Grave Digging, Rain Sweeping and Iguana Soup
There are lots of different places and spaces that are conducive to writing. Perhaps none more than under a thatch-roof patio, an ever so slight breeze visible in the nearby eucalyptus trees, gnats whispering in your ears and chickens pecking at your toes. And coffee!
Garbage day here in Nica is more of a mindset than a weekly pick-up. In a small village like El Tololar, there are no sanitation services, so you dig a hole in your backyard. We are now on our third hole, and are learning the nuances of waste management. Hole #1 lasted one week (not deep enough). Hole #2 lasted two and one-half weeks (deeper and wider, but not enough). Earlier this week we dug our third hole. Bingo! (we hope). It is about the length of a grave, 4 feet deep, and 3 ½ feet wide. Things we’ve learned?
1). After you dump your garbage, throw a little dirt over it to keep the chickens but more importantly the dogs from getting in and spreading garbage all around.
2).Wear closed-toed shoes when digging. This prevents ant bites, which you are guaranteed to get with flip flops or bare feet.
3). In addition to a shovel, bring a local tool called a ‘cova’ with you. A cova has a long metal handle with a sharp curved blade at the end. It is perfect (and really essential) for cutting through roots and breaking up hard, volcanic soil.
4. You can burn your garbage. Not the best for the environment maybe, but here in a place with no services, you have to make choices. Burning garbage creates more space and keeps pests at bay....and allows more time before you need to dig your next hole.
School for the boys has shifted out of necessity. For the first 2 ½ weeks we tried to utilize an excellent on-line school option called TECCA. One of Cully’s good friends is the Vice-Principal and the curriculum is associated with the Massachusetts education requirements. We loved TECCA, but chose it on the pretense that we would actually have an internet connection at our house. Alas, at the moment a home connection is not possible, or prohibitively expense. So we’ve gone with the next best thing, or perhaps an even better thing... Professora Miriam at the casa. Miriam has been teaching the boys for the past couple weeks and so far, so good (teaching science, language arts, french, and social studies to 4th and 6th graders only touches on her wide skill-set).
But it is not easy. Our friend Beto helped us procure some desks from the local school (rocking chairs were not conducive to studying :)). And in between breaks for swatting wasps and bugs, dodging the smell of chemicals being sprayed on the nearby corn field, sweeping the every present dust from the rooms, and riding out earthquakes (our second round since we’ve been here - 5.6 and 5.4 on the richter scale - hit at the tail-end of language arts on Wednesday) it’s been progressing. Again, it is NOT easy. Surely more updates to follow, but please be sending good thoughts and prayers that this would work well in spite of the challenges.
Last Sunday we rented a large pick-up truck, loaded up 18 people (15 in the back) and drove an hour plus to a beautiful, mostly secluded, aquamarine, volcanic crater lake. The trip there involved lots of bobbing and weaving for the riders in the back as we dodged overhanging trees. We made an unexpected detour when one of our participants deemed it of the utmost urgency to find us ‘nacatamales’ (basically the national dish of Nicaragua, delicious corn-tamales filled with shredded pork and vegetables). Nacatamales are generally eaten on the weekends and the best ones are never served in restaurants but made in small, local kitchens across the country. Alas, after our truck had circumnavigated the town several times and asked at least five villagers where we could find nacatamales, we were out of luck. Fifteen minutes later we were walking down a steep hill -getting eaten by mosquitoes and wondering if they carried any diseases - finally arriving at the picture-perfect lake, crowned by a beautiful deep-green forest with now-dormant volcanoes looming overhead. We jumped right in and spent a delicious 3 hours swimming, eating, and just being together with our family and Nicaraguan friends.
