Neighbors!

Here is our esteemed neighbor Samurai. He frequently makes unannounced house visits, often making it all the way to the kitchen before he is noticed.



And his owner Debra Francesca, looking adorable as always

Birthdays!

Yesterday was our host father's birthday!
Here is a photo of him after he blew out the matches (we didn't have candles), he backed up quickly as to not have his face smashed into the cake.

And here is the birthday song that we sing here in Nicaragua, called Las Mañanitas

Estas son las mañanitas que cantaba el rey David
Hoy por ser día de tu santo te las cantamos aquí.
Despierta mi bien despierta
Mira que ya amaneció
Ya los pajaritos cantan
La luna ya se metió.

¡Qué linda está la mañana en que vengo a saludarte
Venimos todos con gusto y placer a felicitarte!
El día en que tú naciste, nacieron todas las flores
Ya viene amaneciendo ya la luz del dia nos dió.
Levantarte de la mañana, mira que ya amaneció.
Y En la pila del bautismo cantaron los ruiseñores.
Ya viene amaneciendo ya la luz del dia nos dió.
Levantarte de la mañana, mira que ya amaneció.

Wacky good times

I just rediscovered these photos from when Sara visited. We found some shells on the beach, brought them back to our house, and then Sara discovered you could attach them to various face parts. Enjoy the hilarity.

Sara first discovering the eye placement


Us doing the nose modelling together


Dylan looking especially indifferent

Scary Monsters!

Due to the warm climate of this region, bugs have had the ability to grow large, sometimes too large...
This post is just a short trip into our buggy experience.
We don't have pictures of every encounter, like when I took a shower with a cockroach (didn't notice until the end) or when Dylan got a beetle stuck between his toes, but we do have some other good ones.

Many things we didn't notice about the natural setting here until the North Branch Nature Center brigade came and just pointed so much out. This Rhinoceros beetle was on a fence that we walk by every day. It was huuuuge. Our bus drivers decided to pick it up and let it crawl on their hands, then pass it around before replacing it on the fence. Wacky.


This chichara (cicada) somehow made its way into our room and on one of our walls. They too are huge here! With this upgrade in size comes an upgrade in their grating volume. When more than one chicharas are sounding off it can feel almost deafening, our host father tells us its his music in the countryside – and it drives him crazy.



The most frightening bug we have encountered was this rather large spider at the library. Dylan was just mopping up after our cooking class, when he discovered that he had disturbed this monster. It looks like she is carrying a sack of eggs (at least I hope so...), she also looks like she is some weird mix between spider and turtle... By the way, she was really huge.




P.S. The Nicaraguans call this spider Pica Caballo, which means Horse Biter...

Buñuelos

Remember when we ate buñuelos as an Ash Wednesday food? Well, when our most recent brigades came, we had a buñuelo making workshop.
The process:
1. Peel like A TON of yucca
2. Now shred that shit.
3. Mix in egg, cuajada, maizena, and salt
4. Now mush that stuff together!
5. Form into balls and drop into hot oil
6. Wait until evenly browned
7. Eat your tasty creation

Note: They are even tastier when soaked in this sweet sugary syrup, which is sugar cane juice mixed with bright pink dye. YUM.

Here is it being mixed together (se fue la luz, entonces, una candela)


Here they are being thrown into the hot oil.


Here they are frying away


Look at 'em go!

Nac nac, nacatamales!

While my good friend Sara was here visiting us, she was set on trying Nacatamales (apparently Wikipedia informed her that they were delicious). I told Doña Aracely about Sara's dream, and she set out to find us some nacatamales para probando. Well, she ran into a couple of problems, one being that she couldn't find any that didn't use pork lard (she is convinced it is like the worse thing for your heart), and number two, no one was making them because they were all vacationing (in was Semana Santa). So what is the only solution? Making them ourselves! Thus the nacatamale tutorial began!

Nacatamales consist of maiza, which is like corn flour mixed with water, a piece of chicken, a red sauce made from achote, tomatoes, potatoes, and rice. After all of these ingredients are combined, the banana leave that you made it on is rolled up with tin foil, then tied all together. After that, they are put into boiling water for two hours. Then, when morning comes, you warm them up again and eat them, because believe it or not, nacatamales are a breakfast food!

