CAN interns in Central America and Mexico

A midsummer night´s fever-dream

2010-08-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

2010-08-11T08:49:00.000-07:00

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

Beans, beans, the more you eat, the better you feel

2010-08-04T14:40:00.000-07:00

My family has a small plot of their own land high up on the mountainside. The trail to get there is long, uphill, treacherously slick with mud and winds it´s way through coffee tree jungles for a half hour´s walk. I went with the eldest brother and his friend yesterday to pick beans early in the morning. Once we were there, we ducked right into the corn and beans, and brush to pluck the red bean plants from the soft soil. It´s easy, but fighting your way past the weeds, and spotting disguised bean plants among the bush, is the real challenge.

Pack them in bunches in your hand, holding by the upturned roots, and dive in again - this for a half hour until we had a massive pile accumulated off to the side, under the banana trees. There, Mario unfolded a woven sack and we set about plucking the pods off of the plants. This took awhile, so we sat down and shot the breeze all morning while we worked. Like singing while you work, it can really help you forget you´re even working in the first place. And suddenly, the work was done, and we had a giant sack packed with the pods.

How Manuel got that sack down the steep hill, perched upon his shoulders, without slipping in that muck is a mystery to me. I wiped out at least a half dozen times until the land flattened out, and I carried the bag the remaining two-thirds of the way home. From there, anybody sitting around the house is usually involved in stripping the ripe red beans from the pods while watching TV, or talking, or any number of idle things.

And then, they´re ready to be cooked and eaten. Beans are one of my favorite things in the world to eat, washed down with a corn tortilla. They´re the staff of life here and you really have to bust your butt getting them down from the hills into your cookpot. Sure enough, we had beans with dinner that night and they never tasted so good!

Class Consciousness in Nicaragua

2010-07-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

As I write this, I have just come back from a vacation with my sister and my dad in San Juan Del Sur, a part of Nicaragua I had never thought existed. It is your stereotypical surf town, mixed with a bit of wealth, inflation, and drinking, and a little more drinking. It’s strange, because the Nicaragua I felt I knew is nothing like San Juan Del Sur – it is made of cement and dirt, it washes its clothes by hand and hangs them to dry under skies that promise rain on plants and barbed wire, and it shrugs off periodic electricity and water losses. It speaks Spanish. Here, the foreigners have pushed their way in and pushed Nicaragua out. The Nicaragua of gallo pinto, low prices (because that’s all the people can afford), 2 or 3 class commodities, and a porous sense of “inside” and “outside” barely exists amongst the three story houses perched on hills over beaches. These houses look like they were cut out of housing developments in LA, with windows and screens, and a clear distinction between what was inside the house and what was considered “outside” and dirty – houses with rugs that you can’t track mud all over. At first it was strange to have to wear sandals in my house because the cement comes apart beneath my feet, and there may be a slug, scorpion, or trail of ants to step on as I walk to the toilet.

Now, for the brief time in which I am more accustomed to living the way most Nicaraguans live rather than how Americans live, the distinction is not only visible but visceral. And I am torn in between the two. In San Ramon, Matagalpa, I had grown accustomed to feeling ill and under-nourished, although I realize this is also a function of my mind because I know the answer to most of my perceived needs is “no”. No, I cannot eat my favorite comfort food (meusli) because there is no refrigerator to store the milk, no I cannot find out why I’ve had body aches off-and-on for the last 2 weeks because the doctors will only listen to your symptoms and prescribe you something, no I cannot feel completely comfortable because my clothes, sheets, towels, hair will not dry, no I cannot have a warm shower to take the chill off. Nonetheless, I had grown accustomed to this, and it really the only time I let it get to me is during the occasional exceptionally cold showers.

The juxtaposition of wealth has been an intense one. I left Matagalpa the day after my birthday, which meant I went right from a home stay with a family who had never been out to a restaurant and had never celebrated a birthday or had a cake. And went straight to Granada to a 4 star hotel. A pool, hot showers, everything was clean to a different standard. Nothing looked like anything that could come from nature. The tiles provided a distinct separation from the dirt, and the temperature controlled room felt nothing like any damp, humid Nicaraguan room I’ve been in. As I sat on the side of the pool swinging my feet in the water, surrounded by wealthy people, it just felt different. Wealth feelsdifferent.

So a few days ago, I had an interesting conversation with a man from Holland. Because I was visiting his house and his chocolate factory, and he just seemed so soft-spoken and gentlemanly, I decided not to say anything to allude to the constant battle in my mind about how to feel about “wealth” and “poverty.” It has been an on-going struggle to come to terms with the varying shades of normal that can be bought with either more or less money. So, I was humoring him by allowing him to say all the things you would expect a person coming from European or American standards and values to say. “You just want to wash your hands all the time” he said, and I realized just how right he was. Since I got to Nicaragua, I have grown to love washing my hands. “Holy shit, you’re so right. Especially on those jankie old school busses imported from the US where I’ve seen people literally lick the seat in front of them, sit with a handkerchief over their mouths looking exceptionally ill, plop live chickens into over-head racks and the plastic is literally wearing away from the touch of thousands of hands. And you know they’ve never been washed. Being on that bus’ll make you feel dirty the rest of the day.” And there it came, pouring out of me –my perceptions of public transit, inherently laced with judgment. It’s hard to keep myself free of judgments when a life with less opportunities just feels different. And it’s little things, like finding that your clothes, shoes, backpack, and sheets have molded while you were gone for a few days, or that the clean dishes you put in the rack several days ago need to be washed again because there’s a black ring of mold in the bottom of the cup. Or having a scorpion in your clothing bag that little by little unnerve me.

I guess it’s particularly poignant for me because I have never been able to, nor have I had to navigate between spaces of wealth and disadvantage before. I have never had enough money to live a life of not having to worry about how much something costs. I have never been able to expedite anything in my life by throwing money at it because I have never had enough money to throw. But here, it’s different. For example, I wanted to get off the island of Ometepe as quickly as I could because I knew I had a 5 hour bus ride ahead of me to get back to Leon. There were two options: take the jankie old 50 cent school bus that everyone takes because they have no cars (i.e. a 1.5 hour trip over un-paved roads), or pay the $16 for the speedboat to take me to directly to the ferry. I had enough toe-wiggling room to be able to take the speed boat, but it was the strangest thing to look out at Lake Nicaragua and know that we were probably one of the only motor boats on the entire like. Then, to be chauffeured directly to the ferry as everyone on it stared in awe at us that we had arrived in a private speed boat. It felt like the equivalent of showing up to something in The States in a private jet. Never in my life has it been more noticeable that the more money you have, the more options you have.

Thanks for reading. I guess I just had to share this because everyone I run into seems to have strong opinions about what Nicaragua is. I think a lot of figuring out “what Nicaragua is” is a process largely contingent upon finding out what the United States are, because it’s only in the juxtaposition that I can realize and understand all the things I had taken for granted as being universal truths. So, I guess I’m renovating my ideas of what’s normal for me and what’s normal in the upbringing I come from. It’s really an exciting and sometimes simultaneously empowering and debilitating process, but I’m really enjoying it.

--Brie

Getting underway, at long last

2010-07-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

As of yesterday, I´m officially making headway in my project - to investigate the agricultural systems of San Ramon. My specific interest is in the production of basic grains; to understand how people here assure their food sovereignty. In the States, the idea of food sovereignty is considered hopelessly obsolete or not considered at all.

In a small nation like Nicaragua, though, to be in control of your own food sources is a strong gesture of independence. Unfortunately, the trend right now in these same countries is to abandon traditional small-scale agriculture (the domestic producers of the nation´s basic foods, overwhelmingly) for the promised high returns of cash crops - in the case of Nicaragua, cotton, coffee, sugar, beef. Then these nations spend much of the revenue on importing the same foods they could have produced themselves.

But it´s hard to explain that to young farmers here. Partly because my Spanish skills aren´t adequate, partly because people here know there´s much more money to be made in other crops - and one can always buy their food instead. I suppose the problems only really seem so grave when one looks down at the whole, global picture. As a college student in the USA, we spend most our time doing that...granted, with all the abstractions that keep real consequences at arm´s length.

So that´s where I was yesterday. Specifically, sitting on a steep hillside of maize, overlooking a stunning vista of the cordillera, of the cluster of roofs marking San Ramon, patchwork corn-and-bean fields everywhere with jungle in between. There was one of those rare, cool breezes brushing the corn plants as Mario (my homestay brother) talked with me for an hour about...well, everything. How he preserves his soil, controls weeds, rotates crops, all of it. And he offered to let me help in the harvest next month, which I´m really excited about.

Up on that hill, I´m happy to say much of my uncertainty about why I came here...dissipated. Talking about growing food; well, that´s my element. Right where I want to be.

