What have we been doing?

Ok so not a single one of my blogs has said anything about what we are doing here, I just pretty much complain and joke about how many nightmarish critters we have and how pooping down a hole can be fun. We actually are doing some serious work here and I’ve got a sore back and some fresh calluses to prove it. I’ll start by giving you a synopsis of our first month, and then I’ll tell you what we think we are going to do for the next eleven.

We started off our time here by attending Grupo Fenix’s Solar Culture Course, which is a 10 day cultural experience mixed with some cool solar energy activities and sustainability awareness. It is intended to be kind of an “eco vacation” for some and for volunteers it serves as an orientation. Grupo runs this course usually 2 times a year, once at the end of July during what the Nicas call “little summer” and again in early January during dry season. “Little summer” is a two week period at the beginning of August during Nica’s dry season when it just doesn’t rain. The weather is beautiful, warm, sunny, and dry for 2 weeks and it comes every year like clock work, up to the point that Grupo Fenix can even plan their course around it. So, the solar culture course was pretty cool. We met some really interesting people from all around the world who attended with us. I could write a whole article about our new acquaintances but for now I’ll just tell you that we had two Australians from Germany who work with the UN, a Uraguayan Italian New Yorker, a Harvard boy from California, a Georgia Tech EE student, and another fellow volunteer, Julio, who Spanish, has a PhD in Physics, is fluent in English and came from Ireland for the course. It was a great group and we had some fun together while we worked. So during the course we did some pretty cool stuff. We started by visiting the for profit solar panel manufacturing company that was founded with the help of Grupo Fenix, called Suni Solar. They are located in Managua walking distance from UNI (Universidad Nacional de Ingenieros). Next we took at 4 hour bus ride to northern Nicaragua where Sabana Grande is located. We spent the rest of our time in Sabana Grande doing the fun stuff. We worked for two days building a solar oven out of wood, roofing tin, glass, and wood shavings as insulation. It’s pretty amazing what these ovens can cook; from plantains to chicken to cakes and cookies, all with only the power of partially sunny day. We also spent a day building adobe bricks for the solar center. The Solar Center is a dream of Grupo Fenix, which is slowly being realized. The solar center is eventually going to be a small campus of buildings and land that will contain a manufacturing facility or solar ovens run completely off of solar energy, a small store where natural remedies, organic foods, and solar products are sold, a small eco hotel, and a community center. Currently the solar center is a large beautiful adobe building that is still in the process of construction. This first building is slated to be a temporary community center and meeting facility and eventually an office for CIPPER (center for research, promotion and production of renewable energy) and manufacturing facility for solar ovens. So we made adobe bricks to help contribute to the construction. Adobe bricks are pretty amazing, they are pretty much just mud and pine needles formed into a brick shape and then dried. There are thousands of buildings in Nica built with this construction, including the house Jenny and I live in. We spent another day building solar battery chargers, where we even got to solder and assemble our own miniature solar panels for the chargers. It actually works, just hook up a few batteries and put the charger in the sun and you can charge up regular alkalines 4-5 times. On our last days we built a solar panel mounting frame, installed it at the solar center along with 4 fluorescent lights, a charge controller, batteries and a 75 watt solar panel to run it all.

Since the solar culture course we have been working on various things every day but staying plenty busy. Like Jenny mentioned in one of her earlier blogs, the mayor of Esteli has ordered 22 solar ovens that he plans to distribute to some select women in his community. This is a big deal for Grupo Fenix because it means paid work for several women for 2 months, it means good publicity for what we are doing, and it means that others are taking to this solar culture. So the women had been working on the ovens for a little over a month before we showed up and for our first 3 weeks after the culture course we have spent the majority of our time doing good ól manual labor constructing the ovens. We just completed the ovens this week. We have also spent one day a week working with the crew at the solar center doing some real manual labor. We are talkin´shovel in hand, sweat on the back under the hot Nicaraguan sun for 8 hours a day. Our first day the foreman pointed out three large mounds of dirt and told us to move them, spread them out and create a nice gradient from the base of the center away so that the heavy rain water would flow away. That was a good days´work! We have also done some sifting, wall preparation for ¨repello¨stucco and lots of fine material sifting for repello mixes. All hard work and is much harder than it looks. After a few days I am really glad that its only once a week so I have time to heal. Of course I am sure they are giving all the hard work to the gringos to see if we will quit or come back next week. So far we are 3 for 3 so take that! Also from speaking with our host family I realized that they have a solar panel and a small 12Vdc pump to run their well water that isn´t working, so I am working on this also. I hope to help get them the right pump and design a system so they can feed a tank on a 8 ft stand and enjoy running water for showers and washing.

