Friday, July 17, 2009

3 months down... 2 years to go!

It has been quite a while since my last post, and for that I am truly sorry. But what an adventure it has been! I’ve barely had time to send the occasional email home to the parents and update my facebook status! On top of the daily intensive language classes, agricultural training sessions and bouts with various types of sickness (granted only a couple, and nothing warranting a trip to the pharmacy, gracias a dios), I’ve had the opportunity to visit several large cities (including Masaya, Jinotepe, Diriamba, and, of course, Managua), an active volcano, a volcanic lagoon, the pacific ocean, the mountainous terrain of Nueva Segovia. I’ve learned about how to grow all different types of plants, including how to graft citrus and mango together to make some really crazy hybrid fruits, where cashew nuts come from (and how to make wine from its fruit), all about basic grains, their various plagues and how to combat them, vegetable and tree farms, how to make ovens and wood stoves out of bricks, mud and a metal barrel, and even how to make tofu! I’ve roasted coffee beans, made friends with the director of the local school, joked with my 80 year old host grandmother about compost made from human waste, attended a catholic funeral procession with nearly the entire pueblo—while carrying a shovel and watering bucket, nonetheless—and I’m even in the process of adopting a little kitten that was born right around the time we arrived in Nicaragua. And all of this in 8 short weeks! It’s hard to believe that this could all happen in such a short amount of time, but at the same time it has gone by all too fast. In only 2 more weeks I will be saying goodbye to my training town, to my lovely compañeros, Jeffrey, Danielle and Pamela, to my host family, to the training team, and, for all intents and purposes, to the peace corps corporate structure in general. It’s hard to say goodbye, but after the past five days, I now have an idea of what to look forward to, and it’s looking pretty damn good.

Last Wednesday was the day of our site assignments. Apparently it has been tradition in the Small Business group for everyone to put brackets together guessing who was going where and all put some pesos into a pool. We didn’t know they were doing this until the weekend before the assignment day, so it was too late to do a pool of our own, but nonetheless our jefes decided to turn it into quite the fun little guessing game.

First, once we were all assembled, they had us all stand in groups by region, based on where we thought we were going. For us Aggies, there were only two regions to choose from: The Pacific region (León/Chinandega) and the central region (Nueva Segovia/Jinotega/Estelí). Once we were all where we thought we should be, Bayardo, our Program Director, told us how many people weren’t where they were supposed to be, but not who. So, being thoroughly confused for the entire process, we ended up with one person in the Central region that should have been in the Pacific region, but we couldn’t figure out who it was (I was almost certain I was going Central at the time).

Then came the announcements. They started with the Pacific region, and after a few rounds they came to the one Ag site where the assigned volunteer wasn’t already standing up there, a tiny pueblo near El Sauce called Los Panales, in the northern part of León. The description of this site included a fair amount about a recently formed cooperative based around sesame seeds that needed help building organizational capacity, and so, being the co-op fanatic that I am, I put it down as one of my top three sites, but I also told them I’d rather be in a larger city, more concentrated and whatnot, so I wasn’t really expecting that to be my site. But once it came up and no one was called at first, people began guessing random other aggies (someone said my name first but the person presenting the site didn’t hear her) and my smile began to rise as it became more and more sure that this was going to be my site… and sure enough, it was!

So hooray, I’ve got my site, song and dance, too-rah-loo. Now to see what it’s really like. Two days later, after barely enough time to read the more complete site description (in Spanish) and get my bags packed, we head up to Estelí for our meetings with our community and INTA (National Technical Institute of Agriculture) counterparts. We get there in time for lunch, and after a delicious meal of chicken and cabbage salad (along with the obligatory beans and rice), we meet together in the conference room with all the community and INTA people. Of course, we don’t know who any of them are, and they don’t know us, so of course we have to play another guessing game!

I start roaming around the room asking people if they knew anyone from the El Sauce area or Los Panales and everyone gives me blank stares and passes me by. After a while of this, I locate Fran, who is the ag volunteer from my group assigned to the city of El Sauce (living with her husband, Richard, a small business volunteer). Fran has already found a couple of people, so I go ask them if they know where my counterparts are. As it turns out, one of the people she was with was Witmar, my INTA counterpart/technician. Jolly fellow, seemed to enjoy talking and joking around a lot but also seemed fairly serious about his job (good stuff, but not that surprising. He’s only been with INTA 9 months and it seems he’s already gunning for his boss’s job). The other person was one of Fran’s counterparts in the “programa de amor,” which works with women to build vegetable gardens in their patios to increase nutrition and add a little income to the family budget.

