Why are we here? What is our purpose? These are existential questions that we often ask ourselves, no matter where we live. In Nicaragua, this topic has certainly come up for us quite a lot. It has been hard at times to hold in tension the fact that we have been here less than 2 months. Our Spanish has improved but has a long way to go, and we are only now beginning to settle in to the rhythm of our daily life. We have to give ourselves some grace, we say, some more time to get acclimated, but still, this whole purpose thing keeps tugging at us.
But purpose often clarifies itself over time and space, and both are coming into better view, thanks to a bit of faith, and the vision of our friends here for a better life and more opportunities for the community of El Tololar. Last Friday we held a skype call with Tyler St. Claire, the Executive Director of Tololamos and Saturday we had a great meeting with Adilsa, Beto and Wilmar, the three main on-the-ground staff of Tololamos. Sometimes meetings, like great ideas, can’t happen until the time is right for a variety of reasons. Saturday’s meeting would have been tough to hold much sooner for one key reason; Beto, Wilmar and Adilsa don’t speak English. A month ago it would have been fruitless. Even now, it was a challenge. But on October 22nd for one hour, we held a meeting in Spanish. And the awesome thing is that we understood, at least most of it :).
The meeting with Miriam, Cully, Beto, Adilsa and Wilmar (Harlan and Olle popped in from time to time in between rabbit feedings, baseball games, and tag) centered on three areas of greatest need that Tololamos wants to focus on in the coming months – Health, Education, and Agriculture. Within these three sectors, they outlined several specific projects they would like to implement. They are modest projects that look to address real, immediate needs. And the great thing is, for a small investment, lives can be changed. For example, the local health clinic does an amazing job trying to address the needs of the entire community. They are doing their best with what they have, and would benefit greatly by larger investments. These include an ambulance to bring patients to the hospitals in Leon, a qualified Pediatrician to address the health needs of hundreds and hundreds of children, and access to medical supplies and better medical equipment. But to start, their needs are more basic. They need chairs for waiting patients and mothers with babies to sit in, new lights to replace old ones, tools and a few parts to fix broken sinks, and a couple of fans to help sick people feel a little cooler in the approaching hot, dusty, summer months. All these little things will make a big difference, and for only about $300 bucks.
In our meeting we talked more about providing scholarships for students, fixing water systems, and building fences to keep chickens, cows and horses from eating valuable crops. In a future update we will provide more detail, and even ask you to consider making a small investment of your own in order to help make a big difference. Purpose is only possible with people.
We run in the beautiful peanut fields many evenings, bouncing through verdant, green leaves, the plants accentuated by tiny yellow flowers. Huge volcanoes shrouded by smoke rise above us. We run by horses nibbling at the edges of the field, their heads stretched through the barbed-wire, trying to reach the most delicious leaves. It is beautiful, and for a moment when we run, we forget the challenges of ant bites, days without running water, nighttime latrine runs, gnats in most orifices, cow-pooped stained roads, and so much humidity that it takes only a day or two for mold to grow on the inside of our bedroom doors. When we run, we are transported to another place and it helps remind us of the beauty of this place and its people.
But the peanuts are, ala Dickens, a tale of two plants. One is our perception of the nut when we run, the other is how it directly impacts the lives of people here. In a previous update we told a little about peanuts, and for a more in-depth overview you can read a great synopsis that Tyler wrote on the Tololamos website. In a nutshell, large peanut agribusinesses whose product is usually destined for export come to villages like Tololar and look for farmers who will rent them their land. Many farmers here are having more and more difficulty making ends meet planting traditional crops such as yucca, potatoes, and peppers, due both to changing rain patterns and a national economy that remains the second poorest in the Western Hemisphere. Hence renting land out provides farmers with at least a modicum of income, even though they receive a paltry sum even by local standards. What’s worse is what the businesses do once they have access to the land. In short, they spray a ton of chemicals (always at night – we only recently figured out what that sweet, acidic smell is that wafts across our patio from time to time). The chemicals keep the fields free of weeds and looking gorgeous for our evening runs. They also destroy the soil and are suspected as being a cause in an increase in kidney issues among children and others in the community. And even if a farmer decides to stop renting his land for peanuts, it takes up to two years for the soil to regenerate to a place where crops can be grown again.