Here are Dylan and Sara adding various ingredients to their Nacatamales




Doña Aracely showing us how to wrap them up


All of the completed and wrapped nacatamales

Something Bird Watchers Do Sometimes

Something bird watchers do sometimes is put little metal bands around birds' legs. They use them to track migratory patterns, among other things, and maybe you already knew that, but did you know how they do it?
They trap the them. In nets. The birds.
If you're just finding out for the first time, as I was a few weeks ago, you might be thinking something like 'huh' or 'LOL WUT', but apparently it's totally okay. They catch the birds in nets, and then put them in bags, and then take a bunch of measurements, and then set them free. And it's fine with the birds- well, if not with the caught birds, with the bird population as a whole, I guess.

Anyway, the nets are these long ones, called 'mist nets', that they set up in a few different places wherever they are tagging birds. In El Jaguar they were mostly set up on the edge of the cloud forest.

After removing the birds from the mist nets, bird-banders take them to their base-camp table and take a slew of measurements that tell them all kinds of things. They record everything, and send all of their data to some database somewhere. If a bird bander catches a bird that has already been banded the 2 sets of data can confirm and suggest theories about migration patterns.

One of the things that's cool about the process is how well you actually get to see (and photograph) the birds. You can even hold them, and set them free (somebody has to).

La Nebliselva del Jaguar

The week before this last one, Planting Hope hosted two different brigades based out of Vermont, a busy and somewhat stressful first. One brigade was a service-learning group from Stowe and the other, with which I spent almost all of the week, consisted of 'naturalistas' based out of North Branch Nature Center, near Montpelier. Just a few days after they arrived here in San Ramón, we took a trip north to El Jaguar (ha-wAhr), near Jinotega, where we stayed on a sustainable coffee farm and nature reserve.
Entering El Jaguar, each step is a leap backward in time. Our camion, having gotten lost twice on the way and worrying over the ride south in the dark, lets us out a thirty minute walk from the core of the actual farm, and we trudge through mud and past coffee fields before arriving. Cresting the first hill and entering the reserve is cinematic. Nicaragua is dotted by large areas of humid and fecund nebliselva, or cloud forest, highly elevated enough that they penetrate into cloud and pull water down into the soil. Jinotega is misty at every time but midday, and, compared to Matagalpa, very cold.

El Jaguar is full of rare and beautiful species of birds, both migratory and resident, and grows lush with different tree types. Pumas exist here, but are rarely seen; epiphytes and bromeliads, plants that often grow on and out of other plants, including many orchids, too, and they are ubiquitous. Monkeys used to live here, probably howlers, too. But, during the Contra War, which was fought primarily in the North, guerillas (not gorillas, as our bemused guide assured me) killed them for food, and they have since died out.

The coffee grown in El Jaguar is only partially shade grown, because of the lower temperature and exposure to direct sunlight that accompany being situated inside of a cloud. It therefore does not qualify as 'shade grown' or 'bird-friendly' (though it's located in the middle of a bird reserve). Lack of local organic chicken shit to use as fertilizer also keeps them from being certifiable as 'organic', though they are certainly very 'sustainable', the one certification they qualify for, and their fields, in non-certifiable reality, are both polycultural and bird friendly.
The frustrations felt by the farmers of El Jaguar as they try to garner these labels (with which come increased consumption and the power to charge higher price) highlights the essential laziness of using binary systems of certification to ensure responsible spending. The only effective and all-inclusive way of buying responsibly (both ecologically and socially) is to learn about what is being consumed. The truly informed buyer is able to decide what is sustainable and how to spend his money, and is not misled into believing that the coffee grown under planted shade in Managua is not, for that reason alone, better than coffee grown under a cloud's shade in Jinotega. In the coming years expect the internet to make truly informed consumption more and more easy.
Anyway, a tour of the coffee farm starts in the coffee nursery (cuter than a human nursery) where beans are planted in little rows.

At some point, the plants are moved into little plastic bags where they grow big and strong.

Then, they are moved into the regular coffee fields, where they don't grow coffee beans for a few years. After a few more years, they must be trimmed down, and they sprout beans again in a few years; this (sentence's) process is repeated almost indefinitely, until the plant will no longer work, which has not yet happened to any plants in El Jaguar.

