Relativity

When one thinks of revolutionary ideas, Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time is one that stands out. Who could have believed that time could be experienced differently depending on one’s location, one’s speed, one’s position?
The relativity of time, now an acknowledged scientific truth, appears to me to be most apparent during international travel. So much so in fact, that I am beginning to think that much of my experience this year is a lesson in the relativity of time; relativity due to cultural norms, due to physical distances, due to external circumstances.
Much of the discomfort that I have felt this last month has been related to the passage of time. I wake up at 6, everyone else has been up since 4. I go to sit in the kitchen, but what is to be done? The tortillas are made, the rice is cooking, the clothes are washed. Everyone is just sitting in the kitchen. I sit, unsure how to just be, and not be doing something. After a long walk, I return to the house with Erick and Byron. I enter my room, then follow them into the sala, where we just sit down and relax, with nothing pressing to do.
I came to this realization this afternoon, on the bus ride back from my day’s excursion. I left El Roblar at 9 a.m. in order to get to an afternoon (time unspecified) appointment at the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives office in San Ramon. Though San Ramon is only an hour and a half away (another lesson in relative time and travel, since it is only about 20 miles), I had to take the morning bus, since another bus doesn’t leave El Roblar until 2 pm. During the two hour bus ride, I slept, thought about what I was going to ask, and showed up at the office about 12:30. I was then told to come back in an hour, as the woman I was to talk to was at lunch. Later in the afternoon, we had a good conversation, and five and a half hours after my departure, I returned to the bus stop to wait for my ride back to the empalme, where I would rechange to the bus to take me home. There I sat, a half hour, an hour, an hour and a half, intermittently asking a young man sitting nearby if the bus that just went by would take me where I was going. “No, it still hasn’t come yet”, was his inevitable response, until he finally asked, “Why are you so nervous about it?”
Why was I so nervous? Why was I checking my watch? That certainly wasn’t going to make the bus come faster. I had no other appointment, nowhere I had to be. No one was waiting for me, there was nothing for me to accomplish today but attending the meeting I had already attended. So why was I so worried about the time passing, and my doing nothing but sitting, reading, and waiting?
Then I realized, I have never lived in a culture where people were not worried about arriving at their class at x time, their job, that meeting, that date, doing A so they could hurry up and get to B. I don’t know how to just let myself wait all day for the bus, just sit in the kitchen, just accept that it’s going to take a long time to do the couple of things I need to do.
Today I spent 9 hours getting to and from a one-hour conversation. I spent a good three hours of that time worrying about whether or not the bus was going to come, about where I was or wasn’t, despite the fact that I didn’t have to be anywhere. Relative to home, moving this slowly through time jiggles my nerves, and leaves me anxious. Relative to here, I have no reason to be nervous, as there is nothing I can do to speed up how quickly I accomplish a particular task. I can only try to learn how to sit quieta, and enjoy enjoy enjoy the nine hours it takes me to get to and from my one hour conversation.