Today it is peanuts. Twenty years ago it was cotton, which according to stories we have been told was much worse. At that time, the same general system was in place; large agribusiness, small-holder farmers, economic needs at the local level vs. a search for the largest profits and the lowest costs. The difference in the 80s and 90s was that growing cotton produced even more detrimental health and environmental impacts. Back then, they didn’t just use a tractor and a machine to spray chemicals. They used airplanes. The planes were very efficient in several ways. They helped create bumper, weed-free crops of cotton. They were also effective in a collateral way. People got really sick. Birds, cows and horses fell over, dead. Animals are like a walking bank-account here and when they die, you can’t make a withdrawal. It was a huge problem that brought the community together. The cotton businesses left, the planes stopped making fly-bys. For a time, things were back to normal. For a time…
In a recent update we told the story of Ivania and her blind horse that had died from eating yucca. A relatively rare occurrence, but one that resulted in a serious economic hit to the family as the horse had pulled a load of food and drinks, prepared every morning, to be sold at the local secondary school. Good news. Thanks to your support, Ivania and her husband Denis have a new horse named Roseo. Roseo is brown with mottled white marks. He is a bit skittish and it may take a while for him to get comfortable pulling the food cart. He’s a horse of a different color, but he’s a horse nonetheless and hopefully will be pulling loads of delicious food (food that Harlan and Olle have sampled and love) to the school for many years.
Rainer is white and fluffy. She (we just found this out) has gorgeous pink eyes. She will eat anything, but seems to prefer green leaves and chewing the wood that is one of the posts that make up her fenced enclosure. She has become fast friends with our kitten dulce, although for a time dulce seemed to be hunting her incessantly. Now they just play together on either side of the fence. Rainer was a gift to us from Ivania and Denis. Olle has been pining for a rabbit since he first saw them in their hutches underneath Denis’s iguana trees soon after we arrived. Rainer got her name by virtue of her coming to us in the middle of a torrential downpour. She now has an outdoor enclosure, thanks to Wilmar and Carlos’s help, and for nighttime, we purchased a small jaula (hutch) where Rainer sleeps, usually in our kitchen. While purchasing the jaula, Cully was given an exclusive, inside tour of the home that stood behind the storefront, where various cages held one fat rabbit, six really aggressive parrots, and two most likely illegal but very cute Capuchin monkeys.
During the same downpour, the water brought out other even more exotic animals. On our way back from getting Rainer, we were walking back home, the dirt road having turned into a small river in various places. Wilmar was walking in the lead on the right side of the camino. Suddenly, he jumped to one side, barely dodging a six-foot boa constrictor that was slithering through the puddle. Upon closer examination, the boa had been run over near his back end by a vehicle, most likely either the Lisandro bus which had just passed, or possibly one of the ubiquitous motorcycles (generally no more than 250 horsepower) that ply the roads of El Tololar. He (or she) was definitely still alive and energetic enough that we only stopped long enough to take a few photos with zoom on high! According to Wilmar, boa sightings are rare and he hasn’t seen one in years. This is partially because when people encounter a boa, they usually eat it. He also said that since the boa only got run over near the tail, there is a good chance that he will go on to slither another day.
Weekends are a great break from school for both Miriam and the boys. It may be hard to imagine but holding school five days a week in only the two rooms of our small house plus our patio is really tough. It’s hard to focus with the bugs and the heat and they can tell you that interaction with their fellow students is a sorely missed part of the day. But there are elements of their education that they would never get at home, like when Miriam was teaching Olle social studies last week and was able to expertly weave into his learning the real-life challenges of the peanut business, pesticides, and impacts on the local environment from an economic and social perspective. But the break that weekends provide necessitates that the boys are creative with how they spend their time. Especially during the heat of the day when it’s too hot to go outside and most people lay low from 10am-3pm, it can be a challenge to stay entertained.
This past weekend Harlan and Olle, at their own initiative, addressed this issue head-on. Taking a page from the Lemonade-Stand playbook, they made popcorn (palomita de maiz) and juice (fresca) squeezed from fresh grapefruit, local peaches (melacotons), and lemon. Okay, they had some help from Miriam :) Their business plan evolved over the course of an hour and they ultimately decided to go door to door rather than expecting their clients to come to them. With a large bowl each of popcorn and fruit juice, they went from house to house (or hammock to hammock) to each of our neighbors, charging one cordoba (about 3 cents) for each product, provided that each customer supplied their own cup and plate. Everyone bought some, a few people even buying seconds. The boys learned a lot from their business venture, but more importantly it was a really creative way to connect and enter into conversation with our neighbors. They were in many ways helping to live out our purpose here, to find deeper meaning in relationships with others.
