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