El Bolo

It is vital to include in one’s observations both the things that are wonderful and those that are heartbreaking, those that make one smile, and those others that are so maddening, saddening, and confusing, that I feel thrown out of everything.
This afternoon, as I was leaving my lovely, family-filled day, the group with which I was walking came upon a small boy, about 4, and his father, on the side of the one-lane dirt highway. The small boy was crying slightly, as he sat next to his father, who was sleeping in the brush. “Mira ese bolo,” Arlen said to me, “el pobre niño”. The poor child, I had been informed, was sitting there looking after the ‘bolo’, his drunk father. Byron went over and talked to the boy, Melkin, who informed him that they had been kicked off the bus that had been taking them towards their home, another 12 miles down the road.
After a quick reunion, we decided to wake up the man and ask if he would like us to take him and his son back to the house, a mere 3 km away. Upon waking him, it was clear this was no option. I have never seen anyone so drunk. He insisted that he could make it, with his four-year-old, walking the 12 miles. When we told him it seemed unlikely, and discussed with him for an hour, over and over again, who we were and that we would be happy to take his son if he felt incapable of walking, so that he could pick him up at the house in the morning. The boy sat at the side of the road, intermittently crying and trying not to cry. In the end, after refusing to let us take his son and to go with us, he got up, fell down, and then swerved his way a further 100 meters down the highway, where he again fell down in the middle of the road, leaving his four year old trying to pull him up.
After watching this for a few more minutes, we decided to try to help the man down to El Roblar, since it seemed to be the only way to avoid this four year old being forced to sleep on the roadside in what was clearly a gathering rain. I held Melkin’s hand and talked with him about he would like to go to school and his older sister, while Byron and Erick each took the man by an arm and dragged him, stumbling along the road. After about a quarter mile, he gave up, laid down in the road, and passed out again. Having left him a note with where we planned to take Melkin, we started on our way, at which point, the drunk man slurred at Melkin that he was to stay with him, not to go with us. Wavering for a few moments, Melkin let go of me and tried to pull his father up to come along. When he couldn’t, he decided he couldn’t leave. He simply sat there are cried, as the rain started to come down, but from that point on wouldn’t let us budge him, threatening to bite Byron if we took him away.
Melkin is definitely still sitting on the highway, with his father, who is no doubt still passed out, perhaps waking up once in a while enough to stumble a few more hundred feet of the 12 miles between him and the house he and Melkin and Melkin’s sister inhabit. While I am trying to be sensitive to the human condition, to poverty, to people’s difficult life situations, it seems nothing short of terrible to me to get so drunk that you force your 4 year old child to watch over you on a pitch black, rainy night, while you pass out because you were kicked off the bus. That you leave the child crying, and refuse to let him be taken a mile away to a place where he could sleep and eat, rather than be alone in the dark. What irresponsibility, what pain, what a disaster! I am so angry about it I hardly know what to do with myself, as that small boy fights with both the love and admiration he feels for his father and the loneliness and fright and anger he no doubt feels at being stuck in the cold, the rain, while his drunk father tries to sleep off the countless drinks he has consumed. Children should never be placed in that situation, ever. It feels unbearable the amount of pain and injustice that exists in the world, the lack of responsibility and support and awareness, unbearable the thought of that small boy, alone in the dark, waiting for his father to wake up.

Visiting Tamales

Amazing the number of things that one can see and experience in one day. I got up this morning, fell down the muddy steps (unfortunately, everyone worried that I had hurt myself rather than laughing, as I know those of you who know me and my tendency to slip would do), and then prepared for the rest of the day.
I spent it in the home of Don Wilfredo and Doña Haydalina Herrera Mendoza, and their family, accompanied also by Erick and Byron, the 20-year old guides from El Roblar, as well as Arlen, Byron’s 26 year old aunt, and her daughter Dorita, who is the god-child of Wil and Haydalina. (It’s that kind of small community, everyone seems to be someone’s relative!) We spent the day talking, cooking, eating, exploring. I chatted with Don Wil about his experience working for the Sandinistas during the war before the revolutionary triumph in 1979. I discussed life in the states with his daughter Dina while shucking corn to make sweet tamales. I encouraged eight-year old Wilton as he milled the corn to make the masa we would spoon back into the corn husks and cook to make the tamal. I beat Erick 18 times at dominoes. I had explained to me both lombricultura (worm farming to make organic fertilizer!) and how to make a hybrid plant (I totally want to try it!). I learned a couple of new games, puzzles, I’ll be excited to share with you all…
It was all and all a lovely day, lovely to the point that I realized I am really starting to feel at home, that I know the community, the people, and could spend days and days here. I feel less pressed about what I need to do, and more able to just enjoy the slowness and calmness, even in the presence of much work to be done.
On my way up to the casa, following El Byron and La Arlen and La Dorita (for some reason here, everyone is referred to as ‘El’ or ‘La’ whoever, literally ‘the’ so-and-so), I realized that I don’t know when the last time I just showed up at the house of one of my friend’s. Stopping by is almost always pre-empted by a phone call, a chance meeting, an email; most everything is a pre-planned get together, often decided upon weeks in advance! Here however, things are completely different. There are no phones in the houses, no way to check and see if someone is available other than to walk the three kilometers to their home, where you are welcomed with open arms, warm food, and good conversation. People are willing to drop what they are doing to enjoy another’s spontaneous company. Just showing up is not seen at all as an intrusion, but a welcome surprise. This highlighted for me the busy-ness and isolation of our 100-mile-per-hour American lifestyle, where the likelihood of stopping by is unlikely from the standpoint that people are rarely home! And if they are, we surely don’t want to interrupt plans they may already have by dropping by unannounced. The fact is that this commitment to the privacy of others often leaves us home alone, prohibits us from experiencing the joy that can just be a spontaneous afternoon with people we love. Today, I was really reminded what a loss it is…
Just one of many observations I’m sure I’ll make this year, am already making… Thanks guys, for putting up with all of them!

