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

Last week my dad came to visit me. We went to Leon- a beautiful city with a lot of revolutionary history and a whole bunch of churches. From there we went north to the beach where i received THE WORST sunburn of my whole life and I think an entire layer of my skin has peeled off! (sorry that is really gross). Now I'm back in San Ramon and the mountains and the rain. I'm sad my dad left, i feel a little homesick and i miss my boyfriend a lot. But also its nice to be back to my family and my home here (even though the food here is STILL making me sick!)

Some new things have happened at work. Last Friday I went to a monthly meeting put on by Yadira and Harold (coordinators of the social aspects of La UCA). It was for Promotoras and jovenes whose job is to represent their communities and give them support in various forms. At the meeting they discused what their job entailed ( ex. a promotora needs to be available, comfortable, and open). They also decided on and organized dates for capacitaciones (workshops) in their communities and then watched a play about sexual health and then discused the play and what should be added and/or changed. It was a really funny play- a man instead of selling candy or food on the bus instead was selling birth control! or a gameshow where the contestant had to put a condom on a banana in the correct way. Going to the meeting was super interesting and important for me. I feel like i now have a greater understanding for the different aspects of my work.

Yesterday Levi, connor, bri, and myself went with Sol CAFE and Cecocafe- the coffee processor and distributor in Matagalpa. It was really interesting to see all of the different places the coffee goes. From producer to consumer it is inconceivable to me how many hands the coffee is going through! The man who worked a Sol Cafe showed us how to do a coffee test to decide on the quality of the cafe (the smell and taste). This is what buyers come to do and determine its quality. With the taste test you slurp up the percolated coffee in a spoon, swish it around in your mouth, then spit it into a bucket! I dont know why but I thought it was totally hysterical. When I did the test I went to spit out the coffee and I dribble of spit was still hanging out of my mouth with everyone watching me! It was pretty gross and embarasing