November 18, 2011
Some interesting things have happened these past few weeks. I spent the past two days “corteando cafe”, or picking coffee beans. It's that time of year where all the coffee plants have red, ripe fruit on them and are ready to be picked and processed. But not all the fruit is ready to be picked. So you have to pick only the red ones amongst the greens. Then about 15 days later the green ones have turned red and are ready for picking a second time. Women often help pick coffee, so I went to learn. I got up at 5am, put on my work clothes, and hiked into the campo where Esmeralda's coffee plants are located. I was with some of the brothers of the family, but did my picking along a row next to Idalia, the girlfriend of one of the brothers. She showed me how to pick correctly, leaving the green ones and trying to avoid picking the little stems with the berries (which I found difficult). Each worker ties a wicker basket to their waist and works their way down the rows, picking the fruit. When the basket's full, you pour your pickings into a large sack and start anew. The coffee berries look like grapes, but grow bunched really close together and are really hard, so my fingers very quickly got really sore pinching off hard berries over the span of 8 hours for two days in a row. My fingers today are still sore. What's also painful is standing on a steep incline where the rows are planted, wearing non-supportive rubber boots, and trying to support your weight in the slippery mud while reaching up over your head for the berries at the tops of the plants. My feet were killing me from awkwardly perching on the hillside with my feet slipping and sliding in the mud and inside my boots, sometimes jamming my toes into the tip of the boot. Luckily the plants are really flexible, so it's easy to grab a far away branch and pull it to where you can reach it, or pull down the top of an 8 foot plant to reach the berries at the top branches.
My greatest fear was slipping and falling, not because it would hurt or I would tumble town the hillside, but because I would spill all the berries that I'd spent the last hour slaving over with painful fingers. I felt like I was moving at a snail's pace. Idalia was picking at twice the rate I was, and filled her sack completely the first day. The second day she filled 1 ½ sacks. I only filled my sacks half way. They measure the coffee in “medios”, which is one full 5 gallon bucket full of berries. I picked 2 ½ medios the first day, and 3 the second day. There was one guy who picked 10 medios in one day! Talk about experience. But hey, it was my first time, I didn't expect to be great at it. Workers get paid 45 Cordobas ($2) per medio picked, and 35 Cordobas if food is included in the day. I told my family I didn't expect to get paid, that I just wanted the experience. But it is really nice to get food delivered to you during the workday. We'd be out there for a few hours, picking away, and one of the brothers would show up with his goodie bag of Tupperware and plastic spoons. We'd stop, set down our baskets, and take about 15 minutes to eat before picking the basket back up and going back to work. The second day I was working on a really steep section and didn't want to haul my ass up the hill to the flat part, so I just leaned against the hillside with my heavy basket still attached and enjoyed my meal of gallo pinto with crema and two tortillas. Esmeralda had sent with the food my bottle of lemon-lime Tang that I always drink during meals, which was a nice surprise. Esmeralda's little dog Mimi was with me so she got some creamy tortilla bits while I ate. The more you work, the more berries you pick, the more money you make. They don't get paid hourly, so it's worth it to take short breaks. No mandatory 1 hour lunch here!
Every once and a while I'd have to stop and look around me and take in the scenery. It was a dewy rainy day the first day, so the hills and valleys had a mystical look to them as it rained off and on all day. There were oropendulas and woodpeckers chattering in the trees. Sometimes I felt completely isolated and alone in the wilderness of Nicaragua, but then would hear Idalia two rows over from me picking her pathway of berries. Occasionally one of the other workers from far down the hillside would hoot or whistle their special call to someone else, who would hoot or whistle back to state where they were. I haven't tried hooting at people yet, but it's something that people do here to respond to their name being called. Instead of answering “what?” or “over here”, they simply let out a high pitched “hoo”. It's kinda cool, but I feel weird doing it. So that was my first Nicaraguan coffee picking experience, and I'm not sure if I'd do it again considering how sore I was after, but I'm glad I finally did it and got to enjoy the good parts. The next time you sit down to enjoy a cup of genuine Nicaraguan coffee, just think, it could have come from one of the 5 ½ buckets of coffee picked by yours truly!