Jenny talked about defining her role some so I guess I´ll talk about my offical position too. Last week we had about 2 solid days of meetings with the Grupo Fenix staff and Sabana Grande community leaders. As a result of all the meetings I have found myself working on a couple long term projects. My main assignment is to work with one fo the community leaders, Nimia, on the solar oven research, design and development. This will include cooker design improvements, manufacturing process improvements, and continuing research from some previous work as well as new efforts. Throughout the whole year I will be working closely with community members on projects to help improve their project management and problem solving skills, the whole idea here is sustainable development. I hope that when our year of service is complete and we return to Virginia, we will leave a capable group of leaders rather than a void. I am also working closely with a small group of women to develop policies for a new secondary school scholarship for children of the village that will be funded by a former solar culture course participant. All in all I feel like I am getting to do some interesting stuff and I think what I am working on will make a real difference.

Does anyone know what this week is?!

First of all, two days ago was Jenny’s 24th birthday. We celebrated a little before leaving for Nica because I knew there was no way I could buy her any good birthday presents here, plus my family was all over it and they had a little “Jenny’s birthday gift shower” the night before we left. I even got her the new Harry Potter book before we left and kinda tolerated it for 2 weeks while she read it every free moment possible. All that aside, I still feel crappy about it because it wasn’t much of a special day at all. I remembered it was her birthday first thing in the morning and greeted her with a happy birthday kiss when she woke up (at 5:30 am)—mad points for me! But after that I think her day pretty much went down hill. She got 3 birthday cards in the mail ahead of time, which is pretty sweet because that means our mailing address here works and Jenny has some thoughtful and on the ball family. Anyway, back to the downhill part. We started the day off with a nice breakfast of fried chicken, rice, french fries, and cucumber & tomato slices, with fresh orange juicy drink. Not bad, but then she spent 2 hours doing laundry by hand, then joined the rest of us as we spent 8 hours painting solar oven stands with the really nasty paint ultra diluted with paint thinner. This time I wore a bandana as a mask and it worked like a charm. We had a lunch at noon of rice, a dry bean cake thingy, and some cucumber and tomato slices. Then back to work painting. The good news was that we finished in time for us both to take our “shower” before it got dark at 6:30 pm. We had dinner with our Nica family, then we went to bed drowsy-eyed by 8:30pm. No birthday cake, no happy birthday song, no presents. I could have taken here to Ocotal for dinner, but last time we were in Ocotal after dark just about everything was closed already, by 6:30! Also it take 15 minutes to walk to the bus stop, 20 min bus ride, then another 10 min to walk into town. The last bus back to Sabana Grande comes sometimes at 6:45pm, sometimes never. So if you don’t leave by 3pm, you have to pay a taxi to take you home, which cost 10x or more what the bus does. And we had work to do with painting, so no Ocotal for dinner and icecream. :o( Sorry for your crappy b-day honey.