The morning cacophony of crickets chirping in our rooms, dulce meowing outside our door, roosters crowing in the surrounding yards and the distant honking of buses and trucks usually begins at around 3:30am, although some roosters seem to go all night and the cricket decibel level ramps up as dawn approaches. The only element of this noise we have control over is dulce, and we have switched to feeding her at night in the hopes that her stomach won’t tell her to meow quite so early. The results of the experiment are still pending, and we are definitely in the market for cricket muzzles if anyone knows a good vendor. But really, the noises are a part of life (even the trucks, although why they need to honk at 4am when there are no other cars in the road and the cows and chickens haven’t yet started using them for the day as thoroughfares for getting from field to field is a mystery) and we are growing accustomed to listening and learning from them.
Showers are a necessity when you live in the village and we are told that once the dry season really kicks in during March and April, multiple showers a day are a requirement due to the extreme amount of dust that gets kicked up with every step you take. Our shower is pretty basic even by local standards, outside and connected to our kitchen and made from brick and mortar with walls about 6 feet plus high and a concrete floor. Some grass has begun to grow inside, and at nighttime you really need two headlamps, placed on either side of the wall, to provide adequate lighting. Day showers can be nice and more comfortable then taking a cold, night shower in the rain, as long as you can dodge the wasps that fly in and out of the water streams. The challenge can be when chicken soup gets involved. For two full days last week we had no water. But Adilsa our neighbor has a shower that gets its water from a well, not the municipal water source, so she usually has water for showers when we don’t. Yesterday Olle took a shower at Adilsa’s first and had solid flow. Harlan and Cully were next and managed to have enough to rinse off the soap, barely, although it seemed like the decline in pressure was a bit of a fluke as that had never happened before.
Miriam’s shower started great, but quickly turned into a drip and then nada. She was left in a predicament; stand there and wait, or put clean clothes over soapy skin and return to our house in the hopes that we had enough water in our 5 gallon bucket to complete the process. She wisely took option b, and thankfully had enough to finish the job in our shower. To make the process more efficient, she used our purple bowl to rinse, a container that only an hour earlier had contained the delicious chicken soup she had made for our neighbor Miriam, who had just returned home from a successful gall bladder surgery that found 21 stones, which we all had the privilege to see, wrapped neatly in a plastic bag.
Ventas are basically rooms in people’s houses out of which they sell stuff to make a little extra money. Each venta is a little different but most offer basic stapes (rice, beans and eggs, a few fruits and vegetables) as well as various other things someone might need in a pinch (coke, a beer, hammocks, and peanuts). Not everyone has a venta, but a lot of people do. We wish they had such things back home. They are a great way to be let into someone else’s life, to shop and chat, to build relationship and purchase goods at the same time. The transaction becomes not only about money, but about learning something new about another person each time you make an early morning tortilla run, or just need frijoles because really, don’t we all need frijoles?
Our tank of propane for our three-burner stove that works overtime cooking rice and frijoles ran out of gas suddenly last week. At first we thought we were in a bit of a pickle, as raw beans and rice just doesn’t cut it and our burner does ALL the cooking. We had been told that the only place to refill was in Leon, a 45 minute bus-ride away and a moderate hassle to carry a large tank on a bus, through the crowded city streets and to a gas-refiller guy, and back. But after a conversation with the guys (Carlos, Nelson, Aciles, Wilmar) who were hanging out in our yard at the beginning of Spanish class, we found that in fact there was a gas-refiller guy much closer. Carlos offered to borrow Adilsa’s motorcycle and take Cully on the back. In addition to being a corn aficionado, Carlos is an expert biker, maneuvering adeptly through the slippery, volcanic soil better then just about anybody. We were in the tail end of another in a succession of afternoon rain storms but that didn’t deter Carlos. With the tank behind him and Cully behind the tank, they made the round trip journey post-haste, with only one or two instances of possible danger when Cully’s feet flew off the foot pegs while trying to balance his butt on the end of the seat while holding the tank in place.
To end this week’s entry, here’s a quick poem about life here:
"Through the shattered glass of grass and weed, visions emerge
Souls are animated. The heights call to all, bending their ear for the morning dirge
We sway in the wind, rain, sun and we rise
Again, riding the unexpected, all is ethereal
Weeks tick-tock, searching for the nearest purpose, the moments reveal"
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