El Sauce...my new home for the next two years!!

Well hello everyone, sorry it has been a long time since I have last updated this blog...many things have happened here! To start out, I am now in my new site near El Sauce, Leon. I live in a very rural farming community with about 400 people. It is located in the department of Leon on the Pacific coast and the North West part of the country. I have a new address to receive mail:

Wesley Meier PCV
Apartado Postal #366
Leon, Nicaragua
Central America

I also have a new cell phone which I can receive free incomming, but costs quite a bit to call out both nationally and internationally, the number is: 505-409-0366. To receive reception, I have to walk to the top of the hill. In the future I should be living closer to cell reception and wil be able to receive more calls.

Since the last time I wrote on my blog, I have completed training and am now an official Volunteer with Peace Corps! Near the end of November the total group, 43 members went to the capital, Managua, to participate in the swearing-in ceremony at the US Embasy. The total group stayed in Managua for a couple more days, then we all went to our new sites spread out throughout all of Nicaragua. I packed one dress shirt, one tie, and one pair of black dress shoes, and was finally able to wear it all for the ceremony. Twenty-two of the volunteers are involved with the Ag/Rural Development – Food Security (my sector), and the other 21 work with the educational environmental.

Right now I am living with a new host family in my new site. My host dad is the leader of the community, which is helpful as he is introducing me to most of the families in the community. My house is quite nice, but fairly compact. The inside of the house is one big room and divided into four smaller rooms with a bed sheet divider.

The farm where I am living right now has about 15 acres of corn, millet, red beans, and sesame. Every day we are up around 6am to milk the cows. They have four cows we milk daily, and about 15 cows in total. With the milk, we either drink it fresh, boil it and put it in our coffee, or make cheese out of it. The leftovers go to the dogs or the pigs-nothing is ever wasted.
Now that I have moved to a different part of Nicaragua, I also get to experience the different types of food. The new area that I have moved to doesn´t have as much access to a variety of food due to the climate and how rural we are, so my diet has only consisted of beans, rice, a tortilla, and the cheese that I mentioned they make from the milk daily. Luckly, my new host mom makes the best beans with a lot of good flavor, otherwise I would get pretty tired of beans and rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Lately, the price of rice has gone up by quite a bit, so we have been just eating beans. Yeh!
The pattern of making the beans consists of placing the fresh beans that we just picked into a pot of boiling water and cook for close to an hour. Then with this first batch, we scoop out the bean water on top and have bean soup. For the next couple meals we can just eat the beans that were just cooked. After a day or so, they re-fry the beans with of course a ton of oil and we have that for the next few meals. All in all, we can make a batch of beans last for at least 2-3 days. Sometimes they ask what we eat in The States, and I don´t even know where to start. I don´t want to offend them, but say we eat a variety of foods including fruits and vegitables...they are lost after that wondering why we eat so many things, when we could just stick with one simple food. Ahh the joys of different cultures!!

So these last two months have been the harvesting months. It is normal in Nicaragua to have two and maybe even three growing seasons. Well where I am there are two growing seasons, and now is the end of the second and final season. My family started harvesting beans. About a month ago we went through all of the bean field and pulled out the bean plants to dry, then returned to collect the seeds. Well the whole family went out to the field with sticks, a tarp, and water jugs. My brothers gathered the bean plants and threw them into the tarp, while I was on the tarp beating the plants with two sticks in my hand. Yes-I have weak un-Nicaraguan hands and I got a ton of blisters on them. We did this only for the mornings until noon then retreated away from the swelling hot sun! We filled up close to ten 100 lb. bags and hauled them back to the house on our back. This lasted for about a week, until we harvested all of the beans in the field-enough to last the family until the next year.
After beans came sesame seeds, and was the same process-using a tarp and beating the seeds out of the plant with sticks, but this time my hands have healed and I didn´t get any blisters. Also the field was a couple miles away, so we hooked up the oxen on the cart and took it out to the field. I felt pretty cool riding on the cart, thinking that my grandpa or great grandpa probably did this at one time in his life and I was able to relive it, just in another country!!
The last crop to harvest was corn. We walked the field and hand picked the ears of corn and threw into another 100 lb. sack. You may be saying to yourself, I bet they´re probably not going to use sticks this time....but your wrong! We dumped the ears of corn into a hammock, twisted the hamock over on itself so the corn wouldn´t fall out, and beat it with sticks to knock off the corn kernals!! The with the cobs…. they are kept and used for toilet paper! They also use leftover newspaper for toilet paper. The newspaper is much softer than the cobs for toilet paper! In a month or so, we are going to harvest millet, which looks similar to the sesame plants so I imagine the harvesting process to be similar to the rest.
The house that I live in is all brick and is very dark inside, especially with no electricity. The rooms are separated by hanging sheet material. To go into my room during the day, I have to use my headlight (powered by the many batteries I brought with me). My family eats at 7 pm by candlelight, and are usually in bed by 8 pm. The hot food is prepared by gathering sticks and starting a fire in a primitive wood stove. With the open environment and holes all throughout the house, small animals seem to randomly roam inside and outside the house. If some of you remember my previous post about a pig getting into my room, well now, due to the lack of privacy, I have a rooster sleeping under my bed. Since my wall is just a sheet, I have no way of keeping out the dang thing!