Excerpts From My Personal Journal

2010-07-20T08:26:00.000-07:00

July 18th

7:00am: I got into a fight with a cockroach over who was going to have possesion of the toilet this morning. I won.

July 19th

The majority of the decorations on my walls are slug trails.

I saw a beetle the other day that resembled a miniature rhinoceros.

The Daft Punk sond "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" could be an anthem for the Nicaraguan wildlife.

Itching our bug bites has become a way of life.

I found myself trying to imitate one of the common song birds around here, but I can't whistle; so, I got frustrated.

My host family's house cat is named Socrates.

One thing that unites all of us travelers in Nicaragua is that we share the common notion of not knowing why we're here exactly.

mi familia !

2010-07-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

so its been two weeks or so since i last wrote. I think yesterday is the first time that i truly felt like i was adjusting to my life here. Not to say that it has been bad...its just an adjustment and sometimes this adjustment feels easier than other times. I think it was a combination of getting a cell phone with service at my house (so i feel less cut off) and finishing out that my dad is coming to visit me in a few weeks and also last night was the first night that it wasnt raining and i could see the stars.
I am struck by how beautiful it is here and how fortunate i am to experience a different way of living. I really like my host family and the house. I love falling asleep to the sounds of the animals and the wind rustling the trees and then waking up to the sound of torillas being made and the gallo cantando. I love the smell of the mountain and how fresh the air is. My family doesnt talk as much as my family at home. Back home between me, my sister, my mom and myself there is barely a pause in conversation (my dad is usually silently listening and smiling). But here. There can be twenty minutes where no one talks and all we are listening to is the sound of the radio---how many times can they play lady gaga in one day!? But i think im adjusting to the silence and the way time moves at a different pace than i am used to. It is really beautiful and i would like to think i will be taking away a lot of ideas on how i communicate differently back home.
Today there was a workshop (i think that is the translation for ). It was basically a 2 hour long powerpoint presention given by a very passionate and enthusiastic man about the benefits of farming agroecologically--working with the plants and the myccorhizae instead of applying fertilizer. It was super interesting to me because i have learned this at school in washington and have basically gotten the same lecture in English. But to hear it in a spanish in a totally different environment---in the U.S it is always from the perspective of the consuming country. It made me feel really excited to be here getting to experience how the cooperatives all function with each other and realizing that it really is directly related to what ive been studying in school.
Anyways thats all for now. Im going to try to figure out if i can download a picture to put on the blog.
--kylie

Matagalpa

2010-07-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

So, I have to present my project today in front of a committee.

The CANnection website is finally functioning. It's still very basic,

but it's something that I can work with. I've become the web guy here.

I'm working on their eco-tourism website using Joomla, which is

supposed to be webdesign made easy, but it's really unintuitive.

Next week I'll be giving computation classes, and hopefully setting

people up with pen-pals to see how well the site works, and if it is

indeed something that will have utility down here. I already talked

to one Nicaraguan student who was very excited about my project,

and it reassured me a bit.

My host family here is really nice. I get three solid meals a day, a
room that resembles a prison cell made out of brick and concrete,
my own bathroom, and a lot of lizards that scuttle across the walls to

keep me company. The most valuable tool that I own right now
is my mosquito net. Everything bites you here.

I feel like this country is going to eat me alive, literally, so that
there is going to be nothing left of me but some rotting malaria
infested pile of what used to be a goofy Mexican Jew wearing skinny
jeans in the most inappropriate environment to wear them, in some
random part of the rain forest. But, now that I'm out of the Capital I
do feel a lot better. The country is beautiful, and just my 35 minute
walk from my host family's house to the office is one of the most
beautiful walks that I have ever been on.

There are a lot of people in my host family, even some people I
haven't met yet. Apparently, I have a mom, a dad, 3 host sisters, 4
host brothers, and several nieces and nephews (Everybody seems to have
at least one baby, it's like Watsonville). It's probably best to have
larger families when your livelihood depends on farming. More hands
for labor. My host mom is really nice, and she cooks way better than
my last host mom. I'm eating a lot better here, but I noticed that I'm
losing weight... There isn't enough fat in this food. I need some Jacks...

She also goes out of her way to wash my clothes
by hand whenever they get dirty. It's still a little strange to have
another person wash my clothes, especially by hand, handling
all of my delicates and such. Everybody is really amiable, and they
try to make me feel as comfortable as possible here. All the little
children laugh and giggle whenever they see me. I'm sure they think I
have a funny face. It might be the beard. I still don't know all of
their names...

My host Dad doesn't have an eye. He has a gooey sewn up slit where his
eye used to be. Apparently there is a really common eye disease around
here, so I'm trying not to touch my eyes. I feel for the people who
wear contacts. It's interesting, the house dog is missing the
same exact eye. Talk about dogs that look like their owners. The two
other people I talk to the most is my host sister who is 25 and my
host nephew who is 10. It's going to be my host nephews birthday soon,
and I was thinking about helping my host family buy him a bike,
because no little kid should ever be without a bike.

The rain and lightning storms are really intense. The lightning
crashes really close, and I realized that my room is a giant lightning
conductor, due to its aluminum roof. Whenever it's not raining too
hard and I'm not at the office working, I try to take little hikes
around the cooperative, find a nice place to sit, and play my banjo.
I'm so glad that I brought it here. It has helped me become more
adjusted; and, it's a good way to relax and try to express myself
(although, without any music theory, expressing myself musically is
like desperately grasping for something unknown in the dark). My host nephew
took an interest in my banjo, so I've started to teach him a bit.

Yesterday, I took a 45 minute hike up the mountain through the coffee plantation.

I played my banjo on top of a plateau that overlooked the community. It was beautiful,

one of the best experiences that I've had here.

I have had a perpetual stomach ache for a month, but I know that comes
with the territory. My new drug of choice is Pepto-Bismol.

Overall,things are going well. I think I'll be able to make some sort of

positive impact on the community, or at least start something that
will.

Levi Sharpe

After 4 days in La Reyna....

2010-07-05T10:02:00.000-07:00

Okay im really bad at navigating blog websites so you'll have the bare with me. Im sitting in the office in La UCA San Ramon. Today is Monday and my first official day working here i suppose. Everything still feels so new and foreign to me, which is to be expected. I'm just trying to focus on being in the present and not being too hard on myself if I feel a certain way. But so far I really like it here. The family im living are all SO nice and helpful. I live up a mountain and all night I listen to the sounds of birds and the rain and a rooster (starting at like 3:30Am!) I eat plantains and rice and beans and vegetables that I have never heard of. Basically what im trying to say is that everything is so NEW and Different. Its scary and confusing but also so exciting.
Brianna-one of the other CAN interns has been here for a month already and I am so grateful to have her here to help orient me. Besides that I have been very aware of the different form of speaking here. I want to be able to understand what everyone is saying but damn it is so hard. All the words sound slurred together and the "S" is not pronounced like i learned spanish in Mexico. But I like the challenge and I hope I will be able to improve my Spanish.
The Project I will be doing is to meet with different young people who are involved in the cooperativas and conduct interviews. I feel nervous about it right now b.c I am not sure what form this will all take. I guess thats it for now. I just have to be open to experience and see what comes of it. but i feel very fortunate to be able to experience a culutre so different than my own. Ill write more when I have some more to say.
--kylie

After 4 days in Managua

2010-06-24T18:48:00.001-07:00

My Spanish conversational skills are increasing dramatically. When they say you are going to be taking an intensive Spanish course, they mean INTENSIVE. I feel like I've spoken more Spanish in the last 4 days than in my entire life, and that's after living 9 years in Watsonville. After talking with my teachers and a lot of the people that I meet at the Spanish school about CAN and my project I've regained a lot of my ambition. They all seem to be genuinely interested in what I’m doing with the coffee cooperative. My teachers are wonderful; and having one on one instruction with somebody who will focus on your weaknesses is incredible. Right now I'm a level II speaker, but by the end of two weeks they've said that I will probably excel past level III. The school also offers a lot of activities that they guide you on. They are really concerned with our safety, and will even accompany us to the supermarket if they think it might be even the slightest bit dangerous. After being too nervous to wander around my neighborhood too much, I finally went to the grocery store today with one of the employees from the school, and got to buy Q tips at last, which was a relief. I didn't bring any toiletries other than a toothbrush, and a tiny bit of toothpaste. I have been showering for the past few days only using shampoo from an almost empty bottle that I found in my bathroom. So, it was in everyone’s best interest that I go to the grocery store. I was also able to finally buy mosquito repellent. I didn’t have it before, and the mosquitoes have been having a feast. Apparently my sweet foreign blood is a delicacy for Nicaraguan Mosquitoes.