To prevent the growth of weeds the ground is covered with tons of one tiny plant. In some places in El Jaguar, they use a relative of the peanut plant that only works in conjunction with coffee in the cloud forest ecosystem.
More on El Jaguar (birds!) later.

Easter Traditions

Now for a couple of posts about making things, you know, hands on experience...

As you might have already seen, Easter was a pretty big deal here, but for Dylan and me it passed without many of the traditions we are used to. Well, Beth had a remedy for that, her mother brought down some packets of egg dye, and about a week after Easter, with some of our neighbor children we dyed eggs! Beth has done this a few times in the years past with them, so they knew what was up. Like American children they tipped the cups of dye over, dyed their fingers many different colors, couldn't quite wait until the eggs were dry to put the stickers on, and incessantly checked on the eggs soaking in the dye to see if they were done yet. Unlike American children, they ate most of their eggs in about 30 minutes of finishing dyeing them, with remarks about how delicious eggs were. Let that be a lesson kids, eat your hard boiled eggs!

Here is me instructing a tutorial on how to get stripes.


The young students putting it into practice.


The egg I made, combining crayon, a brown egg, and purple dye.


Dylan, pretending the egg holder is his monocle.


And Ezra showing us his egg, which turned out to have Spider Man colored lines underneath the shell. Disclaimer, because he is an American kid, he refused to eat his egg.

Points in Nicaragua History: The US occupation

From 1909 to 1933 the United States occupied Nicaragua, with our ever-famous marines.
The US's interests in Nicaragua lied in their abundant natural resources and the very convenient location for a Atlantic-Pacific canal (through the San Juan River into Lake Nicaragua, and then a small length of land left until the Pacific Ocean).


As you might also know, the US is really great at finding reasons to occupy a country. Our reason this time was that on November 17, 1909 two Americans were executed under the orders of President Zelaya (they had confessed to having laid a mine in the San Juan River with the intention of blowing up the Diamante, but whatever). Zelaya was also very against foreign access to Nicaraguan natural resources. Through US pressure Zelaya resigned later that year, replaced by Adolfo Díaz, who essentially became a figurehead for the US government.
(A photo of the dapper Zelaya)


And so began the US occupation, which only had a nine month break beginning in 1925, but the Marines came back after a little scuffle between the conservatives and liberals. In 1914 the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty was signed, which gave the US control over the proposed canal (which never happened, obviously).

From 1927 to 1933 General, and beloved national icon, Augusto César Sandino led a guerrilla war against the regime, but his main goal and purpose of the war was to evict foreign influence and interference in Nicaraguan political affairs. In 1933 the Americans left due to the Great Depression and also to the incredible success of Sandino's guerrilla war. But, if you thought the Americans would leave that easily, you would be wrong. For assurance, they created the National Guard, a military and police force trained by the Marines and left Anastasio Somoza García (a grand friend and supporter of the US and its policy) in charge.

Here is Sandino with Somoza, after they had just signed the peace agreement ending the guerrilla war. On February 21, 1934 only days after the peace agreement Somoza ordered the assassination of this national hero, and soon after systematically sought out and killed his followers and army.

Pera pears

It is pear season folks! The pear trees here bear these vibrant fuchsia flowers, and then later these pink pears. But, much to Dylan and my surprise, these are not the pears we are familiar with. The pears are lighter, with a thin skin and spongy flesh, and a flowery flavor. The seeds (pit?) are also huge, making the pears more seed than pear.

Here is a picture of a ripe “pera” and an unripe one (which is apparently delicious with salt – the Nicaraguan precedent when it comes to unripe fruit).


Here I am munching down on a delicious ripe pear directly from the pear tree outside our bedroom window.

It's a boy! And another boy! And a girl!

Good news everyone! Our host-brother has two dogs, Cadir and Tummy (pronounced Toomy), well turns out Cadir has fathered a litter of Tummy's puppies. There are three of them and their eyes are not even open yet. Look how cute they are!


Look at them nursing and just being their cute little blind selves.



And the proud Papa, Cadir

Where Else Have We Been?