It’s not under my bed when I go to sleep, but wanders inside when I am asleep. I guess I can say that I am a heavy sleeper now with all of these ¨extra activities¨going on every night: dogs barking, horses, chickens, roaming animals, walking mice, etc. Then about 2:18 – 2:20 am EVERY SINGLE MORNING a rooster lets his presence known by crowing under my bed! I just lie in bed and laugh because it is just so funny-and with an average of 9-10 hours of sleep-can´t really say it is making me loose too much sleep!
At the start of the New Year, I will move into a new house by myself a little closer to town. Here I can have a bit more privacy and space to spread out my books and things. I also plan on growing a big garden and testing if new crops can grow in this area of Nicaragua.

Nicaragua’s dry season is November until June, which means no rain at all. The temperatures are approx. 90-100 degrees during the day (not sure as there are no thermometers), but cooler at night. “Food security” is an issue during the dry season/food shortage season. Sometimes the wells and even the rivers dry up before June, so it’s quite a concern. By February, almost everything the farmers have grown will be consumed. Many people go hungry during the later part of the dry season, and some people have cases of malnutrition and potentially starvation. The farmers eat almost everything they grow and are self-sustaining substance farmers, but once their food supply is gone, they have nothing.
They use 2-4D and roundup for crops. They spray with a hand sprayer while they walk barefoot with no shirts; people die or have severe birth defects due to exposure of the chemicals. In time, I hope to enlighten the farmers on the hazards of chemical exposure. First, I need to master the Spanish language and gain some trust to slowly try improve their farming practices.

I now have a horse named Wiskey, who is a great companion. I use him to help haul sacks of feed, ride into town, or just for a ride up in the mountains to get away from everything! My small rural village is about six miles from the closest ¨bigger town¨where I can buy supplies and even use the internet when there is electricity. Not too far, but makes for a good hour and a half walk one way if there is no trucks.

As I have always claimed since I moved down to Nicaragua, the views are really beautiful and the sunsets are even better! Anybody is welcome down here, as you have a place to stay and plenty of things to do!!
I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Love you all,

Wes

505-409-0366

Ahh the rain…

It has been raining constantly for the last three weeks. Beside the fact that nothing dries do to the moist air, the strong rains have been flooding the low areas in Nicaragua and really hurting the bean harvest-to the point that if the rain keeps up for two more weeks, there will be no beans left for the farmers to harvest and could cause a major food shortage in the coming year.
On a brighter note, I have only four more weeks left of training and I actually start my volunteering experience in my own site. This past week I stayed with another volunteer in their site. We built a biogas digester and improved cooking stove. Real quick-a biogas digester is basically a tank in the ground that you add cow manure into daily. The manure degrades and turns into methane gas which can be used as a clean odorless gas for cooking. The excess manure turns into fertilizer for your garden. The only costs for this project include the initial capital for the tank(about $150)-everything else is free as long as you or a neighbor have at least two cattle. We were able to talk with the people in the village and learn what they were interested changing and potentially adding to their village. Then just yesterday, I visited a very active community who are involved with smart and sustainable ag. business products. Within the village they have big fruit tree producer. He uses all sorts of neat technologies to water and fertilizer his crops. Then his neighbor uses worms to make fertilizer which the tree farmer uses for his fields. The community also has a cooperative started to utilize a truck to transport their products to market in a bigger city.
One of the goals of the Peace Corps is to live like the people of Nicaragua, which includes receiving the same amount of income. I am finally understanding how far $1 will really go. My friend and I refuse to take the bus into town for only 6 Cordobas, we walk the 15 or so blocks one way. The exchange rate is $1 = 20Cordobas, so 6 Cordobas is about $0.12, but adds up to $0.50 in two trips! I have to quit calculating what the cost is in US dollars, because everything here is really cheap for American standards-even when ice cream costs $0.10 for the flavor of the week!
Another great opportunity I was able to be apart of was actually making my coffee-from start to finish. My family has a coffee plant in our yard which they use for coffee, but since coffee harvesting season isn’t till November, they bough some coffee in a neighboring district where the harvest is going on now. I put the coffee beans in a big pot on the hot wood fire to toast to perfection. I have to constantly stir the beans to give an even toast to every single bean. To check the desired toasting level, I just had to smell the beans as it was on the fire. I decided to go for a medium to medium-dark roast (plus or minus a whole range as I really had no clue what it was supposed to be like) which took close to 40 mins on the fire. After toasting the beans, I had to grind the beans in a Mollena. This is a hand crank device which they use for just about all types of food-including corn and even chicken. I set the grind to be fairly fine so when they brew the coffee, the grounds sink to the bottom of the pot and I don’t have to choke them down. They don’t use filters, just a dash of cold water on top of the grinds to help them sink to the bottom of the pot (kinda like cowboy coffee when your are camping!) After a solid hour of grinding, I had close to a 2 - ½ gallon bucket full of grounds. Sounds like a lot, but this will probably only last my family a month. It is very common for Nicaraguan’s to drink a lot of coffee throughout the day. We always have at least one cup for breakfast. A half pot of coffee is kept on the hot coals just in case they have a visitor and need to share a cup. They then drink a cup for lunch. And finally after a good hard days work, they will enjoy a cup for dinner. After all the work that I now know goes into one cup of coffee-the coffee tastes all the better!!