I went on one of the activities that the school offers with a couple of other students from the School. We went to a little town called Catarina, which is about a 40 minute bus ride from the city. In Catarina we visited a ceramicist, and watched him throw a pot on a wheel right in front of us. It was really neat, and I ended up buying two small souvenirs from the place for 5 dollars. We then went to the main attraction of the city which is an amazing view of a giant lake surrounded by a mass of the most vivid green trees. It was beautiful, and a necessary change from the crowded dirty city. Afterward, we went to a small stand and bought some refresco de pitalla, which is a delicious ruby red fruit drink. On the taxi ride back from Catarina one of the other students told me an interesting story. On the first day they were here some older man came onto the bus they were on and started robbing people with a machete, taking their jewelry and such. They said everyone started screaming and running out of the bus until some guys pushed the old man off. Apparently, this student also has to keep a blog of their trip but refused to post this story, which I think, is silly.

My host family is really amiable. I get three meals a day, a large room with a fan, and my own bathroom. They let me keep to myself, but they are always welcoming when I decide to be social. I have also noticed that they give me the largest portions, and they don’t let me wash my dishes (although, sometimes I do when they aren’t looking). Every night my host mom, my host brother Ernesto, and I all sit together to watch Spanish wheel of fortune. Although I’m never able to guess the phrases on the show, it’s still really nice.

Tomorrow I will be taking a trip to Granada. I’m excited to get out of this city again. So far I have liked everyone that I have met in Managua, but the city itself is awful. Coming up, I’m going to go on another activity to climb some volcano, and also on Saturday I am going to a nature reserve called El Chocoyero. Overall, I’m feeling a lot better than when I first arrived. My spirits are higher, and during the day when I’m able to distract myself with everything that’s going on, I don’t feel as sad or anxious (even though it does creep up here and there). It’s really at night when I’m alone and have time to dwell that I get really despondent and I miss my ex the most. I know that if I could be sharing these experiences with her they would be even greater and meaningful.

-Levi Sharpe

fter 4 days in Managua

2010-06-24T18:48:00.000-07:00

First day in Managua

2010-06-21T22:26:00.000-07:00

After an uncomfortable flight having been sat next to a hulk of man who could have easily taken up a seat and a half on his own, a three hour layover in Huston, and an even longer sleepless flight, I finally made it to Managua. As soon as I walked out of the plane into the airport I could feel the humidity creeping in from outside. I was immediately drenched in sweat. This would be my state for the rest of the day. I got my luggage and found the taxi driver that was waiting to take me to the host family that was assigned to me by the Spanish school that I will be attending for two weeks. I hopped in his cab, which luckily had no seat belt, because I was about to be taken on one of the most nerve racking cab rides of my life. The traffic in Managua is a controlled chaos where everyone is tacitly playing a game of chicken with everyone else. The soothing sounds of car horns fills the air and semi trucks come so close to you that you can practically give the driver a high five. I chatted with the taxi driver to take my mind off of his (and the entire city’s) driving habits. He asked me how I was doing, and I told him that I was tired and a bit depressed. I explained to him that I had to end a relationship before coming to Nicaragua. He told me not to worry because there were plenty of beautiful women in Nicaragua, and that I would soon forget about this other girl. I replied that I wasn’t really looking for finding a beautiful woman in Nicaragua and that I didn’t want to forget her. Him and his girlfriend who was in the front seat just laughed. He then told me about the importance of learning the obscenities in Spanish, and going to discotheques.

Upon arriving at my host family’s house, I was fed immediately. The food was decent: some fish, some avocado, and some rice with peas. I finished my plate and accepted seconds, because that’s how I was raised. After a while of relaxing, playing banjo, and contacting people to let them know that I was safe, they drove me to the Spanish school. I talked to the Spanish school’s director and was put though various tests. He said that I was some kind of anomaly who has advanced Spanish understanding and conversational skills, but a very poor basic foundation. I will have an 8:00am-12:00pm intensive Spanish course daily for two weeks. The rest of the day was spent running errands with my host family, having beans and rice for dinner, and watching Nicaraguan wheel of fortune.

As I’m sitting here writing this blog there are a variety of wild noises outside my room ranging from something clawing at my roof, to that thing that was clawing at my roof falling off the roof with a loud screech and thud, to howling, to stomping, to the continuous revving of car engines. There are also perpetual random downpours which strike hard and fast. They happen more at night, but I experienced this earlier as I was walking back home from the Spanish school and had gotten lost for a bit (there are no street signs, and everything looks the same) sometime in the afternoon. Just as I was getting really flustered and annoyed at my self, the sky suddenly opened up and I was drenched; but, instead of making things worse, in this humidity it was welcome. Although, because there are parts of the street that are full of trash, the rain can make it smell like a dump, which as you can imagine is not very pleasant

As of right now I’m feeling lonesome, sleep deprived, and disheartened. I have left the country three times prior to this, but never before had I been more reluctant to leave than this time. Being forced to prematurely end my relationship has indeed crushed some of my ambition for my project, especially when it was at the cost of something so precious to me. It was extremely difficult for me to tear myself away from her to walk through the doors of the SFO airport a lonely dejected mess, not knowing how long it would be before I would be able to see her again, or how communication would continue. I am hopeful that I will soon be able to muster up some drive and fight the apathy that has overcome me. I have decided the best thing to do is to focus completely on my tasks at hand, making sure that my social networking project doesn’t fall through (something that has been a constant worry of mine), and also doing well in my intensive Spanish course. Overall, given the circumstances I consider today to have been a very good day, and there is definitely a part of me that is excited to see how the rest of this trip pans out, especially when I begin working on my main project with the UCA San Ramon Coffee Cooperative in Matagalpa.

I know Kerry wanted the interns to write down some expectations, but I’d rather just keep an open mind to whatever comes at me. However, the definite expectation that I had about not being able to have a warm shower has been confirmed.

p.s. I apologize if this entry has been very disorganized, I’ve never written a blog before and I haven’t slept in a day.

-Levi Sharpe

All in all in: Brie in La Reyna, Nicaragua.

2010-06-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Saludos,

Brie

Cepeda week 4...where are you, all you other interns?

2010-02-10T13:15:00.000-08:00

Here is what there is a lot of in Cepeda:

Friendly people

Babies

Fiestas

Doctors appointments

Trash

Borrachos

Beautiful people

Teachers not showing up for class

Chickens

Hope

A couple of things:

1. A Sherman Alexie moment. So I go play basketball with the girls when it is the girls´turn to play basket, as they call it. We play half-court four on four and for the next two hours, I feel not even a little bit weird or different or unusual. Like everyone else in the game, all I want is that ball. I accidentally smash the ball into someone´s face and everyone laughs, I say sorry a million times; a couple minutes later, someone smashes the ball in my face and everyone laughs too. We yell in Spanish and Maya. I am in the middle of the Yucatan in the middle of a crazy part of the history of this little town and this people, and I could be playing with my friends in Bellingham or Santa Cruz. The power of el deporte is not to be underestimated.

2. The school…I feel strange just putting my opinions about something I barely am beginning to understand on the internet. I feel like I am not qualified to judge, but I am also being asked for my recommendations and help. Middle school is a hard age. All of the kids are great one on one, but in the classroom some of them are a real challenge! Throwing things—hitting each other—hitting the people trying to pay attention—writing love notes—how do real teachers deal with this stuff? I´m not a teacher, I don´t know. At the same time I can´t blame the kids when their teachers don´t show up for class at least once a day, and in Cepeda there are not a lot of people who have beyond a middle school education or are doing work that requires that, so there aren´t a lot of role models. So I take the naughty kids after class and talk to them and try to make an agreement that the classroom is a place for learning and at the very least they need to let those who want to learn learn. When I ask them why they are in school, the answers I get range from I want to get a good job and make money to I want to learn to There´s nothing better to do. But one on one, they are interested in the project, they ask me all sorts of questions, they teach me Maya, they ask me about the medicinal plants in the garden, they ask me about David and California and where I´m from, they tell me about their grandma who taught them about plants. It´s a powerful age too, if there were only enough good mentors—what kids that age need is someone to work with, someone they respect, like an apprenticeship in a way. They are proud of their Maya and interested in the plants; mostly I think it is the ¨why¨ and ¨how¨ of conservation and agroecology that it is important to teach, el largo plazo, the long run. I have also been teaching poems and songs and games in English in classes where the teachers don´t show, and we learned Head Shoulders Knees and Toes in English and Maya, and the kids for the most part really enjoy it. I´m looking forward to getting some more outdoor lessons developed.

