January 19, 2012
House update: the two windows in the kitchen have been installed, and the plumbing in the bathroom is underway. The problem is the water pressure. I’ve been told it’s too weak to actually allow the toilet to flush, so I may be flushing it with buckets of water, which is do-able. A lot of people with actual toilets (not latrines) use buckets to flush. I’m just glad I can actually flush it away and don’t have to smell a huge hole full of shit for the rest of my service. The electricity still has to be installed, which is becoming more of an issue than I originally thought. Turns out they want to hire a guy to do it, which means they have to pay him, and he has to make time to come do it, when I originally thought the owner was going to do the work. So that’s probably going to slow things down even more. At this point I’m hoping to be able to move at the beginning of February. And the updated rental agreement (which hasn’t been signed yet) is that the owners want to move into the house by Christmas this year, which means I actually only have 10 months in the main house. But they’re going to build an addition in the backyard that I will move into, with my own bathroom and private room, so that’s another thing I have to wait to get finished. To save my ass I’ve written in the contract that I have the right to remain in the main house until the addition is complete and safety checked by Peace Corps, just to ensure I’m stuck without a place to live. Fingers crossed!
Last week Paul and I visited with another Ag volunteer that lives about an hour away who’s ending his service in July. He had us over to pick out the furniture we’d like to take when he’s gone, since Paul and I are both moving into our own places soon and don’t have any furniture. I got some Tupperware and random bowls for the kitchen, and a whole bunch of books. We’ll go back to his site in May or so to pick up the furniture. Hopefully there’s no fighting over the good stuff!
So the newest recipe I've made with Giovania is mac'n'cheese! I had bought some Mozzarella cheese that I found in Jinotega (I’ve never seen cheddar here, unfortunately), and it turned out really good! She had some really beautiful ripe tomatoes that I sliced and added too. My plan is to make a mac’n’cheese dinner for Esmeralda and her family when I move out to say thank you for housing me for the past 6 months. A little taste of something from home to share with them. I just have to find some more good cheese options when I go into town again, plus, I’d love to get some bacon if I can afford it and add that too. Should be delicious!
This past weekend I did a tech exchange with an environment volunteer who lives in the department of Leon (where it’s hot!). She’s doing an improved stove project, making about 30 total during the month of January, which means she does multiple stoves a day. I had learned to make a stove during training, but it’s pretty confusing sometimes with the specific measurements, so I went to her site to get a refresher course. We started the stove at about 9am and didn’t finish until almost 3pm, it took so long! She said she’s done stoves in a couple hours by herself before, but it really depends on the family who may or may not help you build it and help prepare the supplies beforehand. Well, our help consisted of two 2nd graders, and we mixed all the dirt for the mud ourselves, which takes time, so it was no surprise that it took all day to do it. But I learned how to make a stove again and hope to do a stove project in my community at some point. There are people here who have already told me they want one, but I have to finish this current oven project I’m working on before I can do the stoves. Since the projects receive money from Peace Corps, we can only do one project at a time. I have made 3 ovens so far and have 7 more families waiting for their money so they can buy supplies for their ovens. Hopefully I can get them all done in February so I can start another project soon.
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| Improved stove in progress |
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| Finished stove, minus the chimney |
Another idea I have is to try to plant Marango trees (also called Moringa, or known in English as: Drumstick tree, (Horse)radish tree, Mother’s best friend, and West Indian ben), which is a super awesome medicinal plant that grows really well and can be used for many things besides nutrition. It’s full of vitamins and is really good to add to diets of young children and women who are nursing. Gram for gram, Marango leaves have 7 times the vitamin C in an orange, 4 times the vitamin A in carrots, 4 times the calcium in milk, 3 times the potassium in bananas, and 2 times the protein in yogurt! Another great thing is that this tree grows in most all countries where malnutrition is a problem (Mexico, Central/South America, Africa, Asia, Pacific Islands). It apparently doesn’t grow in North America above Mexico, sorry guys. Giovania actually approached me about this since she read about it in my cookbook. I got my hands on another copy of the PC cookbook, so I’m going to give it to her so she doesn’t have to photocopy any of the recipes she’s interested in, she can just have the whole thing!
This last weekend I also made a side trip to a town called El Sauce (pronounced “el sow-say”), in the department of Leon. Every year they have their fiestas patronales (every town has it’s own party every year to celebrate whatever saint they’re affiliated with), where tens of thousands of people from all over Central America come to celebrate El Señor de Esquipula. What I’ve heard is (and I’m totally butchering this story, please look it up if you want the complete facts!) that in the 1700’s a statue of a black Jesus was touring through Central America (I think from a European country originally) and stopped in El Sauce. Later a representative was sent to retrieve the statue but died of cholera on his journey. So a 2nd man was sent to get the statue, and he too died on the journey. When the 3rd person sent to retrieve the statue also died, they decided it was meant to stay in El Sauce, so it’s been there ever since. I wanted to see what this was all about, so after making the stove I took a trip to El Sauce. I was traveling by myself and had never been there before, but everything worked out fine and everyone was really helpful when I asked directions. I feel remarkably safe and comfortable traveling alone in this country. I’m always super cautious with my bags and make sure to keep my important stuff in a bag in front of my chest so I can always see it and cover it, and I recently started putting a little lock on the pulls to my backpack which I think helps a lot since I’ve twice now had people try to get into my backpack while it was on me. When you’re in a crowded situation with your backpack on you really have no say in what people do to it behind you. That’s why I try to keep the important stuff in front of me.