I wish all of you the best-and hope you enjoy that cup of coffee!!


~Wes~

The pig snuck unto my room again….

Yes you heard me right, my family has a couple of pigs that they let run around the house and the little squirt snuck unto my room once I opened the door to my room. I am finally adjusting to life here. There is definitely a difference in the time schedule here-‘Nica Time’ as we would like to refer to it as. Things are very chill and relaxing. A meeting at 1:00 pm usually means 1:30. The weather right now is absolutely gorgeous. I go to bed with about 70-80 deg F temps and it is usually around 80-90 deg F during the day. It has been raining a lot which really makes for a mess as my whole yard is dirt and mud. My house has dirt floors so I can’t really take off my shoes when it rains, so I just add to the dirt on the floor with new wet dirt!
I am now really enjoying the cold water bucket showers in the morning! Every morning I wake up, go to the kitchen well and crank up a bucket of water, then go outside to my bano and shower. There is a opening in the trees by the bano, so I get a really neat view of the facing mountain while I shower!
I am currently on my fourth of eleven weeks of training. We have been learning some very important sustainable practices for agriculture and also how to add value to simple products. We have learned how to can fruits and vegetables, make jam out of the million different fruits, make yogurt, make soy milk from soybeans, then take the meat left over and make soy burgers, use some of the plants for medicinal uses, and make candy out of fruit. On more of the ag side-we learned how to make a good compost pile using only what we have around us, how to ferment horse/cow manure, sugar, and tree leaves to make a really great natural fertilizer and herbicide. We have been planting our own garden with radishes, cucumbers, and a couple of other medicinal plants which help raise the protein level is peoples diet. We just started a small tree nursery (vivero) with 50 seeds that will grow into small saplings which we can then transplant to help the deforestation issue that is so prevalent. All of these projects we are doing with our families and the local community so they can learn also and implement the practices themselves once we leave-which is our whole goal-to be sustainable!!
I love hearing from you all. I will you all the best and I appreciate all of the prayers!
-Wes-

Life in Rural Nicaragua!

I am currently located just south of Esteli in a rural villaje living with a host family. A typical includes waking up around 3:30a thanks to the rooster at 5:00a for the dogs and then around 5:30ª to get ready for the day. Moving into my host family was a huge thing for me. With my limited spanish, I have to communicate everyting form washing my clothes, to eating, to telling them if i want sugar to whatever else comes up all in spanish! It is getting a lot better, although the dinners are usually quiet do to the lack of spanish!
As for some of the stuff that I am learning and doing: the Peace Corps Agriculture position is a great program to practice a wide variety of things. We are learning all of the ag stuff that you would expect-land management, sustainability crops and fertilizers. On top of it, we have a week session about cook stoves, another week on fruit drying, and as a training group of 22 we are starting a micro-finance banco-Grameen style. We are doing it with our own money so we can understand it and then take it out to our rural communities where we will be placed. As you can tell I am super stoked to be learning and working in so many different areas! Also I may be working with solar PV and solar hot water.

I hope everything is going great with you all-Love to hear from you via email(sorry if it is a delayed response)

Wes
wlmeier@gmail.com

Sept. 9th, 2008

Hello everyone!
I arrived in Nicaragua safely on Wednesday and have been in training in Managua(the capital city) until now. I am all packed up to head to my host family´s house today. For the next eleven weeks I will be training for Spanish with a personal tutor, learning sustainable ag techniques by traveling to other Peace Corps Volunteer´s site, and learning the culture simply by living with my host family!
I appoligize if this page is not updated for those eleven weeks as the training will be very busy and may keep me in rural locations without internet!

First Post

Mixing clay, water and straw together to make briks for the new stove design.