Well, today I turn 25 and I´m on my way to buy birthday cake supplies (carrots and cuajada for the frosting). While I tried to keep my birthday a secret in my community, it somehow became general public knowledge and I have been convinced to celebrate by baking my own cake. It should be fun, but I was hoping to spend a quiet evening by myself.

With my quarter century mark on the horizon for the last couple weeks, I have been thinking frequently about age here and how different the lived experience of people in my same age group is here than in the States. Most 25 year old males in my community have children, and have not finished high school. (On a side note, as a result of some kinship charts I have been working on, I have found out that two children I formerly believed were siblings are actually half-siblings and cousins at the same time having been fathered by the same man but born to two sisters.) They are generally landless and work in the fields of others, earning of 50 cordobas ($2.50) for a full day when work is avaliable. This small income is often the only stream of money for a household, which is even more trying in the dry season (that is to say now) when a day´s work is difficult to find. Many of the young men in my community have the hopes of going to work in the States some day to earn what little money they can to send home to their families. Those living here with relatives in the states enjoy a markedly higher standard of living and security of life than others. Rather than making the dangerous and costly journey to the States, many instead opt to try their chances seeking work in Managua, where the monthly income for unskilled labor can be as much as 2500 cordobas ($125). In another indicator of the troubles of the Nicaraguan economy, Nicaragua sends a very large number of workers to neighboring Central American countries such as Costa Rica, where as many as 500,000 Nicaraguans have illegally immigrated to work. Life is hard for the young adults in my community, and at times I have a hard time relating to their experience. However, I am finally making some friends my age and making an effort to learn from them. Now I just have to wait for the rains when they´ll come home to work.

Anyways, I must be on my way. Thank you for your help with the seeds. Until next time, que le vaya bien.

Once again it's been a while, but I'm still here melting away. At the beginning of the dry season I didn't quite believe all of my neighbors' ominous warnings about the temperatures in March. However, unlike their overly dramatic preparations for the December cold, their predictions have been nothing if not understated this time around. The wind is no longer a refreshing respite from the heat, but rather comes in superheated gusts while being in the sun has gone from moderately unpleasant to intolerable. On the other hand, I am not altogether sure that the seasonal change has as much to do with my recent climatic discomfort as with the recent addition of a wall thermometer to my house. Now I can monitor the mercury's every move and I am convinced that 105ºF feels significantly hotter when you know it's that hot. On other climatic notes, I have recently discovered that at certain temperatures duct tape melts and I was faced with the realization that I have become almost fully adapted here when I embarrassingly found myself clutching for a second blanket during a frigid 75ºF cold snap. In other news around the house, I have seen, but not caught, a spider larger than my hand three times (I hope it's the same one), and am only encouraged by the idea that the very large scorpion that has been living in the tiles of my ceiling will catch it before it bites me. Here is a picture of the scorpion, for scale I should mention that it is standing on a two by four. I've had a rather eventful last couple months and I'll try to sum it up as best as possible. As far as work goes, my community bank is up and running and I've been doing a lot of work with a women's group to improve their bread baking businesses. In addition to this, although we are still in the middle of the dry season, I managed to plant a small garden with the help of a drip irrigation system I have installed for demonstration purposes. My house is in the perfect location for this, and I plan to use my roadside garden to teach a few sessions on home gardening and organic fertilizer making. So far, I have planted Jamaica Rose, a couple varieties of tomato, Swiss chard, okra, summer squash, collard greens, and watermelon in the main space and I have planted mint, menthol, wormwood, lemongrass and aloe (outdoors!) in a smaller space nearby. There should be more pictures later, but here is a picture of the beginnings of my drip irrigation system.

The barrel is filled with water then is routed to a special hose (not pictured) which drips. Many people have passed by expressing interest in organic fertilizer/pesticides, drip irrigation, and in planting gardens of their own, and I'm very excited to get started on some projects as soon as the rains come in May. Not only can home gardens help with the quality of nutrition of the family, but they can also be a very helpful and sorely needed second income stream. While the people here seem very motivated to plant gardens, access to vegetable seeds is a big problem. They are hard to find and prohibitively expensive when you do. I have a small stock of seeds here now which I plan to use to start a community seed bank with my harvest, but we could definitely use more here. I am going to go looking for seeds in Sebaco sometime next week, but your help would also be appreciated. Please send seeds (especially tomato, green pepper, squash, cucumber, carrot and onion seeds) to: Kyle Murphy AP 21 Ocotal, Nueva Segovia Nicaragua, Central America Thank you very much for your support, one packet of seeds can make a big difference in the nutrition of a family here.

In addition to the gardening project, I am working on a proposal to make a good number of improved wood stoves here. The stoves that most families use now are very primitive and burn more wood than is necessary. In addition to this, they lack chimneys and therefore, the kitchen is often filled with smoke causing a high number of respiratory illnesses. The improved stove is rather cheap to make ($25) or so, uses less firewood and has a chimney to reroute the smoke away from the kitchen. I'm hoping to make a good deal of these, and am planning on requiring the recipients of the stoves to plant a small tree nursery to offset the amount of wood that the stove will burn over its lifetime. We'll see how it goes, but I'm planning on having the proposal ready within the month. In other matters, my parents came for a visit last month and it was a great time. We made it to a good variety of places, while still managing to be in my site long enough for me to continue getting work done. It was nice to get to spend time with them and I don't think I realized how much I missed them until they were here. This a picture of my father next to one hell of a tree in a cloud forest at Selva Negra (no, it wasn´t raining, he´s just that sweaty).

Easter is the culmination of the biggest holiday in Nicaragua, Semana Santa. While the festivities are mainly centered around food (a lot of people have been eating fish lately despite the elevation), it is also very common to make pozas (wells) by damming the small, shallow rivers. I spent a couple days this week cooling off from the heat by going for a quick dip. I played some water baseball and had a nice picnic with a few of the local youth, getting out just in time for the drunks to take over the swimming hole. Along with the swimming I have been spending a good amount of time with the neighbor kids, who have been out of class for the week and generally seek me out when they are bored. I have a small (and ever dwindling due to loss and theft) stock of toys that I loan out and they come knocking on my door as early as 6am to ask for them. Here are a couple of pictures of the kiddies and one of my neighbor Nedi doing his best “Nica face”

That's about all I have for now, but I will close with a quick anecdote which I think says a good deal about the relaxed nature of the local culture. I was walking home one day and a large truck pulled up along side me full of Nica men. I recognized the driver as someone who works at the mayor's office and we began to talk. He offered me a ride and I told him that I lived just up the way and it wasn't necessary. Then he asked me which house and how I had been and we kept talking like this for another five minutes or so while the truckload of men was waiting. Finally I asked him what they were doing around here and he asked me if I had seen any smoke coming from over the hill in the distance to which I replied that I had. He continued to tell me that they had received a call at the mayor's office that a field fire had gone out of control and that they were the fire brigade sent to put it out. This is a bit of an extreme example, but truly indicative of the manner in which everyone is always friendly and never in a hurry. Well, until next time I hope everyone is doing well, and like always I will try to be more frequent posting in the future.

Hi,

Sorry for the absense. I wrote a post a while back that seems to not have made it online and the draft is lost, so I will try to recap things as best I can. First of all, Christmas was completely different here. It was my first year not being with my family. Christmas is not by a long shot the biggest holiday around, taking a backseat to the Holy Week celebrations preceding Easter Sunday. This, along with the poverty of rural Nicaragua, meant a build up to Christmas bereft of the nonstop commercial pummeling which I always found depressing in the States. Christmas here serves as an excuse to drink to excess and eat as many nacatamales as possible. For my part, in the space of two days I managed to down seven of the large festive cornmeal tamales which consist of corn, pork, veggie and lard masses wrapped and boiled in banana leaves, a total matched by my fellow Peace Corps volunteer Travis who visited me for the holiday. We spent Christmas walking around my community visting families that invariably offered us food and commented on Travis´s height.

