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.