3. The project. Jesse and I are pretty much working together on the entire garden space and curriculum because compost requires a lot of resting, and there are at any given time at least five kids who want to help us, between teachers not coming and kids not going to class. We are making progress; some big challenges are the trash and the leaking septic tank. The difference between organic and inorganic trash has been a big thing to teach, the distinction is not made here, all basura is burnt. Jesse has some great creative ideas and he and the kids have already brightened the space so much. The kids like to paint signs and some of them will pick up trash and collect rocks. The pecuarias class is often killing chickens with a nail to the brain as we work. The biodigestor (pig and chicken manure) worked so well that I need a bigger methane capture tank for the second one and I want to hook up a little simple stove to it so we can cook an egg or something to show that it works. If anyone has done that, please can you email me and tell me how you did it? Thanks! I don´t want to blow up the drum, that would be sincerely stinky.

4. The community is lovely and kind and welcoming. There are a lot of problems—trash, half the men in town falling down drunk at night, general poverty, junk food, kids getting taken out of school for weird bureaucratic reasons, lots of 15, 16 year old moms—but also they have a clinic where people go for very frequent check ups, the women are very organized and have meetings about health education, preventing domestic violence, and school; and they still have a lot of their inherited richness of knowledge, biodiversity, language and culture. The women seem to have a lot of organization and momentum; I would like to see the boys have that sort of role models too. The men work very hard here, but there seems to be less organization and interest in education among them. Or maybe I just talk more with the women, I don´t know. They are at such an interesting time in their history—they still have their language and some Mayan ceremonies although the church is very strong here, and lots of old people seem to know the medicinal and food plants, but in the last two generations much of that seems to have fallen by the wayside. But the kids are interested in it, which is so great; I could definitely see them only wanting to move ¨forward¨ into technology etc, and I could see why, and from Tom´s stories of Tzucacab I was half expecting that. But now is a mix. For instance, for a quinceañera we made relleno negro, with entire turkeys and chickens and burnt chiles and tortillas, and we also made pasta salad with ham, mayonnaise and pineapple. The computacion class is the one that seems to have done a lot of work with David and is interested in medicinal plants. A time in the history of Cepeda with much potential, I think, and I am grateful to be part of it, as well as aware of the huge responsibility of being here for it.

I am wishing I had more time. Ten weeks is very little to understand and to take steps to address things that the community wants to address. Now it is time to get back.

Maálob—Maya for bueno and goodbye—Sarah

2010-01-19T07:38:00.000-08:00

Buenos dias from Merida! I have been here almost one week and will go to Cepeda tomorrow. Today I will present my proposal to professors Patricia, Rocio and Hector and maybe some other people, also I was invited to some masters proposal presentations about worms and seeds so I think I will go to those soon.

So far it has been very easy to live here. It is easy to talk to people, which is the first thing--Alfonso does his job very very well. Because of conversations I have had with him, I think it will be much more possible to do well in the work I am attempting. We have talked about the importance of establishing trust, and how to do that, and he has taught me words and phrases in Maya, and he has told me stories of his many years of working with campesinos to acheive stability and sustainability in agriculture. His son Diego has told me about the beautiful things there are in the Yucatan, and about a spirit that lives in the spiny tree, and how to tell by the sound of the hen´s squawking that she has laid an egg. I have told Diego about airplanes and what he will get to see in Santa Cruz, and how not to freeze (everyone asks me ¨no tienes frio?¨ disbelievingly here. I do not think it is cold, it´s maybe 65 or 70 degrees F, but everyone is wearing five sweaters and ¨muriendo del frio.¨ I tell them that when it is hot I am going to melt because I am not accustomed to the hot, I am accustomed to the cold and that is why I am not cold.) I am very happy that Alfonso, Aidi and Diego get to see Santa Cruz in the Intercambio.

But even his family cannot have the same luck. Joanna, his daughter-in-law, must wait for her husband to come back from San Francisco and they do not know when that will happen. Maybe a year, maybe more. I could not bear that. I know that on March 24th I will see my love and I am so relieved for that simple, taken-for-granted fact. At the same time I am torn apart because the injustice of the border and the trade agreements that our government has imposed allow me freedom to see those I love, and prohibit people whose love is no less strong and whose human dignity is neither greater nor less than mine from doing the very same thing.

The education and solidarity that I bring is a drop in the bucket and will not change anything for Joanna or millions of others in her shoes. But it might help some of the kids in the school in Cepeda to choose a career that will allow them to travel and to express their opinions to people of power. It might shine some light on how I could go back to the US and tell the people that matter, we must extend a hand, we must not be so greedy.

I have gotten to meet a lot of Alfonso´s extended family. The other day we piled a lot of us into the car and went to four different houses. A Chayotear means to go eat somewhere for free, as in when PICAns come to a potluck without bringing food, or when you bring eight other people to eat posole at your daughter-in-law´s father´s house. You are a Chayote if you do this, and you are welcome because you are family, or friend of family. (I thought at first that chayotear meant harvest chayote, which is a kind of squash. This provoked much laughter.)

I am anticipating challenges when I go first to the community. Gracias a David, who has laid a very good trail to follow and has endeared himself to the community, I hope that I can live up to the kindness and openness that he as shown and that the people have returned. But I am also anticipating good things--good conversations, ganas de trabajar, songs and dances and much learning on my part. My plan is to work with the teachers and the students to do a compost experiment: try four different compost systems to see which works best while learning the scientific method of experiments and the science of compost and why it is important and if it works well with the way things are in Cepeda.

I am very grateful for the kindness of Alfonso and his family, for staying healthy thus far (may it continue! I do not want to burden the community with sickness) and for my ability to speak Spanish, and for the evenings and mornings when I know that one day is past in a beautiful clouded sunset and another will be beginning in which i have no idea what will happen, but I look to it with much hope.

Al Yucatan me voy

2010-01-09T13:28:00.000-08:00

Hola--Sarah here, seeing if this works. Karie said to record some hopes and aspirations, so here goes.

I've been reading two books, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution by MY AUNT--yes that's right, mi propia tia, Caroline Fraser--and Stones into Schools by Greg Mortensen. The first one is about efforts all over the world to recreate large corridors of habitat for native flora and fauna in hopes of preserving biodiversity and stalling global warming. Some efforts do better than others. Most striking and intuitive to anyone who's studied PAR is that the efforts that involve local people--economically and educationally--succeed. They are locally owned, provide jobs in ecotourism or provide markets for local goods, and educate the children of the place about the importance of the life around them. This is one thing I am going to remember if people ask me questions about what I am doing for the environment, or what they can do for it.

The second book is a follow-up to Three Cups of Tea and tells the stories of the schools that Greg Mortensen, in partnership with a Central Asian staff crew and every community he works in, has helped build in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here is a quote that I am going to take with me and remember in my work:

"When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children."

Listening is the most important thing, which is good for me. I don't always have something to say, I don't have solutions to all the problems I will see, and I know that at times I may feel powerless, I may feel as though my country is the root of all evil and I can't pull that out of myself, and I still have quite a lot of self-doubt to overcome. But I can listen.

I have a great opportunity to listen to children. Oh, I will teach too--I have the Rodale composting book and diagrams of food webs and the nitrogen cycle, and songs and poems a-coming--but I will make plenty of time for listening. I will ask kids what they want to do when they grow up, and use silly check in questions, and ask them to teach me songs to share with the kids at my mom's school, and teach them some of the songs I know. So that if those kids ever meet, they will have songs to share, some from each.

Jesse, Karie and I watched a documentary about Yucatecan immigrants in San Francisco. It was mostly discouraging. Afterwards Jesse and I talked about it and sort of agreed that we don't want to say to people we meet "No, don't come to the US" because that would be sort of dishonest--yet we kind of felt that we are supposed to somehow imply that. But we're coming back here because we love our home and it's wrong not to want to share that, right? I've been thinking about this a lot. I have concluded that it's not my job to persuade or dissuade anyone from making the choices they make.

My job is to be kind, to be in solidarity, to give what I can, to respond to what people tell me they need, and to learn. My job is to make sure I give back to the community as much as it gives to me, to have fun, be fun, create happiness, to love. As silly as it may sound, only with love will work reach its full potential. My job is to separate the good and the nasty parts of privelege, to separate human rights from unjust excess, and try to represent myself and my communities as honestly as I can. My job is to keep on keepin' on. My job is to listen.

So, hopes and aspirations--I hope I can do all that and leave knowing that years from now, I will still be friends with the people with whom I worked.

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto...
Con ganas de trabajar,
Sarah

You say goodbye I say hello

2009-12-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

That Beatles song is always running through my head here. People say ¨Adios¨ (¨bye¨) when they pass you in the street. Sometimes I´ll say Hola and the response I get is Adios...
Every place that I have gone in Costa Rica there are roosters that begin crowing before the sun rises and little dogs that bark aggressively and right when you think that you might get bitten a woman appears and yells calmly - as if all is normal and your life was never in danger. I´m going to miss this place.

