living in a poor country. I have been making a list of all the toxins and carcinogens that I am exposed to here on a regular basis, likely in greater amounts than what I was exposed to in the US:

Aluminum – in cooking pans
Aflotoxin – from peanuts (look this one up if you haven’t heard of it. It’s kind of scary)
Burning plastic
Chlorine
Chloroquine – anti-malarial medicine, supposedly bad for the liver
Dust
Hydrogenated oils – in local baked goods, instead of the traditional rendered animal fat
Pesticides
The sun
Scratched non-stick pans
Occasional doses of antibiotics and anti-parasite meds
Wood smoke
Zinc – in cooking pans, etc.

So I wonder: is there any data on populations like Peace Corps Volunteers that shows the long-term health effects of spending two years in a less developed nation? Is sum total of everything I’m exposed to here any greater than my exposure in the US would have been? Is fresh food, fresh air, and abundant sleep enough to make up for all the bad stuff? And is two years enough to have any kind of lasting effect?

Clearly there are long-term effects of the kind of exposure that Nicaraguans are suffering – the life expectancy is lower here, there is a higher infant mortality rate, etc. But Peace Corps Volunteers have good access to quality medical care, were better nourished as children, and are only spending a couple of years in these conditions. Given the fact that we are already a special population – generally from well-off families, health conscious, well-educated – do a couple of years of exposure to the hazards of the third world in our young adulthood make long-term difference on our health? I would love to know.

Gift Economy

2010-03-06T05:16:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things about my town – and I imagine much of the Nicaraguan countryside is this way – is the way people give each other gifts. Whenever people have a bit extra of something, they give it away freely, especially food. My three closest neighbors (who are all part of my host family) have basically opened their kitchens to me. I eat all the beans and tortillas I want, and my neighbors won’t hear of taking payment from me. In addition to the staples, I receive baked goods whenever my neighbor Clara bakes, soup whenever my neighbor Marina kills a chicken, and now that it’s vegetable season I’ve been receiving little gifts of tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, cabbages, and watermelon. Sometimes I get a couple of freshly laid eggs or a ball of salty farmer’s cheese, all as regalos - gifts.

My one source of anxiety when it comes to this system is that I am not exactly sure how the accounts are kept. I receive so much, and I don’t know how much I am expected to give in return. At the very least people are not generally afraid to ask for things they know I have. It’s not uncommon at all – nor is it considered rude, unless you do it a lot - for people to say, “regáleme un poquito de eso” – give me a little bit of that. I keep certain spices in my kitchen that my neighbor Marina often comes to borrow. But still, I am not sure if I am holding up my end of the bargain, and people’s reluctance to accept money is part of a larger aversion to talking directly about what is owed. I’m sure I’m getting it wrong a lot of the time.

My gifts tend to be different, as well, from what my farming neighbors give to me. I give things like printed photos of their kids that I’ve taken with my digital camera, or pieces of chocolate that my parents have sent me, or once some glue traps for mice that Marina asked me for. She was going to pay me, but I insisted that they be a gift. Come to think of it, I have in some sense adopted the ways of my Nicaraguan neighbors when it comes to gifts. Marina asks me for a favor – can I pick up a mouse trap next time I’m at the supermarket in Esteli? – and then when I come back with it she asks how much she owes me. “Nada,” I say, “es un regalo.”

The War on Dust

2010-03-02T09:21:00.000-08:00

I live in a part of Jinotega (one of Nicaragua’s departments (like states)) that is known as “the dry zone”. And let me say that the dry season in the dry zone is, well, dry. Every day we have bright blue skies with nary a cloud in sight. It’s still chilly after the sun goes down, but once it pops up above the hills, the heat is immediately intense, starting at 7 in the morning.

Dry season is great for doing laundry, since it takes about 30 minutes for my clothes to go from soaking wet to bone dry. But where the hills were once a lush green, they are now brown. The cows and chickens have nothing to eat. Milk is scarce, so there’s no cheese and no baked goods either. My garden has shriveled into a ratty mess of sad-looking plants barely clinging to life under a shroud of dust.

The river has become a narrow trickle. The other day I saw a group of farmers using plastic cups to scoop out the silty dregs of what was once the town swimming hole, where during the rainy season the water was so deep I couldn’t stand. It is especially bad this year, people say, since Nicaragua is in the midst of a bad drought. During the second half of last year’s rainy season only four good rains fell, where people are accustomed to daily soakings for a straight month and a half.

To make matters worse, there is a road project on the highway I live on. A road crew is set to come through and pave (by hand, with cement tiles) around the end of the dry season. That will be helpful when it’s finished, but for now it just means that trucks come through constantly and kick up huge dust storms. I am fighting a personal war on dust and losing horribly. Everything in my house is covered, no matter how many times I wipe it down. If I leave for more than a day, you can practically measure the accumulation on my table and chairs with a ruler. I sweep out my house daily, have a huge sneeze fest, and then by the time what I’ve stirred up settles back down it’s like I never swept at all. When I shake out my sheets at night to look for scorpions, even my bed smells like dust.

The war on dust is like the war on terror or the war on drugs. It’s long and protracted and it cannot be won definitively. All I can do is hope for mud.

How to Be Healthy

2010-02-24T08:53:00.001-08:00

When I go on visits to people in my community, a very popular topic of conversation is the fact that I run in the mornings. Running – or really doing any kind of deliberate exercise – is a very gringo thing to do, and as such is something of a curiosity in my town. People ask a lot of questions. I love it because their questions teach me a lot about local beliefs, and answering them challenges me to be clear about what exactly it is that I believe.

For example, many Nicaraguans have beliefs about hot and cold and being careful not to mix them. When I get back from a run I am warned not to drink water or take a shower right away, as the effect of cool water on my warm body will “hacer dano” – do me harm. (I’m still not sure what kind of harm exactly.) This same warning, I’ve learned, applies to men who are working out in the fields. These guys will often spend the whole day out in the sun without drinking any water. Sometimes, men that I pass on the road while I’m running will say things like, “You’re going to dehydrate yourself” or “You’re going to get tired” in addition to the usual piropos – “ay, que linda”, “mi amor”, etc. These comments always struck me as being kind of strange since getting tired is kind of the point when you’re out running, but when you realize that it’s not customary to drink water after physical activity, it makes more sense that these guys would say such things. Going out and working up a sweat could actually be kind of dangerous.

Recently, one of the community members that I work with asked me, “What is this running for? Is it to lose weight or to gain weight?”
“Well,” I said, “I guess if you’re fat you would lose weight, but if you’re skinny you might gain weight. It’s not really for either one. It’s more to keep your heart healthy.”
“And how does it do that?” he asked. “Why is it better than walking like we’re doing now?” We were on our way to a community meeting.
“Walking is good too,” I explained, “but running makes your heart beat harder, and that’s good for it.”
He seemed satisfied with my explanation, more satisfied than I was. It was actually difficult for me to come up with reasons for why I hold what is for me a very basic belief - that vigorous cardio-vascular exercise is good for me.

My host family also loves to talk about my running. My host mom, Ester, often asks me how far I’ve gone, or makes fun of me for the fact that I come back red-faced and sweaty. Though she does not exercise herself, Ester at least seems to hold the belief that exercise is good for you. It seems that some of the more overweight women in this town have been advised by the doctor at the health post to walk for at least 30 minutes a day in order to burn off some excess fat. “They’re lazy, though. They don’t do it,” Ester tells me. “I try to teach my students” – she is a teacher at the school – “that it’s good to exercise. I tell them to run with their mouths closed.” I’m not sure why this is so important, but Ester brings it up every time we talk about running. Anyway, at least we are in general agreement about the benefits of exercise.
“No, Laurie, people here don’t take very good care of themselves,” she says. I nod along. We’ve had this conversation many times. “It’s the same with women who have given birth. They’re lazy. The ones that really take care of themselves don’t drink water for 40 days.”
What? Now this is new information. “Excuse me, they don’t drink water for 40 days?”
“No,” Ester informs me. “Only pinol [a hot drink made from ground corn] and pinolillo [the same thing but with cocoa]. And they don’t eat beans or eggs. Only tortillas and roasted chicken.”
Really? “Really?”
“Yep, and they wrap a towel around their heads and they don’t get out of bed for 40 days. And if they have any pain in their vientre [uterus] they drink guaro[liquor].”
Okay, now really I have no idea what to say, since this conversation about taking care of oneself by exercising has now changed into something else entirely. “That’s interesting,” I say,” because doctors in the US say pretty much the opposite – that women should drink milk and water and definitely not drink liquor and that they should eat a varied diet with all the normal things in it.”
“Oh, the doctors here say that too, but we know that the old ways protect the women. The lazy ones go ahead and eat everything, but the ones that really want to take care of themselves, they do it the traditional way.”

It is easy to think that these beliefs are flat out wrong, and that part of my job is to debunk what to me are myths that are keeping people less healthy than they could be. But when I’m sitting at a woman’s kitchen table talking to her, how can I launch into a lecture about how her deepest beliefs about her health are wrong? That just seems rude and uncalled for, not to mention ineffective. Besides, I am interested in where these beliefs come from. I wonder if they may have at one time had a protective effect on a population that didn’t have easy access to clean water or sufficient calories. So I continue to do what I have learned to do here, which is to live the way I think is healthy, to talk about it when I’m asked, to listen when people talk about their own beliefs about health, and to keep off my soapbox as much as possible.

Join the Peace Corps

2010-02-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

Every Peace Corps blogger has to at some point give an endorsement of the experience. I’ve been waiting to give mine until I had finished the parts people say are most difficult – training and the first three months in site. Well, I am six months in site now, almost seven, and I can honestly say that I highly, highly recommend this experience. If you are reading this and thinking about applying, or if you’ve applied and are deciding whether to actually do it, here is my advice to you: DO IT. Especially if you are a bit older, as in older than 22. At 28 I am the oldest volunteer in my group who is not a retiree. But I actually think that the 4 or 5 years I have on most of my colleagues make a difference in a good way.

I think I’ve said before in this blog that I view this whole experience as a sort of extended meditation. It is a meditation in the sense that I simply cannot escape myself, and so I am forced to deal with what I am finding out about myself (mostly good, but not all). Also, the task of trying to help people is profoundly spiritual in that it causes you to constantly question everything you thought was true. Any time I think it is important for someone else to change their behavior – whether it be to start eating more vegetables, to grow a garden, or to wash their hands more thoroughly – I have to ask myself, “Why do I think this is important? Does this other person think this is important? If not, why not?” I have learned to really resist the urge to lecture, or to be the annoying gringa who’s always saying, “You know, in the United States we do this better.”

Apart from being a great spiritual challenge the Peace Corps has been great for my writing. In between gently coaxing people into working with me – basically drinking lots of sweet coffee and sugary fruit-based beverages in people’s homes – I have plenty of time to work on my novel. (Yes, I am writing a novel.) I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but I do want to give a little sampling. The whole thing came out of the question, “What would it take for things in the suburban US to work the way they work here in Nicaragua?” From there I invented an adventure story based on a family that has been separated.