After brief introductions Witmar informs me that my community counterpart, who also happens to be the President of the sesame seed Co-op, and whose name is Ángel, couldn’t come because, according to Witmar, his house was also the local health center and he was needed to help out there, or something. Also, the counterpart of Fran’s who was supposed to come didn’t show up either, for one reason or another, so I started pondering the various ways everything could go horribly wrong, or at least be horribly difficult to get started (no one in the community understanding what Peace Corps does, or how to relate with someone from the States, et cetera…). Whoopee, freakout time! But “no te preocupes” says Witmar, and whatever, as much as I like having plans and planning, I can work just as well by the seat of my pants. Just a minor setback, it’ll all work out fine in the end, I’m sure. It always seems to, down here in the land of Lakes and Volcanoes.

The next day we set out on our journey to the municipality of El Sauce. Some guys from INTA were kind enough to give me a ride most of the way, at least to the highway that splits off in León to head north up to El Sauce, while Claudio led the way in the Peace Corps Mobile full of other León-based volunteers and their counterparts (including Fran and her program of love lady). We sat down at the bus stop there at the intersection and eventually boarded a bus jam-packed with Nicas. They threw my big backpack up on top of the bus and I had to find space in the overhead compartments for my other two bags, both weighing more than an 8-year-old boy. Hooray, already going against the suggestions of Peace Corps about keeping your bags close… something’s going to get stolen for sure. It took us an hour to get up that one stretch of road, through a whole lot of campo and not much else. Talk about remote! But still, once we got there, there was a fully functioning town at the end of the road, complete with electricity, a bus station with posted schedules, plenty of stores to buy clothes, plastic housewares, food and what-have-you. Even full-bar coverage of both cell phone providers and at least three internet cafés! The only things El Sauce is lacking, as far as I can tell, is a post office and an ATM, two things I, unfortunately, am unable to live without. Looks like I’ll be making occasional trips out to León city after all…

So thankfully my site isn’t anywhere near Managua, or any of the other tourist centers, for that matter, so thieves are pretty much unheard of up there. What’s the point of robbing other poor people, right? All my stuff made it to El Sauce intact and together, but of course, being the campo, no one can really be trusted to keep a schedule. Not to mention the fact that last Saturday was the national “celebrate liberation from Somoza” day in all the municipal heads, so everyone was drinking and dancing and shooting off bottle rockets and having a generally dandy ol’ time.

We were supposed to meet the head of the INTA office there when we arrived, but of course it was all closed off and he, along with the rest of the INTA staff, was at the party getting borracho, instead of answering their phones. Thankfully, our program de amor lady (whose name is really weird and I’ll probably never remember) knew where Juan José (the INTA director) lived, so we walked over to his house, all our stuff in tow. We got there, sat down, exhausted, and waited for probably 20 or 30 minutes until an INTA truck carrying Juan José and several other people, who may or may not have worked with INTA, arrived. Whether he had forgotten that we were coming or not was hard to determine, but he clearly was not happy about having to do work-related stuff on this day of festivities. So I throw all my stuff in the back of the truck and get in with him and the driver. We head off down the road and Juan José first informs me about the party and then tells me that we need to go drink beers, but that I have to pay for them. 10 dollars, he tells me. 10 dollars! May not sound like much to you, but that’s 200 pesos and nearly a third of all the money I had for that week. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t want to be totally trashed when I arrived at my host family’s house for the first time. So I told him I didn’t have that kind of money and he seemed a little disappointed. Once we got to the town square where the party was (apparently it was over, everything was being packed up as we drove by), Juan José got out, gave directions to the guy driving the truck and bid us farewell. We drove along and chatted for a bit about the area and his job and whatnot (he, also, seemed like he didn’t want to be there), but we managed to make it out to my house, and all things considered, the journey went quite well. I only ended up spending about 17 pesos on travel, when I had been budgeted something like 110, so that was nice. And I got to see a bit of El Sauce, the only city-like location within at least 70 kilometers.