This place has been a really important life experience for me, where I have learned mostly about myself. Here, I often feel that people are too kind, that I could be doing more or working harder, but any effort that I make or work that I do, the people seem so impressed with me. ¨Que valiente¨ they always say. So valiant. I don´t feel so valiant, but soon I will return to my country and the men will no longer constantly be telling me how beautiful I am and the woman will no longer be so incredibly impressed with my will to work outside and my ability to cook and life will be more how I expect it I suppose. I will be normal, not an anomaly.

I´m going to miss the people so much and the simple lifestyle. They buy milk from their neighbors and slaughter their own chickens and walk more than they ride, the showers are never hot, there isn´t glass covering the windows, people very very rarely eat out of the house, clothes are dried by the sun,... This life is rich. Everybody knows one another and greetings are hugs and kisses on the cheek. There is a lot of love in this community.

On my last day my mind is filled with preparations for leaving, loose ends here that need tying, excitement for something new, anticipation for the unknown, and the difficulty of leaving the people that I´ve met here knowing that I will likely never see most of them again, which comes with the desire to make evident how much I really really love them and the seeming inability to convey how strong my feelings are...

Pura vida, twenties, buenísimo, adios Costa Rica

Buenicimo! ¿Twanies o Twanies? Pura Vida!

2009-10-25T16:06:00.001-07:00

Buenicimo! ¿Twanies o twanies? Pura Vida! (all equal in meaning)

Its usually all three of these things that Jimmy greets you with. Its damn hard being happpy all of the time but when I see Jimmy`s ear to ear smile its like Chirstmas morning. Jimmy pronounced "Yimmy" designed and runs the coffee processing facility called "The Beneficio." He always seems to be busy but has volunteered many hours of his time helping me and my supervisor, Merlin, with the worm compost bins next to beneficio. Lining the bin with plastic and designing a wall to keep rain water out; I can tell that he just loves helping his community. He just loves people. The other spark of life to my daily odd job routine is Merlin. Always helping me out with all of my projects while dealing with a mountain of other work that she has including raising her child Eliot and finishing up college. Amidts the chaos of work she still manages to take us to amazing places around Costa Rica. I really don`t know where she finds the time. When I say "us" I am refering to the other intern Kerry. If not for Kerry I would be going crazy speaking Spanish all day. It is to Kerry that I can let loose with and express my deepest feelings about my experiences here in Copa Buena. All three of these people are keeping my spirits high while we all attempt to solve the days problems. Problems that would be incredibly easy to solve in the states with my dads tool shed are incredibly difficult here. For example, we need to drill a hole in the bottom of the worm bin to set up a PVC pipe drainage system but no one has an extension cord long enough that can reach between the beneficio and the worm bins. Neither does anyone, at least anyone I know, own a cordless drill. Now we are looking into finding a hand powered drill but maybe Merlin or Jimmy will find someone with the proper tools. I just wanted to mention the three people in Copa Buena that help me solve problems, that keep me happy and in the end keep me sane. For them I have an incredible admiration and love for which makes me want to reciprocate, which makes me want to be that much better. Right now my younger brother Justin is pearing over my shoulder but he cant read what I am saying. He just gave me a confused look because he saw me typing his name. Dont worry Justin, I am almost done and then we can go roller skating. Well you heard it, I must be off rolller skating. Con Mucho Amor - Mike

Tierra

2009-10-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

"This coffee is going to the United States!¨ Francisco was glowing with pride. I spent the better part of five hours that morning picking coffee with Francisco on his farm. His entire family participated, which included his wife, Maritza, and his children: Jose 17, Jalitza 15, David 12, and Estefanie 4 - she wasn´t quite as helpful, but she was eager. The process was really beautiful especially when I was able to push aside the coffee-picking stories of spiders that give you huge welts or make you temporarily go blind or the snake bites that send you to the hospital or the catapillars that give you a mean sting. Such tales found little opportunity in my thoughts that morning, as my head filled with the constant Spanish conversation of the entire family and my hands raced to pick as fast as I could - I definately only had Estafanie beat in speed. The job seemed somewhat daunting as we raced through maybe one third of a hectare and the plants stretched across 5 hectares in total. Red is the color of ripe, but the season was early yet, so, like in most agriculture, we picked yellow to red. Some plants had to be thoroughly searched to find a few ripe beans, while others were dripping in red. When the rain began to fall at 11:30 I realized that we would never ´finish´this task. We walked to the house in a steady shower at 12; it was difficult to pass the large clusters of red. The family would return after lunch, but with the rains many of the ripe beans would fall, especially if not picked today - how could they pick everything?

A lot of things poured through my mind that morning with Francisco´s family. His son, Jose, loved working on the farm and was Francisco´s right hand man in every project. He went to school on the weekends and at night so that he could work in the field during the day. He would graduate in December and was planning on going to a university to study criminal justice. Although he hoped to find a job close to home afterwards and have a farm of his own, I wondered how altered Francisco´s life would be without him. I suppose David would step up to fill the gap, and then after that? Was it so different from American farm faimlies? Maritza worked in the field as well, which was different for Costa Rican households. I admired her for having such a large family and taking care of them and working hard outdoors. I wanted every person who says that women belong in the house taking care of their children and home to see her example. This ´house-bound´role for women is accepted here by men and women.

For large amounts of time Francisco talked to me about organic verse sustainable agriculture and how he produced very high quality products that on a rare occassion needed chemicals to prevent disease. He told me that there is no such thing as bad soil, only bad farmers. As he said that to me, I was struggling to keep my balance on the steep graded hill that his coffee was planted on. The ground was wet and incredibly slippery, since the soil here was mostly fine clay that had poor nutrient retaining qualities. His coffee plants did look healthy though and the row crops that he grew rested in rich, black soil that he had built up with compost over the years. He was a good farmer.

Markets drove the workers here like in the rest of the world. Farmers learned to diversify their crops after the coffee crisis that devastated a lot families. Francisco grows over 30 different crops on his land other than coffee and all of them can be sold at different times as the market changes, but they always provide his family with food. Currently, coffee sold to America is his largest income. The other farmer that I work with, William, is glad to be out of the coffee business and only grows and sells row crops. My project with him is helping him start hydroponic lettuce, which Francisco says is for people without soil.

The people in this place are hard workers and take pride in their work, but simultaneously work in a more relaxed state. The ´pura vida´attitude is engaging and I´m glad to get a taste of it. I wish that more people in America could put these faces behind the products they purchase. Every piece of food that is consumed was grown sustainably or insustainably by a farmer or a corporation. Coffee is the second largest commodity that is traded in the world and most people choose cheap coffee that is destroying the land and lining the pockets of incredibly wealthy corporate individuals, as the farmers that produce it can barely feed their families and do not have the diverse crops to supplement their needs. Every choice we make is supporting something and in America we have the choice thanks to consumerism to support something good. Products that are certified Fair Trade mean that the farmers who grew them receive a fair price, that´s how Francisco is able to make money off of his small sustainable farm and not be another victum of NAFTA´s ¨free¨ entirely injust trade.

Teen in kal Na lúum yetal tulak´ Puuk´siikal...