The bus... what a ride

The school bus that I am sitting on is decorated with Tweetie Bird stickers right nect to a black and white portrait of Carlos Fonseca, founder of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, the left party that guided Nicaragua through the revolutionary 1980´s. How´s that to put things into perspective? Out of the tinted windows (which I still feel guilty for opening below the imaginary black line that I was so used to in elementary school) I can see only the tops of the lush tropical forest that covers this region of northern Nicaragua, where though few people actually go to church, anything good in one´s life is "Gracias a Diós". This bus, one that makes four daily trips out the pot-holed, one lane, dirt highway to the communities of Yasica Sur, is known as the disco, due to its neon lights, big speakers, loud music, and very tinted windows. The driver, Bismark, and Victor, the fourteen-year old that spends his days walking up and down the aisles charging people their ten cordoba fares, each breakfast and lunch everyday in the house of my family here before turning around to head back for their next trip to Matagalpa.
Today I was putting a few things into perspective on the bus ride. I am currently living an hour and a half´s bus ride from the nearest telephone or flushing toilet. I haven´t had a hot shower in four weeks, since when I am not pouring bowls of icy river water over my head, I am merely turning the knob on the shower at my $4.75/night hotel from off to on, no temperature control. The legal safety stuff is also an interesting perspective, making life seem obviously much more carefree, but also more dangerous. Yesterday, one of the buses I was on got stuck in the mud because there were so many people inside, it was too heavy! And, when there are too many people inside, they simply put more on the roof of the school bus, wedged in between the one-hundred pound sacks of elotes (corn cobs) and other agricultural goods.
So, though this entry is short, just a few more things I have been thinking about, noticing, and working on. More to follow...