Outside, Steve heard a noise. A pickup truck was driving slowly past the house. A man with a megaphone sat in the truck bed hawking wares. “Batteries! Electronics! We have walkmans, we have solar panels! We have blenders, toasters, radios!” Some of the neighbors had come out to take a look. The truck pulled to a stop in front of the next door neighbors’ house.
“Hey, Judy, do we need anything from the electronics truck?” Steve asked.
“No, nothing I can think of.”
Steve decided to check out the merchandise anyway. He knew the family that ran this particular business. The man with the megaphone was the son of the man driving the truck. The driver was a tinkerer who had spent his whole life collecting broken appliances and parts, thinking that one day they would come in handy. Finally, they had.

Outside, a small crowd of neighbors had gathered to look at the goods. The back of the truck looked like a junkyard. Toasters were piled up in one corner, blenders and food processors in another. The metal railings around the truck bed were lined with wires and cables and cords of all description. There were old television sets and laptop computers. Anything you could imagine, as long as it had a plug. Steve felt nostalgic looking at all of these appliances and electronics. Some of the toasters must be at least 30 years old. Even the older laptops looked like antiques. The sheer abundance of the stuff reminded him of a time when people plugged in whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to and didn’t think twice about it.

Like I said, just a taste. And if anyone reading this knows anything about book publishing, give me a holler.

Hermosa

2010-02-11T07:48:00.000-08:00

Last night I took my first salsa class in a year – that’s right, people, a year. It was incredible. And not only was it a great class, it was a Cuban-style class. And since I didn’t have a partner, I got to dance with the teacher. Amazing.

The classes are held in the posh Vivian Pellas gym, which is owned by the richest woman in Nicaragua. As far as I can tell, these classes constitute the entirety of the salsa scene in Nicaragua, since I saw everyone that I met the one time I successfully went out salsa dancing in Managua.

I was on a total high after the class, until a guy I had met dancing those several months ago came up to me and said, “Are you looking a bit more ‘hermosa’ than the last time I saw you?” ‘Hermosa’ translates literally as ‘gorgeous or lovely’, but in Nicaragua it means something like ‘big and beautiful. Ergo, “more ‘hermosa’” basically means “fatter”.

So I said, “Hey, I’ve been in this country for a while now, and I know a thing or two. I know what hermosa is. You mean I got more gordita.”
And he said, “No, I didn’t say that. I said hermosa.”

Sadly, this guy is no the first person to tell me that I’m looking a bit more big and beautiful these days, even though as far as I can tell I haven’t changed since I got here. I think it may be some kind of compliment. But to my gringo mind, fatter is definitely not more beautiful. “Más hermosa” seems like a pretty backhanded compliment to me. But then again, maybe it is my perspective that is messed up. Maybe I should be embracing the fact that in Nicaragua women are considered more attractive with a little more junk in the trunk. Maybe instead of trying to cut back on carbs (as if there were anything else to eat) I can just roll with it. More beautiful. I can live with that.

Haikus

2010-02-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

While my brother was visiting me we got in the habit of writing haikus about the little quirks of Nicaraguan life, basically taking verbal snapshots. Here is a sampling:

Bomb blast? Guns shooting?
No, just kids with fire-crackers
Loud noise equals joy (1)

If he doesn’t know
He’ll still tell you where to go
“Siga más recto” (2)

Asleep in the street
You have been drinking guaro
Where is your left shoe? (3)

Don’t get on that bus!
Everyone has a chicken
You don’t want bird flu (4)

Chicken on a plane
Hope you’re not afraid to fly
Buckle up, chicken (5)

What is this music?
Reminds me of the eighties
That’s the clásicos (6)

Once these socks were white
But washed on a cement slab
All my socks turn grey (7)

1. People here associate loud noise with joy. It doesn’t matter if the noise is pleasant – as in the case of nice music – or annoying – as with the cheap fire-crackers that every kid seems to have a stash of. It’s all considered joyful. It’s surprising to me that in a country that has known civil war the sound of a bomb connotes joy. But that’s how it is.

2. As a general rule, Nicaraguans are very friendly and helpful. Which is great, except when they don’t know the answer to the question you’re asking. This haiku was inspired by the experience my family had trying to find the Laguna de Apoyo, a crater lake near the city of Granada. We took a wrong turn and ended up on the worst road any of us had ever seen. You know how it is when you’ve gone the wrong way, though. After a certain point it seems like a better idea to keep going than to turn around. At any rate, every time we saw anyone walking or driving a donkey cart or riding a horse we would ask them if they knew how to get to the lake. Without fail, every person said, “Oh, you’re not too far. Siga más recto.” [Keep going straight.] Which we did, and eventually we got there. But it was definitely the long way.

3. Some people (including the author of the Moon guidebook) consider Nicaragua to be the Wild West of Central America. An unfortunate similarity to the Old West is that many Nicaraguans, especially men, are a bit too fond of the sauce. In some communities (not mine, thankfully) Sunday is the day to get drunk on guaro, aka moonshine. By Sunday evening, guys are passed out all over the place.

4. Riding the local buses is a colorful experience, in more ways than one. First of all, the buses are literally colorful. The collectives that run them – usually a groups of brothers or cousins – manage to turn old Blue Bird school buses from the States into traveling works of art, most often featuring religious iconography and/or celebrities. While he was here my brother Joe took a picture of a bus with huge, side-by-side pictures of Jesus and John Claude Van Damme in the front windows. Also, people transport all kinds of things on the buses – furniture, fruits and vegetables, and small animals. The latter has led some people to call these buses “chicken buses”.

5. Related to (4) and inspired by Joe’s trip to the Atlantic Coast. While he was waiting for his plane, we saw a passenger whose carry-on was a tied up sack. He put the sack down, and it started to move. Then it started to cluck.

6. Many Nicaraguans unabashedly love American 80s music. Even my too-cool-for-school host brother regularly watches Bon Jovi and Michael Jackson music videos. Based on my travel experience, I think people almost everywhere in the world (including France) love 80s music, except in the US (where people secretly love it but are embarrassed to admit it). The English music radio stations here play exclusively 80s music, which they call “los clásicos”.

7. This one is self-explanatory.

Hospitals

2010-01-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

Before leaving for Nicaragua, I predicted that I would visit a hospital at least once during my two-year tour. In the past two weeks* that prediction has come true – twice. Don’t worry, I’m okay.

The first time was on New Year’s Eve day. My whole family was in town visiting me for the holidays (which is why I haven’t written in so long), and I had planned a weeklong get-to-know-Nicaragua-fest for their benefit. Our trip ended in San Juan del Sur, the most popular Nicaraguan beach town, known for its spectacular surfing opportunities. I’m not sure what part of my brain had shut down that day to make it seem like a good idea to take my whole family out for a surfing lesson. But that’s what we did. Our instructor was a hottie teenage Nica surfing champion, but alas, his teaching skills were not as impressive as the many scars adorning his scalp – all surfing injuries.

After a brief beach lesson on how to stand up on the board, we were out in the water. The surf was kind of rough that day, but our instructor didn’t think it was a big deal. I was still getting the hang of holding onto my board when a wave would come by when the instructor started sending us out in turns. He would wait for a wave to come then push us out to paddle and try to catch it. My first one, I didn’t stand up on the surf board, but I did ride the wave. “Okay,” I thought, “I can get the hang of this.” I waited and watched my family members for a minute, and then headed back towards the instructor, expecting that he would wait for me to come and take my turn again.

Well, I didn’t get a second turn. As I was swimming out a big wave came. I held on to the leash of my surf board and went under the water just like I’d been taught. But when I came up, I felt something hit my head. I heard my brother, Joe, say, “Hey, Laurie, did you see that? I almost stood up on that one.” And then suddenly the instructor was next to me freaking out, pressing his hand to my forehead, and saying, “Don’t worry. It looks like it will only be two stitches.” And that’s how I ended up in the hospital the first time. Not five minutes in the water and I got whacked in the head by my brother’s surf board. Luckily, the emergency room got me in right away. I was even able to go out for New Year’s sporting three stitches covered by a band-aid right below my hairline.

My second trip to the hospital occurred yesterday. My brother – who is still staying with me – woke up feeling sick and spent the morning revisiting our dinner. When he didn’t feel better by mid-day, I started to get worried. I live two hours from any medical attention besides a small medical post (not open on Sundays), and I have spent the last six months wondering what would happen if I were to get really sick at my site. Now, thanks to my brother, I know. I gave him an anti-nauseate that didn’t seem to do much, and we boarded the bus. A bumpy two hours later, we were at the public hospital in Esteli.

The good thing about the public hospital is that it’s free. The bad thing about it is – well – almost everything else. The ER was clearly overwhelmed. While my brother tossed and turned on a bed that had clearly not been made up just for him, I tried to avoid asphyxiation from the competing odors – of food on a tray that had been sitting there for who knows how long, of hospital cleaning agents, of stale urine – that surrounded me. Finally, a nurse gave Joe a shot to stop the nausea. Once he could stand and walk around and not feel like he was going to lose his lunch, we were sent to the lab for tests.

At the lab, a little girl of about three years old was sitting behind the counter playing with lab test sheets. It soon became clear that there was only one person working at the lab presumably the little girl’s mother. This woman was responsible for all functions of the lab – giving out sample cups, receiving samples, drawing blood, and examining the samples. Given that it was just her and her three-year-old, she was actually quite efficient. After emerging with a handful of results from previous patients, she handed my brother a Gerber baby food jar and instructed him to produce a sample. Which he did, equipped with a headlamp in a bathroom with no working light and no toilet paper. Thirty minutes later we had handwritten results to bring back to the doctor. She saw us immediately, wrote out a prescription for antibiotics, and sent us on our way.

Overall, although the conditions were certainly not up to the standard of an American hospital, I must say that the experience was not as bad as it could have been. The whole thing took only four hours even though the emergency room was full of people clearly in worse shape than my brother – a guy who had been kicked by a horse, for one – and we did not pay a single córdoba for the injection, the lab exam, or the doctor’s time. We wouldn’t have even had to pay for the antibiotics if the hospital pharmacy had had them (they were out). Based on my limited experience, my assessment of Nicaragua’s medical system is that it is comprised of competent people working with very limited resources.

Okay, so not as bad as it could have been, but still not an experience I hope to repeat. Here’s to good health in 2010!

*Apologies for having taken so long to write anything. I wrote this post about two weeks ago but the internet was down when I went to post it.

Chickens

2009-12-18T06:09:00.000-08:00

I am surprised to find that in rural Nicaragua I am learning a lot about the roots of North American culture. For example, had I not come here I may never have considered the roots of that quintessential American joke “Why did the chicken cross the road?” That joke exists - and it’s funny - because people once lived close to chickens, and chickens are constantly crossing the road for no apparent reason, just like the bird brains they are. There was a time in American history when most people had direct experience with animals other than cats and dogs. Pigs, horses, cows, and chickens were all part of people’s daily lives. The evidence is in our language – “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”, “as dirty as a pig sty”, “coming home to roost”, “the early bird gets the worm”, and those are just the few that spring immediately to mind.

Here, there are no pets. People don’t have animals around whose only role is to receive love. All animals have jobs. If they aren’t providing food, they are protecting the house (dogs) or killing pests (cats). I tried to explain the concept of an American house cat once to my host family, and they just did not get it. It must be one of those things – like wall-to-wall carpeting – that you can’t understand unless you’ve lived with it.