On the 20th of March, my brother Duncan and his girlfriend Katy, arrived in Managua for a ten day visit. Ciara and I took an early bus to enjoy the very swank Best Western across from the airport that convenience (truly, a lack thereof) dictated we spend the night in. At eight, we retrieved
Duncan and Katy from the airport and crossed the highway back to the hotel. We ate there- Ciara and I split the imitation pizza.
The next day, Sunday, we caught a taxi and a bus to the city of León in the Northwest of Nicaragua. We dropped our ample baggage off at the very backpacker-y hostel Bigfoot, which could have been León's response to The Bearded Monkey, but with a foot shaped pool and a much better tended bar, and set off in search of food. Somehow, almost every restaurant we looked for was closed because it was Sunday, though one that we were seated in had just run out of food. In looking, we stumbled upon a skating competition set up on a basketball court. Finally we found a pizza place, which got closer to the real thing, at least, and devoured a pizza. We ate dinner across the street from Bigfoot at Vía Vía, a hostel with a great menu of typical food from nearby countries.



The skate park in León.



Monday, we ate at a restaurant attached to Bigfoot, in which Ciara enjoyed a bagel almost too much, and contracted a taxi to take us to the nearby beach-town Las Peñitas, where we stayed at the high class, but reasonably priced Barco de Oro. Of Las Peñitas, no apparent aspect can escape absorbing and radiating the immense heat beating down. León was hot, but here the sand was scalding, the ocean like a warm bath, and the sweat a stream. Even the showers, sometimes unpleasantly cold in Matagalpa, in Las Peñitas, when the cold would have been most welcomed, were terribly warm. The only shelter was Duncan and Katy's air-conditioned room. That said, the town and the beach were very beautiful, a nature reserve within was in walking distance (but remained, regrettably, unexplored), and our hotel and its restaurant were great.



The beach at Las Peñitas.




On Tuesday we returned to León and made the long, hot, and burdened walk from the bus station to Hostel Lazybones, which we had be seeing fliers for everywhere and which looked promising. The hotel was opened fairly recently, offered us two nice rooms in a secluded upstairs area, and had a nice, big pool. We dined first at a Comedor (sort of like a buffet), which was cheap and fun, walked around a bunch, bought a ton of pastries, and dined a second time at the Restaurant Sacuanjoche, which had terrible service, but great food.




One of the numerous beautiful cathedrals in León.



The next day we got up and broke fast early, and took a taxi to the bus station. Duncan, Katy, and I took a bus to the scorching Chinandega, Nicaragua's hottest city, if you believe everyone we have talked to about our trip, and from there a bus that crawled up North to Jiquilillo. For unclear reasons, we had to check into our hotel there before 1:30, and we made it just in time. Ciara took a bus South to spend some unfortunate time in Managua, picked up our friend Sara from the airport, took a bus up to Chinandega and met us at 6:30, just as dinner was served.
Hotel Rancho Esperanza, where we stayed, is a very cool set of cabañas located a convenient two minute walk from a beautiful beach. The thatch-roofed cabins have sand floors, and the hotel offers three pretty tasty meals a day. It's also the center for a number of community service projects, many of which were run by its owner Nate, who seemed like he should have been cool, but was actually quite unfriendly. Outside of that, and the surprisingly high price at checkout, staying there was a great experience. The beach was great, and pleasantly cold, and you could see fishermen as they motored out for the night every day around dinner time. Duncan got a serious sun burn, and we all bonded with other travelers of Nicaragua.



One of the cabañas.











Fishers heading out for the night.



Friday we took the long trip home to San Ramón, first from Jiquilillo to Chinandega, then from one part of Chinandega to another, then to León, then to Matagalpa, across Matagalpa, and finally home on a packed bus. We helped Duncan and Katy check in at their hotel, up a steep hill, and got Sara settled in our house. On Sunday we went back into Matagalpa, walked around, and ate at Comedor Oasis. And at night we went to our friend-boss Beth's house to paint her new pool. Monday morning Katy rode our host family's horse, and Sara, Ciara, and I went to teach swim lessons. In the afternoon, in an unfortunate rush, we got Duncan and Katy onto a crowded bus to Managua, so that they could spend the night before their early flight home.
Tuesday and Wednesday we spent bumming around San Ramón, eating pastries, and enjoying Beth's new pool. Thursday morning we went to El Chile, and came back with a mountain of woven goods. Good Friday at midday we sent Sara back to Managua via taxi. Since then, we've just been chillin' and watchin' the Easter processions rollin' by.