Now a bit about my host family in Los Panales. It turns out my host dad is the secretary of the Cooperative, and on very good terms with Ángel, el presidente, who we went to meet Sunday afternoon. He and his wife, Petrona, live in a three-house compound with a whole host of children and grandchildren. All in all I estimate there are between 10 and 13 people who live in the three houses, not including myself, and they range the gamut from somewhere around 4 little kids under 10, 4 youth between 11 and 15, a 23 year old guy and a woman I’m guessing is around 27 or 28. It’s quite large compared to the family I’m with here in my training town, and I absolutely love it! The kids are always around to entertain and be entertained by, there are always extended family members coming to visit (their compound is right in the middle of the community), and Doña Tona, as she likes to be called, even went out and bought limes to make lime and jamaica fresco with for me when I told her I liked frescos! They’ve got all kinds of trees, flower bushes, a vegetable garden, chickens, dogs, a cat, and plenty of space for more in their patio. Tona wants to plant coffee trees under the big trees she planted 12 years ago (there were no trees or anything on the land when she got there). I told her I’d get my friends up in coffee country to donate to the cause.

Sunday, the day after I arrived in town, I went out to the baseball field with my host brother-in-law Bernardo, who also plays for one of the local teams, to watch the game. It was a team from Los Panales against a team from El Sauce proper. Bernardo was fully immersed in the game, so I went about myself, introducing myself to various people and meeting them in return (and then promptly forgetting their names…). I met a guy who works for the one of the cooperatives in El Sauce, I met several guys who lived in the area and worked the land, including a couple cheles (nica for white people) who apparently grew up there, several teenagers, the local gay, and a drunkard from El Sauce. Several people invited me to come out and play soccer with them the next afternoon. I told them I would come if I could.

Monday morning we had a meeting with INTA at 10. There are only two buses that pass by my house to El Sauce a day. Once at 8am and once again at noon. If I want to get back to my house from the city after noon I have to take a bus to the intersection of the highway to Achuapa and the road that goes off towards Panales and walk the last 2 kilometers or so. So I show up at 8:30 in El Sauce and call Fran up, and low and behold, she’s got a stomach sickness! I make my way over to her place and we call both Witmar and Juan José and leave messages with both of them, but neither call us back. Well, we figure, if they can’t get their act together to call us, then what’s the point trying to meet with them? They probably won’t even be at the office.

So instead we head out to the local laboratory where Fran took her stool sample earlier that day to get analyzed to pick up the results, relay them to the peace corps medical staff, and then head over to the pharmacy to pick up some antibacterial pills and rehydration salts. In the process of all this I meet Fran’s host family, which seems to be equally as large as my own (including one daughter who seems pretty keen to catch my eye), we run into the local small business PC volunteer (who was in a panic trying to get all her stuff together before moving out on Thursday), we meet another local gringo who works for some New York university teaching English classes and doing educational activities up in the mountains, find the local Eskimo ice cream shop, and thoroughly miss our appointment with INTA.

I headed out at 12:15 to catch the 12:30 bus back to Panales, only to find once I got there that the 12:30 bus had left at 12:10 and the next one didn’t leave until 7am the next day. The next bus to Achuapa left at 2, so I decided to wait around for that one and called my host mom to tell her to meet me at the bus station at 2:30. Well, the 2pm bus actually left around 1:45 and got to my bus stop a little after 2, but as I began walking up the 2 km stretch to my house a couple guys on bicycles came along and one of them offered me a ride on the middle bar of his bike. So an hour walk turned into a 10 minute bike ride that only hurt my butt a little, and I not only got home before anyone had even left to meet me at the station, but I also got to meet a couple more teenagers who could end up being part of my youth group! My family was all surprised and seemingly a bit relieved.

So after a bit of relaxing at the house, playing spin-top with the boys and chatting with the girls, an INTA truck comes up the driveway. Oh no! They’re going to be so mad we missed the meeting! But oh yeah, I’m in Nicaragua, this kind of stuff happens all the time. No one seemed all that angry, and I got to meet a couple more program of love ladies and talk with them a bit about how we were going to go about setting up family vegetable gardens in the community, while Witmar joked around with the family. We set up a meeting time for the next afternoon at 5pm, since I was going down there anyways.

