Now that it’s my fifth day and I feel a bit more settled in here, I have arrived at a more complete understanding of this place and my research, so I can finally write about it. Yet, as I sit down to write this email, I can tell you that the little black bugs that eat biodegrading foliage are still flying and dying, and piling up on the floors all around me. The little lizards are chasing after their dinner, running back and forth on the cement walls, and I am good and tired. Today, I woke up at 6:45 (actually initially at 5:30 to the sound of my host mother Eliza [pronounced “Ay-lees-ah”] the family’s clothing, but I was able to get back to sleep) and began preparing for a day full of tourist activities. The community here takes tourism very, very seriously, and they have become accustomed to putting everything else in their lives on hold to host tourists and show them the best parts of their pueblito (beloved town). I think hosting tourists really gives them a sense of pride and honor that someone chose to come to their very rural town of Monte Grande in San Ramon. There isn’t even a paved road to get here, and people are coming to see Nicaragua, here in their little town! Many of them have to walk on senderos (footpaths) for 20 minutes until they even get to the dirt road that leads to San Ramon, which is such a small town that it doesn’t even have a Mercado (market). Perhaps the real town with doctors and a market is in Matagalpa, about 20 minutes away by bus or car, although really, Matagalpa is not a city by US standards.
So, there. I have located myself: about 30 minutes drive to the nearest “city,” 10 minutes of which are on a dirt road, and the last bit is up a trail. I’m lucky, though, because I’m not one of people in this community have to trek 25 minutes on foot paths up and down hills under the hot sun to get to the road. I visited communities like this when I was in India, but I never really thought about the logistics of living here. 99% of people don’t have cars. From what I’ve gathered so far, I think teachers are paid about $1.50 a day, and a mechanic’s assistant makes $2.50 a day when he works from 7am until 8 or 9pm. This is barely enough money to scrape by on when a bus ride into town is $.25, and eggs are about $.10 each. The bus is always so full you can barely breath – your butt is smashed up in someone’s face, and a mother with a baby in one hand is essentially embracing you in an attempt to get her other hand onto a railing. In my community, many of these people are paying off their very modest 3 room cement houses, which were built for them by a succession of religiously affiliated NGO’s with loans they took out from the coffee cooperatives to which they belong.
They live amongst fruit trees I have probably never seen before, and perhaps would have never known existed, like guanabana, anona (noni), jocote (a bland sort of fruit with almost the consistency of an apple but a pit like an avocado), guava, mango, lemon, avocado, papaya, plantain, banana, cashew and the list goes on. Many of the plants have medicinal properties, too. These trees are all here specifically to provide shade to what I have actually realized is a coffee farm. Interwoven amongst the fruit trees are coffee plants. Once I learned to recognize them, I realized that they are everywhere I look. According to my first impression, I though I was just in the jungle. I did not realize until later that this is actually a very carefully planned farm designed to feed its residents and supplement their income.
I love seeing the connections between people, places, organizations, and the rest of the world unravel before me. I think it helps that everything is so new. I’m not used to so many fruit trees, but they’re for food and to give shade to the café. I don’t think I’ve seen so many chickens since I was in Tanzania, but they’re here so the community members can have free eggs. The idea of communally owned and farmed land is so new to me, that I literally had to walk up the footpath and into the coffee plantations. Even then, I literally had to stumble upon a branch full of green little beans hanging out into the path to realize that most of the plants around me (except for the tall ones above me) were coffee plants. Bit by bit, I’m assembling a sense of where I am.
Today, I spent the day with a group of New Mexico University tourists trying to piece it all together – the connections between people and places and institutions. We are oblivious tourists, but only because everything is so new. It took me several days to realize that the 10 houses of people whom I walk by on my way to the road are not just strangers, they are all Eliza’s family members. In the US, the concept of knowing one’s neighbors seems to have grown out-dated, like tape decks and living in the same town as your parents. And half of these houses I walk by either have wear one of two colors of paint, dark green or blue, and carry a code of letters and numbers. ETV86, CSB62, no one can tell me what they stand for, but these are the several (largely religious) organizations that have come and built dozens of cookie cutter house of cement walls and three rooms. But it works, because often the other houses are made of stick frames and dried mud and a dirt floor. Whatever light the intermittently placed light bulbs throw is swallowed up by the uniform brown of the floor, ceiling and walls. It feels noticeably different, whether it comes down to comfort or cleanliness or the distribution of light, but the simple NGO cookie-cutter houses are definitely an improvement. And I don’t think it’s just me coming to these places completely inundated in my “developed world” standards.