So now to the second point of my entry, Do you know what week this is?!! It is opening week of college football season!!!! YEAH!!! Wooohoo! Go Hokies! Ranked # 9 preseason by both poles, picked by all the experts to win the Atlantic division and the ACC championship, and slated to play #2 LSU next Saturday in what is rumored to be a preview of the national title game. O hell yeah its going to be a good year!! So I did some research and found that there is a local sports bar just down the street from the internet café that opens at 12:30 and has ESPN, our first two games are on ESPN, sweet! Unfortunately todays game starts at noon eastern and in Nica we are 2 hours behind you there so I have to go to the internet café to follow the first half or so of the game. Here is the plan: logon to ESPN and watch the game on gamecast, while being logged into my new ESPN insider account which gives me access to a streaming scoreboard update realtime, in addition I found that Yahoo broadcast offers an online subscription for only a few bucks a month and they cover all the VT football games!!! Sooo sweet, I can listen to even the most worthless games this season (like VT vs. William and Mary) on live radio from Nicaragua! So I am really hoping that this sports bar thing works out because that means that I’ll get to watch VT vs. LSU live next week if I can get them to stay open late enough (kick off at 9 pm eastern 7 pm Nica) otherwise we are headed to Managua to find some venue to see this awesome game. I hope all you jerks have fun flying to Louisiana to watch it live.

So in spite of Jenny’s birthday being pretty sucky, this isn’t such a bad week. Now we are in Ocotal awaiting kick off and all decked out in our Hokie gear. After the game we plan to do some double celebrating, and if we are lucky we will be able to get our hands onto something that resembles a steak if the sports bar ever opens, then finally some ice cream and special birthday treatment for Jenny. Happy College Football Season everyone, and Happy Birthday Jenny!

Staying Healthy & Getting Cozy

Well, I said that C.J. and I were alternating days being sick... it turns out that we had parasites. In fact, all the international volunteers (who were tested) had them, even if they weren´t feeling sick. Fortunately it´s easy, although quite discusting, to get tested and very easy to get medication. We are on the mend, and we are planning to follow up with another test to make sure we got it all.

We´re not sure where they came from, because we only drink purified water, but we suspect that food preparation and dish washing may have been the culprit. We have started adding a cap of bleach to our shower/dishwashing water as an added precaution, but we are still eat 2 meals a day at a local home that doesn´t use bleach (we have reduced our meal plan to lunch and dinner only, so that we can have american style breakfasts). The other volunteers have suggested that we get tested every 1-2 months, and we are planning to stick to that, because being sick is pretty miserable.

The worst part about being sick in Nicaragua is that there is no couch to lie on. All we have are plastic chairs, and then our bed. Our bed is like the only cozy place there is - and it´s no that cozy with like 25 thread count sheets (mom is sending some better ones - yay!). We are in desparate need of a hammock so that we can have a cozy place to hang out and read or just lounge. Unfortuantely, we have been unable to find a hammock in Ocotal, but Charlotte, one of the other volunteers, has two really nice ones that she got near Managua. Hopefully it won´t be too long before we get one!

Along with making our house more cozy... we have ordered a bookshelf / storage cabinet from Marcio. We just ordered it yesterday, so it may be a little while before he has time to make it. Once he starts though, he is really fast. He made a table for Julio in 2 days, and that wasn´t the only thing he was working on!

So, little by little we are getting used to everything. Although, I don´t think I´ll ever get used to the latrine. I really hate that thing!

No Money Mo problems

So now I am officially a volunteer worker and I´ll make no money for a whole year and I would like to say that Puff Daddy is totally wrong. I feel like even though I am making no money I have tons of new problems. So lets just say for the record, this is my venting entry.