Travis was the first visitor to grace the peaceful confines of my new house (pictured below). It is affectionatley known throughout the community as "El Synogogue" (why I don´t know) and is of the finest adobe and mud construction with a newly finished concrete interior. Featuring a clay tile roof outfitted with two transparent plastic laminates to allow for a brighter interior, "El Synogogue" is the occassional home to a variety of local wildlife including but not limited to mice, bats, sparrows, a wasp´s nest and chigüines. While it´s not perfect, I am very happy living in my own house and have been lovingly welcomed into the neighborhood. I spend a good deal of time with the family up the hill and am treated as one of the family. Contrary to what you might think, I actually have less privacy living alone, given the fear of my former host mother by most of the community meant that I had very few visitors living there. Now there is a constant stream of visitors curious about how I manage to not get bored living by myself, to which I always respond,"Well, I´m never alone here." Men simply do not live alone here and my solo lifestyle (especially what I eat if I don´t have anyone to cook for me) is a constant topic of curiosity for the Nicas. One benefit of the cultural incongruity of me living alone is that people have a hard time allowing me to do what is normally considered women´s work here. As the inept male, I am constantly assailed with offers to do my laundry, sweeping, cleaning and dishes, which I generally accept out of courtesy, always helping out enough to prove that I´m capable, but staying out of the way enough as to not offend the offer.

My house also played host to my first visitor from the States. My girlfriend came to visit me for 2 weeks all the way from the snowy hellscape which is Michigan. It was great having her here and a big blow to see her leave again so soon. However, the time we spent together was amazing and it was a nice treat to have someone to show around. Also, everyone in my community was very excited to meet her and despite her near total lack of Spanish skills (with the exception of Hola and Graciás), they graciously insist that she speaks very well. We managed to tour around a bit, taking advantage of the New Year´s holiday to get to a good variety of Nicaraguan destinations. The pictures that follow are of a couple of these spots. The first is from the belltower of a cathedral in Granada (the tourist capital of the country). Granada is lovely, but I felt very out of place as the city seemed half filled with gringos and half filled with people trying to sell things to the gringos. I really did enjoy my time there, but the difference between how I feel in my community as the only American and how I felt on the backpacker´s trail is remarkable. The second photo is of the Finca Magdalena on the Island of Ometepe. It is a coffee farm operated by 27 families at the base of a volcanic (half active) island in the middle of the freshwater lake Nicaragua. It was very tranquil and the surrounding forrest was filled with howling monkeys. It is cheap enough to stay there even on my Peace Corps budget (a private room is $10 a night and a dorm bed is $4) and while I was advised that the Finca´s accomodations were "very rustic" beforehand, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is a significant step up from my everyday accomodations ("you mean they have showers AND toilets"). The Isla de Ometepe is a beautiful place and is the closeset I have seen here to what I consider true wildness. The final photo is of me buying pupusas on the street in Estelí for Alice and I to share. While the street food here carries a distinct risk of contracting stomach parasites, if it is served hot you are generally in the clear. And at about 50 cents for 3 delicious cheese and chicken filled pupusas, I, for one, am more than willing to take that risk. Alice managed to stay healthy through the entire trip and I hope she manages to convince some others that Nicaragua is a safe, fun and cheap travel destination, as they could sorely use your tourist dollars.

Speaking of tourism, my community is trying (with the help of a NGO based in Ocotal) to attract visitors with a project based in non-traditional agro-tourism. It has the distinction of being along the route where Agusto Sandino hid and staged raids on American targets in the 20s (I´ve been told there is an old mine that still has abandoned American equiptment around it from that time period. The American interests abandoned it because of increasing pressure from Sandino´s guerilla army). They hope that this historical importance along with a curiosity about the lives of small scale Nicaraguan farmers will help to bring tourist dollars to the community. I don´t have much faith in the flood of visitors that some community members are expecting will ever make it here, but I am happy to see the community getting behind something like this. They have already been around taking a census ( which lead me to correct what I had previously though was only a mispronunciation, but turned out to be a complete misunderstanding of my name. A group had been calling me by what is certainly second only to Judas as the least desirable of biblical names, Cain.) and cleaning the streets. I can only hope that they will take to my projects so well.

I received some generous donations over the holidays from the James family and my aunt and uncle. I would like to thank you here for your generocity and let you know that a portion of the money has already been used to buy school supplies to be distributed to the children most in need. Oftentimes the poorest families cannot send their children to school for the simple lack of funds for a notebook. The rest will be used to purchase fencing material and bucket irrigation systems for a number of small patio gardens which will hopefully both help the families vary their diet and sell veggies at the green market in Jicaro. Thank you again, and I will keep you updated on the progress of these projects.

I should head back to my house as I am supposed to meet one of my 9 year old neighbors there that is writing a letter to some schoolkids in the states (if you have a young one interested in a pen pal, I can arrange it and translate the letters myself, just send me an e-mail at murphykylek@gmail.com), but before I forget I´d just like to mention a couple of strange things I´ve seen recently. First, to add to the casual daredevil list I found a new favorite. I saw a mozo in the fields using an old pesticide bottle as a watter bottle (I have since given him an old empty water jug to use instead). Secondly, there is an old man who lives in the park in El Jicaro off of the scraps off garbage he can manage to collect, who, as I recently noticed, often is seen sporting a black t-shirt with a shipwreck printed on it. The shirt is labeled with the name of my hometown Sault Ste Marie, Michigan. ¿Qué Raro, no? With that I´ll leave you. Hope all is well and hasta luego.

Well, I´m back in Jicaro after spending last night advising Olympia on her Christmas decorating. She was very interested in setting up her small artificial tree in as American of a way as possible and I was happy to oblige acting as her advisor. Outside of that I have been working on moving into a house of my own and finding a role for myself now that my sitemate has returned stateside. Prior to now it has been a hectic month including two trips to Managua and one short stay in Estelí. I was receiving much needed Spanish grammar classes in Masatepe for a week (turns out grammar lessons are hard to come by in the campo where I live) and upon my return was floored by a 5 day mystery fever accompanied by a headsplitting migrane. Fortunately, I´m told that it wasn´t dengue, but nonetheless I would not rush to repeat the experience. Afterwards I spent a half healthy week working in communities surrounding my own followed by a trip to Managua for a conference with all of the Peace Corps volunteers in Nicaragua. All of this moving around has made me feel that I have hardly been in my site and therefore I don´t have much to report work wise.

I have finally managed to upload a few photos of my site and surroundings for your enjoyment. First, this is a picture of the hot water springs I described in an earlier post. While the water is too hot for bathing, it is perfect for cooking a big pot of sweet potatos which we placed directly in a rock formation filled with volcanic boiling water.

Here are a couple pictures of the scenery in my site. The first is the road which runs in front of what will likely be my new house in a couple weeks. The second is a shot of my new palacial estate which I have been told is nicknamed ¨The Synagogue¨ by the people in the neighborhood for reasons unknown to me. The third photo is Doña Juana who lives just up the hill behind my new house and has one of the best views in the community (she also makes the best bread this side of Susucayan)

Finally, here is a picture of me and my banjo riding in style on top of the bus between Quilalí and Wiwilí - the only way to travel.

As it turns out, the rains never did come along strong enough to give people a good bean harvest. While I haven´t encountered anyone who lost everything, some producers did not plant at all and all of the others have been reaping significantly less that usual. However, there is still a large amount of work avaliable for both the bean and coffee harvest which means that many people (especially the poor landless peasants that rely on day labor for survival) have more money now than in any other time of the year. This is clearly observable given the sharp increase in the number of discarded rock-gut rum bottles on the side of the road (occasionally seen accompanied by thier owners). While not everyone simply drinks their money away, there is a strong tendency for the people here to spend what they have when they have it. I am trying to work with a small group of women (the same group that theoreticallly attends the Green Market every other week) to form a community bank. Hopefully the group will meet monthly to deposit money into a collective box and then loan it out to its members. This helps create a culture of saving (especially important with the dry season approaching) and makes micro-credit avaliable to a group that has no access to banks. We´ll see where this project goes, but I´m hoping for the best.

On anther note, I have felt that my Spanish has stagnated for a while now. I have certainly improved since training, but at no where near the rate I had maintained before. It is difficult to learn without instruction, but I have had the chance to make a couple of interesting linguistic observations. First, the people here more often than not form their questions in a negative fashion. For example, if you were to walk into a store looking for soap you wouldn´t ask ¨Do you have soap?¨, but rather ¨You don´t have soap, do you?¨ Likewise if you are to ask if someone is hungry, you would normally term it, ¨¿You aren´t hungry, are you?¨ instead of simply, ¨Are you hungry?¨ This plays into the embarassment people here have to saying no or admitting to not knowing something. By terming the question in the negative, the opportunity is given to the person asked to answer affirmitively in the case that there is or isn´t soap. ¨You don´t have soap, do you?¨ can be answered, ¨Of course we have soap.¨, or ¨You´re right we don´t have any right now.¨, both positive answers. By terming questions in this way, the opportunity to avoid the social stigma of saying no is given. This reluctance to say no is extended to the fact that everyone in this country will give you directions whether or not they know how to get there or not and will tell you that they are planning on attending your meeting and never show up. A second observation I have made in my community is the manner in which the people address their pets. In textbook Spanish there are two third person forms of address, the formal Usted and the informal tú. However, due to a history of colonization and isolation an archaic informal form of address no longer used in most of the Spanish speaking world, vos, is the form most commonly used here in Nicaragua. Besides its interesting history, I am also interested by the fact that the people in my community exclusively use vos between eachother, reserving the tú familiar form of address only for their dogs and cats. I have no explanation for this, your interpretations are more than welcome.