When our Spanish class ends (Mon-Thursday from 2-5pm) we normally look for a bit of an escape. Sometimes we all go running in the peanut field together, other times Harlan plays baseball with his new friends and Olle uses his awesome sense of humor to entertain two 4-year olds who live nearby. One day this week Harlan decided to go running alone. He returned breathing heavily with fantastic stories of monsters chasing him through the field. Apparently near the final turn of the peanut field he had been accosted by a group of dogs (there are a lot of dogs here, and usually they pretty much leave you alone and are only interested in scavenging for food). He made it back safely, a bit spooked with only a scuff or two, only managing to get back home thanks to his lightning-fast speed. Our new rule is that we never run alone.
Last week was a tough one for Harlan. After a couple weeks of off and on stomach problems, we decided he needed to be seen by someone. Everyone here is so willing and ready to help with anything, and before we knew it three of us were riding a motorcycle on curvy, dirt roads, dodging chickens and cows on the way to see the doctor. The bumpy ride did not help with the nausea, but we made it into Leon without any mishaps. Getting seen turned out to be a remarkably smooth process. The doctor ushered us into his small office. He asked a few questions in Spanish (Harlan answered in Spanish, way to go dude!), checked Harlan’s neck, throat and stomach, and quickly prescribed 3 different medicines. Almost magically, we were able to obtain the medicines at the pharmacy, conveniently situated next door, a small window connecting the doctor to the pharmacist. 15 bucks later (this included the doctor visit, the medicine, and two orange gatorades to boot) we were out the door. Five days later, Harlan is fully recovered.
We woke up at 4:30 AM a few days back and started loading yucca onto a tractor trailer. It is now yucca planting season, and we had a chance to participate in the whole process, which goes something like this. First, you take a bunch of yucca branches from the previous year’s harvest. With your machete, you cut the long pieces into small chunks, about 4-6 inches each. Each small piece must have at least one shoot (sapling) that will grow into a new yucca plant. You load the small pieces into burlap sacks, and then load onto a trailer (most people don’t have their own tractors here so you need to rent one). It seems that John Deere and Belorussian-made tractors are the most popular. You drive the tractor and trailer to the planting field about 3km away. En route, you stop at a family-member's’ house to get a plough and with six or seven people (including Miriam and Cully), you load the plow on the trailer. Once at the field, you unload the yucca and the plow, detach the trailer, and hook the plough to the tractor. Then you load yucca seedlings into blue bins that you tie to the top of the plough. The plough (with 3 separate ploughs) is driven through the field and 2 guys sit on top of the bins, throwing yucca into the freshly plowed lines. Other people walk behind the tractor, pressing the yucca into the soil with one foot while spreading and pressing down the dirt with the other. Locals mostly do this barefoot but due to biting ants (again, they are everywhere) and small, really sharp thorns, shoes are highly recommended.
There is a whole additional side to the yucca story that involves exhorbitantly high interest rates and lack of capital that can and should be for another update.
It is amazing to be a part of the process of how people here actually live their lives. First of all, life is not easy. Average income or money-made for a family for a year is about $1,200. There is no wiggle room for extras, date nights out, or weekend trips to the lake. But, they are so efficient with their resources. Miriam was helping our friend Adilsa paint her house last weekend. They finished one room and had a bit of white paint left. Adilsa found a small bit of leftover red paint from a previous job. They mixed the two with extra water and came up with a gorgeous salmon color and enough to paint a solid 2/3rds of the bathroom. People here are all so connected to nature and almost every element of their life depends on the natural world around them. Here’s an example:
For us, rain can be kind of a nuisance, especially when it comes down torrentially. Several times we have found ourselves playing the ‘sweeping’ game, taking turns with the broom, headlights affixed, pushing water away from the rooms and into the field. During a heavy rain the broom technique can barely keep up with the rain. When it’s windy, rain is pushed through the windows and into the rooms. This we can’t sweep and just have to pray the wind stops. For the people in El Tololar, rain is everything. They get plenty of sun but in the rainy season (which ends in about a month) they NEED rain. Climate change has been shifting weather patterns and even though we feel like we’ve had a fair bit of rain since we’ve arrived, in reality they are a fair bit behind on their totals for this season.