Don´t know what to think about this one

This week I have been at a capacitation for the guides of the eco-tourism project that is part of CECOCAFEN. We have been in a new community, La Reyna (the queen), practicing their guiding abilities, learning about coffee, about trail building, about bird identification, and each other. It has been a wonderful time, though complicated for other reasons...
I am staying in the house of Isabel, a 37 year old, 4 foot 10 woman with a bright smile. She and her family moved to the house they now inhabit, three rooms made from cinder blocks and surrounded by wooden shacks with mud walls, after Hurricane Mitch washed away their house an hour´s walk further up the mountain. The roofs are made of black garbage bags; Isabel, her mother, and four children sleep in the big house, while two of her sisters, one brother, and their families, have their own respective 10 by 10 foot huts outside. It is clear that it is difficult for her to talk to me, that my being there pushes her comfort zone as much as my own. Though we are able to laugh, to talk about what it means to meet new people, and she is able to help me as I try feebly and painstakingly to pat my oddly-shaped masa into something resembling the beautiful round and delicious tortillas that her fingers spin out in a matter of seconds. The environment here feels different than in Mayra´s house, and reminds me that even amongst people living with less, there are very varied degrees. At Mayra´s, people have missing teeth, but they all have metal caps. Here, there are only missing teeth. This morning, Byron asked if there was toilet paper to go to the outhouse; there was none. When we returned from our morning, there was a roll on the table by out cots. The luxury of being a guest...
However, none of that is what struck me hardest. Talking to her the first night, I peered into where Isabel and her family sleep, and saw what appeared to be a small girl lying limply on the wooden bedframe. I was struck my how skinny her legs were. I said hello and asked her old she was, she heard me, turned her head, and looked away. Isabel then informed me that this tiny person, lying there, was my own age, 23, but had been crippled completely when she contracted polio at 3 months old. Since that time, she has been cared for by her family, where she spends her days looking out the window of the concrete house, making small noises and not moving.
I didn´t know what to say, and largely feel like I still don´t. I am angry, shocked, saddened, worried about my inability to deal with this experience. Why didn´t I talk to her somemore? Ask Isabel more about her, ask about polio vaccinations now in Nicaragua? I don´t know how to feel, how to react, how to possibly begin to understand this kind of tragedy. And I feel like I am trying to shut it out due to not really knowing how to understand, but don´t know how to move on. I will continue to think about it, to talk about it, to examine this experience that I am not used to seeing, not used to anything more than hearing about on the news or in theoretical analyses of poverty, disease, and development. I don´t know if what I need now is to push further, think deeper, or give myself some more time to reflect... a little distance, to try to garner a little more understanding. understanding after all, is what I am trying to get here.

a moment of mental craziness, with some later reflection...

Morning of August 19 - "Oh my god, I can hardly stand it right now. I really just feel like I need some time to myself, and think that I will definitely go to Matagalpa tomorrow rather than on Sunday, and return on Monday afternoon. I am tired of being the center of attention, or everyone wanting to see and play with my stuff, of Joselling constantly touching and playing with me, of constantly answering questions. I just feel like I want to put on my headphones and scream! AHHHHHH!!!!!! And now Melvin is playing my harmonica, which, while fine, is also obnoxious from the standpoint of trying to transpose this interview and having to hear the same notes played over and over again out of harmony. Right now I am just tired, tired of everything about me being a novelty to half of the people that live in the house. God I cannot wait to get out for a little while. And I really probably should have just enrolled myself in the ecotourism project so as to not feel bad about leaving earlier than eight weeks from now, because right now I seriously don’t know if I am going to make it that long. AHHHHHH!!!!!!!"

Rereading this entry in my journal, I almost have to laugh out loud. These are the feelings and moments that one is negotiating all the time when traveling in a new place, attempting to incorporate themself into a new culture, new traditions, and a new family. I need to remember that it is fine to feel this way, and also figure out how to close the door so that I can work at the house when I need to.
Ranting on another note, I am wondering why it is that a young woman, traveling alone, cannot possibly want to have a meal by herself, or, if she is choosing to talk to someone and spend an evening together, it automatically means she is looking for a hookup? Haha, I have been having a lovely time, but getting hit on all the time by both nicaraguan men and extranjeros who are also traveling is really tiring...
So, those are my thoughts and my complaints for the morning. I can´t believe I´ve already been here three weeks. Things are becoming more familiar, and feel pretty good, though confusion and frustration come up often enough. All looks better at the moment, however, since I just found a big jar of peanut butter at the super market. Funny how when away from home it becomes those really little things that make all the difference....

to organize or not to organize?