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| Black Jesus in the Cathedral |
So anyways, back to El Sauce. I met up with Fatima, my neighbor, at the Cathedral during the Saturday night mass. The church was so crowded! Probably over a thousand people crammed in that beautiful building. It was too full to get close to the front to get a good picture of the black Jesus statue, but I got one blurry one. There were lines and lines of people at confession, lots of singing, lots of kids whining and crying, lots of people pushing and shoving to get in and out of the hot building, and lots of tired people sitting on the ground who didn’t get seats. That was me. I stood for about an hour, but eventually ended up sitting down with people standing all around me. I still had my two bags with me so I was keeping a close eye on my stuff too. It was interesting to see the church and the festivities, but church just isn’t really my thing, especially when it’s all in Spanish, it’s even harder to follow. That night we stayed in this closed-in patio with lots of big trees to hang hammocks. Fatima brought an extra one for me so I slept outside under the stars in a hammock that night. It actually got kinda cold that night, which was surprising since Leon is always so hot. Luckily I had recently bought a new sweatshirt in Jinotega so I slept in that.
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| View of volcano on the way to El Sauce |
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| View from the bus leaving El Sauce, Leon |
The next day I decided not to stick around since it was still so crowded and I had to find my way back to Jinotega. I took a 7am bus out of El Sauce that was crammed to the gills, which dropped me off at the main highway where I waited for a passing bus to Matagalpa. Matagalpa is the next stop to Jinotega from that direction. But instead of heading back to Jinotega right away, I walked into town and went to a couple of grocery stores. Matagalpa is a really cool town that has some special food items you can’t find in Jinotega, so I went on a little shopping spree and bought some brown rice, green split peas (to make a soup someday), some dried oregano, and a packet of cream of asparagus soup mix. Just some variety I can’t get in Jinotega. Next time I’m going to buy some lentils since those are plentiful in Matagalpa too. I have a ton of really yummy-sounding recipes that call for things like lentils, garbanzo beans, and special spices, so I’ve been on the lookout.
Bayardo, the Ag sector director, is coming up to my site this Tuesday to do my house check. PC has to safety check all new houses before volunteers can move from their home-stay situations, so since my house is almost finished he's coming up this week to see my house and Paul's new house, since he's moving into his own place too. My house is still moving along slowly. The plumbing for the bathroom is installed minus the toilet itself, the outside bathroom door needs to be installed as well as the outside door to the kitchen, and the electricity still isn't installed either. February is creeping on up, and I sure hope I don't have to continue paying rent to my host family in February. It's getting down to the wire now.
The photos I've been taking for local families have kind of been a pain in the ass, but the photocopy place finally fixed their color printer, so I've been able to print all the pictures that people had paid me for over the past two months. So now that I'm all caught up, of course people continue to ask me to take pictures for them. I've decided that there's a limit to how many I'll take per family, and try to explain to them that it gets inconvenient when I have to take time out of my day in Jinotega running errands for myself to print out a whole bunch of pictures. I've told them that they can have as many pictures they want for free if they can buy a memory stick that I can put all the pictures on, then they can print out the ones they want themselves. But of course no one wants to or is able to buy a memory stick if they know I can just do it for them. Of course. But it takes over an hour sometimes waiting for them all to print out, and sometimes I have to re-do them since the printer sometimes goofs up. So I've explained that I can only print two pages per family, which fits 8 photos. Yesterday I went to this woman's house who wanted photos of her baby girl taken with all the empty instant milk containers she's finished throughout her babyhood. So we stacked them all into this big pyramid against the wall and took pictures of her in front of them. They were pretty cute, and the baby was very well behaved. But inevitably the rest of the kids in the family start asking for their own pictures, saying they only want one, just one more! Then the next kid comes out in her finest dress asking for her picture too. It's an endless cycle. I show up for one subject and they end up asking for 5 more. So I told her, sure I can take pictures of the other daughters too, but overall you have to pick only 8 photos total. So if I take 10 pictures or 100 pictures, she can only pick 8. The hard thing for them is picking which ones. If I take 10 pictures of the same scene, trying to get the one good one where the baby's smiling or looking cutest, they always want all of them. So I try to explain that they have to choose the best one, that they can't have every single picture that I took. That way I keep the numbers down and things don't get out of hand. Luckily it worked out pretty well this time.
Well, thanks everyone who's reading this blog and tells me they find it interesting. Don't forget to send me an e-mail every so often to update me on your lives back in the good ol' U.S. of A. No news is boring news!
Love and miss you all.
~Sarita~
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