Which brings me to Tuesday. Tuesday morning I pretty much just chillaxed and read until after lunch. I had to travel back to my training site on Wednesday, and the easiest way to get to Managua was to take one of the Achuapa-Managua route buses. Only problem with that was that there were only two, once that passed by the 2km bus stop at 4:00am and left El Sauce at 4:45, and another that passed by around 12:30. If I wanted to sleep in Los Panales Tuesday night I would have had to leave my house at 3am and walk 2km in the middle of the night to the bus stop. To my great fortune, however, Fran has an extra bed in her house (which I will probably end up taking advantage of a fair amount in the future, considering how infrequently those busses to Los Panales run), so I decided to head out to the Sauce Tuesday afternoon. After getting out to the bus stop (the driver of the local bus was sick that day) and taking the bus into town I headed over to Fran’s and hung out a while with Evelyn, until Fran and her husband Richard (who has temporarily changed his name to Ricardo, much more suave, ¿verdad?) returned from their little walk around the block. After they came back we went around getting to know the town a little better and met one of Fran’s host sisters (Linda) who runs a hardware store just a block away from her house. It turns out Linda’s husband has a finca out in Los Panales, and he also has a truck, so maybe I’ll be able to bum some rides from him in the future, which would be nice. They also offered the extra bedroom over there to me if my place with the familia grande doesn’t work out, so that was extra nice. We’re gonna go over there sometime and have a barbecue. And on top of all that, Linda has offered to help me find someone to build a trunk for me to keep my valuables in! Don’t want those little kids in my house playing with my expensive computer, now do we? Thank god for confianza and family connections.

The meeting with INTA was interesting, if fairly uneventful. Juan José and Witmar sat there with their cigarettes and whenever Fran mentioned something specific they were quick to blow it up into more general terms. And whenever they started talking specifics, Fran would counter with her desire to just spend the first few months getting to know the area and the people and whatnot. It was kinda funny. I didn’t say much.

That evening Fran and Ricardo went to look at a fridge that the former business volunteer was trying to get rid of and Evelyn managed to convince me to go out with her to meet a couple of her best friends. We took a mototaxi over to one friend’s house and hung out for probably 10 minutes or so, but I was tired and had to wake up before the crack of dawn the next morning so we didn’t stay long. Her friend had a son who looked to be around 5 or 6, and her husband was off in the states working “mojado” in Miami, but I guess things were going alright so far, since she had a pretty nice house all to herself. They’re going to throw me a birthday party there with dance music and a piñata and everything! But they’re evangelical and, from the looks of it, don’t drink, so we’ll have to make sure my birthday party in Panales is hosted by some less morally sound individual. The other friend didn’t make it in time, but we saw her as we were driving back in the mototaxi and got the driver to wait a minute while we introduced ourselves to each other and she apologized profusely for taking so long to put her clothes on. Oh girls…

I went to bed early that night and fell asleep pretty promptly, even with the loud pool hall right across the street. Every time I go to bed I think “man, I could use some ear plugs,” but then I just fall asleep anyways and by the time I wake up again all I hear is the dogs and the roosters. Life could be worse.

So the next day I spent all morning traveling. 3 and a half hours to Managua, another 2 to Masatepe. Once there I was famished, so I walked down to the bakery and had some pineapple bread and Fanta naranja, then headed over to the cyber but the internet all over town was out, alas. No internet, no phones to the states, all that was left was to buy some toothpaste and toilet paper and head back to my pueblo. I got home around 10:45am and, after unpacking the few things I came back with and bucket-bathing myself, I hit the hammock and read the newspaper. Tonight I’m going to see how everyone else’s visits went.

The one thing that struck me most was that the information packet I got about Los Panales said it only had 400 people living in it. As it turns out, there are actually 2 Los Panaleses, and between the two of them there are actually more people living there than in El Sauce city! The other thing is that it is SUPER campo. There’s at least a kilometer between each house (or cluster, as the case may be), and if you want to walk anywhere you’re going to be walking for at least half an hour. So I’m going to have to buy a bike. Or maybe a horse. Bike’s are cheaper, but horses are cooler. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Spread out and small feeling, but several communities to work with, so there is lots of potential. The next few months are going to be fun.