I´m off to find some transparent hose for my winemaking rig before making it back to my community for a graduation dinner this evening. The next week has me going around meeting a baking cooperative and making more wine with a women´s group to sell for the Christmas Green Market. Along with hopefully making my move to my new house I should be kept pretty busy, but I´ll try to update more regularly. Hasta entonces.

I would like to take this opportunity to appologize for my extended absense as well as to assure you that I have continued to exist throughout the duration of this lapse. However, the internet is painfully slow today and I can´t seem to actually post (as in I have lost what I´ve written a few times now and am getting frustrated). Therefore I´ll leave you with the promise of posting soon when conditions are better.

While I have finally managed to take some photos of the community, they´ll have to wait to make it onto the internet as I loaned out my card reader last week and am still patiently awaiting its return.

Anyways, I´ve had another varied two weeks including the construction of another barrel oven, a picnic, a dinner party and the successful first taste of the orange/ginger wine that Victoria and I made with the yeast I received from my father. For the picnic we went to a sulfur hot spring, which while being too hot to bathe in (although I can´t imagine ever finding myself enjoying bathing in a hot spring in this climate) is perfect to cook with. Along with about 10 Nicaraguan women and children, one man and his truck, Victoria and I spent the day by the hotsprings with a lovely lunch of boiled eggs, potatoes and sweet potatoes augmented by a salad and kebobs grilled over a fire (and of course the ever-present grand heap of tortillas). The springs are very remote and completely non developed. We were the only people there outside of the occasional campesino passing with a backpack sprayer full of agrichemicals.

The dinner party was hosted at my counterpart Don Ramon (Moncho)´s house and was meant to launch his barrel oven. I made a pan of roasted sweet squash covered with pepper and dulce (raw sugar sold in half pound blocks), some roasted potatoes and onions, a coleslawish salad of cabbage with a homemade mayonaise based dressing (nice and spicy) and a butterflied chicken (which entered the oven still warm from meeting its final reward) with a rosemary/lemon/garlic based rub under the skin. Moncho´s house is especially remote and tranquil and was a great place to have the dinner. Everything came out well and it was particularly nice to eat some roasted vegetables (or roasted anything for that matter) because ovens are almost exclusively used for bread and pastry cooking here (mainly due to the fact that the traditional ovens need to be heated up for a long time and then the baking done all at once with residual heat) and there´s nothing like an oven sweetened roasted onion. The wine also turned out very well - strong and acidic, but without the yeasty taste that the Red Star packaged baking yeast they normally use imparts. The evening also featured some of the best stars I have ever seen. There was no cloud cover or moon and the severe deforestation of the surrounding mountains makes for a clear view of the night sky.

To make good on my promise to describe a bit of the dardevilism of Nicaraguan men, I should first mention that the women are also daredevils in their own way. For example, the night before picnic-ing at the hot springs we made a marinade to put the pork pieces in overnight (which was followed by a 36 hour pour outage - meaning marinated pork unrefrigerated overnight - ¡A la gran puchica!) and Maritza, who was cooking at the time, kept tasting the marinade to make sure it was tasting alright. This would be completely normal to me, but she added the dangerous element of tasting it once it was on the raw pork. I, for one, consider that a brave act of daring. The daredevilism of the men manifests itself in a different manner. While it does happen in concert with the machista culture of dominant masculinity, what I am more impressed by is the dangerous behavior that is not meant to prove anything, but rather is performed in an offhand, aloof manner that makes it seem normal and not worth a second look. Some acts that I have noted include: the common practice of riding motorcycles (more often that not with noisily bad brakes) without a helmet or back from the bar, spraying agrichemicals without the slightest pretense of protective gear (especially daring in a country whose capital has hosted a plastic tent city of squaters protesting the continued use of nemagon since the late 90s), tapping into their speciously run electrical system without turning off the breaker, climbing to the top of a moving run down school bus and constructing a platform over a 80 foot deep well while standing balanced on a small tree trunk resting across the opening. While these acts are all very dangerous, they are approached withouth the blink of an eye as just another day to day reality. While they are not active risk seekers, these small lifestyle choices have not failed to wow me.

On another note, I have some rather embarassing news to report, although on the plus side I do believe it is a positive sign of my adaptation to Nicaragua. It is the winter here, and while I have mocked the Nicas for their heavy hats and coats at times, I too last week fell victim to the deadly chills of the Nicaraguan nighttime. It is not very easy to tell the temperature here (there is a distinct lack of LED bank thermometers), but the normal daytime highs in this region are around 90, while the nights can dip down to around 70 degrees. The other night I found myself chilled, rapping my sheet tightly around my body unable to shake the cold. Coming from the northern reaches of the States, I had not thought this overnight chill a possibility before coming here, but I have to confess that I truly felt it. To my credit, while I was busy wrapping a sheet around myself, the Nicas were busy throwing a second blanket on their beds. However, I am still embarassed about my new found climatic adjustment and fearful of my return to the Great White North in the future.

I was also recently reminded of my geographical heritage a couple weeks ago when I remarked to Victoria that the smell of a particular part of the community reminded me of the beach. She looked at me with a perplexed gaze, not having the faintest clue what I was talking about. She is from California and beach smell to her (understandably) signifies a salty breeze. However, what I was referring to was a streach of sandy road covered by fallen pine needles which, when warmed by the midday sun, emits an odor that makes me think that I should be approaching the shores of Lake Superior in short order. So, as it turns out, I am getting American geography lessons here as well.

I have a busy couple weeks coming up as I have to travel back to my training town area to take a week of Spanish Classes as well as get started on a couple of projects in my community and travel to Estelí to attend a meeting with my counterpart organization INTA. Hopefully I´ll have a chance to post soon and include pictures as the internet is considerably faster where I´ll be travelling.

Hi again,

While I haven´t managed to take any photos in the last week, I am planning to take a walk around my community in the next couple days with the direct purpose of capturing some images to show on here. However, for now my less than vivid prose will have to do. The rain has picked up a bit, but is still well under the normal levels, and certainly not sufficient to keep the already planted beans alive for long without some kind of change. There was a slow drizzle all afternoon yesterday leaving the landscape greener and refreshed this morning, but without some consistancy the dust will stir up early this year. On the plus side I have been very lucky in that it has no longer been raining every time I do laundry meaning my shirts have finally dropped their half dry molded smell.

Along with my site mate we´ve constructed 3 more barrel ovens in the last week, with one more left to go next week as well as a baking session to inagurate each one. This flurry of activity along with the fermentation of some orange ginger wine (thanks to the yeast I received from my father) has been keeping me busy, but I don´t expect it to last long. The Mercado Verde was last Saturday and the women sold nearly everything they brought. This was very encouraging, given the last two consecutive markets had been rather slow and the situation is fragile enough here that a good sale is definitely necessary to sustain the market for any length of time. There is a good core group of women (mostly from other communities near by, but a couple from my community as well) that participate regularly in the market and will seek out or make a product to sell when their own garden isn´t producing. For example, when she has no produce of her own, one woman from my community goes around to trees she knows are producing fruit that no one is eating (such as the starfruit (melocotón) tree her neighbors have but don´t harvest) and gather fruit to sell. Other women will bring a tied up hen or make nacatamales (large corn masa tamales with spices stuffed with vegetables and pork then steamed in banana leaves) or guirila (a thick tortilla of young corn served with fresh cheese which has a lightly sweet flavor). I am very happy to see this creative commitment to the project and I hope I can both sustain what´s there already while helping them to expand their repetoire of recipes and production techniques. We´ll see how it works out in a couple of weeks as it will be the first time I am at the market unaccompanied by the other volunteers.

Yesterday morning while making an oven I witnessed something that was strange in that my sitemate Victoria had to point it out to me, although in retrospect it was definitely something that I would never have seen in the States. The young son (around 3 years old) of one of the women of the house at which we were working was sitting on the front bar of an unhitched oxcart making motorcycle sounds with his mouth and using a stick for handlebars. This by itself is unremarkable - the fact that he was using a plastic bag fully pulled over his head as a play helmet (without protest from any of the many attending adults) is certainly something worth noting. I, however, did not notice this as anything strange until Victoria mentioned it.