Since I don’t own any animals (yet), I don’t interact much with pigs or horses or cows. But chickens are everywhere here. One of my favorite hammock activities is to observe chickens, since they do a lot of strange things. I like to watch them scratch around looking for insects. In the heat of the day they lie down on their sides and roll around, coating themselves with dirt. The way roosters chase the hens around can be pretty comical. I sometimes laugh out loud watching a flustered hen try to recuperate after a hot and heavy encounter with an amorous rooster. And like pigeons, chickens always have an inquisitive look on their faces, as though their brains are just slightly too small to grasp some important concept.

But the chickens also annoy me, since they are the primary pest from which I must protect my garden. Free range eggs are great, but chickens do not respect property lines, and my neighbor’s flock doesn’t seem to understand that my vegetables are not for them. I throw rocks at them when I see them messing with my plants, but they are too dumb to remember and be scared.

There is one rooster in particular who really gets to me, so much, in fact, that I have declared him my arch nemesis. It’s not even his behavior that bothers me so much as it is his attitude. I mean, he is just cocky (and now I know where that word comes from). He struts around like he’s the boss here, chest all puffed out, crowing, womanizing. He is beautiful, I’ll give him that, but I don’t know why he has to be so vain.

I also don’t know where the myth that roosters only crow at dawn originated. They do crow at dawn – that is true enough – but they also crow pretty much constantly throughout the entire day and night. Maybe they crow a little bit more at dawn, but they crow basically all the time. My arch nemesis is no exception. He loves to jump up on a fence post and sing his heart out, as if everyone around is just hanging on his every utterance. Whenever I see him parading around my yard, I have an uncontrollable urge to cut him down to size. So sometimes, when he’s not looking I sneak up on him, and just when he’s least expecting it, I make a loud noise. It scares the living daylights out of him. He runs away on his skinny legs, flapping his wings and making a huge racket. See, he acts tough, but when it comes down to it, he’s just a big chicken.

Development Worker

2009-12-06T06:11:00.000-08:00

As a freshman in college I took a course that completely changed the way I thought about the world. The course was called International Relations, and during that semester we talked about global poverty, development, and the roots of the dramatic inequalities between the so-called developed and developing worlds (what used to be the First World and the Third World). Studying international development prompted me to take a new look at where I fit in – not just in terms of my own social circle, my city, my state, or even my country, but in terms of the whole world. I have to thank my professor, Eve Sandberg, because she sparked an interest that led me to pursue a graduate degree in geography and ultimately to join the Peace Corps, all in an effort to understand what development is and where I as a middle-class American fit into the global picture.

Unfortunately, development is one of those concepts that the more closely you look at it, the harder it is to pin down. While living in a poor community in one of the poorest countries in Latin America has given me some new insight on development, it has also made me question some of its most basic aspects. Starting with the most obvious one, what exactly is development? A common way to look at development is in terms of stuff – electricity, a paved road, a water system, a health center. Understood this way, development is about meeting people’s material needs, raising their material standard of living. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I am a development worker, tasked with helping to meet the material need for secure and nutritious sources of food.

A more expansive definition of development, and one that I like better, is “meeting people’s needs”. I like this definition because it allows for other needs besides the material ones - such as the need to be loved and to find life satisfaction. Again unfortunately, this definition of development raises more questions than it answers. If development is about meeting both spiritual and material needs, how do you know when people have reached the point that their needs have been met? And who decides which needs are important enough to be taken into account? If I feel that I need internet access, is that a real need? What if having internet access helps me to find a job and therefore gives me more livelihood security? Determining which needs should be considered part of development gets complicated pretty quickly.

This brings me to another set of very basic questions. We tend to talk about development in terms of countries. So what exactly is a developed country versus an undeveloped or developing country? At first this seems kind of obvious – the US is a developed country and Nicaragua is an undeveloped country. In the US most people get a high school education and use flushing toilets and drive cars. In Nicaragua you can’t flush your toilet paper even if you do have a toilet, there are still horses sharing the road with cars even in the capital, and in the countryside illiteracy is very common. That’s what makes US developed and Nicaragua developing.

But does development have a meaning in an absolute sense, or can we call some countries “developed” only because other countries are “un-” or “underdeveloped”, and vice versa? Is there an endpoint to the process of development? The word “developed” makes it seem like the developed countries have reached some sort of endpoint. However, on closer inspection, it seems the US still has a long way to go if development is about making sure that all people’s needs are met. Having taught in the inner city in Philadelphia, I know that there are many children in the US who are getting an inadequate education – in some cases not much better than what the children Nicaraguan farmers are getting. Also, I believe that people have a need to live in a safe environment without the daily threat of violence. There are many communities in the US where that need is unmet. In general, it doesn’t seem to me that non-material needs – for things like fulfillment and community - are met any better in the developed world than they are in the developing world.

Still, I am not one to deny the importance of the material inequalities between countries, which raises the question of why these inequalities exist in the first place. Why are some countries more materially developed than others? Historically, the concept of development arose at the end of colonialism. After the colonial powers pulled out, the former colonies were left dependent on a global economic system in which they were at an extreme disadvantage; people living in these new countries were unable to meet their needs. Despite fifty years of global effort to stimulate development, the situation hasn’t changed much. The global South– much of Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia – is home to many people whose most basic needs – for adequate food, safe drinking water, basic health care, a clean environment – are not met.

Before I came here, I thought that the best explanation for why development has been so uneven – why people in some places have so much and others so little – had to do with historical exploitation. I still believe that the roots of the inequalities in the world are there, but I now find it an incomplete explanation for why those inequalities still exist. I now believe that much of what keeps poor people poor is cultural and social. The money is there – billions of dollars of it – but the real changes have to happen in people’s minds. Without any extra money or resources, many people’s lives could be made much better. Simple practices like consistent hand-washing can save the lives of children. More complicated social changes, like making women equal to men in social status, are necessary if development projects involving stuff are to have any lasting effect.

Additionally, I’ve come to question the concept of development as pertaining to large units such as countries. I have started to see development as being as much a personal phenomenon as it is a geographical one. For instance, a development worker from London still pertains to the developed world even when on assignment in Somalia. Does a Guatemalan immigrant still pertain to the developing world when working as a landscaper in Southern California? What about the children of that landscaper who are American citizens? What if those children go to school in inner-city Los Angeles and barely learn to read and write? Or what if those children do well in school and end up completing college? Development seems to me to be based on some combination of factors – material wealth, educational opportunities, infrastructure, job prospects, life chances, and world view – all of which have both structural and personal aspects.

So where does this leave me as a development worker with a job to do? Honestly, I have good days and bad. Some days I am frustrated with very nature of the development project. How can I, one person without any resources, be expected to make any lasting changes to people’s food security situation when even big international organizations with huge budgets haven’t been able to make much headway? On good days, though, I think maybe the only way to really make any changes is person by person, one family garden and one community bank account at a time. On those days, there’s no place I’d rather be than here.

Corn Queen

2009-11-16T05:35:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-10T13:47:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-03T09:04:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-30T07:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-12T07:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

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!)

A Typical Day

2009-09-23T07:50:00.000-07:00

5:00 am. Wake up to the sounds of roosters crowing and my neighbor cutting firewood. Crawl out from under my mosquito net. Stumble up the hill to the latrine.

5:15 am. As soon as I hear my neighbor making tortillas, set out for a run.

6:00 am. Back from my run, go to my neighbor’s house to fill up buckets with water for the day. make oatmeal and tea for breakfast.

6:30 am. Water my garden, weed, take care of my plants, maintain my compost pile, sweep my house and my patio, and straighten things up around the house.

7:30-10 am. Hammock time. Read books, write in my journal, kick around ideas for the novel I want to write, come up with blog posts, do Sudoku puzzles, listen to my ipod, play my guitar, think about projects I might do in my community.

10 am. Now that it’s good and hot, it’s time for the water sports. Go up the hill to my former host family’s house and bucket bathe. Then do whatever laundry I have. I find it’s easier to keep up with it if I do it every couple of days instead of letting it pile up. I also hand wash my shoes, a practice I intend to keep up once I return to the US.

11:00 am. Lunch – either beans, rice, and tortillas at my host family’s house or whatever I can whip up using my propane stove. Yesterday it was whole wheat pasta with peanut sauce and Swiss chard from my garden. Sometimes my next door neighbor gives me an egg or two if her chicken has laid that day.

12-3 pm. More hammock time.

3-5 pm. This is when I do the bulk of my actual work, since this is when people are available to meet. If there are no meetings scheduled then I go around and visit people. This involves a lot of sitting around and talking about the weather – it hasn’t rained in way too long, and all the producers are worried about it – a lot of super-sweet and very weak coffee, and a lot of sweet bread and corn cookies. Sometimes there is corn on the cob, but that is trailing off.

5:30 pm. Dinner. (See Lunch)

6-7 pm. Hang out with my host family.

7-8 pm. I’m trying to get into the new soap opera, Rastro de Analia (Analia’s Face), since my whole host family – aunts, uncles, grandparents, siblings – watch it every night. But the plot is pretty cheesy. Basically Analia is a sexy undercover spy who is trying to get even with the people who killed her lover. There are a lot of costume changes into ever more revealing dresses that show off Analia’s fake boobs and long legs. They should probably call the show something else, because the chick’s face is definitely not the focus.

8 pm. Go back to my little house and read in bed until I fall asleep.

Plastinic

2009-09-04T09:34:00.000-07:00

Since arriving in my community, I have become acutely aware of my relationship with plastic. There is no trash pick up in this town. I imagine that this arrangement wasn't a problem before the advent of plastic packaging. People could just throw their corncobs wherever, and they would dry out and decompose. Same thing goes for any other kind of organic waste. But now almost everything comes with plastic - from bars of soap to bags of fruit to bottled drinks. And there is nowhere for it to go. Many people continue to treat all garbager as though it were as innocuous as corncobs; hence, the town is littered with chip wrappers, shredded shopping bags, and crushed soda bottles. For my own waste, I've started a compost pile, which takes care of most of what I generate - unlike my Nicaraguan friends, I'm not comfortable just chucking stuff - but the plastic I don't know what to do with. I save bottles for reuse as seed trays, but that still leaves me with all kinds of plastic packaging. Currently, I save it up and dump it in a waste basket in one of the bigger towns.

I'd like to say that I was working on eradicating plastic from my life, but if corn takes first place as the root of Nicaraguan culture, plastic might come in a close second (ditto for America). Plastic chairs are a must for receiving visitors in one's home. Without them, the social fabric of Nicaragua might come apart. Plastic water vessels are also indispensible, as the town only has running water for two hours a day. On my meager salary, which is not even as meager as what most Nicaraguans live on, it would be practically impossible to furnish my home without relying on Plastinic, the country's chain store where all things plastic are sold. Everything in my PC medical kit is packaged in plastic. I also must admit that I cherish packaged foods in a way that I never did in the relatively parasite-free land of my birth.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that doing without plastic does not seem either realistic or desireable. At the same time, it is important to recognize that plastic doesn't just go away. We as a species are choking out the oceans with plastic garbage (look up the Eastern Garbage Patch). Here in my community plastic trash is a horrible eyesore. Even when it finds its way to a landfill, our plastic trash will basically never decompose.