With all these new revelations about different structures and brings me to my research. I live in house number ETV86, and I am very lucky to live here. The other houses in this community of host families don’t offer a separate house to their tourist guest. I have two rooms all to myself, a porch, and my own bathroom and shower. Eliza is one of 6 host mothers (alojadoras) in the community of La Reyna. Each of these six women have gone through trainings and prepared their households for tourists to come. They have been trained on how to cook for us, keep our houses clean and pest free, and keep our sheets smelling clean. They know what will bother us – not having enough fruit in our meals, the smoke from the fire, being left out of family activities, being left without a knowledge of the community. These six host mothers (alojadoras) of the La Reyna community are actually 6 of 40 other host mothers. These alojadoras have been trained by the tourism coordinator at the coffee cooperative I’m working with. These 40 host mothers are spread across 4 different communities: La Reyna (where I live!), La Corona, El Roblar, and La Pita. For my research over the next 9 weeks, I will be going from each tourist household distributing a questionnaire to assess how these host mothers feel about the tourist program. Also, as part of my research, I will finding about 8-10 people from across the 4 different communities and getting their insight on how tourism has affected (both benefitted and detrimented) their communities. These taped interviews will ultimately be on the website of the organization I’m working through (the UCA San Ramon Coffee Cooperative). I will also be reviewing the English (and Spanish) sections of their website to help give them input on how I think it should be organized, and also translating some of the website into English.
This works incredibly well for me because, although I seem to be serving as an intern for this organization, the work I’m doing here fits my research perfectly. My overall project aim was to study “the impacts of tourism on the community: is it really sustainable, and who is really benefitting?” and then make a film about it for my Anthropology thesis. The organization I’ve come through is called the Community Agroecology Network (www.canunite.org), and essentially their goal is to provide researchers with an already established network into the communities where they want to do their research. I was interested in this program because, initially my interest was in agriculture. Specifically, agriculture because it lies at the junction of global networks of commodity exchange, environmental degradation, and increasing monopolies on chemicals and seeds at the hands of incredibly powerful international agrochemical companies. So, I set out to see how so much of the world’s population makes agriculture their livelihood, and how they can build a lifestyle that actually supports them, even when the buyer-driven coffee market and the dominant forms of agricultural production don’t support them. I didn’t come because it would look good that I did a thesis as an undergraduate – I came because I want to understand as much of what’s going on within these systems of agricultural production as possible. But I didn’t come to be a useless mooch either. When some people travel, they do it as a form of selfish learning and self-betterment so they can say “oh, when I was in Nicaragua and I had to walk 10 minutes to the nearest road”… I also want to help, and not just come in and say “you need this type of help” but to come in with the purest intentions and say “How can I help you? Assign me a job to do.”
So, within that context, I will be staying in the house of Elizabeth and Antonio Molino for the next 9 months. Eliza is employed in the tourist business, and I am her tourist. Although it may not be a 9-5 job that she can leave behind when she gets home, I still give her credit. She’s helping host 7am – 7pm events for groups of visiting tourists, often putting everything else on hold. For example, the two feverish children she couldn’t leave home alone had to stick around all day while she tended to the tourists’ programmed events. Or the laundry she’s been trying to do for two days keeps getting rained on or blows off the line into the dirt, so she’s had to rewash the clothes twice. This is a serious job – just as it is a serious job for the other 40 host mothers who participate in the same tourist programs in their own respective communities. But not so serious that being a mother and home-maker, and being an alojadora don’t mix. It’s a difficult line to ride between the benefits and detriments of this tourism project, and neither is it entirely objective. But this is basically what I will be researching this summer, through the questionnaires and the oral histories.
I apologize for the length of this update, but hopefully this'll give a better understanding of where I’m coming from. I have no distractions from my research – my nearest close friends are countries away, I have no music on my computer (what was I thinking?!), and sometimes I need to escape from the land of all-too-quickly spoken Spanish. So, I return to this house, with its simple wooden desk and plastic lawn chair to sit and think about my day and what it means to be here, tangled in the networks of people, places, and organizations that have created this Nicaraguan world I am experiencing. It’s exciting, it’s new, it’s confusing, and it can be a little lonely, but I’m really enjoying it.
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