On a slightly related note, I have recently noticed that many things that initially seemed exotic to me I know accept as mundane and even banal. For example, dodging pineapple or pithaya barbs to get to the latrine was at first something I had to consciously reason through before doing, but now it is second nature to the point that I don´t even notice I´m doing it. A conversation I had with a couple of young Nicaraguan boys further made this point to me. I started talking to them as they were picking guayava from a tree near my house and they started asking me about the fruit in Michigan. I told them that there were a lot of apples this time of year and they could hardly believe that such a strange land of fantasy could possibly exist. Apples are an exotic fruit here prized for their uniqueness and rarity. This goes to demonstrate that the idea of exoticism is purely contextual and someone can just as easily find a mango boring and worthless as I can be fascinated by the vividness of its flavor.

As much as I feel fachento (pretentious) having my mp3 player with me, it has been invaluable in the maintenance of my sanity through the slow times so far. Given it´s been so important to me so far to have my music with me, I thought I would start posting what I´ve been listening to lately. In addition to this, I live my life by musical milestones and hopefully I´ll thank myself later for recording my listening trends. That being said - the song of the week is Nina Simone´s first successful single "I Loves You Porgy" from Gershwin´s Porgy and Bess.

That´s about it for now. As always I hope everyone is well and come back next time for my report on the casual daredevelling of Nicaraguan men.

Well, purportedly the winter and the rains that come with it is on its way, but it is over a month late in coming as I´m told. While the community is genuinely desperate for the water to nourish the Postrero bean planting, it has yet to come in any volume. However, I did see a sure sign of winter´s onset yesterday; a child was walking with a knit cap to keep out the frigid 75 degree cold snap. Outside of the climatic concerns, my work pace has picked up, or at the very least I have had a specific task to accomplish every day. Unfortunately, one of those tasks was to hold food down without immediately expelling it from my body, but that has passed and now I´m hoping this is not a false sense of security I´m experiencing as the eggs of some parasite gestate in my large intestine - wish me luck! This short illness did give me some small insite to some cultural differences here that I had not seen until now. When Nicaraguans are sick they like to have people around, comforting them by talking and touching and simply by providing the presense of other humans. This led to a bit of a cultural confrontation as I was happily locked away alone in my room passing the day reading and listening to music between frantic runs to the latrine when unannounced one of Olympia´s friends burst into the room and began to ask me in detail about the conditions of my digestive tract, refusing to accept ¨stomach problems¨ as a sufficiently explicit response. In my weakened condition this was rather disorienting and at the very least quite the surprise, but it´s good to know the difference between the concept of privacy here and in the states - it might be time to go house hunting......

Outside of my couple days of adjusting to the local water supply (which I´ve realized is impossible to avoid and am now banking on my body eventually taking it without problems) I´ve been busy with my first site visit from my bosses and the construction of a couple of brick/barrel ovens of the design I posted about a couple of months ago. It´s been nice to have a set schedule and goals for the moment, but I know I have to be doing more to sustain this work level after the other volunteers in my area leave in November. The visit from my bosses was helpful in that it has me thinking now about how I can prepare in the month ahead for the transition between the three other volunteers that have been supporting the green market here in Jicaro and the time when I will be the only agriculture volunteer in the area. Fortunately, Peace Corps has placed another volunteer here (from the health sector) who has told me that she would like to work with the market as well. I´m feeling better integrated into the community lately as well and I can always find someone willing to talk with me (often too willing, but it´s something).

On another note, this country has had me thinking more and more about recycling and conservation of resources. As I posted before, there is no trash pickup here meaning litter is a problem, but the extreme poverty means that not much is thrown out or bought new. One thing that I did not mention is the case of reusable shopping bags. The kind of conservation that happens here is real and occurs in the only form that could be effective. The people here would think the idea of purchasing a "green" reusable shopping bag as absurd as it really is. Everyone already has something that they can use for this purpose (including the plastic bags the venta gave them last time) and to buy something you already have is a near cardinal sin here. Although it is poverty that drives this here, it is just as true in the U.S. It is always better for the environment to use what you have rather than burden the world with the production of something new. Anything with a "green" label is just another marketing tool of the same companies that produce the more damaging products. Used is always preferable to new and don´t let "environmentally friendly" marketing fool you into thinking otherwise. This is intimately connected to the push for recycling in the U.S. The original thrust to promote recyling in the U.S. in the 70s and 80s was largely funded by companies such as Coca Cola which produced the products most often found as litter. By promoting recycling as a solution for this litter problem, these companies effectively transferred the responsibility for the large quantities of trash they unnecessarily prodcuced from themselves to the consumer. In this manner it´s always good to be suspicious of marketing that claims to give you a cleaner environmental reputation through your consumer behavior. That´s it for the lecture, but I´m sure I´ll be back with more soon.

I have to say my attitude of grinning and bearing it which I mentioned last time may be wearing thin. The music played in this country leaves a lot to be desired and I´m becoming more and more convinced that Nicaragua shares the same soundtrack as my personal purgatory. While the setting would undoubtedly be different (perhaps Canton, Michigan or 28th Street Grand Rapids without a car) the neverending loop of ABBA, 80s Rock and horrible pop would certainly be there.

Anyways, I promise more photos in the future and hope that everyone is enjoying their apples.

Although it´s been a rather uneventful week, I just wanted to post to let everyone know I´m alright and give a couple quick observations. First, it still takes me by surprise to see Nicaraguans with blue eyes, but my area in particular is full of very white ¨celeste¨ eyed people. I even saw a redhead in town the other day. The people here put a particular value on pearly white skin. They idealize whiteness as beauty and very often will call someone attractive based solely on this. It also works in reverse in a particularly troublesome self loathing in that they will call the darkest people ugly, and judge themselves by these same standards. I´m sure that part of this is attributed to the long standing power held by whites in this country dating back to the original Spanish colonization. This makes it all the more interesting when the people with the white skin here consider themselves more "Spanish" and those with darker skin more native. I, however, believe that the white skin has more to do with the US Marines spending 20 years here in the early 20th century more than anything else.

Also on the subject of beauty standards, I was amazed a couple weeks ago (but in hindsight not that surprised) to find out what a big deal the Miss Universe beauty pagent is here. The day´s schedule was completely turned around to accomodate the show in its entirety and Olympia (the woman I live with) could not make time pass quickly enough during the day in her anticipation for the broadcast at night. I, having nothing else to do, watched it with her feeling the whole time that I had to hide my true feelings towards it. Those of you who know me are undoubtedly familiar with my feelings on beauty pagents (and my general feminism) , and I hope you are as impressed as I am with my new found ability to grin and bear situations like this one. During the program Olympia kept asking me who I found most attractive, to which I continued to respond taht I did not think any of them were particularly good looking - somthing that she could not understand. She, on the other hand, had very definite ideas about who was the most beautiful, and while always routing for the latin candidates she would also continually deride their darker skin preferring instead the bleached blonde American (although her routing for the American may have just been to make me feel more comfortable, while it actually acheived the opposite). Anyways, as you may already know, Miss Venezuela won for the second year in a row which prompted the funniest thing that I have heard Olympia say (albeit unintentionally). When Miss Venezuela won Olympia (a Sandinista) found it the perfect time to to give me a talk on international politics. She said that the world needs to rethink its stance on Venezuela. Everyone is always talking down Hugo Chavez and saying how he is doing damage to his country and Latin America. If that´s so, then how can you expain that Venezuela has won two years in a row on a universal level. I had no way to respond given laughing was inappropriate and engaging this on any logical level was both ridiculous and clearly not going to effect anything. I should say that I don´t mean to be negative about her or my situation here in general. This is just something I found amusing.