Plastic is a case in point for th edifferences between environmental problems in Nicaragua and in the US. Here, environmental problems are immediate and in your face. Pesticide use is contaminating the rivers that many people still use to wahs their clothing and themselves, and deforestation is changing rainfall patterns, causing farmers to lose crops. As in the case of plastic, there are good reasons why people keep spraying - otherwise they might lose their crops to pests or diseases - and cutting down trees - they need the firewood and the farmland. But environmental issues are never simple. If they were, they probably wouldn't become issues in the first place.

Corn Country

2009-08-28T13:14:00.001-07:00

I was listening to the radio the other day, when I heard a commercial for a festival in one of the towns near my community. "We'll be celebrating corn," the announcer said, "the root of our society." I have heard people say other things to this effect about the centrality of corn in Nicaraguan culture. I have also witnessed it first hand. Every day the men in my community go out ot work in the corn fields, while at home the women process the mature plant into tortillas, breads, crackers, corn-on-the-cob, and any number of other things. People here have a daily, intimate relationship with corn. It is their livelihood and their nourishment. People here love corn. They identify with corn.

Since hearing that radio announcement, I've been trying to come up with an analog in American culture. What is at the root of our society? Wheat? Most of use probably eat flour every day. Corn syrup? Honestly, we probably produce more corn than Nicaragua does. Petroleum? Americans do depend heavily on oil. Apples? Apples are quintessentially American - Johnny Appleseed, "American as apple pie". All of these things certainly pertain to American culture, but none of them really has the resonance that corn has in Nicaragua. With none of these do we have the kind of hands-on, dependent, loving relationship that Nicaraguans have with corn.

After several days of deliberation, my best hypothesis as to the root of American culture is the automobile. I'm not being glib. Think about it - most Americans have a daily relationship with their cars. They depend on the car for their livelihood;without it they wouldn't be able to get to work. We use cars to meet our basic needs for food and clothing. We mark life transitions with the car - from the carseat to the backseat to the front seat, and 16 to the driver's seat.Buying one's first car is an important step on the path to adulthood. We drive to weddings and celebrations in limousines. We ride to our final resting place in a hearse. There are plenty of songs about cars - Greased Lightning, Born to Run, etc. We build our cities and suburbs around automobile transportations. We go on family outings and take road trips in our cars. Some people make a kind of mobile nest out of their cars, keeping toiletries, changes of clothing, food, and all kinds of other things in their cars. People listen to music, have important conversations, and do some of their best thinking in cars. People name their cars. They cry when their cars die. Yep, I'm convinced that cars are to our culture as corn is to theirs.

I'd be very interested ot hear any alternative hypotheses as to the basis of American culture. And stay tuned for my next post, on plastic.

Garden update: garlic is growing great; spinach, kale and carrots have sprouted; lettuce seeds were carted off by an ant colony. Can't win 'em all.

Packing List

2009-08-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

While I was in the process of applying to the Peace Corps, reading blogs written by current and past volunteers became somewhat of an obsession. Without fail every PCV blogger includes a list of most and least useful items they brought with them. I think it's time for me to make the obligatory packing list post, on the chance that any Peace Corps applicants are reading this.

Best things I brought:

1. a head lamp. Everyone lists this, and with good reason. It's great for reading in bed when the power goes out (which is a lot) or for making late-night trips to the latrine. (Just try not to look down once you're in there.)

2. a thermarest camping mattress. This was a last-minute addition after I read a PCV blogger's description of the mattress in her host family's house. I have been thankful for it every night.

3. ipod and good speakers. Also a set of items I give thanks for every day. The speakers I purchased were called iMaingo2. I highly recommend them. I also bought a set of rechargeable batteries to use with the speakers, which was a great choice as well. Apparently batteries here are both expensive and of poor quality. Plus, I wouldln't even know where to find them.

4. sun hat. A must-have if you plan to walk anywhere or do anything outside during the middle of the day.

5. duct tape. I wrapped a bunch around both of my water bottles, and it has come in handy many times already.

6. a pair of lightweight pants to sleep in. Great for protection against mosquitoes and fleas. The mosquito net the Peace Corps provides is great - unless a mosquito happens to be in it. It also does nothing for fleas (which are present in most homes with a dog, i.e. most homes).

7. a bath puff. I feel much cleaner when I have something to scrub myself with, especially in cold water bucket baths, which are all I take.

8. yoga mat and strength bands. I've been trying to stay in shape, despite the high-carb diet. Everyone says male volunteers get really skinny because they lose their muscle mass and female volunteers get fat eating tortillas and beans and rice.

9. American foods like cherries, almonds, cranberries and dried apricots. It was really fun for me to share some of these things with my host family and to see their reactions to these (for them) exotic foods.

10. my favorite clothes. I got a lot of recommendations from people about what to bring for rain, for heat, for sun, for modesty, for whatever. I have found that the things that I've enjoyed having the most are the things I most enjoyed wearing at home. That said, I plan on ruining everything I brought between the cement wash slab and the barbed wire I hang my clothing on to dry.

Things I brought and haven't used much:

1. a computer. I think the laptop would have been really great to have, if it hadn't stopped working. I'm still waiting to see if I can get it fixed in Managua, but I'm not holding my breath.

2. solar shower. Basically a black bag you can fill with water and put in the sun to get hot so as not to have to take a cold shower. A great idea in theory, but I haven't really used it. The showers are cold, but it's so hot here I don't really mind. Maybe I'll start using it to wash my dishes once I'm living in my new place.

3. solar panel ipod charger. This would have been really great if I had ended up in a site without electricity, but I didn't. So I haven't used it.

Into it: the internet cafe I go to sells ice cream bars
Still getting used to it: the fact that I will not have regular access to a flushing toilet for the next two years

Spare Tire

2009-08-12T13:44:00.000-07:00

My host mom loves to tell me that I am going to get fat in Nicaragua. She tells me all the time that soon I am going to have a llanta (tire) of fat around my midsection. And not a small tire, either. She says I´m going to have a llanta de tractor. I tell her I´d rather keep my llanta de bicicleta and hope it doesn´t turn into a llanta de motorcycle.

But my host mom is probably correct that I will be gaining weight here, since it seems like all I eat is corn. I eat corn tortillas with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I eat corn on the cob for a snack, and for dessert I eat corn pudding. I drink both hot and cold corn beverages, sweetened and unsweetened. I eat soups thickened with corn flour. I eat corn cookies, corn crackers, and corn breads. I´m getting a little sick of corn, but it is the basis of the diet here, and we are at the height of the corn harvest.

I am working on planting a garden, both so that I might have something to eat other than corn and to have something to do that will help me burn off some of the corn calories I´ve been so abundantly consuming. My garden is going to be in the front of the house I will soon be renting, next door to my host family´s house.

Not a lot of people have family gardens here because there are so many things that can go wrong with a garden. A horse can eat it. A chicken can scratch through it looking for worms and seeds. A pig can root it up. A fungus can grow on it. Insects can infest it. A virus can destroy it. But I´m trying anyway.

The day I set out to dig, my next door neighbor (who is also my host mom´s sister-in-law) came over to help. So did my land lord. And so did my neighbor´s son. With their help, what would have taken me all day took only a couple of hours. The whole time I kept thinking, Where else but in Nicaragua would my neighbors come out to help me dig my garden? The whole time we joked about how much of our llantas we were going to lose sweating like this. The four of us took turns with a pick axe, and after about an hour we had dug a three meter by three meter plot. I´m going to plant carrots, onions, tomatoes, peppers, watermelons - all of which are known and loved here - as well as a few crops that people here are unfamiliar with - kale, spinach and swiss chard. (When I showed my host mom my seed packets, she looked at the spinach and asked "Is this broccoli?")

In this picture of my house you can see where my garden is going to be - right out front. I can´t wait to get some chicken wire up and get started planting.

Names, a few favorites
Best sibling names - Marjelly and Marjulie
Best dog name - Escott, after the dog on the Scott toilet paper package
Best mis-spelling of a PC volunteer´s name - Hering, for Erin

Agriculture and Food Security

2009-08-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

I have been in my site for four days now. Everyone says the first few months are the hardest because we have no schedule at all, and it is up to the volunteer to figure out how to achieve the project goals. The overarching mission of the Agriculture project is to increase the food security of the community. Basically, the idea is to improve people´s diets while also helping them to make a more secure living.

We work with three groups in society - producers (mostly men), women, and young people. With the producers we might help them make organic fertilizers and pesticides or help them to organize a producers cooperative. With the women we may start a community bank or help to create family gardens or work with a group to earn income from value-added products like jams or teas or bread. With the youth we might start a school garden or a tree nursery. The scope of our work is very broad, and we can really do anything that the community wants, which is the project´s biggest advantage but also its biggest challenge.

My strategy is to try to move forward with projects that involve members of each of the three groups mentioned above. The other day I spoke with the director of the secondary school in my town, and he seemed interested in a composting project and a tree nursery. Today I´m having a meeting with one of the teachers to talk about coordinating something. I also met with some of the members of the community bank that the last volunteer started. They are very interested in having my help getting started again. I also talked to one of the farmers who is also on the local citizen´s government council. I am going to one of their meetings this Friday.

So in week one, things are going well. I still have a lot to learn about how things work in my town economically, politically, and socially. And the process of gaining people´s trust is long. But as of week one I am very optimistic. Seeing this rainbow on my first afternoon in site seemed like a sign. (It was actually a complete arch, but I couldn´t capture the whole thing.)

Used to it - people commenting on whether I am more or less gorda than other people
Still don´t get it - ¿Why do so many Nicaraguans shower in their underwear?

Cultural Whiplash

2009-08-01T06:58:00.000-07:00

Being in the Peace Corps requires you to be able to fluidly handle rapid changes from one type of environment to another. They should probably include it as a requirement in the job description. I´m not just talking about the fact that during the rainy season you might at any moment be soaking wet when not minutes before you were slathering yourself with sunscreen for protection from Nicaragua´s brutal midday rays. Nor am I refering just to the reality that a volunteer, especially an Ag volunteer, should be prepared to walk through mud, over rocks, or across a field at virtually any moment, regardless of how he or she is dressed or what activity was planned for the day. No, the most difficult transitions are those that remind us of the differences between the way of life that most Americans are accustomed to and the way that the majority of Nicaraguans live.

This week was a case in point. Finally, after three long months of training, three months of language classes and technical trainings and living with a rural host family, we have made it to official volunteer status. (Hooray!) We spent the last half of this week in Managua in order to complete some final administrative tasks and to receive briefings from the US embassy to Nicaragua and from USAID. During this time we´ve been staying in a hotel, a really nice hotel, close to the Peace Corps office. We´ve been going to meetings in air-conditioned offices where everyone is dressed in business casual attire. Yesterday, our Swearing In ceremony took place in a really nice hotel. Afterwards we had a dinner at the home of one of the Country Directors for Peace Corps Nicaragua. She served us all kinds of foods I hadn´t expected to see for the next two years - goat cheese, spaghetti with meat sauce, olives, red wine. It was almost painful how much like America her house felt - despite the fact that her backyard was filled with tropical plants and surrounded by razor wire.