Lets start with the illnesses. Since we got here it seems like Jenny and I have been nearly alternating from day to day who is not feeling well. From stomach aches, to head aches, lack of sleep, colds, etc. As for me I started with the typical indigestion problems associated with living in a new country and eating all new foods that I am not used to. No big deal, I was expecting that. Then, I was starting to feel like I am getting into a groove and the food doesn´t bother me any more. So I was working on painting all day Monday which was the last step in our construction project of 22 solar ovens that Grupo Fenix was contracted to make for the governor of Esteli. Well, here in Nica they use paint thinner very very liberally to stretch their paint and it turns out to be about 50/50 in the end. At first the smell bothered me some while I was painting, then eventually I got numb to it. But I also thought that it was no big deal because we are outside and theres plenty of air flow, right? WRONG! I started feeling bad on Monday night, then tuesday morning I woke up with my nose and throat burning and the stuffiest nose I have had. One of the other volunteers noted that a stuffy nose is the bodys reaction to bad chemicals being inhaled, which I think makes sense. I figured it was obviously due to the paint thinner and since tuesday was day 2 of painting with no masks I decided to sit it out and recuperate. Now it is Saturday and I am still coughing a bit and my nose isn´t unclogged yet.
To get to my next illness I have to give some background. Just about all the other volunteers, who all have been here for only about a month also have gotten sick. On our solar culture course one guy left early because he felt so bad. Another guy got Denghi fever and was out of commission for 2 weeks, then decided he didn´t like Grupo Fenix anyway and high tailed it out this week. The latest is that two others were feeling sick and tested postitive for parasites. Great. So the day after I hear about the parasites I start feeling sick too. Lemme tell you these symptoms make you feel so disgusting. Burping and farting for days on end with nothing to provoke it. Constant churning of the stomach and actual noisiness. Then as you could expect all the diarreah you can handle and vomiting. So I figured after all this I probably have the parasite too. So now I am in the internet cafe waiting for the clinic to finish my test results and tell me what I have to take to kill it. I also figured while we are at it we should get Jenny tested too since all the volunteers have been eating the same foods prepared by many of the same people all this time. And thats not all.

Now I can get to the real no money part. My wallet got stolen last week while I was here in Ocotal with some friends at the patron saint festival, which is a big fiesta the whole city has once a year. The party is so big they have like 7 live bands and they charge everyone a hundred cordobas to get in, which is expensive for here. We were all in line and one of our Nica friends has and idea on how to get to the front quick and get us all our entry bracelets. So she takes the money from all of us, smooth talks the dude at the counter and next thing we are pushing through the crowd to get our bracelets stuck on. At this moment I am thinking dang its crowded I really need to watch my wallet. So I switched it from my back pocket to my front left where I kept my hand in it all the time to keep guard. Well it just so happens that to get my bracelet on I had to reach over a row of people and stick out my left hand for the desk lady, and during the short 10 seconds I had my left hand off my pocket and reached out for the bracelet some creep picked me clean. I didn´t even feel anything or see anyone. I turned walked out of the crowd and felt for my wallet, I kid you not, only 30 seconds after it was stolen I noticed. And it was already too late. We called over the cops, they could do nothing and I just turned in a police report. It had about 45 bucks of equivalent US money, my drivers license, an ATM card and a credit card. I was at least smart enough to clean it out and only have my essentials in it. So I went back and got my bracelet cut off, took my 100 cords back and used it to pay a taxi to take me home. What a crappy night. So I learned my lesson, but I am not too sure of what I could´ve done better. I guess sometimes they just got your number.

So now I am done venting and I am going to take my broke parasite breeding butt back to the clinic to see what they have to say. I knew all this would be hard and there would be some obstacles, but for goodness sake! I am praying to the Lord it gets better because we are only just starting.

poco a poco

We have been here in Nicaragua for nearly 4 weeks now and I am finally getting the hang of this “poco a poco” thing. Poco a poco essentially means little by little and it seems that almost everything here tends to come about in this way. Poco a poco I am getting used to going to bed at 9 and waking up at 5:30 am with the rooster crows. Poco a poco my number 2’s are turning solid again. Poco a poco I am beginning to decipher the enigma of Nicaraguan Espanol that is so different from other Spanish that they call it Nicanol. Where “adios” doesn’t just mean goodbye, it also means hello; where half of the vocabulary I learned in Spanish class is completely foreign to Nicaraguans and therefore useless. Poco a poco I am getting used to responding to “chele”, which is what the Nicas call light skinned people. It is actually a slang word derived from “leche” and basically means “milky” if you translate it literally. Poco a poco I am learning to express myself in Nicanol without a dictionary in my hand. Poco a poco we are learning to do things the Nica way, like washing our laundry, bathing, drawing water from the well, walking in the pitch black night without stepping in the mud, and even how to keep our floor clean. Poco a poco our relatively new, previously unused latrine is stinking more and more. Poco a poco I am falling in love with 70-80 degree weather all the time and a daily rain shower that you can count on. Little by little Jenny and I are getting used to how to deal with all the thousands of bugs and critters that just love sharing our space with us. I actually saw my first live tarantula today and it was just as big and hairy as I imagined it would be, but I haven’t run all the way home screaming and I am actually sitting here quite relaxed afterwards writing this blog entry. Through trial and error day by day we have learned clever ways of how to use the lights in our house without drawing in what seams like half the gnat and moth population of our village. Speaking of moths, I just have to go on this tangent; they have some moths here that are literally the size of bats! They are huge; just as dumb and disgusting as a regular moth but like 20 times the size. This brings me to my next point: poco a poco I am discovering every freaking critter in Nicaragua; from bats to mice, to scorpions, tarantulas, snakes, and just about every freaky insect that I have ever seen on fear factor including those big tree spiders that look kinda like crabs and giant 4” cockroaches. Its amazing I ever get any sleep at night, and poco a poco I am realizing how right I was when I said our mosquito net is our most prized possession.