2009-10-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

I love you with all my heart mother earth in maya, words I have been singing as I bike or run allone through the wonderfuly beatiful jungle the people here call the Monte. These last few weeks have been incredible with many adventures and heartfelt moments that words from this deeply rooted culture better express my heart, for life has been HACH Málo (How wondefully good!). I have rooted myself in this small community full of good folk, and like a tree that has been rooted in time it bears fruit, and for me the fruits of this experience are only becoming sweeter. For the last weeks I live my days sharing life with the cute and joyful youth at the local school, helping and sharing life about my mountian town in the Sierra Nevadas and the Peace and wonderful people and place of santa cruz. The children are soo egar to speak with me, to play games, and to learn and share life that I often leave school exaugsted for the amount of energy they have. All of which giving me strength and joy to see how powerful and concious this next generation is. Sitting in class and hearing students reading about thier relationship with the enviornment and how humans can better live with our earth toches my heart greatly. I spent a wonderful night reading essays from a class that has formed thier own club to protect the environment and one students essay was titled "I am a hero of the Environment" and gave wonderful insight in how we humans can live as stweards with the animals and plants. Egar to learn english the students have made a deal with me to teach me maya and I teach them english for I tell them how beatiful maya is and how I can better express my heart in spanish than in english and the more maya I learn I realize how deeply rooted the words and the thoughts that the words create. For example how are you in english in spanish is como estas (how are you ) but more of the feeling you hold, and in maya Biix abeel is how are you doing but means how is the road of life you are walking? Wow a expression that is more close to heart how are you doing in life! Helping in different agricultural classes were the kids learn to plant black beans all laughing and just getting to know the earth has made me very content and happy, to know the power of education. I have been sooo foruntate to meet really good folk that are happy and egar to bestow all their magical secrets about amazing plants! I wrote to a friend early to day that I have learned more about plants that my mind can hold so I have been making a ethnobotanical (Human and plant relationship) book to better remeber these plants. I have record over 60 plants and have learn a ton more, but with all these plants we can heal all the diesease of the human body, which is sooo absolutly incredible. I have befriend a handful of herbiteros (maya traditional plant healers) that have taught me much about life and more about plants that are truly magical! They are teaching me how to prepare them, how to use them, and with great respect and gratitude heal. Monday I return to the sweetest woman´s house were I have lived many amazing days playing with her sweet grandchildren, adventruing with here to the Monte and her Solar (home garden system; basically a garden that surrounds the house that is more like a forest that flows like a river into the surrounding forest jungle of the Monte) There we will share more laughter and I will learn more about plants and keep writing in my plant book and colllectin plants for the garden soon to live at the school. I am in the process of healing the land to prepare a future enthnobotancial garden full of magical plants. Because many elders here know the traditional plants and how to heal with them but many of the youth do not know, so working with the community and the school I am soon to plant with the help of the students this garden that will hopefuly help the children to develop more relationships with amazing plants that heal. I am full of my deepest gratitudes to this life, and my heart is full of the love of wonderful people that have really opened up to me. Last night I was invited to dinner my a wonderful family and we laughed and shared srories, ate Chia (my favorite food) drank lemonade. And my friend taught me the begining of a new passion of mine, the Jarrana, the traditional dance, that is sooo fun. I was dressed in my fancyist clothes, a nice street that was gifted to me by the woman I love, a fly sombrero that was loaned to me by a friend for after this dinner celibration I traveld to the Aniversary Celibration of the local School and enjoy the celibration. With a friend dressed in similiar fancy attire we danced infront of the school and large part of the community to the music of Darrengueza, a dance that we have been practicing. I was quite tired that night from my day filled with running and bike, but was reguvinated after all the wonder was shared last night. Wow I feel glad that I have been keeping a journal and remember all my wonderful memories recorded in my heart to share later in this life, so I will share one more story before I go to the Carne Asado (The cooking of meat celibration) in a nearby town that I have been so kindly invited to. One of my favorite days of this life was.... Riding my bike to my friends house in a nearby little town traveling by a road that is cut through the jungle I befriend a man as well biking and we talked about life. We talked about how good life is and how important it is to have possitive thoughts and feelings of gratitude to help navigate through this life. Biking to the town of Acu we talked about the beauty that is the Yucatan, the pure life, great food, great music. We also talked about the life with money and how money and technology offten create distractions with the goodness of life, and create a disconnection with the earth. I offered how buying a apple is very different than grabbing the apple with your hand from the tree that you know and is your friend. We laughed and shared other great stories, and when I arrived to Acu I was introduced to my friend´s brother in law and shared the day with him learning all about plants in his home garden system and we were sharing a glow of giddieness and glee. Biking along side him later in the day on a small dirt road that pierced into the jungle and the sun was creating such a soft light on us that everything was made soo clear, and I was gigling to myself soo happy and full of gratitude. We would stop and he would teach me about plants that heal everything, and he remarked at how luck I was to learn all of his secrets about magical plants he doesnt tell most people. I told him that I was honored, and laughed saying Dios Bootix, which is Gracias (Thank you) in maya and I believe it directly translates as God gives, and much of my life has been filled with too many connotations of what God means, but seeing many words painted on walls and cars saying "Dios es Amor" "God is love", I am indeed happy to shout this gratitude that love gives, for love is truly the most powerful thing in my life and so with these last words of this blog I leave for my next adventure,
I love you all very much,
David

Hammer meets Body

2009-10-14T15:31:00.000-07:00

I have been working on this giant worm box for the past couple of days and it was a lot more work than expected. Lining plastic in the bottom of the wooden box and then figuring out a method to secure it took us a solid three hours. And we still have to install a drainage system so that the worms dont drown. During this time we came across a scorpions exo-skeleton which can be viewed below and an actual scorpion which we fed to some Hormigas Locas. "Us" includes Merlin my surpervisor and her good friend Jimmy who runs the Beneficio (Coffee Processing Facility) next door. Jimmy has been the only handyman willing to lend his time to our endevour. All other help seems to think worm composting is a waste of time and resources. It is a waste of time when thinking about the immediate costs/benefit, but over the long haul the goal of the worm composting is to provide a teaching aid to school groups and provide farmers with a cheaper and richer source of fertilizer. Once the worms have multiplied to a desirable number the wooden composting box we have now will be torn down and a much larger cement box compost will take its place. After lining the box we had to create a rain sheild around the box. We already had a plastic roof so walls were all we needed. All around the Beneficio grows these Canye Indio plants which could be described as really skinny palm trees. When the majority of the area in Copa Buena was clear cut for coffee farms, these Canye Indio plants took root quickly and now provide living fence lines for the farmers. Since their is such an abundance of this plant we could chop it down and use it to create our rain shield. We dug six holes, jammed the six support beams into the holes, filled the holes and then attached the support beams to the roof with two clavos (nails). Upon installing one of these beams I had to climb a ladder to short for the job and then drive the clavos throught the roof and into the support beam. Akward as hell and with a shakey balance I managed to drive the first clavo in, but not as staight as I would have liked. The second one I tried nail in with baby taps but there must have been a knot in the Kanye Indio because it wasnt going anywhere. Slightly frustrated I decided to wind up and drive the sucker in but as the hammer came down my footing slipped and I nailed my thumb instead. My thumb began to turn black and blue and I felt like an idiot but as I have learned very well that shit always happens and you just got get back up and try again, which I did. We finished installing the support beams and called it a day.

Later that evening I was stoked to see the US and Costa Rica duke it out for World Cup standing. Costa Rica had previously lost to Honderous and beat the US in Costa Rica. In order to get World standing they would have to defeat the US. I´m not a huge fan of watching sports but I could not pass up the opportunity to shit talk (but in a nice way) with my host family becuase I knew they were dedicated fans. In the first half of the game Costa Rica was up 2 to 0 and the United States was playing horendous. For the moment I switched sides and told my family that I was rooting for Costa Rica all along until US scored their first goal with about 15 minutes to go in the game. At this point the US had stepped up their game and the ball was constantly on Costa Ricas side. In the remaining minute of the game the US brought the ball backl from their side and managed to get a corner kick. Now only 20 seconds remained in the game. The kick looked good was sent right into the quagmire of people in front of the cage. And it was Jonathan Bornstein, lucky number 13 who lended his head and a couple of brain cells to help tie the game, 2 - 2. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I screamed and jumped around the house. The shocked faces of my family were priceless and even my little sister Maria Jose began to cry and I´m not sure if it was due to my parading around or the loss in general. For the moment I was a little resentful of shananagins but the family realized that it was just a game in the end.

Hormigas Locas

2009-10-14T15:22:00.001-07:00

Large callused hands with flat split thumb nails. I notice dirt from the mornings work packed tightly in the gaps between nail and skin as he reaches to shake my hand in greeting. My hand disapears in the mass that is his, but I find comfort in its gentle yet confident grasp. "Buenos días William, puedo ayudar hoy en la finca?" I returned. The past week I had been on the move with my supervisor Merlin, getting the lay of the land so I had not gotten the chance to help out my host family with their farm. My host father seemed uncertain about my ability to wield a machete but handed it to me anyway along with a guaba tree branch about the length of my arm. At the branchs end it naturally hooked. I guessed that I would be needing this tool in conjunction with the machete. Arriving to the place where many plants would surely meet the blade of my machete I noticed many large ant hills. Getting a closer look I found many red ants carrying small cuttings of leaves into their home. William pointed out another gi-mungus ant hill next to a small bush that had been completly stripped of its leaves. The red ants seemed to be some sort of carpenter ant that would set up shop right next to its food source, exploit it, and then move on to the next. "Muy muy mala para café," William said refering to the carpenter ants.

