A midsummer night´s fever-dream

Hello norteños!



Life is very stable here in San Ramon these days. The rains have thinned out in the last month but we still get thunderstorms to rattle your bones every once in a while. Last night I heard some downright malicious thunder like nothing I´ve heard before. More sunny days now, which are very pretty and very sweaty.



I´m well underway on my mission now, doing fieldwork with the neighboring campesinos and learning as much about corn and beans as I could want to know. It´s genuinely interesting to me and I soak this information up like a sponge whenever the chance presents itself. In about a week´s time the real maize harvest is going to begin and I´ll get to help with that. They´ll cook nacatamales (tamales, basically) and guarila (sweet-corn tortillas) until the maize dries out and from then on it´s used for regular tortillas, the drinks pinole & atole, and any dozen other uses Nicaraguans have for it.



It´s not the only staff of life here, though. There´s sorghum grown in drier regions, which are made into very nutritious tortillas that aren´t very popular at all. The flavor is all wrong, they say. Also rice is grown in the wetter hills where I´m located. With plentiful harvests of beans, this means Nicaragua can provide all of it´s own staple foods which one would think, would make this country a stable net food exporter. But for some reason, there´s never enough and I´m trying to understand how, and why. So I have interviews with farmers and co-op presidents half the time and spend the rest trying to make myself useful in the fields, trying to learn the wordless way.



For a while now I´ve been enduring a whole galaxy of different intestinal catastrophes, with occasional 10-hour jungle fevers that boiled my brain a few times over. At last, I went to the clinic in town and discovered I have an intestinal parasite and inflammation in my guts which around here = nada. Socialized medicine here means getting to see a doctor cost four bucks (at the better of two clinics), with all of the prescribed medicine available for free. It couldn´t have been simpler. I´m feeling better already. But I´ve been very much missing the family back home, and the very idea of getting to see everyone again, and again, has me looking forward very much to returning. I´m about ready to go home right now, actually, but I can´t!



But the care packages I´ve recieved from my family have been a real gift. I´m plain spoiled; Levi, my buddy who´s the other intern here, hasn´t received any so I´ve been sharing the booty with him, until his girlfriend sends him something...



Saludos!

Conor