This entire experience feels like the culmination in my studies of culture, of travel, of history, and particularly of democratic theory. Of worldviews, and histories, and personal experience, of the multitude of ways that people are and want to be in the world.
What does it mean to have a strong civil society? What does it mean to be organized? Why do it? What does it offer? All of these questions, and their answers (individual for different people), are part of the subconscious and conscious actions of the people in these communities.
Yesterday I attended a cooperative meeting of 28 women who for the last five years have held monthly meetings, started a group savings account, sent their children to school, increased their knowledge of coffee and other crops they cultivate, and held workshops on everything from accounting to self-esteem, cooperative law to the history of mother’s day. They have, in their own words, “organized themselves”. The benefits for them seem to be clear. They have become more informed, have gained title to some of their property, can sell their coffee themselves, get loans and credit, put their children in a scholarship program, and help each other. They can utilize a greater number of resources, be they each other, the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives credit office, home remodeling (meaning the addition of running water, electricity, or an outhouse) program, or CECOCAFEN’s technical advisors and youth scholarship program. Through all of these programs and capacitations, they see themselves bettering their lives, the prospects of their children, and strengthening their communities.
Today, I talked to another señor, whose take on cooperative organization was very different. “Those in the office,” he stated matter of factly, “are in it only to get rich themselves”. He cited the fact that the cooperative doesn’t always pay what the market does, that people in the cooperatives are of one political persuasion, and that the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives (UCA) comes with their fancy vans to pick up only the coffee of its members, leaving others to figure out how to move their product themselves. The loans he said, one must also repay at high interest rates, and attend meetings that, if missed, can cause one expulsion from the cooperative. He was in one, but chose to get out, after all, those from the UCA are only in it for themselves.
What could lead to these vastly different readings of the situation and purpose of cooperatives, of what they do? Individual experience of course, but in my opinion, also a worldview (and please comment any and all if you think I’m way off here). For the women in El Privilegio, the mere act of organizing themselves has meant increased empowerment, it has meant a better life by making oneself more involved and more dependent on others. Through that integration and that dependence, they have increased their support network and therefore their options. For this, they pay the price of a few córdobas (local currency) a month and a commitment to actively participate in deciding cooperative business. In return, they receive a stable price for their products, and everything else that was mentioned above.
The other señor on the other hand, views the organization and the commitment of money and time, as too much. He prefers to work independently, and on his own, find the person or business that will pay him most for his café. With this, he has succeeded in building a lovely family, home and farm. With coffee at its current price, all is well and he has no need to be organized, to ask for a loan he can repay in coffee, anything like that. He and his family take care of themselves, and live happily and wonderfully from their hard work. For him, the benefits of cooperative membership do not outweigh the inconvenience of paying a monthly fee, attending meetings, and arguing out issues in the democratic process required by the cooperative rules.
Neither of these people are wrong. For the women of El Privilegio, being in a cooperative had made all the difference in their ability to demand knowledge and money from their husbands, to access social programs, and to thereby improve their positions. Those with whom I have spoken view the required commitments as benefits, not costs. The señor on the other hand, has not needed the cooperative organization to shape his life as he wants to. He has preferred to go it alone.
So it seems that here, a everywhere, and in this issue, as in every issue, there is no right thing for all people, only right things for individual people. Cooperatives can work for some people, and not for others, as they will work for development in some places, and in some areas of production, better than they will in others. Maybe this was part of the problem of the sandinistas, not everyone wished to follow their model. And if the model that one makes is too strict, too inflexible, it works for fewer and fewer people. Some people here as everywhere, are political animals, enjoy working dependently with others, and view their lives as enriched by these aspects. Others do not. Both are right.
So tonight, I am left with an understanding broadened by my liberal arts education. There is not just one way, no simple right and wrong, only different models that work well and not well in different ways. I’m not sure what to do with that, other than to remind myself that its okay to know that there are multiple answers to every question, and that I want to increase my knowledge about both the good and not so good things that come to small scale coffee farmers who “organize themselves”.