During this short trip, I seem to have developed a severe case of cultural whiplash. I´d just started to adjust to living in a house whose kitchen has no floor, rarely seeing a flushing toilet, and eating rice and beans three times a day when I was whisked away to a posh B and B with hot showers and a swimming pool. Three nights ago I was sleeping under a mosquito net and praying I wouldn´t have to get up to use the latrine in the middle of the night. Last night I was drinking rum and cokes by the pool and eating Pizza Hut and sushi (delivered to the hotel, free of charge).

This morning I´m enjoying a few more minutes of free wireless internet before I go to eat an American-style breakfast and then head out for my site. I feel very ready to do this job - or at least I did until they teased me with air conditioning and cable TV - but I´m expecting to have to decompress for a while once I get to my site. It´s not the campo lifestyle that´s the hard part - it´s the back and forthing that really gets me out of whack.

Farewell Fatima

2009-07-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

So this is the end of training. Yesterday we attended a product fair with the youth group we´ve been working with during training. The purpose of the project was twofold. First, the youth were supposed to gain confidence by coming up with a new product, making it, selling it, and presenting it at the fair. For the Peace Corps Volunteers it was a way of getting our feet wet working with youth and helping a group to create a value added product.

The fair was our final training activity. For the next week we have some administrative things to do, and on Friday we swear in as volunteers. It´s kind of a bittersweet time for me for a couple of reasons. For one thing, four of the people in my training group have left or are leaving the Peace Corps for a variety of reasons, including the closest friend I made during training. Not that we were going to be serving in sites near each other, but it´s still a huge blow to my morale. And for another thing, I am actually very sad leaving the host family I have lived with for the past three months.

My host mom, Melida, asked me yesterday what was the most valuable thing I learned during my training. I told her that the best part of training for me (besides milking a goat) was getting to live with this family. And I meant it. When I arrived here three months ago I was kind of like a baby. Melida had to teach me how to wash my hands - no joke. Since then I have learned to love gallo pinto and beans (even after learning that the bean pot sits for three days unrefrigerated). I have made tamales (corn meal and cheese cooked in a banana leaf) and pinolillo and sorted beans. I´ve learned how to wash my clothing in a cement pila, and I´ve asked the definitions of a hundred words I didn´t know.

During this whole time I´ve been the beneficiary of an incredible outpouring of hospitality, warmth, and caring. My host family may be poor, but their generosity is overwhelming. I´ve been showered with gifts - mountains of fresh fruit, a keychain with my name on it, a wooden bracelet, a pair of shower shoes, and a grain sack to keep my yoga mat from getting dirty on the floor. But more importantly, this family has shared their home and their lives with me. My host mom has talked to me about the joys and sadnesses of her life, I´ve gotten to watch as my host sister-in-law (wife of one of my four host brothers) went from being five months to eight months pregnant, and my little six year old host sister has shared her drawings with me. My host brothers have split coconuts for me with a machete, given me rides in the family bicycle taxi, and walked me to the bodega when my host mom insisted it was too dangerous for me to walk alone. They´ve also asked me to translate the lyrics of all kinds of songs, including Celine Dion´s My Heart Will Go On and Fifty Cent´s entire catalog.

I´m sure I will form relationships with the people in my new community, but I will not forget the connections I have formed here.

Into it - almost being a full-fledged volunteer
Over it - losing members of the group

Animal Husbandry

2009-07-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

This weekend we went to Rancho Ebenezer, a training center for sustainable small animal management. Our hands-on trainings have all been great – making compost, growing a school garden, starting a tree nursery, food processing – but the animals were the best, sin duda. At the Rancho, they keep goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, rabbits, cows, and tropical sheep (yes, there are tropical sheep, they just don’t have wool).

My new favorite animals are goats, chickens, and rabbits. I’ve never really considered myself an animal person, beyond cats, that is. But today I got down with some barnyard creatures, and I was pretty into it. At 6 this morning I reported to the goat stable and learned how to milk a goat. I wasn’t that great at it, but I was at least able to make the milk come out. After milking, we fed the goats a mixture of leaves from a variety of tropical leguminous plants.

Then it was off to the chicken pen. We were treating them with a prophylaxis for a common respiratory infection that kills a lot of chickens. Each one had to get a drop of solution in its eye. I won’t lie. I was scared at first to try to catch the chicken and hold it still. But once I caught one, I was hooked. Running around after chickens is really, really fun. Our next lesson was on how to give a chicken a bath. At the Rancho, they bathe the chickens once a month in a solution of water and neem leaf. Neem is a tree whose leaves have a repellant effect on insects, so it is used to keep any little bugs from living in the chickens’ feathers. Bathing the birds requires holding them under their wings and dipping them into a bucket up to their necks. The best part is that once the chickens come out of the bath they stagger around drunkenly until they’ve dried off a little bit. The weight of the water just gets them all out of whack.

Post neem bath

The bath was a little much for this guy to handle

At the rabbit hutch, we felt a rabbit’s belly to see if she was pregnant, watched two rabbits mate (takes about 3 seconds), and saw another rabbit give birth (8 babies in less than a minute). The great thing about all of these animals is that they are really easy to take care of, and they all can eat plants that serve other purposes but cannot be eaten by humans. The Rancho feeds its animals using the same plants it uses for reforestation and soil conservation and regeneration.

Among the other topics of the weekend were:
• how to tell if a female pig is in heat,
• how to clip a goat’s toenails,
• how to test a goat for mastitis before milking,
• how to castrate a baby pig (accompanied by a really disturbing demo),
• how to kill and skin a rabbit (surprisingly easy, not that I did it myself),
• how to build worm composting systems using old tires (very cool, something
I’m planning on doing at my site)
• and much more.

A lot of campo families have chickens. Rabbits are less common, and goats are pretty rare. Cows and pigs are both really common in my site, but rabbits and goats have a lot of advantages over these animals. Mainly, they produce more given a smaller quantity of food. And in the case of goats, they will eat practically anything. Since goats also do really well eating green leaves from trees, instead of needing pasture land, they also go perfectly well with reforestation projects. Culturally, getting people to switch from cow´s milk to goats milk is really difficult. But I´m really excited to start promoting the use of these animals when I get to my site.

A few things that seem normal to me now - eating every meal with only a spoon, hanging my clothing to dry on barbed wire, being woken up by roosters every morning
Stil not normal - when my host mom cleans the floor of my room with gasoline, pasta served with rice (yes, we must have at least 4 types of carbs on every plate)

Site Visit

2009-07-16T15:13:00.001-07:00

This past week I finally got to see the community where I’ll be living for the next two years. Site visit is the week we’ve been waiting for since training began 10 weeks ago. Last Friday the 17 of us traveled to Esteli to meet with our community counterparts, and the following day each counterpart-volunteer pair left separately. I felt so sick with nerves that during the bus ride to my site I thought I might have to ask the bus driver to pull over so I could be sick. Thankfully that did not happen.

My counterpart, Don Paulo, took me to his house and his wife served me some very sweet coffee and bread she had baked. I started to relax a little. Then the two of them walked me over to the house where I’ll be staying for my first six weeks before I’m allowed to live on my own. When I met my new host mom I started to really feel good about the site. She was great, so funny and warm. “No tenga pena, Laurie,” she told me. “Sientese como en su casa.” Basically, Don’t be shy with us, Our house is your house. My new host mom, Dona Ester is a teacher in the local school. She is a single mom with three grown kids. The two boys work in the fields every day, and my host sister recently graduated with a degree in Small Agriculture. I’m really excited to get to know her better, especially since we’re close to the same age and in the same field.

Here´s the house where I´ll be living

From what I could tell in my short visit, the town is going to be great for me. It is small – only about 100 families. They absolutely loved the previous volunteer, which is great because she really seems to have paved the way for me. “The last volunteer went running a lot, so the people are used to that,” they told me. Great. “And she loved to dance. So we’ll expect you to get down at the fiestas.” Amazing. “And the last volunteer was very independent. She liked to live alone. We’ve got a little house all picked out for you.” Incredible. “We can’t wait to bake with you, since the last volunteer was really into baking.” Perfect way to get integrated into the community.

Some replacement volunteers I’ve talked to have said that they didn’t like being compared to the volunteer before them. So far, I just feel lucky that I don’t have to explain myself. The people in my town understand what the Peace Corps is, more or less, and what types of projects I might be doing. Even more importantly, they are really excited to have me there, since they have such warm feelings towards the volunteer who was there before me.

My host grandma making coajada

It’s very hard to tell what kind of work I’ll be doing in the community, though I think that’s true of every site. The community really lacks organization, since there is a lot of tension and mistrust between the two political parties. Apparently, the hostility is so intense that Sandinistas won’t come to a meeting if they know that Liberals will be there and vice versa. That might make community organizing a bit difficult. I’m very optimistic, though, and I have a lot of ideas for how to get started gaining confianza.

Otherwise, I’m pretty excited to live in my town. It is on the road between Esteli and Jinotega, which means that buses come by frequently. There are also several volunteers within an easy walk, bus ride, bike ride, or horseback ride. Yes, horseback. I will be living in Nicaragua’s Wild West. The department of Jinotega is serious cowboy country. I saw a lot of cowboy hats, boots, and of course, cows. My host family has two, so I’ll be drinking fresh raw milk and eating a soft cheese called coajada every day. I already learned how to make the cheese with my host grandmother.

This is my host mom

I can already tell that I will be fiending for vegetables in my site, since I didn’t eat a single one in my four days there. But I am also really impressed with the self-sufficiency of my town. People grow corn and beans, and they keep cows. Their diet primarily consists of corn tortillas, boiled beans, and milk. I get the sense that if this town were completely cut off from the outside world, that not a whole lot would change. They’ve only had electricity for the past 8 years and running water only for the past 4.

This is our living room

I’m really excited to go back and get comfortable in my new home, but I’m also really sad to be leaving Fatima. When I came back yesterday I felt like I was coming home. I had really missed my Fatima host mom’s cooking. I was so happy to have a big cabbage salad and a plate of fruit waiting for me here. I certainly won’t forget how good this family has been to me during my training.

Into it – only two weeks of training left!
Sad about it – having to leave the friends I’ve made in training

Material Culture

2009-07-15T15:12:00.001-07:00

Nicaragua is the poorest country in Central America and one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Seventy-five percent of rural people live with incomes that are considered to be poverty-level or extreme poverty-level. I’m certain my host family would be included in that statistic. There’s no denying that life here is tough and opportunities are limited. And yet, there are many aspects of living at this material standard that I really appreciate. I love the fact that our food is incredibly fresh – the other day we bought squash from the neighbor that was harvested just that same day, and this past Sunday my mom made a beef stew made from a cow that was slaughtered that morning. You don’t get much fresher that that.