In addition to this grinning and bearing it moment, I had another smaller incident during one of the most fun nights I have had here so far. Olympia´s cousin (and 15 other family members and friends) came last week in a pickup truck from Honduras to visit for another family members birthday party. On a side note, her cousin has a history which I find interesting in a number of ways. He was initially a member of the Sandinistas during the revolution and then again during the war with the U.S. supported and funded Contras. He was captured by the Contras during the war and tortured leaving his face permanently disfigured. Later, he moved to Honduras (where the Contras had been trained by the US and from where they often staged their attacks) and joined the Honduran standing army to be trained by US soldiers. Now he lives in Honduras, married to a Honduran, but his neighbors often tease him and enter into property disputes calling him a foreigner, to which he responds that he has given his time in military service to Honduras making him as Honduran as anyone. However, he still maintains his Nicaraguan self identity. What I find interesting about this is that first, he is very positive about Americans despite his treatment during both the war and army training (which he described as very violent as well). More than anyone I have met here he makes a clear difference between people and their government which is very encouraging. Secondly, this seems to prove the point that soldiers are rarely politically motivated, but rather their specific social conditions are what lead them into combat. The people actually doing the fighting in countries such as this are not idealogical such as they are painted in the histories we read in the U.S. , rather they are fighting for a group identity nominally connected to a political ideology, but without any real identification or attatchment to its ideas. The people that fought the war against eachother here are now neighbors and oftentimes members of the same family, church or political party which provide more lasting bonds than the divisions of the war.

Anyways, this same night I met her cousin we played music on Olympia´s porch while drinking nance (yellow tart cherry) and pithaya (dragonfruit) wine. The grinning and bearing it came during this playing when one of the guitarists started playing the Who song Behind Blue Eyes (with a very good English accent although he didn´t understand what any of the words meant). He finished and I told him that I really liked that song to which he responded by asking me if I knew any more Limp Bizkit. I take it as a sign of my personal growth here that I only mentioned that I knew no more songs by them. This night was exactly what I needed and I have been promised by one of the musicians that lives close by that he will teach me some Nicaraguan songs and the basic right hand roll common here. Hopefully this will work out and I can finally learn La Mora on banjo.....

This week I have my first visit to my site from my bosses which I hope goes well. Other than that there´s just to keep working on getting integrated and maybe start a box of worms, but we´´ll see. I hope all is well and I´ll try to write sooner next time.

Howdy,

It´s been a very strange couple of weeks in terms of workload. On the one hand, I feel that I´ve been working a lot (albeit on projects initiated by the other volunteer in my site, my own will come with time), on the other hand, I had time to finish Anna Karinina over the span of 5 days. I´m still adapting to the new pace and feeling myself very lucky to have someone here to direct me for the time being. This past week we started painting a world map in the town center, which is now only lacking a few final touches. The people here have shown a lot of interest in the map and I am particularly excited to have a small inaguration for the map with the kids from the school across the street. Maps and geographic knowledge are obviously lacking here and I am hoping that this map can help me explain that it is a very long drive to reach my neighbor´s relative in Miami.

In addition to this map project, I have been meeting more people in the community and learning the work rhythm in which I will be living. I´ve been asked to be the manager of a local baseball team and I´m looking forward to the opportunity to meet some more youth in the community. I am fearful that they just want me to sponser the team (which I am not disposed to do), but we´ll see how it works out.

One thing I have been noticing more and more here is the connections between the resourcefulness of the people and the problems with litter here. The style of construction here continues to make me think that my father would do well for himself here. While people are forced to make do they are also very particular to detail. For example, a new gate was installed in front of the house I´m living in last week which utilizes an old hand crank mill and a piece of wire for a hinge, but is notched out to make it aestetically pleasing. The doors to my room are also a testament to this, given one latches by putting a screwdriver through a hole in the door into one in the wall and the other is slightly warped and permanently has a decorative towel draped over the corner to allow it to close tightly. Nothing ever quite wears out here, it is only transferred to a new use. People use old rice sacks for everything and what is often considered trash in the US is a resource here. As it turns out, generations of poverty and limited access to consumerism is a very good recycling program. What disposible goods we take for granted in the US are used time and time again here without the consideration of throwing them away. While it is encouraging to see all of the creative reuse of trash as a resource here, it is also common custom to throw what is of no use (candy wrappers and other small pieces of plastic) on the ground creating a good deal of litter everywhere. If people do collect their trash, they burn it or bury it given the lack of trash collection (however there is trash collection in the town up the road from me). The difference between here and the States is very interesting in this respect. While there is significantly less litter in the US, there is much more of use thrown away and hidden from view in dumps. I´m not sure which is better.

One of my biggest dissapointments coming here was the absence of good coffee in a coffee producing country and I made a big breakthrough with the woman I´m living with the other day to this effect. It had been an improvment here already given that during training I was drinking instant coffee, but the coffee still had been sweetened beyond recognition. I finally managed to explain effectively that I liked black coffee and that she was only wasting money on all of the sugar she was pumping into me. I´ve been treated to wonderful local coffee for the last few days due to this and I´m considering it my first application of the agronomy training we received. And speaking of local, I have recently come to the realization that the food I have been eating is nearly preservative free and almost entirely sourced from within my community. The tortillas and atol are from the corn in front of the house as are the beans and cuajada (fresh cheese) that always accompany them. While the food is simple, it is delicious and more local than anything to be found in the States.

I recently found this website, from which you can send me text messages for free. I can´t respond, but it would be lovely to hear from you. Go to http://www.ideasclaro.com.ni/sms2web

Where it says destino type in my phone number 8358 6135. In origen type your name and Mensaje your message. Type in the code and click enviar and it will be on its way.

Until next time, hope all is well.

While I haven´t yet forgotten about this blog, I have been remiss in going nearly a month without updating. I promise to write more often in the future, and as it stands I have a considerably greater amount of free time on my hands now as I have been sworn in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer.

The past month has been fairly hectic. After returning from the site visit, we almost immediately left to visit a demonstration organic farm called Rancho Ebenezer. As it turns out, my community counterpart in site works with Rancho Ebenezer which has trained him as a sort of local level veterinarian. During our visit ther we were trained on simple animal maintenance (including a demonstration of a piglet castration which had pretty much everyone wincing) and given a tour of their ecological closed circle method of patio management. Everything grown at Rancho Ebenezer has a purpose and there is no waste. For example, the trees function as food for the goats which in turn both give milk and manure. The manure is used to feed worms which both produce excellent fertilizer and serve as food for the chickens. The fertilizer is then used to fertilize crops to feed both humans and the animals. I found this visit very encouraging and I hope to work with them in the future.

After this quick visit, we returned to our training towns to finish up with our youth group activities. We spent a day making the final batch of Gánaca (Gaseosa Natural de Campos Azules) which turned out very well and then went to meet with the other groups of trainees (and our youth group) to compete in a product fair. Our group managed to win third place which elated the kids and also won them some nifty backpacks filled with school supplies. The following week, we had a party to congradulate the group and to send off the gringos. We had a lot of fun making fools of ourselves with the pinata (of which I have video that I´m planning on uploading as soon as I can find a faster connection) and spending time with our youth group and families, but it was sad to be leaving. Our training town was very welcoming and friendly and helped me immensly to prepare for service as a volunteer, but I was also ready to leave and get on with my job as a volunteer. Here are a couple of photos of the fiesta. First my host sister hidden behind the pinata and seconly the youth of Campos Azules with their gringos.

After the fiesta we went to Managua to prepare for our swearing in and have a bit of a break before setting out to our sites. We stayed at a very nice hotel in the ritziest area of Managua. It was a very strange feeling going from bucket baths and small town life to hot showers a pool and shopping at an American style grocery store (which nearly gave me a panic attack with all of the options and flourescent lighting). It was jarring to live the income divide first person going from the impoverished campo directly to being surrounded by people that are rich by US standards. This isn´t to say I didn´t enjoy myself, it was a very nice respite to have the opportunity to relax with Americans for a bit, even if it didn´t come guilt free. Our swearing in ceremony was very nice and most of our training town families attended. The ceremony was in a very very nice hotel and it was suprisingly strange to see my host mother and brother out of context. They seemed clearly uncomfortable in the ornate setting (as was I to a degree), but I was happy to get to see them one last time before I left.

Here´s a photo of part of the training group with a couple language facilitators at the swearing in.

We had the day free after swearing in as volunteers and a number of us stayed in Managua to celebrate and take one last deep breath before setting off to our respective sites for two years. Four of us stumbled upon a chinese restaurant (which had fantastic food) and spent the afternoon there playing around with a lazy suzan, which after 3 months in the campo is enough to keep one occupied for a great while. Here is one of the videos that resulted from this goofiness.

After this nice weekend of relaxing (and in my case another couple days to wait for a doctor´s appointment) I finally made it to my site in Nueva Segovia. I am in a small farming community where most of the men have shaved down mustaches and the older ones have cowboy hats like Walter Brennan with the absurdly large tops. Speaking of westerns, I am constantly being reminded here of John Wayne´s entrance into the house in The Searchers where he is in silhouette from the strong light behind him framed by the tiles of a clay roof. The view from my front door here is very reminiscient of this as it is rather dark inside and I spend a good deal of my time letting my eyes adjust to differing light levels.