El Empalme de San Francisco

Currently I am sitting at an intersection of two highways, awaiting the bus that is going to take me home to El Roblar and the monthly meeting of the women’s cooperative, El Privilegio (The Privilege). From a small cantina behind me, the Richard Marx song “Right Here Waiting for You” is blasting, reminding me of my mom and of being eight years old, at a time when this was the only song that I knew by heart. Oddly enough, on the buses and in stores here I feel surrounded by eighties ballads I have not heard en años. Like a time warp every time I go anywhere.
I’m feeling anxious as I sit here about not being able to do more than just sit and wait for the bus. I mustn’t forget to always always bring a book with me in the future.
There is a bull grazing across the bumpy dirt highway, a man pedaling by on a bicycle driven ice cream cart, and dark rain clouds moving across a sky that five minutes ago appeared to be endless blue. Hard to know if it is going to pour or simply look menacing for the rest of the afternoon.
It is strange to be in a country where the highways are so full of potholes that car axels break, where the police nonchalantly carry AK-47’s because that is what is left as arms from a war that finished two decades ago, where thousands of children don’t go to school because their families can’t afford to buy them shoes or notebooks, and where hitching a ride in the open back of a pick-up is so normal that one never passes empty. Strange to see that en el campo, the largest most luxurious houses are 40 by 20 feet, with dirt floors and brick walls, and house 16 people or more! Strange to live in mountains that in the last thirty years have been home to guerilla warriors on both sides of a political struggle about how best to meet the needs of los nicaraguenses, the people of Nicaragua. Strange that even despite the raging and vibrant political culture, the government does not come out to the campo to build roads to make it possible for the base of the country’s economy, agriculture, to make it to the market.
In the midst of this I am trying to understand how it is that largely uneducated campesinos are organizing in order to better their lives. It is because they have seen that the government won’t build roads in their communities or help to develop potable water sources? Or because, although there is a high school in the next community, there is no bus to make it possible for their children to attend it? Is it simply a knowledge that together they will be more able to help each other? I don’t know…
Every day I see and experience things sad and wonderful, obvious and confusing. I know it is impossible to synthesize a place like this, to understand. It is impossible to do more than gather the stories of a few, learn the histories, and try to see them as they play out in the present. I need to remember at this point to lighten up, and to just absorb the experience, and to know that I am not going to understand any more than a little more than I do now.

democratic musings

Here again, seated in mi cuartito en the community of El Roblar. Today I had the opportunity to attend my first meeting of one of the cooperative groups, that being all the members of the ecotourism project here in this community.
From that meeting I have really remembered that that is what I am here to study. How people who have agreed to work together are doing so, what topics and problems and issues they have, as well as what successes. Today’s meeting was very interesting, because it was about choosing two fincas to be the fincas modelos. Two of the six members were absent, and what came up was a brief discussion about responsibility and accountability amongst the members. The ever-present problem of how to take into account the opinions and ideas of someone that isn’t there, of the necessity of having everyone present in a democracy.
So it seems that it is really a project about democracy on a small scale, and in places where the everyday negotiations may or may not be thought of in this light. I am trying to discover how cooperatives help people work together in a way that is supportive and inclusive, that recognizes the diverse experiences and humanity of all involved. How it is that coming together aids this process, or doesn’t, and what other factors contribute. Interestingly enough, the meetings seem to remind me in many ways of the Womyn’s Center, or ICWES, of organizations in which I have taken part that seek to identify and tackle problems in a democratic way. People may be reticent to say what they think, but everyone is respectful, and trying to ensure that everyone understands why particular things are happening in certain ways. There are also a few people, for example Pedro, who seems to be here to facilitate the present group in reaching their own decision, something that definitely seems to be stressed in this process.
It is interesting to note that looking at the cooperatives cannot be an isolated thing, which I think I thought it would be more or less. But here, as everywhere, there is a multitude of factors and experiences that shape people, from their parents to NGO’s to their everyday lives and their own personalities. Is it a particular kind of person that chooses to join the cooperative? Are those people often involved in other positions of power within the community? How do they foster qualities of leadership in other members? How much does social change have to with the actual, physical environment and how much with the people present? How does all this relate to the power of the human spirit when placed under difficult conditions? To different kinds of knowledge, since many of those that lead and organize here have not even finished elementary school? There are so many questions to which I don’t have answers, and to which I know there are a multitude of answers, it is hard to know how to get at them all. I guess that I will just have to go with what I can here, which is talking to as many people as possible and figuring out what the best questions to ask are as I go.