We don’t use a lot of electricity, since we’re mostly in bed by 8:30. This family of eight shares one bathroom, and remarkably there’s never a line. I don’t even miss hot showers. On the contrary, every day I’m grateful that in the shower it’s actually possible to get a sunburn or have a mango fall on my head, and that I get to listen to the next door neighbor’s parrot singing and chortling to himself and calling his own name. I love that we mostly travel by foot or bicycle taxi, sometimes in moto-taxi (basically a three-wheeled motorcycle) or in a bus, rarely in a car. I love that people use the things they own until they are absolutely and completely used up. Before coming here, I had never imagined the many uses for an empty plastic coke bottle (watering can, planter, fly trap, funnel, drip irrigation system, soap dish, etc.) or a used bicycle inner tube.

It’s not that people aren’t poor - they certainly are. And it’s not that Nicaraguan society couldn’t benefit from an influx of well-spent money – a functioning emergency health care system would be a good start – but there are many ways that people’s lives could be improved that are much more about education and organization than they are about material wealth. In many communities, a well-organized co op could do much more to provide employment and better people’s lives by taking advantage of the resources that already exist in the community than could outside investment or aid. For example, with a concerted community effort a town could turn the garbage people burn in front of their houses into a saleable product, compost. Similarly, a lot of the health problems that plague rural people – diabetes, malaria, diarrhea – could be greatly improved with simple changes – eating less sugar, getting rid of standing water, washing hands more frequently. Basically, I am not at all convinced that having more stuff – be it cars, or paved roads, or fancier clothes, or whatever else – would make people’s lives better. To date, much of the stuff that has come in from outside has actually made people less healthy – chemical pesticides and fertilizers that people apply by hand since there’s no money for protective gear or machinery, packaged food loaded with sugar and fat, sweatshops that provide jobs but result in major respiratory problems for a lot of their workers, etc.

The question that I keep asking myself is this: Is there any society on earth that has resisted the trap of development? In other words, is there any place that has figured out how to better its population´s standard of living without just exchanging one broken system for another? Could Nicaragua become a more wealthy country not by providing jobs that compel people to commute in private cars and allow them to buy processed food shipped from far away, but by recognizing and taking advantage of the incredible richness that is already here? Would it be possible for Nicaragua to achieve gender-equality, to offer young people increased life choices and life chances, and to create a health care system that serves its population, without rejecting the simple abundance that people here take for granted and that is so coveted in so-called developed societies?

Sometimes I wish the people I meet could just see inside my head. I wish that instead of feeling nervous about whether I’ll like the campesino food she feeds me, my host mom could see what I’m thinking. Which is, Oh my God, food snobs in the US would kill to have this much local food on their plate at one time! I wish my host brothers could see how much more impressed I am with how they climb coconut trees and wield machetes than I am with their imitation iphones and DVD collections. Rather than apologizing for not having a car to give me a ride, I wish people could see how much I appreciate living in a town that doesn’t depend on fossil fuel transportation – another goal of high-minded US environmentalists. It’s not that I don’t think I have a lot to offer here based on the knowledge I have. It’s more that I believe the US has just as much to learn from Nicaragua as the Nicaraguans have to learn from us.

Into it - baby corn that doesn´t come from a can
Over it - mosquitoes that just don´t quit

Integrating

2009-06-30T14:31:00.000-07:00

I´ve been with my host family for over six weeks now, and this weekend I finally felt like part of the family. Sunday morning I told my mom I wanted to cook an American meal for them. I decided omelettes and home fries would be a good cross-cultural meal, nothing too ambitious or foreign. Once I am in my site I am going to try to cook for people more often, both so that I can offer hospitality as a way of gaining confianza (trust) and so that I can introduce some dietary novelties - green vegetables, for example. But for my first foray into cooking for Nicaraguans, I went for the easy sell. The omelettes were pretty simple - some queso coajada (I tried for mozarella and failed), onions, and oregano inside - and my mom helped me fry them, at which time I understood why my refried beans taste so delicious (hint: 3 letters, starts with O ends with L). To the papas fritas, I added some rosemary that I found at the plant nursery next door. Both the papas and the huevos were a hit. And of course they served it all with rice and beans and fried plantains.

After that lunch, my host sister-in-law offered to paint my toenails, which I took as a huge compliment since she´s been very shy with me up until now. I am now sporting a french manicure on my toenails. Unfortunately, all the colors she had were pretty much the same as the color of my skin, so you can´t see it too well.

It´s been a great cooking week all around, actually. On Friday we made mantequilla de mani (peanut butter). Even though this is a peanut-producing country, the butter is practically unknown. My family, especially my little host sister, was really into it. The soymilk and soy meat we made yesterday were also very popular. I´ve been in soy city since then, eating tortas de soya (deep fried soy patties), soy chorizo (sauteed soy with spices), and drinking soymilk with pinolillo, the national drink of Nicaragua.

To make pinolillo you toast whole corn and cacao and add cinnamon, cloves, and something they call pimiento de olor (odoriferous pepper). My mom mixed the ingredients in a bucket, then sent me to the mill to grind it. For ten cordobas (50 cents) the family with the mill ground it for me twice, leaving a fine powder that smelled wonderful. Back at home, we mixed it with soymilk and sugar. Pure deliciousness. Now that I´m cooking over a wood stove, taking things to the mill by myself, and drinking pinolillo, I am really starting to feel like I belong here.

Into it - dreaming in Spanish, very tight jeans like the Nicas wear, the rainy season (aka ¨winter¨)
Over it - flea bites, mildew

Mirando Quien Viene

2009-06-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things to do here is to sit outside on the wooden bench by my house. Just watching who comes by - mirando quien viene - is better than television. All manner of transportation rolls, gallops, and meanders down my street. The biking is truly a thing to behold. More often than not, there is more than one person on the bike - a mother with her child, a guy and his girlfriend. Sometimes three or even four kids will be perched on the same bike - one on the seat, one on the top tube, one standing on pegs, and one on the handle bars. People also bike by carrying all kinds of things - machetes, big baskets, coolers full of tortillas or nacatamales, plants that they've purchased from the nursery.

There are a couple of kinds of three-wheeled transport as well. The caponeras or triciclos are three-wheeled bicycles with a bench to sit on in the front, covered by a shade. The kids that drive them are all in their teens or early twenties, and they hang out together at a few critical intersections, kind of like bike messengers. They'll drive you around town for a couple of cordobas (about 10 cents), which is great for people in my town because most of them don't like to walk. There are also the mototaxis, which are basically motorcycles with three wheels. They are really built to hold about three people - the driver plus two passengers in the back - but in a pinch they can accomodate up to six. As with the bicycles, people carry all manner of things with them in the mototaxis and triciclos. Today I saw a mototaxi with a big basket on top that held, no joke, two dogs. Not puppies either. Dogs.

Sometimes horse-drawn or ox-drawn carts pass by carrying milk or the harvest from a farm. It was from one of these carts that my host mom purchased the milk I insisted on drinking cold, and which made me really sick for about a day and a half.

The evangelical church across the street just adds to whatever scene is occuring in front of the house. Around 5 o'clock each night they start singing religious songs about El Senor. The church is just a group of benches and little lectern, but their meetings are always fully amplified. Plus I think they must have some agreement that the guitar-player's instrument must be completely out of tune and that the person who holds the microphone must be the singer with the worst voice.

Mirando quien viene is not a passive activity, either. The bicyclists passing by like to mirar right back at me. Sometimes my gringa face inspires them to rattle off whatever English words come to mind at that moment - hello, goodbye, I love you. "Adios," I say back.

Dance, Gringo, Dance!

2009-06-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

I´ve become something of a salsa dancing addict in the past year, so I was psyched when the Peace Corps placed me in Latin America. Little did I know then that Nicaragua is basically a dancer´s purgatory. Every day I hear my favorite songs blasting out of people´s stereos - reggeaton, bachata, salsa, cumbia, merengue - and yet it doesn´t seem like anyone really knows how to do any of the dances. I´ve been so hard up, as has my friend Hannah, that the other day the two of us started dancing outside of my house to the cumbia my host brothers were listening to. My host mom got really excited. ¨We can have a party here!¨she exclaimed. ¨We´ll have a DJ and you and all the other gringos can dance.¨

I wasn´t sure exactly what she meant, but I had been to a party the weekend before at another trainee´s house, so I kind of had an idea about what a Nica-style dance party would be like. Sure enough, last Saturday at 5 pm the DJ arrived in a pickup truck loaded with speakers. He set them up and commenced to play first the Ghostbusters theme song, then Funktytown, and Nirvana´s cover of The Man Who Sold the World. Those songs were just a warm-up apparently, because then the Latin music got started. He played my new favorite cumbias - the one about the guy who gets poked in the eye with a sharp object, and the one about the kleptomaniac named Maria, and all the others.

But nobody was dancing yet. Once the other PC trainees arrived, everyone started pressuring us to dance. This has become a familiar routine. It seems everyone´s favorite activity at these parties is to watch Gringo Dance Theater. It even happened at the club we went to in Esteli last week. A guy was actually using his camera to film us dancing, as if it were the most amusing thing he had ever seen.

At the party at my house I think the gringos must have danced for a full 15 minutes before anyone else joined in. It kind of makes you wonder what the people do for entertainment when we´re not here. It was also really strange to be in a simulated club environment when I was actually out on my host family´s dirt patio, though the music was certainly loud enough, and the lights were certainly flashy enough.

At one point I paused to watch the other gringos dance, and then I started to understand why everyone here enjoys GDT so much. First of all, we are pretty spastic. We aren´t at all like the restrained Nicaraguans, who kind of bob back and forth gingerly in time with the music (no spins or dips here, folks). What we lack in rythmic intuition, we make up for in raw enthusiasm. Also, I´ve noticed that making such an effort to comport myself according to Nicaraguan cultural norms means that when I cut loose, I really cut loose. I think all of us do. So if the people want to see some gringos dancing crazy, I´m happy to oblige.

Into it - cramming 18 people into a microbus, i.e. minivan; Nicaragua buses in general
Over it - nightly news that always features dead bodies

Mi Abuelita

2009-06-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

One of the people I most admire here is my host mom’s mother – my host grandmother. Her name is Dona Luisa, and she must be in her seventies. She has nine children, eight of whom still live in this small town. Her grandparents lived in Masatepe, the larger town down the road from Fatima, and her grandfather was an immigrant from France.

Last night Luisa announced that she was going to plant her terreno, the family field that is about a 10 minute walk outside of town. I asked if I could come to help. We went out this morning - Dona Luisa, my host mom, three of my host brothers (I have four total), and I - before the sun got too hot. There were a couple of guys there already using a draft horse to plough the weeds under. We each took a bowl of beans and started walking down the plowed rows, dropping the beans in slowly, and kicking dirt over them.

After the beans were planted, we left the two guys and one of my host brothers there to plant the remaining part of the field with corn, while the rest of us went out to see the part of the terreno that is planted with fruit trees. We walked through a field of coffee trees, and my host grandma remarked that the harvest probably won’t be good this year, since there hasn’t been enough rain yet. We collected some fallen mangos – stragglers, since the season has really almost ended. My host grandma offered me the one ripe orange clinging to a small orange tree. It was tart and extremely juicy.

When we got to the avocado grove, my host mom told my brothers to go climb up the trees. They each scrambled up, at least 30 feet in the air, and started shaking. Avocados rained down. We collected them and wrapped them in tee shirts to carry them back. On the way, one of my host brothers picked up a big brownish ball-looking item from the ground, cut it open with a machete, and offered me a piece of orange fruit that tasted like papaya, only better. “It’s called mamey,” my host mom informed me.