Moving on to other news, I have been offered a much better housing situation than the little casita I was considering before. There's some friends that live down the street that I hang out with often. One of the couples have been building this house for the past 3 years, but haven't finished it yet. The husband is a construction worker and so works in the cities, meaning he only comes home about once or twice a month, and the wife, Gloria, doesn't want to live in the house alone with the kids. Since they knew that I was looking to move and am able to pay to finish some construction, they offered that I move into their house. It sounds like they don't really have the money at the time to finish the kitchen in the back, which still needs a cement floor and doors and windows. Plus the bathroom needs the toilet installed. Yes, I said toilet, not latrine. They have already bought a toilet, it just needs to be installed in the bathroom when the cement floor gets put in. The lot already has a water spigot, so I don't have to have that installed, and the wiring for the electricity is bought, it just has to be installed. I think I'd be paying a lot less to finish this newer, bigger house, than the casita that didn't have anything but four walls and a roof. Plus, this new house has a double bed in it already, which they said I could use, so I don't have to buy a bed, which would have cost me at least my full month's pay. It's also completely surrounded with a chain link fence, which gives me more security at night. And there's a front and back yard, with plenty of room to plant a garden and maybe build a chicken coup for my own eggs! Yep, I'm dreaming already of the way it could be. My plan, once Peace Corps clears the house as satisfactory, is to have the construction done during December so I can move into it in January. I will have to have my future pay lent to me ahead of time to afford the work, but it'll be worth it to have my own private house. It will feel a lot different not having a family in the house with me, and maybe a little scary at first, but I'm sure I'll get used to it once I've been there a while.
Last week I officially killed my first chicken. It was Gloria's birthday, and she was making “sopa de gallina con albondigas”, or chicken soup with dumplings. I told her I'd come over to help and wanted to learn to cook. So she had me prepare the chicken, meaning dispatch it and pluck it and everything. I'm not a huge fan of doing the killing part of butchering animals, but I knew it'd come around at some point. We debated on how I should do it, by cutting it's throat, like the men usually do, or by wringing it's neck, like the women usually do. I found it hard to imagine taking its neck in my hands and breaking it, so I chose the knife method. I wasn't given clear instructions, so after it was hung from it's legs from a tree branch, I simply took it's head in my hands and quickly sliced it's head off. The nerves always react terribly when its head is severed or neck is broken, so the poor thing flaps around violently making it look painful, when really it's just the nerves reacting and the animal doesn't feel a thing. As I stood there disturbingly watching it flail around, Gloria's brother came out of the house to see how it went. His first reaction was one of surprise, and chuckled and said something along the lines of “wow, Sarita, you didn't have to cut it's whole head off, just slice the throat”, and so I felt kinda stupid. But he didn't tell me that part! I just figured you'd cut the whole thing right off and call it good. It sounds much more painful to try to just slice the thin little neck. All I could think of was my trip to Tanzania when my friend Jodi cut off a chicken's head so we could eat him for dinner. I saw nothing wrong with it. 
So after the chicken calmed down, Gloria came back out (she had left to hide in the house while I did the dirty work) and helped me process the chicken. We put it in a boiling pot of water to make the feathers easy to pluck out. I did all the plucking myself, then held the carcass over an open flame to singe off all the extra little hairs. Then it get's washed with soap and rinsed well so the butchering can start. She showed me how to cut it into the different pieces. I find it interesting that they don't really see the breast meat as the best part. It just gets cut in half through the bone without thought of keeping those pieces intact. One of the favorite parts of the body is the “piedra”, or the rock, which is the meaty part around the stomach sack that holds all the food bits. Looked gross to me, but when properly cleaned it's a nice piece of meat. I never new. Not something I remember from poultry class at Cal Poly. 
