The Sauce Thickens

Here I am, not even a month into service, in my cozy little casinera north-west of El Sauce, León, and I’m happy to say that things are going very well for me so far. I have gotten used to the pace of life down here, and it is great to feel like you’re accomplishing things and getting started on long-term visions so soon in the game, even though on an average day I do no more than three or four hours of real work. The concept of “work” has changed significantly for me as well. Good advice from current volunteers has gotten me scheduling only one item of business per day, and it’s been great. Not only am I feeling like I’m getting things done, having meetings with important collaborators, going to various local social functions and getting buddy-buddy with the local producers, doing my best to ask around and find the women’s group and local semi-government that supposedly exist, and working with parents and students to put together the vegetable garden at the local primary school, but I still have hours and hours of free time during the day, in which to read, write, play with the kids, and even watch the occasional telenovela or Dragonball Z episode with my host chavalos.

One thing that I find quite interesting is that despite my original plan and the encouragement of fellow volunteers to spend the first three months just getting to know the area, the people, the potential projects, et cetera, I have already surpassed that goal and then some. I’ve met lots of people, yes, and I hope to meet more, especially in the area of women, who I’m supposed to be working with on patio management and food processing techniques, but I’ve met lots of producers, made friends with several of the more important members of the sesame seed co-op, and, probably most concretely, I’ve gotten together a youth group made up of fifth and sixth grades in the primary school, had a meeting and begun work on the vegetable garden. Granted, the school parents had already decided to make the vegetable garden and, in all honesty, they are the ones doing most of the work to get it together. However, me coming along and organizing the kids will be a great help in maintaining the garden, as well as giving me a chance to build relationships with them and teach them about everything from garden creation and maintenance to nutritional values, commercialization and added-value food processing techniques. Hooray for youth groups!

If this one goes well (which I’m sure it will), I plan on starting another youth group at the secondary school in Las Palmas, though probably not until the end of the rainy season, at which point the opportunities to do agriculture-related activities will drop dramatically. That’s ok though, I’m looking forward to just playing games, teaching them how to dance, maybe even sing and read music. I guess it all really depends on what they want.

The one area that’s lacking my attention at this point is the women. At times I feel like it’s almost insurmountable. When working with the moms on the garden, they barely talk to me, and answer my questions and comments with very short and quiet replies. I know that the more time I spend with them the more open they will be, and in order to really build confianza I have to go out and meet them at their own houses and spend time shooting the shit with them, preferably while the male is out of the house. Several times when I’ve been at someone’s house I’ve wanted to talk to the woman but she always bows out of the room when the male sits down, and I fall into the SOP of men chatting with men, women chatting with women.

They emphasize the difficulties for female volunteers working with men in the community, but they never really talk about male volunteers working with women, which seems strange. The program itself is designed around working with women in the patio, and youth in the schools and patios. A female volunteer really doesn’t have to work with men if she doesn’t want to, and from the stated goals and objectives of the PC Nicaragua Ag program, they really shouldn’t be working with men anyways. Maybe give the occasional charla on contour lines and live-/dead-barriers, organic fertilizer and other methods to curb soil erosion and other environmentally nasty issues, but the regular work, family and school vegetable gardens, value-added food processing, patio management, all revolves around the “ama de casa,” the doña. I’m finding the most challenging part of my job is gaining confianza with the women. If there already is a groupo de mujeres like my documents purport, this would be very helpful in overcoming this challenge for me, as it seems building confianza with women around here is easier done in a group setting than individually, as they have a chance to talk behind my back right in front of me, getting the whole talking-behind-my-back step out of the way immediately. But if it doesn’t exist, and Peace Corps expects me to organize one myself, I may be up a bit of a creek…

But honestly, if I have two active youth groups and a sesame seed cooperative that I’m working with on a regular basis, does that not seem like enough to keep myself busy? If I do end up building an oven here at my host mom’s house I will invite women across the land to come see us build it and learn about it’s great benefits, and maybe more will want one. Any project that I do that may be a benefit to the women I will invite them to, but I just can’t see myself organizing a group of women around anything from scratch right now, I just don’t think I have enough capacity to do that without a female counterpart who wants to help—which I don’t have. The only female counterpart listed in my information is the treasurer of the sesame seed co-op. Sure, I’ll talk to her about some ideas eventually, but she might already be too busy with keeping her house and the house of the co-op to do any outside organizing. I guess that remains to be seen.

Anyways, enough complaining about women. Three weeks in and I’m getting stuff done, that’s all that matters to me. I’m surpassing expectations, as far as I see it, and by the end of these three months I’ll not only have a thriving vegetable garden at the school, but I will have a functioning youth group who already know the benefits of vegetables, have begun learning rudimentary English and know how to salsa. With any luck I’ll have come across some added-value techniques for sesame seeds that I’ll be able to teach to the co-op members, and maybe I’ll even get that older kids youth group started down the road. Eat your heart out, Peace Corps.

--------
UPDATE!

My host mom just got back from a six hour long meeting with the alcaldia (municipal mayor’s office) about empowering women, and after talking with her a bit I have found out that there is in fact no grupo de mujeres, but she seems somewhat committed to at least putting an organizing meeting together and getting things started. Small at first, of course, but hopefully if we can get our act together (read: if I can get them to want to put effort in) we can organize an official bono productivo and get some funding from the government, maybe to build ovens or some other way to make value-added products. It is a long road to glory, isn’t it?