While we walked back, I asked Luisa about the terreno. I asked her if the land had always been in the family. She explained that after the revolution, a lot of people left their land. This parcel had once belonged to a wealthy family, who left during the revolution. When the Sandinistas took power, they divided up land and gave it to peasants who had never owned land before. Now the family has four manzanas (an area of land slightly larger than an acre) that they plant each year. Before that time, the family had to rent land to plant it.

I really loved being out there this morning, following the family in one of its annual routines. My host family insists that they are poor people, and it’s true that they have very little in the way of material possessions as compared to North Americans. But there is wealth here too. The more time I spend learning from my host family, the more convinced I am of that fact.

This is Nicaragua

2009-06-05T15:27:00.000-07:00

Think for a moment about Depression-era America. Then take the image you’ve constructed and set it in a tropical country. Next imagine that the Depression was preceded by a decade of civil war, and you will have an idea of what Nicaragua is like. But to your dirt roads, wood stoves, and corrugated metal roofs, add modern television and plastic trash. Here, houses with dirt floors and walls that don’t touch the ceiling are home to massive stereos that blast reggaeton, merengue, and the occasional American pop song at full volume from dawn to dusk. Young people work in sweat shops making designer clothing they can’t afford to buy. Their parents are subsistence farmers. They dream about owning iphones.

When trying to understand any society, it is all too easy to fall into black and white thinking. I think Americans tend to hold one of two opposing views about the developing world. One is a kind of Noble Savage idea – these are people who are closer to nature, they have long traditions of indigenous knowledge, they have a lower ecological impact, and their world view is altogether more harmonious. The other view is of a people living in poverty and misery, lacking in skills, knowledge, and opportunity. Our responsibility as First World people is to help save them.

Now that I’m here living this reality, I find it impossible to romanticize this life. Both of the viewpoints I’ve described seem to me to hold some elements of truth, though both are woefully incomplete. It would be complicated enough if my only goal here were to observe and attempt to understand the culture in which I am immersed. But I am also tasked with doing something to improve the lives of the people I meet. I want to help people to realize their dreams for themselves and their community, but I don’t want to be part of the process of turning Nicaragua into an individualistic, work-obsessed, car-loving, cement society like the US. But what is the first thing that rural people here do when electricity comes to town? They buy television sets and start mainlining US culture.

It’s not even that I dislike the US. There are many parts of our culture that I absolutely love, the independence of women for example. Ultimately, I want to hold complex views of both Nicaragua and the US. I don’t want to be reduced to line-item judgments – e.g. Nicaragua does well with family closeness, or, the US does a good job providing clean drinking water to its citizens – because the reality is that behind even these simple statements there is complexity. Sure, Nicaraguans have really tight-knit families, but women are often confined to their homes whether they want to be or not, and there is rampant cheating and womanizing. And sure, the US sanitation system does an amazing job of delivering safe drinking water to our homes, but we also waste it profligately. We take clean drinking water, a resource to which a full third of humanity does not have consistent access, and flush it down the toilet and spray it onto manicured lawns.

I am having a really fun but also very difficult time trying to explain America to my host family here. The questions they ask me are deceptively simple and surprisingly tricky to answer. The other day my host mom asked me, “Is there poverty in the US?”
“Yes,” I told here.
“Is there poverty like there is here?” she continued. “Are there people living in houses made out of plastic?”
I tried to explain American urban poverty to her, since that’s what I’m most familiar with, but it was really difficult. The fact that people live in permanent structures doesn’t necessarily mean they are any better off than poor people here. And at least here, even very poor people often have access to land they can farm.

Then she asked me, “What kind of things do you grow there?”
“Mostly corn, soy, and wheat,” I replied.
“Oh,” she said, “you grow corn. So you must make a lot of tortillas, and tamales, and sopa de maiz…” and she continued to rattle off a list of corn-based foods I had never heard of before.
“Uh, not exactly,” I said. How do you explain to a person in a traditional, corn-based society how the US uses corn? We put it into our cars, we feed it to animals, we process it into junk food, and we distill it into High Fructose Corn syrup, a product that is sweeter and even less nutritious than sugar and is slowly turning us into a nation of diabetics. I tried but failed to communicate that despite how much corn we grow and use as a country, the amount that we actually cook with corn is quite small.

While we’re watching television, my host dad will often point to the TV screen and ask me, “Do you know that person?” I finally realized that he wanted to know if I actually knew that person. Not, had I seen the actor in a movie, but rather, did he come from my town? Had we perhaps met walking down the street? Once I realized what he was asking, I explained to him that no, I don’t know Harrison Ford, I’ve never met Barack Obama, and Angelina Jolie is not a close personal friend. He looked disappointed. “Well,” he asked me, “do you at least know Chuck Norris?”

Pluses: fried plantains, rain on a zinc roof, Eskimo ice cream pops.

Minuses: malaria medication, Chagas bugs, boiled plantains.

More on Training

2009-05-29T15:53:00.001-07:00

Peace Corps training in Nicaragua based in communities and is designed to be a kind of miniature version of our coming service. Which is great because it seems like we will be really well prepared by the time we get to our sites. It is also completely crazy because we are essentially cramming two years worth of work into twelve weeks. During this time we are expected to plant a large garden, start a tree nursery, work with a youth group to create a saleable product from local resources, read 20 books, and become proficient in Spanish. In our spare time we are supposed to complete reports, do homework assignments, and have talks with local people who can provide information that we aren’t able to cover in class. We also have technical training for three full days out of every week on topics ranging from food preservation to meeting facilitation to organic gardening to agribusiness techniques.

I shouldn’t complain because I am really excited about everything I am learning. Yesterday was the best day so far. We spent the whole day making food products. We made peanut butter, soy hamburgers, and pickles, among many other things. I got really excited to work with people in my community figuring out how they can augment their health and commercialize untapped food resources.

There are five people in my training group, all of whom are really great. I have a feeling we will become really close over the next three months. It’s great having a cohort of people with whom to share the craziness of total immersion in a foreign culture. We are living in a small town that is very poor by US standards but is probably doing okay by Nicaraguan standards. Everyone here seems to have enough to eat, and the houses are generally very well kept. The town is wired with electricity and running water. Because the water is rationed, most people keep the taps open. That way when the water is on, it goes into barrels or other vessels for future use. The system is generally okay, except in the case of one of the trainees in my group, whose family keeps a turtle in their pila. (A pila is the cement sink that all homes here have for washing hands and laundry.) He has decided to skip bucket bathing on the days when the water doesn’t flow from the shower head, though he said his host brother has no qualms about bathing in the turtle water.

A couple of nights ago my training group went to a meeting of the local GPC, a sort of governmental council that all towns in Nicaragua now have thanks to the work of the new administration. It was certainly interesting to see how a meeting is run here, and I could tell from the experience that meeting facilitation will probably be a challenge here. We listened to two straight hours of men (and it was all men talking, even though women were present on the council) pontificating about the problems of alcoholism, delinquency and violence in the community. Not one suggestion for action was presented, and every oration with punctuated with phrases like “Let me repeat that…” and “I return to say…” and “As I mentioned before…” On top of that the meeting was held at the local cock fighting ring, so there was also the issue of roosters cock-a-doodle-doodling at random intervals throughout the entirely of the meeting.

Things I am thankful for this week: my inflatable camping mattress (an excellent decision to bring it, since my mattress is about as thick as a folded sweater), my mosquito net, and the fact that I am not yet tired of rice and beans even though I eat it three times a day.

Things I could live without: the latrine, moquitos and chocorrones (the local equivalent of the june bug), open garbage fires.

Fatima Favorites

2009-05-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve been in my training town for about half a week now. There is way too much to describe, so I think maybe it’s best to just share a top ten list (in no particular order) of the things I love right now.

Bucket Showers

My host family’s shower is an outdoor enclosure with an open roof. It has a spigot and supposedly there is running water, but I haven’t seen it work yet. But I don’t care, because I love bucket showers. To take one, I fill up a 5-gallon bucket from one of the barrels of water around the house. Then I soap myself up and sluice water from the bucket to rinse. It’s cold and refreshing, and I feel so clean afterwards. Unfortunately, I am not really allowed, or at least strongly discouraged from bathing after about 3 pm. People here believe that showers late in the day cause coughing and sore throats. Since I already have a cough, they really don’t want me to shower at night.

My Mosquito Net

I love my mosquito net. This is a standard issue Peace Corps item that everyone gets, and it is just fantastic. I have it strung up so it makes a big space for me to sleep in, like a canopy bed. I am so comfortable at night under that thing, and I don’t think any zancudos (the campesino word for mosquitoes) have gotten me in my sleep yet.

No Car Culture

Fatima is not a car town. Almost no one has a car. Everyone bikes or walks to get everywhere. Which is not to say that people here are particularly fit. In fact, most people seem to have an aversion to walking, either because of the heat or the dust or for some other reason. There are a lot of guys who make a living driving these big tricycles with seats in the front, sort of like a bicycle rickshaw. People will take one of those things just to get a few meters down the road. But really everything is within walking distance. Even the bigger town nearby. Most people take a bus to get to it (and by bus, I mean one of the minivans that pass by every so often), but it would really be a short walk. Friends and family are all within such easy walking distance that people constantly just drop by to have a fresco (fruit juice) and chat for a while.

Fruit Everywhere

It is mango season right now, and there are mangoes everywhere. It seems like every family has a mango tree by their house, and a lot of families also manage farm plots that have a lot of trees. It is also avocado season. Oranges are coming next, since it’s about to be winter. It is incredible how much natural abundance this town has.

Shade Trees

It is really hot here during the day, but there is always somewhere to find shade. Every house is covered by shade trees, and there are tons of places to sit and just enjoy a fresco or an helado (ice cream) under a shade tree. Yesterday I sat out in front of my house for several hours just watching the street. People passes by on bicycles and tricycles, on foot, and on horseback. A lot of people are curious about the gringos in town, so it was fun to wave and say hello. Much better than television. I only went in because the sun went down.

Week 1 Done

2009-05-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

The sound of a mango dropping from a height of 20 feet onto a tin roof is startling, to say the least. I awoke in a panic on the first night of my homestay in the rural town of Fatima when one of the fruits basically fell on top of my head. But I guess night terrors are a small price to pay for fresh, ripe mangoes. They are everywhere in Fatima, the rural town where I will be training for the next 11 weeks.

I love my host family. My host mom feeds me huge meals and constantly offers me sugary fruit drinks called frescos. On a hot afternoon, there is nothing better than a cold pineapple fresco. And it is hot. Luckily my training town is at a slight elevation, so it cools off at night. I haven´t been sweating in my bed, and sometimes I even get cool enough to need a sheet.

In addition to the mangoes, I´ve also gotten to know some interesting local foods. Pipian is a squashlike vegetable I´ve been served a few times. There´s also a squash called chayote that I like. In general, the food is incredibly salty. And if it´s not salty it´s super sweet. My mom makes me hot milk with a splash of coffee in the morning, and she loads it up with what tastes like at least a few tablespoons of sugar. I keep telling her not to feed me so much, but the message must be getting lost in translation. I think after two years here I will probably be fat, diabetic, and have high blood pressure. But at least the food tastes really good. Fortunately for me, I love rice and beans. Yesterday I ate rice, beans, french fries, and cheese for breakfast.