Thoughts from El Roblar, written August 9

Sitting in my eight by six foot brick room, I contemplate the walls (three plain brick and one half of one brick painted white), the single light bulb, and the tin roof, squeaking tat tat tat as the rain falls down. My bed, a wooden frame covered with a few pillows and a fabulous wool blanket, is covered with an exotic looking light green mosquito net, which I hope is keeping me safe from such interesting illnesses as malaria and denghue fever. This small room and comfortable (if hard) bed, as well as electric plug to which I can connect this foreign laptop computer, strike me as absolute luxury in this setting. Who would have known that I could here sleep so well.
En el campo, everything is made with corn. From guerila (green corn tortillas), to atoll (ground corn cooked with sugar until thick), to tamales dulces (corn meal mixed with sugar and then cooked in the cascara of the corn), to nacatamales (corn meal and rice and pollo cooked in banana leaves), to regular tortillas. Maiz, and the other “granos básicos” make up the regular diet of almost all campesinos, interspliced with some cooked tomatoes, avocadoes, papas, or something of the like. Dessert can be anything from atoll, to an actual sugar cane, which you suck on until you wish to spit it out. According to my plan, and that of the family abuela, I should come home able to make any and all of these meals.
Rubber boots seem to me an absolute necessity for campo life, where, despite there being a huge amount of work to be done, life moves slowly. People are all awake from 5 or six in the morning, making tortillas, or feeding the pigs, but then pass the day either in the kitchen (a large room with a mud floor, an open flame stove top, and a stone slab onto which a faucet drops water) or on the veranda, playing guitar and talking. As the day draws to a close, the family (and others, who suddenly appear from anywhere) gather around the small television to watch the novellas of the “mexicanos dramaticos”, in which the wife of one man now has to move with him to the house of his brother, who is actually the father of her newborn child. Gasps and giggles emanate from the entire crowd as the hour progresses.
Who knew how many new things a person can learn in a day, or feel adjusted to. Today I climbed a waterfall, ate sugar cane cut with a machete, used a giant malanga leaf as a rain hat, and walked along with two young men who brought a machete “en caso de que”. I played at piedritas con Jocelyn (throwing up a marble, trying to agarrar some semillas antes de que the marble lands again on the tile floor). Tomorrow, the five foot grandmother Dora is to teach me about the washing of clothes here, which will then be hung up on the barbed wire clotheslines dispersed around the outside of the house. Funny too, and wonderful, how all of the sudden, in this atmosphere, things like cold showers attained by pouring bowls full of water over one’s head, and putting on one’s boots to traipse through the mud to the outhouse seem perfectly natural.
As I continue to live here, my mind moves more and more back to its Spanish language banks. Las palabras se me salen, though they may not be proper “nica” speak. But I am learning it, chinchelas for sandals, calcomanillas son stickers, para alli voy.
Though I am not sure just how this project or this year will take shape, I am trying to soak up all that I can. To come away knowing much more about agriculture, about coffee, about cooperatives (not in theory, but in practice), and about what it is to wake up under a mosquito net in a small brick room, to face the day, and find out what is entailed in that.