After the chicken was cut into pieces, it was put into the soup first to cook and flavor the broth. Later we added carrots, onion, chaya, which is a green vine vegetable that's really tasty, and malanga, which, like chaya, is similar in texture and flavor to potatoes, but is white and purple in color. Both are delicious. The albondigas are made with corn masa and cuajada, the common cheese here. They're delicious, and cooked separately and added last to the soup so they don't fall apart. I absolutely love this type of soup, and hope to make it for the lucky ones who come to visit me! Incentive!
Gloria's brother often butchers cows for meat in the community, and to make some extra money, so that's an option for me if I ever want to see how that's done here. I honestly don't think I could do the dispatching of a cow, but I'd be interested in seeing how he processes the animal and compare it to how I remember doing it in my meats class at Cal Poly. I'm pretty sure the cuts of meat we obsess over in the States isn't taken with such seriousness here. People simply stop by the house the night before to get their request in for 5 pounds of beef or parts with the bone, they don't know to ask for brisket or a sirloin cut. Same goes with pork. I'm pretty sure people don't request baby back ribs or a pork loin. But as much as I'd like to see how the process is done here, part of me still feels really bad for the cow and the pig. Also, people start the butchering process at 3am so the meat is ready early in the day for selling, and the lazy part of me finds it really hard to get up in the pitch dark, walk down the street and watch a cow get butchered. I'll have to get over that, because it's just one of those things that I need to do while I'm here. I'm an Animal Science major dammit!
So my Thanksgiving plans are to go to Managua and spend dinner with a family that works in the US Embassy in Managua. There are about 20 other volunteers who were invited to spend Turkey day with an American family in the capital, including one of the other volunteers I've met in Jinotega. So we're catching a bus together to go eat Turkey in Nicaragua! I'm so excited for the big meal. Lots of volunteers get together during US holidays to spend time together celebrating and cooking traditional meals, but cooking a turkey amongst volunteers is difficult considering ovens are expensive as well as the gas needed to bake for 4 hours, plus turkeys aren't commonly found among the domestic livestock. So the chance to have a full-on Thanksgiving meal is pretty exciting. At least that's what I'm expecting.
I'm hoping within the next few weeks to have started my first oven projects in my community. Building improved ovens and stoves is something aggies are trained and known for, and I already have 6 families interested in getting theirs done soon. At least three of them want them done and ready for baking for Christmas. The ovens are made out of 55 gallon metal drums and adobe bricks. We make the mortar with horse manure, dirt, sap from sticky plants, and water, mix it with our feet, and build the oven one layer at a time, measuring meticulously the whole way. The outside ovens use less wood and take up less space than the traditional huge domed ovens used here. The stoves are for inside the kitchen, and also use less wood for cooking and funnel the smoke through a chimney to improve the health of the women using them. I'm excited to start my first oven! Four of the families have already bought their metal barrels and bricks, and are in the process of collecting the other materials. I'm hoping to get them started the beginning of December, about the time I'd like to get working on the house too. Lot's to do in December! I haven't started any large projects yet. I've attempted to hold two meetings with houses in different parts of the community to discuss starting community banks. The first meeting had a very small turnout, with only 10 people, but they acted interested and agreed to discussing the idea with their neighbors so I could hold another meeting for a larger group. So far I've heard nothing back from them, so I don't know how much convincing I'm going to have to try to do. The second meeting was even more frustrating because not one person showed up. The woman who's house I wanted to hold the meeting at told me that it was a bad day since everyone was out picking coffee. Then why did you pick this day to hold a meeting?! I wanted to ask her. I have them choose the days for meetings since they know when they best have time to attend. But sometimes they're wrong too. Honestly, overall it's just really hard to organize people. It's one of the most frustrating things I deal with. How am I supposed to spread information if no one shows up to listen?