As promised, the training schedule is rigorous. We have language classes three days a week for six hours. Another three days a week we have technical training on subjects ranging from how to avoid getting malaria to turning old tires into vegetable gardens. When we´re not training we´re supposed to be planning lessons to share with the youth groups we are supposed to be forming, planting a vegetable garden and starting a plant nursery in our communities, doing a ton of reading, and spending time getting to know our host families. It doesn´t leave a lot of time to, say, relax. Which is weird because the rest of the PC experience is supposed to be very tranquilo, as they say here.

I am really enjoying everything about this experience so far. There is so much to tell, and so much to learn, that I feel completely overwhelmed. But so far it´s all good.

Going to Fatima

2009-05-16T05:17:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of my orientation retreat and the last day I know I will have easy internet access for the next 12 weeks, maybe for the next 2 years. Today we will be going to our training towns. Mine is called Fatima. It is tiny. We are divided up into small groups based on language ability. I am with four other Ag volunteers - Aggies, as we are known. We are the advanced language group. Fatima is a really small town with only one paved road. All of us will be using latrine toilets, but we also all have running water and electricity in our training towns.

I am really excited to start training. Everything we've gotten from the PC has been incredibly high quality. I am truly impressed with this organization. It employs a great mix of Nicaraguans and North Americans. The security guy seems incredibly competent. We have four medical doctors on staff. Everyone on the training team seems to really know what they're doing. They gave us our medical kit, which includes all kinds of things - sunscreen, floss, antibiotics, pepto-bismol, you name it. I have had my first vaccine (typhoid) and taken my first dose of anti-malarials. No crazy dreams so far, but I'll keep you posted. We also were given a library's worth of books to read. We have books on how to be an effective volunteer, how to work with teenagers, how to teach adults, how to assess our communities, how to farm, how to process food, the history of Nicaragua, and on and on. Probably 20 books in all. Receiving them was like getting a Christmas present. I can't wait to absorb everything inside.

The group is interesting. As I said, there are several older people. One man is 76. I am so impressed with him. He has been married for 38 years. This is something he has always wanted to do, and his wife and family support him 100%. There is also a retired married couple and another older woman who I think is in her late sixties. I'm really inspired by the fact that these people are doing something that I think will be a challenge for me at my most robust. If all goes well, I might want to do this again in 40 years or so. The majority of the group is under 25, though.

I've been enjoying the food so far and luckily no one has gotten sick yet. The food is incredibly salty but otherwise pretty bland. Not a lot of spice, unfortunately. We drink a lot of "juice" (a.k.a. sugar water). Not sure what the food will be like once I get to my host family. I also don't know how many people will be living there. My host mom has four (or was it five?) kids ranging in age from 6 to 22. Crazy. Not sure how many still live at home. I think the oldest boy is married.

75% of Nicaragua's population is under 25, so there is a big focus on working with young people. They don't have a lot of opportunities here in Nica, so one of our goals is to help them figure out ways to augment their livelihoods in the small towns where they live, so that they don't end up moving to Costa Rica or the US.

I am really looking forward to our training projects. We will be starting a garden plot for our host families, doing a lot of composting (including worm composting. yay!), and doing some sort of commercialization project with a group of teenagers (e.g. making jam or baking bread or something like that and selling it at a product fair).

First Day

2009-05-14T11:05:00.000-07:00

I have been in Nicaragua for almost 24 hours now. We are staying in what amounts to a compound somewhere in Managua. Its exact location is and will likely remain a mystery, given that I have not seen (or heard of the existence of) a detailed map of the city. But that doesn’t matter much, since we will only be in Managua until tomorrow. No volunteers serve here in the capital.

Last night I had my first plate of gallo pinto, the national dish. It is (surprise, surprise) beans and rice. After dinner, I promptly went to bed on a mattress that folded like a taco when I sat on it. I was so exhausted I hardly cared. Based on the food I have eaten here so far, I expect to be gordita after these two years. In addition to the gallo pinto, last night’s dinner included deep fried tortillas wrapped around strips of beef, cabbage slaw slathered in ketchup and something resembling mayonnaise, and to wash it all down, a glass of Coca Cola.

Our main order of business during this three-day retreat in Managua is to determine where we will be training. We will be placed in small towns in groups of three or four, based on our language ability. The levels go from Novice to Intermediate to Advanced to Superior. The diagnostic test was a thirty-minute personal language interview designed to take the speaker to the point where their communication skills broke down. I definitely got there.

I am nervous about a lot of things (one of them being that we are told to expect not to get five consecutive minutes by ourselves for the next three months), but above all I am incredibly excited. When I think about everything I’m going to learn here, I can hardly contain myself. All of the current volunteers we have met rave about their service and say that the time has passed quickly, too quickly. For now, we have internet service, but I expect that to end on Saturday, when we head out to the towns where we’ll be living during training.

Why I'm Going

2009-05-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

In the weeks leading up to the start of my service with the Peace Corps, lots of people have asked me why it is I've chosen to do this. Usually, I say something about how it’s a great opportunity to have an adventure, how it will help me to get work in international development, or that it’s a good way to avoid looking for a job during this economic crisis.

All of these things are true. But there’s more to it than that. The more I think about it, the more I realize that my reasons for wanting to join the Peace Corps are spiritual. While listening to a Speaking of Faith podcast the other day, I was struck by something that Jon Kabat-Zinn (the author of several books on Mindfulness) said:

“In a sense I think all of us, each in our own unique way, are being called upon to find out who we are, and to live that, authentically, in the service of this world.”

I went back and listened to that line several times. This is it, I thought. This is why I want to go on this adventure. I want to find the fullest expression of who I am and to live it in the service of the world. I want to face head on some of the fundamental questions I have about life:

How can a person who has grown up with privilege find ways to give back?
What kind of work is worth doing?
How will I define myself while existing outside of my own culture?
What kind of comforts can I live without?
And what will giving up those comforts teach me about what is truly
important and meaningful?

As regards this last question, I’ve been thinking a lot about a phrase that the mother of one of my college friends used to always say:

“Live simply so that others may simply live.”

I believe in this concept, and it is partly an interest in finding out just how simply I am capable of living that I want to do the Peace Corps. It strikes me that here in the US, we are constantly encouraged not to live simply, not just by advertisers but also as a component of our civic duty. Perversely, we are told that we must live consumptively so that others may simply continue to have jobs and support themselves.

Throughout everything that has gone down with the economy over the past year, I have felt a sense of optimism. Maybe it is through this crisis that people will be inspired to live more simply, to reconnect with what really makes life worth living – our relationships with each other, the pleasures of food and family and nature. I am hopeful that the whole culture will start down a spiritual path of simplicity and service. But I’m not willing to wait around.

Contingency

2009-04-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

I’ll be leaving for Nicaragua in a scant 4 weeks’ time. I’ve found myself obsessively fixating on my packing list, which is making me more than a little bit crazy. See, for the first three months, I’ll be required to report to training dressed in “business casual” attire. How I’ll train to do agricultural work wearing such clothing is a mystery to me. After than time, I’ll be working outdoors in the rain and the mud and the sun. I may be in the mountains – cold – or the lowlands – hot. I’m trying not to get skin cancer – long sleeves – but I’m also trying to avoid heat stroke – tank tops. I'd like to be comfortable - cotton - but I don't want my clothing to mold during the rainy season - nylon and polyester. With all of these conflicting goals, plus a weight limit, you can see why packing has gotten me all bent out of shape.

One thing, though, will be the same no matter the climate or dress code. And that is chronic malnourishment. All volunteers vent about it. I expect to be living by the adage “peel it, boil it, or forget it”. As in, bye-bye, salad. See ya later, strawberries. Ta-ta, fresh tomatoes. I don’t expect to be getting much protein either, or fiber.

American health nut that I am, I took a trip to Whole Foods to check out what’s on offer in the wide world of supplements. I was looking for something that might keep me healthy should it turn out that I subsist primarily on white rice and tortillas these next two years. Luckily for me, Whole Foods and its partner manufacturers have gathered, dried, pulverized, and packaged the nutritional bounty of six continents, and made all of them available (at prices befitting their exotic origins) in the brimming supplements department.

What a dizzying array of powders, pills, and gels! Jay Robb’s Whey Protein screamed out its attributes beside a photo of its muscle bound namesake – “Outrageously delicious! 25 grams protein per serving! Easy to mix! Made with stevia!” Green Vibrance advertised ingredients geared toward the following categories: “membrane and nerve support”, “high fiber foods and prebiotics”, “antioxidant and circulatory support”, “adaptogens”, “immune support”, “skeletal support”, and “palatability factor”. I guess that last one was supposed to make the stuff taste okay. It didn’t. It would require a chemistry degree to interpret the package of Alive Whole Food Energizer Ultra-Shake. Isoleucine, methionine, tryptophan, chlorella, broken-cell microalgae, lignoceric acid. Come on, people, am I expected to ingest this stuff?

The sweet-faced boy working the supplements section reminded me that I should definitely not attempt to spend two years in the developing world without a ready supply of probiotics, in case my own internal stock should be depleted by traveler’s diarrhea. Thanks, buddy.

So this week I’m taste testing. I picked up a package of every single-serving item I could find. Each day I mix one up and gulp it down. Some of them are actually not that bad. I don’t know if they’ll help, but it’s probably my brain that will really need these supplements anyway, not my body. If a tub of Greens and Whey can help me to accept a life without actual greens, it’s probably worth it.

It's Official

2009-03-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

In June I applied.
In August I interviewed.
In October I completed a full medical review.
In December I was deemed medically qualified. (Phew!)
In February I finally got the big blue envelope.

I’ve been invited to serve in the Peace Corps beginning in May of this year! I’ll be stationed in Nicaragua working in the Rural Development Project.

Being the compulsive list-maker that I am, I have dedicated a page in my journal to each of the following topics:

• What I want to bring
• What I want to get rid of before I go
• What I want to buy before I go
• Things to send myself in a care package after 6 months in service
• Things to send myself in a care package after 1 year in service, and
• Things to worry about

Since it’s too early to really pack yet, I’ve been focusing on the last list. Here are the things I’ve found to worry about so far:

1. That I will not see a green vegetable for the next two plus years
2. That I will get fat eating five to six kinds of carbohydrates at every meal – potatoes, rice, beans, tortillas, bread, and fried plantains
3. That I will be bitten by a scorpion
4. That the anti-malarial medication will make me loco in the cabeza
5. That I will contract malaria anyway
6. That I will not be able to wear my contacts at all and will be stuck wearing glasses for the next two years. Or that I will try to wear contacts and will end up getting a freaky tropical eye infection
7. That I will become so frustrated by the whistles and catcalls that one day I will completely lose my cool and go ballistic on some poor Nico
8. That I will become so acculturated after two years that the reverse culture shock of coming back to the States will be worse than the adjustment to Nicaraguan life

Based on my reading of other PCV - that's Peace Corps Volunteer - blogs, all of these scenarios are likely. But I'm really excited anyway.