seis dias despues

so, I have now completed 7 of my 365 days, it´s amazing and strange how things here move both quickly and slowly. Tomorrow I am going out to the campo, where I will start living with the family of Mayra Gamez, president of a small women´s cooperative in El Roblar, Nicaragua. I go armed with my rubber boots, my journal, my mosquito net, and hopefully a mind that i will be able to keep open to all of the new experiences that await me. I visited the home this week and stayed for a night, surprised to find it had both electricity and running water in the brick, dirt floor kitchen, though no toilet, rather a latrine located nearby. While there, I went for a tour of the coffee fields, looked at the beans, saw other fruits and vegetables that were growing there, both for sale and for the families consumption.
Also this week, I had the opportunity to visit Solcafe, the drying plant where coffee grown in the fields here is processed before it is exported. So, I feel I am already getting a good sense of where the coffee is picked, where it is taken in quintales (100 lb sacks) and the process that it goes through before it heads in a bag to a roaster somewhere in the states. I will be excited to return there, to the areas de recepcion, when the harvest is actually happening, and the whole dry mill is full of coffee. Though it seems obvious and silly, it is phenomenally interesting to actually be in the places where this transnational economy takes place. The farmer walks up to the mill, places his sacks on the scale, has each sampled for quality, and from there recieves a reciept. The coffee then passes through multiple processes, drying, fermenting, peeling, and then hand selection, before it is ready to leave the country. It is interesting to see how this coffee market, this fair trade area, operates at a business level, which it obviously is, but which is not the aspect that is stressed about Fair Trade coffee where it is consumed. So though I know that is no kind of synthesis, just some rambling observations.
The last thing I want to comment on on here today is related to what it means to be here, as a foreigner, who knows nothing about coffee, and is here with relatively little to offer in return for people who are opening up to me their lives, their homes, and their perceptions. I have just finished reading an article about service, and what it means, where it stated that people who come to help somewhere, see life as weak, those who come to fix, see it as broken, and those who come to serve, look at life as it is as whole. I think that this struck me particularly as someone who is entering from outside, from a place where Fair Trade is seen as a wonderful thing, and where there is a certain amount of pity related to thinking about "poor third world farmers" and their situations. However, in the short time I have been here, I continue to be struck by the open heartedness, the joy in the people I meet. The grandmother in the family I am staying with, who lves her telenovelas and cannot wait to teach me to make tortillas, the son with his girlfriend, the father with his pool playing friends. Their lives, will challenging, are also whole, full, like everyone´s, of love, of food, of hard hard work. There is nothing here that I can fix, or help, I can only offer what I have, a body that is willing to work, a mind that is hungry to learn, and a spirit that is open to being touched by this experience.

Newly arrived

Well, this is my first blog entry, and I am not sure what to do. I am sitting currently in a crowded internet café in matagalpa, nicaragua, surrounded by people speaking spanish (not a big deal) and preparing tomorrow to move to el campo (a slightly bigger deal).
This morning I climbed out of bed and into a taxi to a bustling bus station, where I was hustled onto the "express matagalpa jinotega" amidst crowds of people vending gaseosas and balancing trays of plates of chicken on their heads, while remaining all smiles. As the bus pulled out, I felt comfortable and at home, the whole atmosphere semi-familiar, resembling some of my other experiences in latin america.
The landscape however, differs completely. I was breathtaken and awestruck as we moved through glistening green valleys towards tall majestic and lush mountains, the part of the country that I will be calling home for the next couple of months. Clouds rolled in over the hills, as we wound around two hours into northern nicaragua.
On the bus I ran into Wendy, a graduate student who went to U of Oregon (what a small world!), who helped me find the coop office. Here I met a horde of people, one of whom, Felicity Butler, this lovely english woman, took me to lunch and told me all I need to know about Matagalpa. We´ll see tomorrow how much I have managed to absorb!
Tomorrow I am on my way to my first coop meeting, related to the agro-ecotourism project in which I am participating. I must introduce myself and what I am here to do, which freaks me out a little bit. It is the realization that the grand plans of mine must now be made a reality; I must discover how I will actually come to understand the theoretical questions I have posed. I must walk in and meet farmers and their families, travel with them, figure out what to ask to learn some of what it is I need to know. All this on top of just realizing that I am actually sitting now in the places that I have researched and written about, this adventure is actually happening; I am on my way. Day 2 of 365 and I am already spinning. Hard to imagine where I will be a year from now, both physically and mentally. Eek! =)