November 21, 2011
Today I'm recovering from the past two days of being sick in bed. It started last Saturday with terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea. I had to cancel my English class for the day I felt so bad. I went to bed and woke up later in the evening with a fever and chills. I could barely sleep that night with all the sweating and shivering, not to mention the frequent outings to the latrine in the middle of the night. The next day I felt no better, but decided not to call the med office since it was Sunday, and they would no doubt ask me to send a fecal sample to the laboratory (which is 2 hours away in Jinotega), and the lab's not open on weekends. So I slept through another sick night, which was luckily way better than the first night since the fever had lifted by then. I called the med office this morning, and based on my symptoms the doctor told me it sounds like I have a bacterial infection. Luckily I already had the pills needed to take for a bacterial infection from the last time I had one way back during training. So the symptoms are diminishing and I think I'll be fine for my trip to Managua for Thanksgiving on Thursday. I would hate for a bacterial infection to ruin my chance at a traditional Thanksgiving meal!
Even though I had a good reason to, I felt bad for canceling my English class. Last week was the first class I had given in 3 weeks since I was gone for the Spanish language workshop, so only 4 people showed up to class last week. I hope my students don't think I've stopped giving classes. It's just that sometimes I have to leave town on weekends for PC stuff. The class I gave last week was about numbers. I taught zero through twenty, then one hundred, one thousand, and one million. To test them, I wrote really big numbers on the board, like 2,457,801, and had them write out the spelling in English (two million four hundred fifty seven thousand eight hundred one). After a few tries, I realized that the younger kids didn't even know how to say that number in Spanish, since they were only in 3rd grade. So that lesson partly failed. I decided to move on to just saying their phone numbers, by having one student tell another student their phone number in English and that student would write it on the board. That went better. My plan for this past Saturday was to continue working with numbers, but then I got sick. And I'm not sure if I'll be back in time this coming Saturday to have class, so that will further delay classes. It's hard to keep class attendance up when I'm not even there myself sometimes.
November 23, 2011
Yesterday was super interesting. First of all, I have to update that my bacterial infection is gone, even though I'm still taking pills for it, but last night I came down with a cold, so now I'll be coughing all during Thanksgiving dinner in Managua instead of running back and forth to the bathroom. Lame. I hope I don't gross people out. So yesterday, I went over to Gloria's house for an invitation to eat pork, but when I got there she hadn't even left the house to buy the meat yet. So I went with her to the house where they were butchering the hog. Turns out when we got there that they had just killed it and were about to start cutting it apart. So I got to watch the whole process. It was really interesting. I felt stupid for not bringing my camera for the occasion. But I know there will be more pigs to be butchered in the future and am interested in helping out next time. They sell the sections of meat by the pound, and I had my eye on the ribs and the “Easter ham” rump section. Although I'm pretty sure I could never bake myself anything similar to a Honeybaked ham. I don't have a spiral cutter either. But at least I know that fresh meat is never too far away. Gloria bought some bone pieces from the spine (bone sections go for 20 Cordobas a pound, less than $1, the meatier sections are about 45 Cordobas a pound). So we had a super tasty pork vertebrae dinner with rice and yuca. It was so good.
Today I'm hanging out in Jinotega, catching up on some internet time (irritatingly trying to figure out what happened to my blog!), and will be heading into Managua tomorrow on the 6am bus. After spending Thanksgiving with an Embassy family and about 20 other volunteers, I'll be heading to the Peace Corps office on Friday to see if I can get a medical appointment to help me with this dry cough I've had since the last time I got sick a month ago. Then I'm heading to the Embassy to attend a panel presentation by three speakers discussing their careers. One of them was a volunteer in Peru and now works for USAID. Hopefully that will be interesting.
Well, I think that's an earful for now. Everyone have a great Thanksgiving! Love and miss you all!
~Sarita~
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