The hillside we had to clear was full of tall ones, short ones, wide ones and skinny ones. Plants of all colors and origins would soon be hooked by my guaba branch, slashed and then tossed downhill. I don´t know why but I felt like a kid again; like when I first came across my dads various knives he kept hidden from me. Maybe it was a mistake for William to give me that machete, we would soon find out. Spliting up, I began on one side of the hill and William the other. We worked the hillside systematically, meeting in the middle every twenty minutes and then moved farther up the hill to repeat the process. We hooked, slashed and tossed until we reached the top of the hill that was lined with a living fencline of trees. These were beneficial trees and could not be chopped. Before I could move quickly and hack without much percision and the job would get done. Here I had to manuver my machete in between trees which slowed me down. This one bush was giving me a lot of trouble, keeping my feet in the same spot for about thirty seconds... thirty seconds toooo long becuase when I looked down at my foot it was covered in thousands of pissed off black ants. I had been careful and looked for ant hills everywhere I stepped but these ants seemed to be living in an unmarked location. Their home was of finely cultivated soil with pinholes for entry/exit points. I called to William for help but he was too far to hear and what was he going to do anyway. It was up to me. I ran in circles and scraped my machete against my boot with no results. I had to drop my machete and use my hands since the ants had begun to travel up my sock. Luckily the ants didnt bite my hands but later that day I found one of them near my upper thigh that got a couple of good stings in before I crushed it.

Later that evening when I returned home I opened my door and flipped on the light switch to find 5 cookarochas perched upon the various items of my desk. My notebook, jar of peanut butter, the plastic spoon I use to eat my peanutbutter, reading material, etc. Their antenni were going haywire trying to gather information about the new presence in the room. Taking a step towards them all movement halted and that scene from Jurrasic Park began to play out in my head, but with cocaroaches in place of people and me in place of the T-Rex. Each cocaroach was speaking in distressed rico suave accents, similaiar to that of Antonio Banderes.

"I don´t know... what should we do man, that thing is huge!"
"Wait! Don´t move! It can´t see us if we don´t move."
"... its walking towards us... "
"Shit Run! It can see use!"

They had scattered before I could squash them with my book in hand. But at that moment I could really only laugh thinking about life from their perspective. When I turned off my light for bed I could hear them moving about like little plastic wind up toys, clicking a clacking across the floor and my desk. Thinking back to later that day I had remembered my host brother telling me that cocaroaches like to eat the dead skin and eyebrows off your face. Broma(Joke) or truth, I was not about to let my eye brows become some rare delicacy for those bastards. I grabbed my headlamp and ran into the kitchen to where a spray bottle of venino (posion) lay. Returning to my door I could hear them scampering around from outside. Flinging my door open like a drunk Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven I began shooting madley like they had just killed my best friend. I dont know why, but that day I was living vicariously through many different characters of my movie viewing past. There was no mercy. I tracked down every last cocaroach and sprayed them dead. Needless to say I slept well that night.

and more...

2009-10-09T17:21:00.000-07:00

heres some more foto

2009-10-09T16:19:00.001-07:00

just to throw something else in the mix other than that rant... heres some fotos of the work weve been doing and some other stuff for everyone to enjoy. peace!

2009-10-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

although i am happy to read David's account of Cepeda, filled with joy and magic, I feel like bursting, or at least balancing, the bubble a little bit with an account from Tzucacab. My host familiy is not unusual. The father works construction in the urban centers of Progreso and Merida. For the past three years he has been dedicated to drinking alcohol and now wanders the streets sleeping whereever he collapses. Doña Berta, the mother of his children is a big, strong woman. She says she doesnt let him inside anymore. Along with her young son of two years, Jesùs, she also cares for her brother's children, whose mother died. Both her brother and her younger sister work in Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo. Family disintegration is rampant due to alcohol, drugs and migration. Neighboring Peto has 8,000!! of its natives living in the United States, the majority in San Rafael, California. The youth suffer for lack of guidance, often living with grandparents, they take to television, video games and motorcycles at best. six were recently caught with drugs at a local school.
speaking of DRUGS, last year a band of narcotraficantes was almost apprehended here in yown. seven were caught, and three got away. now the townspeople are edgyu and suspicious of strangers because the narcos threaten to kidnap their children. into this enters bearded, long haired, red gold and green shirted I. talking to the kids about what they want to plant, they say MOTA, lets make some money. walking out to cut wood, they threaten to cut my throat with machetes. scenes of the Guerra de Castas flash through my mind, of which hardly anyone has even heard.
The school's attendent explains to me why they dont use k'aanches. he said, "our fathers looked at the k'aanches and decided that they werent very good. a strong wind comes and they fall. and then you have to do all the work over again. we prefer to use wire, it lasts forever and the chickens cant jump up onto it" Gorda, Doña Berta's 16 year old charge asks me, "why do students always come here to study the things we dont like to do?" The reality of people leaving the campo culture for modernity and city values has a staggering affect. Literally between one generation and the next knowledge of local trees and traditions are lost in favor of "emo vs. skate" "OH MY GOD!" girls shout at me imitating a popular song. When i say to Gorda "baax kawaliik?" she replies "i dont speak maya!"
I wonder about the people's interest and investment in the projec, and what would they suggest be changed if they were asked.
Both the top down structure of PROTROPICO and the authoritarian school teachers leave me in the role of taskmaster, the youths frustrated and bored, and the community members ranging from slightly involved to disinterested and fearful. There is very little communication between PROTROPICO and community members. what is discussed is readily misunderstood. I am afraid that all it comes down to for local members of the community is that students pay rent and they are desperate for money.
I am reminded of the phone conference regarding the Sping Break Tzucacab project where everything that was discussed was focused on the students: their experiance, what will they do, where will they live, will there be adequate photo ops, etc. I just want to express now what i didnt then: Why is the experiance of the community not being discussed? Why is no one from Tzucacab being asked what they want a band of 10 gringos to do in town for a week? or if they want them at all= I know were all excited and Dr Jimenez has 10 years working in the community but in reality he isnt from this town and there are serious communication and cultural gaps between Tzucacab and Merida, not to mention Santa Cruz. So let's take a deep breathe before we send in the invasion force and consider: who do we know in Tzucacab? with whom are we communicating? and if the answer is NO ONE then why are planning socalled "participatory" projects without input from the local community?

Extracurricular

2009-10-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

Rain falls steadily from the sky. The sound is subtle and comforting, but the presence is strong. Where will I go with all of this rain pouring down... it entraps me. This is the beginning of October, the rainiest month here and my two-week anniversary. Life has picked up.

Mike arrived last Monday and another Gringo in the village has made life more exciting. Last week social events included dancing lessons, a river excursion to a beautiful waterfall, cruising the town, playing pool, roller skating to music in a gym, soccer practice, and a long hike to see a potentially incredible view, which was actually just a ton of fog. The town is quiet, but fun is here. I´m learning what young people around here do for fun, which brings me to my older brother: Yeison.

There had been a problem with the electricity I believe. That was why every single time that I arrived home they were all working on the car. Although it belonged to Yeison, his brother Octavio and sister-in-law Marisol spent long amounts of time on it. One day when I got home Mari was detailing with a tooth brush. The list of what this car doesn´t have would be easier to cover - a hot tub -, but to paint a clearer picture it is royal blue with impossible to see through tinted windows, very large built-in speakers, the extended bottom, a DVD player for the driver?, fancy blinker lights on the mirrors and crazy blue lights on the stick shift, tires with nice rims, and probably a bunch of other things that I don´t appreciate. Basically, this ride is pimped. So, when Yeison takes me out in his sweet ride, we drive a mile to Agua Buena, get a drink at the bar and then park on the side of the road (with all of the other very pimped rides) and sit on the curb of the sidewalk to hang out with everyone else. Such is the night life that I know in this town and the afore mentioned. As the rain begins to fall more frequently I wonder how motivated I will be to go out on foot.

¡Hách Utz (How beautiful) is this life!