Right now the sky is blue, but for our friends here we hope (as we hope and pray every day) that the storm clouds WILL rise this afternoon.
The other day, termites started eating into the pillars supporting our patio. We asked our friend Wilmar what we should do. He said his house has thousands of termites but there is no possibility of structural damages. Excellent! Our kitten, ‘Dulce or Sweetie’, is great at climbing the wood poles of our patio. But Dulce is not so good at getting down, and we often need to help her down when we return from an outing.
When you are learning another language but don’t know a lot, signs can be particularly confusing. The other day we saw a sign advertising, “zapatos (shoes), ortopedia (shoe inserts) and tacos. Upon further review ‘tacos’ are also the heel of a shoe, but when seen during a lunchtime walk the sign was a bit confusing. Same goes for the word ‘verdugo’. It was on a sign at what looked like a shopping mall, super market-type place. A quick consult of the dictionary showed verdugo to have several meanings, including executioner, hangman, cruel person and tyrant. We still have not found another definition and may need to do another drive by of the stripmall at some point for further investigation.
Grass and weeds grow quickly here, and in the past month our yard has gone from a mostly dirt field used primarily for horse grazing and baseball to a quasi-garden with corn, vegetable saplings, garbage holes, and lots of weeds. We don’t have a goat or a lawnmower (although we do at times have an adopted large, pink pig) so Miriam and Cully borrowed Olle’s machete (come on, it’s his :)) and spent part of several afternoons ‘mowing’ the lawn by bending down and whacking the weeds with a sideways motion taught to us by our next-door neighbor Aciles. Note: Do not kneel on the ground while you whack or you may very quickly have 30 ant bites on your left leg.
There are several white horses that our neighbor Don Lionel owns. Olle got it in his head that he wanted to ride one (or all) of the horses. When he gets something in his mind, watch out! Several conversations led us to believe that Wednesday afternoon at around 4pm would in fact be the time to ride. Starting at two o’clock, Olle began running over to Don Lionel’s house every 10 minutes to see if the horses where there. It turns out that several of the horses had decided to ‘go rogue’ and had been seen walking and grazing down the road in the company of a larger group. Olle couldn’t wait and we set off down the dirt road, in relatively short order coming upon Don Lionel as he led the horses back home. The fact that he didn’t have a saddle didn’t phase Olle, who was in short order sitting on a particularly spiny horse back and grinning ear to ear. He rode the horse (named something like “lightning fast”) home, where Miriam also turned out to be a pro and took a couple loops around the yard.
We walked to our friend Ivanias home a couple days back. We played with their baby rabbits (Olle really wants one),talked about the possibility of someday eating iguana soup with them (they have a lot of iguanas in the trees behind their house) and talked with Ivania and her family about their life. They are a sweet family who like many, live on the edge economically. Every day Ivania wakes up early and makes food (tacos, salad, enchilada’s, fresh fruit drinks) that she sells to students at the local secondary school. Normally she takes her wares on a wagon hauled by her almost completely blind horse. However, we found out last week that her horse had eaten yucca (eating yucca stalks can it turns out be very dangerous for some horses) and quite suddenly died. This is actually a huge blow to a family like hers, as transportation to the school is vital to their livelihood. She is currently borrowing or “renting” a horse but there is an additional cost to this that they won’t be able to bear. It is problems and challenges like this that we hope we can address in some small way while we are here, and we are so thankful to everyone who is following our journey or has provided financial support.
We have been posting photos that correspond to many of these stories on our respective facebook pages. Please check those out or ‘friend’ Miriam Lundgren or Cully Lundgren if we aren’t friends yet. For those who are not facebookers (You guys are totally awesome!) we are trying to figure out how we can upload photos and share more broadly. Internet access has been a challenge so we just haven’t had time for the uploads yet, but will before long.
Gracias to you all
Miriam, Harlan, Olle, Cully
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