But there’s also a lot of other good things like we are finally starting to see our roles in the community begin to define; poco a poco we are earning the trust of those we came here to help and behind our broken Spanish they are realizing our suggestions really do have merit. Little by little I am learning to love the thrice daily serving of beans served all different ways. Little my little I am realizing that there isn’t an ailment that Alejandra can’t fix somehow with one of the plants she grows in her garden. Each day I am seeing how our new little brothers and sister cherish every moment we spend with them and they can’t wait until after dinner for us to teach them a new card game.

I have to say that amongst all the difficulties, lack of amenities, chloroqine induced nightmares, and incessant creepy crawlies; I am seeing that the life and culture here can be quite pleasant, poco a poco.

Beans and Rice

It turns out that despite what the books and volunteer materials say we don’t actually just eat rice and beans here. We actually get to eat a pretty good variety of foods. I have found that as a middle class American with all that processed food, I wasn’t eating as good as our Nicaraguan host family who live off of about $150 a month. It is amazing how mystically fresh watermelon is on the table for breakfast every morning, fresh avocado every day, chicken 4 times a week, unlimited beans, 60 eggs a week (I don’t eat them all myself), fresh off the vine fruit juices, and the best darn fried plantains I’ve ever had; and they all come from the ¾ acre piece of land the seven of us are living on. Even more amazing than that is Marcio is a carpenter and Alejandra has 3 children to take care of and is involved in just about every organization in the community, so they aren’t even farmers! But the variety doesn’t stop there, they have offered us mango, papaya, (which I don’t really eat), tomales, french fries, and tomatoes and cucumbers are a staple along with potatoes and corn tortillas. We get to eat a pretty good amount of foods other than beans and rice but it is definitely a carb loaded diet. Sometimes I have pasta, refried beans, crunchy homemade tortilla chips, and potatoes for breakfast. Needless to say, we are still taking our vitamins every morning—so don’t worry Mom. The funny thing is that amongst all the variety that we are offered I can honestly say that one of my favorite things is the signature beans and rice dish called Gallo Pinto, and we get to have it daily.

Defining our Roles

For the past two weeks (since the solar culture course ended) C.J. and I have been assisting with the construction of solar cookers with the ladies from Sabana Grande. The mayor of Esteli ordered 22 cookers, and the women have been working every day to get them finished. They are all done now, and are awaiting transport to their new owners. In the future, the cookers are expected to be a major product of the Solar Women, but they definitely have some problems to work through first.

On Thursdays, we also help out with construction of the workshop at the Solar Women´s Center. In the future, the Women´s Center will have a store, a restaurant, and other ecotourism attractions, but the workshop is where they will make their solar ovens, dryers, and other products. The workshop is made of traditional Nicaraguan Adobe and is a very open, free flowing space. There is a lot more work to be done there, so all of the volunteers have been helping out.

After several business meeting this week, Susan and I have started to define my role for the upcoming year. For the most part I am going to help with the management of the Women´s Center workshop construction. Right now, they are having trouble keeping the plans, budgets, and schedules accurate and aligned. So, I´ll be able to help out, and teach the current PM some of my management and tracking techniques. Hopefully we´ll get it all organized and the construction will be completed the way we need and want it - on time and under budget (ha!).