It´s very nice to be here, but it is readily apparent that my work will be slow going, especially in the beginning. I am lucky enough to have a very motivated counterpart and volunteers to help me, but the simple act of familiarizing myself with the communtiy is going to take time. In the meantime, I have been reading like crazy and cooking with Nicaraguan women. Last week the other volunteer in site invited me to come bake with her women´s group, which was very fun and I am hoping to work with these women in the future. They also happen to be part of the market group which sells at the Mercado Verde, which I am also very excited to be a part of. Two days ago I went to Ocotal (the department capital) and did some shopping. I returned with potatoes and introduced my host mother to gnocci which she loved. Other than that, life has been fairly quiet in site and I am biding my time until I can actually get to work.

I don´t as of yet have a post office box set up in Ocotal, but in the meantime you can mail me at the same address, it will just take me longer to get to my mail.

I hope all is well at home, good luck with the tomatoes and I can´t tell you what I would do for a fresh raspberry right now.....

Here are the photos I promised from last time. The first two are of volcán Masaya and feature a cross which was originally mounted when it was believed that the devil inhabited the volcano. The visitor center includes a wonderful painting of Native American slaves mounting the cross while being watched by their Spanish masters.

The third photo is of Laguna de Apollo and the fourth is of me after a day of swimming and rum.

I just made it back from my four day visit to my future site and am back in my training town for the final 2 weeks of the training cycle. The keyboard here is working against me, so I´m not sure how much I will actually get written. My site where I´ll be working is in the northern department of Nueva Segovia in the mountains near the Honduran border. It is absolutely beautiful and the house I will be staying in is amazing as well. There are a good number of coffee fields there as well as the basic grains of corn and beans (often planted on very marginal, steep pieces of land). Also, I will be living within walking distance to a large pine forest proving that I can´t manage to travel far enough to avoid jack pines nor bad American pop music. I am also lucky enough to have another volunteer in my site for the first three months of my assignment. She knows the community well and I am hoping she can help me integrate faster. Also, I am very excited to help to continue the Green Market project she has helped to start in the next town over with other volunteers and the producers. As I mentioned before, I found the green market in Estelí very encouraging and I hope that this model will work well farther in the campo as well.

In addition to the other volunteer, I also have a pair of community counterparts. One works for the mayor´s office in the municipal seat and helps with the green market and the other is a community leader who is impressively motivated and willing to try new things. I am alsio very excited to work with him on his wine making.

Here are are a few photos of the new site. The first is of one of the pine stands and was taken directly across from my counterpart´s house. The second is about half of my new room, which contrary to what I have heard from other trainees is a big step up from my training town. I have my own entrance and a tile floor which makes for a pretty posh Nicaraguan existence. The third photo is the view from the front porch. The house is on the main road so the busses pass right in front, but it is set back on a hill which means that it is amazingly tranquil and usually has a lovely breeze which keeps the heat down and the bugs at bay.

I am very excited to get to my site and finally get to work. Training has been great, but I have had about enough of it and now I am mostly looking forward to getting started. However, I am not anxiously awaiting the bus trip as I spent most of 9 hours returning from my site yesterday, most of it on used American school buses, which if you are wondering are precisely as comfortable as you remember. I am still tired from the trip, but we have a busy week ahead and will be sprinting to the finish of training. I will try to post again soon , but we´ll have to wait to see what the schedule alows.

I hope everyone at home is doing fine, thanks for the letters, calls and comments.

Hi,

I´ve made it through another week, and have again managed to forget my camera. I have been in tourist mode a couple of times this week, and although it´s been great it makes me a little overaware of my gringo status. I´m enjoying training but really looking forward to getting to work soon. I find out my site where I will be living for the next two years on Wednesday which has me both anxious and thinking about actually getting down to business. I still don´t have much of an idea where I will be, but I am confident that the PC staff knows where I will fit better than I do. However I am fairly confident I will be working with Green Markets and food processing no matter where I end up.

This past Friday my training group went on a trip to hike around on Volcan Masaya (I have photos of this I will upload later). It was amazing to see a volcano up close although the sulfur fumes made me quite dizzy after a while. I´m told that with certain wind conditions you can see he lava flow, but that didn´t work out for us. Either way it was beautiful and the old forested crater across the way was reminiscent of a James Bond villian´s secret lair. I definitely want to return there some time at night as the lava puts on a show after dark apparantly. It was a slightly distrubing to se a fully uniformed Papa John´s delivery guy show up with pizza for lunch. It was exactly the same down to the garlic sauce and peperoccini in each box which left me with a guilty feeling that I was in an imperialized Disney version of Nicaragua built for gringo tourists. That is not to say that I didn´t appreciate the familiarity of the meal, but I really do think I prefer rice and beans at this point.

Yesterday a group of us went on a day trip to the Laguna de Apollo (of which I posted photos before from the overview). It was about a 45 minute descent down the crater walls of an inactive volcano to reach the shore. The trail was beautiful albeit a bit trecherous at spots (leaving my legs a little sore today). We eventually came out at an isolated beach (again of which I will post photos) where we enjoyed some relaxation and a game of cribbage of all things. The water is strangely brackish and full of floating pieces of pumice stone. After spending some time there we walked past some monkeys (really) to a beachside bar down the way where I had a wonderful bowl of fish soup for a scant $4 (which is actually pretty pricey for me here, but I couldn´t resist). Eventually we took a bus home and I slept incredibly well.

I´m going to leave it at that for now, because I´m planning on returning to the cyber cafe after I find out about my site and hopefully will have something a little more interesting to say. Hasta Entonces,Kyle

Well, I found an internet cafe with a significantly faster connection so I´ve taken this chance to upload a few photos. They really don´t capture anything particularly well, but hopefully they give you a better idea of my surroundings. The first photo is a rather unflatering shot of my host sister Yojarel at the Mirador in Catalina. She is very shy, but always has plenty of pacience with my less than stellar (but rapidly improving) Spanish. She is also one of the members of our training yourth group which I hope to write about more later.

The rest of the photos are from behind the house of my host family. The community I´m training in is well known for it´s plant nurseries and people come daily from the cities to buy all kinds of fruit trees and ornamental plants. My family here is relatively well off and maintains a meticulously planned flower garden behind the house which is for both aesthetics and to vend. It is really a gorgeous place and I hope I can upload some better photos in the future.

I have had another week of Spanish and I am starting to be more comfortable speaking and less self conscious about what I´m saying. That being said, the classes are keeping me busy and I haven´t had much time to myself in a while which is starting to wear on me a bit. However, I am still enjoying myself and feeling more and more prepared to swear in as a volunteer.

Saturday I did go to Masaya, but I opted not to order a custom guitar just yet. I reasoned myself into wating until I am about to leave the country and buying something nice then rather than subjecting something precious to the risks of two years in Nicaragua. I ended up buying a guitar that was finished off the wall in the shop (however the luthier did modify it to a steel string setup for me). It is an auditorium style rosewood body with a flat classical style fretboard which is slighly less wide than most of the guitars here. I paid around $200 for it and it is easily a $600 guitar in the states. The shop itself was less of a shop and more of the front of the luthier´s house. There is a gate and then a half covered zinc workshop space with a few unfinished guitars. It was certainly a Nicaraguan guitar shop.

In other news, some of the funniest things I have seen here have been inappropriate tshirts in English. There is a good deal of used clothing here from the United States and it is of considerably better quality than the nationally made clothing. That combined with a love for English lettering as design leads to some great wardrobe mishaps. My favorite so far has been that of the host father of one of my training town partners. This week we had class at his house and before class began one day he came out wearing a shirt that had a psychadelic colored picture of a victorian era man and said "Will Work for Kinky Sex". We all started laughing and when we eventually translated the shirt for him he became very embarassed and immediately changed clothes. What makes this more funny is that we´re living in a very conservative evangelical community. I´m looking forward to more of these.

And finally, we have settled in with our yourth group. We made a test batch of gingerale together on Saturday which has had mixed reviews. We´re going to have to modify the recipe to Nicaraguan tastes which means less ginger and more sugar, but I like it a lot as is. The interest of our kids has been waning, but hopefully they´ll come around once we tell them they potentially win cell phones and backpacks. Hopefully I´ll have a chance to go more into detail on this soon.

Hope everyone is doing well!

I´ve just finished up another week of training and have come to Masatepe to get some errands done. I needed to use the ATM first of all because today was payday (a whopping $12.50 which is actually difficult to spend in a week here given my rent and food are taken care of and I don´t really have much free time to speak of). Tomorrow I´m going to Masaya again with my host brother Eliezer to go to the Zepeda Brothers guitar workshop. Hopefully I´ll be ordering a custom guitar there, which I´m told is both possible and cheap. However, I haven´t yet decided whether I want to get my name in mother of pearl as the fret inlays yet or not. That plus a pair of custom cowboyboots with two cocks fighting (I´ve seen more than one pair so far) and I think I could give Neil Diamond a run for his money.

Anyways, nothing especially notable happened this week. I finally recieved mail for the first time in 2 weeks and it was nice hearing from everyone. I appologize for not responding right away, but I have limited time and the post office happens to be closed every time I am in town. Thanks for the support and I promise I´ll become more reliable once I get to my actual site. I´ve bounced back from the Spanish lull the week with gringos produced and I´m feeling more confident than ever in my abilities, however I still have a great deal of work to do. I have been a little sick the past couple days, but I have been amazed at the herbal remedies that everyone knows here. While there are some slightly strange things that they tell you when you´re sick (for example, since I have a sore throat and a cough, I´m not to drink anything with ice, nor am I to even look at a pineapple), the teas they have given me have worked better than any conventional medicine to alieviate my symptoms. I had a tea of manzanilla and dulce this morning that worked wonders, and now I´m feeling much better. No matter how I feel tomorrow I´m going to fake healthy as this looks like it´s going to be my only opportunity to make it to the guitar shop.

Earlier today I was confronted by a good deal of natural beauty here that I had somehow been taking for granted for the last little while. My host town is known for it´s viveros and plant nurseries. I, along with my host parents, the other 3 trainees in my town, and our teacher, went for a walk earlier today behind my house and I was again amazed. There are all kinds of fruit and ornamental trees along with medicinal plants and flowers. My host father is big on inherited hybrids so there are a few different varieties of starfruit (one from cuba that is amazingly sweet) and beautiful roses. I´m going to try to take some photos this weekend and upload them next time, and I appologize for not having done it sooner.

I have had a couple requests to narrate a typical day here, so I´ll try to do it briefly as I´m down to 8 minutes of internet time left. I usually wake up around 5 30 or 6 am (at which point my host mother is already up and finishing cooking breakfast, I´ve yet to wake up before her) and take a bucket bath. Then I eat breakfast and usually talk with my host mother or father for about 45 minutes until the mototaxi (a three wheeled dirt bike with a cover and a bench seat which sometimes fits up to 6 people) comes to pick me up to go to class. I then have about 4 hours of Spanish class with the other 3 trainees that live in my town at one of their houses (my nica aunt at the moment). Again, the moto comes to take me home for lunch, which is usually rice, beans, a boiled green banana with a varying mix of veggies or meat accompanied by a freshly made fruit juice drink. I eat quickly and return for 2 more hours of applied Spanish which is anything from writing a story in Spanish to interviewing community members about FSLN projects of the past. Then there is either work to be done in our garden, a meeting with our youth group or, as today, free time. I usually talk with my family and watch some telenovellas in the evening and then go to bed around 9. It´s pretty busy and time has been whirring away, but I´ve been assured that things slow down once I get to site.

Well, my time is up, but thanks as always for the comments. And hi grandma!

So, I´ve had a pretty eventful week, or week and a half as it were. I spent the week in the Northern department of Leon, and yesterday I went with my host family to the artisan market in Masaya and the overlook of Laguna de Apollo. I´ve finally managed to get a chance to sit down and use the internet for a bit. First, before I forget to mention it, everyone here calls me Kenneth (that being my middle name which I have misspelled on any number of occasions). Apparently it is easier for them to pronounce, although I´ve yet to understand the problem with Kyle.

The first picture is me learning to wash clothes Nica style with my host mother Eufemia. What you can´t see in the picture is the crowd of people that happened to show up to laugh at my attempts. I have gained even more respect for the women here as after I had washed only a few pairs of socks I was already sweating and had a series of blisters on the heels of my palms. This did make for a pretty good feeling of accomplishment when my socks were back to a only slightly soiled white color, however it was tempered when it began to rain as soon as I put my clothes on the barbed wire clothes line. Overall I´m pretty happy my host family is getting paid to deal with my dirty clothes with me at this point.

This second photo is of my host brother Eliezer outside of a cyber in Jinotepe with someone else´s motorcycle. He´s a great guide and a lot of fun to hang out with. Also, he is one of two self proclaimed punkeros (punk rockers) in my training town and takes a lot of pride in his syle from his Chuck Taylors to his pantalones de tubos (tube pants).

These next two photos are from the tech days we spent training in Leon. The first is a couple of my fellow aspirantes and myself working on the burners of an improved stove we were building. The second photo is of one of our volunteer trainers with the finished improved oven we had put together. Both the oven and the stove are designed to use less firewood through improved insulation and design. The overuse of wood as cooking fuel here is a huge problem in terms of deforestation and smoke inhalation in the household and both the stove and oven work to solve these problems. Both are made from bricks, rebar and a mud made from a combination of clay soil, a bit of horse manure, water and a liquid derived from the bark of a tree known as guacimo. The bark is soaked for a day in water and then gives off a snotty gunk which works well sticking things together. The oven has a 50 gallon drum as it´s center and worked well for the pizza the volunteers made us for dinner. In addition to this we also built a chicken coop with a raised garden for a roof and took a tour of an agroforestry project which combines trees for animal fodder and basic grain crops in one terrain. Overall it was very encouraging to actually see a volunteer´s site as well as to get some blisters rather that only sitting through talks.

Leon was as hot as it was billed. Especialy the first day was opressively hot. Everyone kept asking me if I had just showered, but I was actually just that drenched in sweat. I´m really hoping to get a site assignment in the north where it´s both more temperate due to its mountains and where there is more of a focus on vegetable growing, but I´ll deal with wherever I get sent.

Friday morning we were in Esteli to visit their Mercado Verde (green market). I had a great time and it was nice to see some nutritious food avaliable. The producers sell directly in the same manner as the farmer´s markets in the States, but there are also a variety of hot prepared foods avaliable. I personally enjoyed homemade yoghurt with fresh pineapple and a fried treat called bunuelos which are cakes of ground yuca with a raw sugar syrup.

This last photo is from the Mirador overlook in Catalina. It is a really gorgeous spot that I failed to capture very well. On the right is one of Nicaragua´s many active volcanoes, and on the left in the foreground is the Laguna de Apollo, a volcanic crater lake. It is billed as the best freshwater swimming in Nicaragua and I hope to get down to the lake level to test it out soon. Beyond the laguna is the shore of Lake Nicaragua which is the largest lake in Central America. While it doesn´t come close to comparing to any of my beloved Great Lakes, it was still nice to see some open fresh water.

This week left me exhausted, but I´m still plugging away. I lost a bit of my momentum with Spanish becuase I was primarily working in English for the week, but I have class every day this coming week and I´m sure it will pick back up. It was nice to see the volunteers speaking at their site seeing as they came in with less Spanish than me. I hope everything is still going well at home, although I´m happy to have been out of the country for the Stanley Cup finals.

Hasta Luego,

Kyle (Kenneth)

I´ve finally remembered to bring my camera card to the internet cafe, but I´ve discovered that I haven´t taken that many good photos yet. This is due to a combination of not wanting to make myself a target by flashing my camera aound and a lack of free time. But either way, here are a couple photos of my daily experiences.

Below is where I generally start my day. Behind the first door is the cement latrine which in addition to a raised cement toilet is occasionally home to geckos and a myriad of insects. It´s not that bad at all, and is actually kept amazingly clean by my host mother. Behind the second door is the baño. Inside is a 5 gallon bucket which you fill with water from the neigboring pila (not pictured but it is a half covered cement reservoir where the water comes about twice daily) and then use a small bowl to wet yourself down, soap up and then use the bowl again to rinse. This is both a very effective way to wake up and an impressive way to save water. I have been using only about 1.5 gallons per bath, which I formerly though impossible.

Second, there is a very poor picture of one corner of my room. I promise to take more in the future, but there is no good way to get it all in one shot. On the left is my bed complete with a mosquitero which gets tucked under my matress and works well to keep the bugs at bay.

Finally, this is a monument in Managua that I saw when we had our tour during orientation. When the Sandinistas took power in 1979, they replaced the statue of the former dictator, Somoza, riding his horse victoriously with a large cutout of Agusto Sandino, their hyper nationalist idol and namesake. While the silhouette of Sandino now overlooks the city, the Sandinistas left the remains of Somoza´s horse as a reminder. So, there has been a lot of activity since the last time I had a chance to post. I´m still having a great time and as a side note I´m particularly happy to have found a computer with an apostraphe key. The training schedule has still been very demanding, but it´s nice getting our youth group project up and running. Despite the limited Spanish skills of my group (though we are rapidly improving and communicating well) , we´ve successfully started a huerto (veggie garden) and a added value agricultural food product project. Last week we had about 14 kids show up to help put the garden in and we´re hopeing that when we start our tree nursery on Friday we´ll have the same turnout. At first I was expecting to have to do some directing on the work, but I soon found out that these Nicaraguan youths need no one to tell them how to work in a garden. It was a good lesson to learn and rather representative of what my role here will be in the future. Nicaragua has the resources and plenty of knowledge available, but what they lack is organization. Hopefully in the future I can find a way to provide that.

In addition to my constant schecule of technical training sessions, language classes and youth group activities, I managed to get some recreation in last weekend. Saturday was Mother´s day, which is a big deal here. I was invited to play in the Evangelical church and I played Unwed Father´s in English on banjo to a slightly confused but enthusiastic crowd. It was fun and I´m hoping to find someone to teach me some latin style right hand rolls soon. Sunday was the patron saint festival here in Masatepe and a good deal of the trainees came to check it out. There was all kinds of mayhem here including a organized parade of horses from all around Nicaragua and a good deal of public urination (not me). There were musicians wandering the streets and it was quite a scene. Later, I rode a juego mechanico (carnival ride) called the Tsunami, which is about the most daring thing I´ve done here so far.

Next week my training group leaves for a town in the northern department of Leon for a week of tech training that culminates in a visit to the Mercado Verde in Esteli. I´m excited for some focused training and looking forward to get a chance to see a different part of the country. However I am a little nervous that it has been described as Nicaragua´s hot corner.

Thanks for all the letters and comments, it´s been great to hear from everyone and I hope you´re all doing well. I have letters written to send, but I´ve been having a hard time getting to the post office thus far, so look forward to some post dated news. Go Wings and good memory Maggie!

Hasta Luego

Kyle

I am still doing well here, and again am running out of internet time. I went to my first Nicaraguan baseball game this morning and it was fantastic. Everyone had a uniform of some sort, just not matching. Pinstripe pants and MLB jerseys though along with paid umpires. There are also people who ride up on bikes (mind you this is in the middle of small dirt roads) and with ice cream carts to sell frescos in small plastic bags with a straw. Overall, while I was trying to gain some sports vocabulary all I learned was that Out, Safe and Foul go beyond linguistic boundaries.

Training has been amazingly helpful! Among other things, I have begun to learn how to grow food in a tropical environment, how to make a fungiside out of liquidized smoke, a 14 day method for a fermented organic fertilizer and the general structure of effective community banking (local microlending). I am very excited to keep going and hope all is well at home. How about them Wings?

I only have 9 minutes remaining on my internet time so this is going to have to be quick. I made it safely to Nicaragua and have spent the last 3 days at a very helpful orientation retreat in Managua getting introduced to my coworkers and taking care of preparations for the three months of training which I oficially start tomorrow. It is ridiculously hot here, but the pace at mid day makes up for it.

Yesterday I officialy moved in with my Nicaraguan family with whom I will stay for the next 11 weeks while I try to learn Spanish and how to grow food in a tropical climate. My host father is the pastor at the local Baptist church and along with his wife Eufemia there are three kids aged 15 to 21 and Eufemia´s niece Marcia living in the house. It´s about a 15 minute 20 cordoba ride to the internet from the house in the Masaya department of Nicaragua, so I don´t know how often I´ll be updating. However, I´d just like to let everyone know that I´m safe and in an extremely (almost alarmingly so) welcoming community that is as excited to get to know me as I am to get to know them. I hope everyone is doing well and feel free to either comment your questions on here or drop me an email and I´ll try to respond next time I make it here.

Hasta entonces,

Kyle

I've been spending the last couple of weeks considering my packing strategy and seeing family and friends as much as possible. I've also been busier than I thought I would be tying up loose ends and such. I was required to cut my hair for service and for the first time since high school I'm going without a ponytail. It was sad to see it go, but I'm sure I will be happier with it once I'm in the tropics. It's been great to see everyone and know I have so much support here at home.

I had intended this blog to be a means to keep in touch with family and friends while I am overseas, but I recently noticed that most of those who have read so far have come from the Peace Corps Journals site. Therefor I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself and explain a bit about my background and my reasons for joining the Peace Corps.

I am from Sault Ste. Marie a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2007 with a degree in Anthropology and Political Science and since then I have done a variety of things including working with a district court judicial campaign, cooking Greek food, planting trees, gardening, working with the US Census office and traveling around the US. I am very excited to be working as an Agriculture volunteer with the Peace Corps. Although I did not study it much in college, I have always been interested and involved in food source issues. I love to cook and am well versed in food preservation techniques and I hope that this will help me to start value adding programs for farmers in Nicaragua. I am also very interested in world musics and have worked with an ethnomusicology archival project in the past. I hope that my love of traditional musics of Latin America in particular will help me integrate into the community more quickly and facilitate an avenue for cultural exchange.

My reasons for joining the Peace Corps are many. I want adventure. I have always had a desire to travel, but up until now it has been confined to the United States. I need to take every opportunity presented to me to do so. In addition to this, I have led a priveledged life thus far and feel especially lucky to be in a position to volunteer abroad. I hope to help in whatever capacity I can to improve the lives of those with which I am working. I also joined because my anthropological training taught me the value of cross-cultural interaactions and I want to experience first hand the world in a different context. Overall I applied because I believe in the program and I have very much admired any of the returned volunteers I have encountered.

I would also like to mention here how excited I am to serve in Nicaragua in particular. As it turns out I had already familiarized myself with Nicaragua and its culture and history before I received my assignment. One book that especially stands out was a ethnography by Roger Lancaster called Life is Hard I read for a class on Latin American Cultures. It focuses on gender relations in the country, but also gives a very good summary of the history of the ties between the United States and Nicaragua. The United States has been a very aggressive and imposing figure in Latin American generally and Nicaraguan politics specifically since the Monroe Doctrine, and this has left a lasting impression on the character of the area. While in the past we have staged coups and otherwise acted aggressively to protect our economic interests in Nicaragua, I hope that my service with the Peace Corps will help to give the people there a more positive impression of Americans. I know the history of US interventionalism in the area will make it more difficult for me to be accepted, as an American, into the community as someone who is there to help, but I welcome this challenge and hope I can work to improve the image of the United States there while working to directly aid the people.

Thanks for reading and I hope I will have regular enough internet access to keep up with posting once I am in Nicaragua. Again I'd like to mention that your comments are welcome. Also, I decided to take my banjo apart and pack it away in my checked baggage if anyone was interested.

After about a year of waiting, I have finally recieved and accepted an offer to serve in the Peace Corps. I will be working as a Rural Development Extensionist in Nicaragua beginning on the 12th of May. I will be going to Washington DC for a very brief (15 hours or so) orientation and then ship out to Nicaragua for 3 months of technical and language training. After that I will officially sworn in as a volunteer and be placed into a small agricultural community for two years. Here's a brief summary of the types of projects on which I'll be working from my Volunteer assignment book:

The people living in these rural areas in the departments of Estelí, Neueva Segovia, Matagalpa, Jinotega, León and Chinandega suffer from high levels of poverty caused in-part by environmental destruction, low crop productivity and inadequate use or access to local resources, appropriate technology, loans and education.

Limited family food production and a lack of income generating opportunities are common in the Nicaraguan countryside. Our project emphasizes involving families in gender appropriate activities related to food production, processing, added value generation, commercialization, organization and youth life skills development.

In the above mentioned working area, Volunteer service involves working soulder to shoulder and coordinating with the local community committees, and individuals, to develop activities and projects to bring sustainable development and improve their quality of living.

Hopefully the training will give me the skills to accomplish some of these rather intimidating goals.

I have started this blog as a way to keep in touch with everyone back home (your comments are more than welcome) and because nothing has helped me prepare to leave more than the blogs of those already serving in my position. Hopefully you'll find what I write here helpful or interesting in some way.

Now I'm off to figure out how to bring a banjo as carry on luggage..........