2009-10-02T09:24:00.000-07:00

I am returning from a lovely morining full of a bike adventure to a near by pueblocito to learn about some magical plants from a good hearted man, Fliex, I joked that we were Feliz because I was happy to be with him and his name is prounouced Fiez, which is happy. Fliex, full of life and full of love, was happy to show me around his little solare or home garden system, growing in abundance of medicinal plants all around his house! And wow! He taught me about 20 or more incredible plants; helping and curing all sorts of sickness from cancer to diabities to the common headache. Indeed a great morning with this good man, we talked about life and about how his grandparents had taught him soo much, and we looked at old ethnobotany (the human and plant relationship) book from 1775, and both we sharing a happy glow to know the power of plants and how they are truly great friends. He told me that he knew many more plants in the wild, he told me that there are more than 1000 wonderful plants that heal everything! I gave words of inspiration to him that we should go to forest and collect many more to grow in his wonderful garden, he told me he would go soon. He is living a good life, tranquillo, as he put it, helping people with plants and not working to hard, eating the gifts of the earth, sell a little at the local market and healing the people that visit, usually up to 5 a day, but laughed that sometimes up to 20 people arrive to his home. I love the people that this magical land cultivated! Mi vida es llena de una cultura maya buena ! I am living with a wonderful family, a strong Mom, whom is friends with nealy everyone in our little community of Cepeda, mi papa ahora is a strong man, whom shares a powerful love of mine; Bicycles, he fixes the towns bicycles. My days are filled with wonderful people and many wonderful family members. I have been here in Cepeda less than a week and my heart is being filled quickly with this wonderful little community. I have been helping out at the local school full of soo many wonderful kids and teenages, so eagar to learn and they have much curousity with me and is nearly impossible to walk by a class room, without many warm and loving calls of David... Inviting me to talk to them, so I have been helping in classes about the environment, farming classes, sharing my prespectives about life, and listening to thiers. Tomarrow some teachers and I are going to create a compost system at the school with some students to teach them how to create soil full of life for the life of plants. All of this experience is soo incredible. On sunday another Yérbatero Maya whom I have befriend is a strong man deeply rooted in Na´Lúum, Mother Earth, who knows much about life and medicinal plants, has invited me to to an all day lecture about medicinal plants with others that know plants...
Now a moment for why I love spanish more than English, for the ease of expressing my heart. When I wrote how other good people that know plants, in my head I was saying people that Conoce, plants conocer is know but to know with the heart, like I know my friends and family, different form saber which is know información....
Okay well I have a bit of an adventure home so I must leave this writing, but much more goodness is ahead in this wonderful life. I have plans to fish with a good friend of mine in Meridad, and bike trips to zaranotes with some of the students at the school and many more learning opportunities to Know plants with the strong people I have befriend. I will soon begin to collect plants and with the help of some of the school teachers and the students we are going to plant a medicinal garden in the local school to help the kids develop a deeper relationships with these magical plants and our tierra madre (mother earth). Vamos a sembrar semillas de concimeinto en las mentes por el medio ambiente!
As always may peace be with you all,
Love,
David

october the first!

2009-10-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

time flies! i am out here writing notes in the ciber and i thought i would share some more photos because today we started building the first kaanche. now the most time consuming part of the project is finding and cutting the wood. after thats done, its not too much work. we now just have to do the walls, line the inside with juano and mine, mix and fill the dirt... and of course PLANT ON THE FULL MOON! tomorrow we finish it up and then i go to merida to speak with Dr. Jimenez and work with Don Alfonso finishing up the second kaanche modificado and aparently he has started building an oven, so we'll be working on that as well. heres some DOCUMENTATION

Farming

2009-09-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

The people here are so kind. I FINALLY got to get my hands dirty today :) They´ve been too clean for too long. I spent the morning working with William the owner of one of the farms that I´ll be working on for the next few weeks. One of the main projects there is setting up hyrdropontic lettuce, but today we started out picking tomatoes and eating really delicious oranges. I had a really great time with him and thankfully understood almost everything he said.
We visited the other farm that I´ll be working on yesterday and they are also a really sweet family. Francisco the owner is growing a lot of lettuce and celery, as well as lots and lots of coffee, but the lettuce has developed a blight that is destroying it and the celery is showing signs of a blight as well. My job is to find a cure - hopefully organic, but Francisco just wants to be able to sell his product and feed his family.
A week here has passed so fast. I love learning about the people. I´m really glad that the farmers are happy to work with me and teach me. I have chosen to do ´trabajo de hombres´ (men´s work) as my homestay mother calls it, but I suppose that the people here have become accustomed to the Gringas.
Some important vocab words - Americans are Gringos. Costa Ricans are Ticos. Ojo de Gallo is the fungus that is destroying coffee in Coopabuena. Costa Rica is where the best coffee in the world is grown. Coopabuena is where the best coffee in Costa Rica is grown. Mai is dude. Catholic is the only true religion.

So I learn...

Family - originally posted in the wrong spot... oops

2009-09-30T14:06:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

"I need someone to wash my clothes, to cook for me, to take care of me. I need my mother." When my 32 year-old, male co-worker said these words I could not help but think: pathetic and wash your own clothes. The great difference between himself and me was our culture; he is Brazilian and I am very American.
Here in the small village of Coopabuena in Costa Rica this characteristic of a family-centered culture is even further enforced. My mother is so kind to... everyone. Since I arrived yesterday she has been so attentive to any hunger pain that I might experience, as well as those of every person that enters the house from her son´s friends to the man who came to take pictures in order for them to consolidate their loans. She already alerted me to the fact that she will wash any dirty laundry that I have. Her fulfillment is in caring for those around her.
The concept of family and responsibility is so broad in this world. In America the idea of being constrained to such a role for many women is frightening. For most here it is natural and a dream to have a family to care for. Children will remain in their parents houses until they marry and start a family of their own, if this hasn´t happened before they are thirty, forty, etc. this is not a problem. One culture that puts great emphasis on individuality and personal achievement and another whose most important accomplishment is family.

Chili Picante

2009-09-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

2 Immodium and 2 Peptobismols. Is it okay that I take them simultaneously? Too late, down the hatch. You expected this but... but why me, why now; better now than later I suppose. Just like chicken pox. Hey you!... ya you! Either you are another CAN intern or I gave you this link in confidence that under NO circumstances will you tell my mother about my late night discussions with the toilet. Unless it is your inention to give a lady in her mid fifties a heart attack. With that said I will now try and explore the origns of my ailment.

I believe it all began with a very very spicy chili. It was my first night with my host family. William and Guiselle have three children: Adreína is the oldest and is in her last year of highschool which they call colegio. Justin is the middle child and is 11 years old and Maria is the youngest with six years. At dinner William pulled out a bottle of chili which is basically white vinager that has soaked in a bottle of whole chili´s for some time. The chili juice was hot but I could handle the temperature with ease. It was not until William offered me a whole chili that I began to sweat marbles. The fact that the chili was small and red should have been my first warning sign but I proceeded to cut off a small piece about the size of a black bean while William chuckled softly to himself. I should have stopped their after discovering that the chili was packed densly with seeds but I proceeded to consume the chili with a spoon full of rice. Chew, taste, swallow and within moments the heat I experienced from the chili juice was magnified tenfold. Sweat began trickling from every pore of my body as the heat slowly dropped to my belly. Laughing and crying histarically at my misfortune with the rest of the family I managed to ask for a cup of milk. Lets just say that after that night, which was 2 days ago, my poops have not been the same. But does a piece chili the size of a black bean have the ability to disrupt my gastro system for that long? According to the interwebs "Capsaicin" is a a substance that is present in some peppers and can trigger diarrhea. Since this has been happening for the past 2 days makes me think that it is not capsaicin but possibly a bacteria of sorts. Aside from the stomach issues I have been learning a lot about the coffee cooperative and would like to let you know what I know so far.

The CoopePueblos Coffee Cooperative is composed of over 50 different farmers. They sell their coffee to the cooperative but usually do not recieve the full amount for their coffee becuase some of the beans are infected with Broca, a tiny black insect that eats the bean. The way that the cooperative is able to test for Broca in the bean is by taking a 250ml sample of all the beans and placing them in a bucket of water. The beans that float have either been infected or have simply dried out (dried out beans are also consisered inferior for making coffee). The beans that float are placed back into the 250ml graduated cylander and measured. The fraction of beans that float to beans that sink is created into a percentage. For example if 10ml of beans float that is 10ml/250ml which is 4%. In this case the farmer will only recieve money for 96% of his total crop. The cooperative measures coffee in units of "cajuelas." A calquela is a box with the length, width, and height of about 1 ft. Twenty cajuelas will fill another much larger rectangular box called a "fanega." 20 caljuelas or 1 fanega is worth roughly 55,000 colons to a farmer. The current exchange rate is 582 colones to one US dollar so 55,000 colons is about $95. If this farmer lost 4% of his crop he would be loosing 2,200 colons or $4. But over the whole coffee season (September - December) when a farmer would fill 100 fanegas a total lost of 4% would equate to 200,000 colons or $344.

The other day I went to a farm just up the road from my house with my coordinator Merlin and another student, Kerry. The farmer, Francisco, and his sons showed us around the farm and what they were growing. Coupled with his passion for farming and the speed at which he spoke it was difficult to keep up with what Francisco was saying. Though his emotion made it clear that he was upset about something. Everything on his farm is grown organically and he incorporates a lot of worm compost to the system. He seemed to be having problems growing his lettuce without the use of pesticides. All of his lettuce has aquired these brown cirlces with smaller and darker brown cirlces in the middle, giving them a very unappealling look for anyone buying them at market. It is the job of the other student, Kerry, to find a solution to this pest. I know that the desciption about the pest is vague but if anyone has any information about how to grow lettuce free or with minor infections let me know so I can relay the information. Currently Francisco is monocropping the lettuce, in which may lie the problem. Besides the lettuce Francisco has a few qualms with how the cooperative accepts its coffee. He says that the cooperative needs to better inspect coffee rather than considering all floating coffee bad. Remember the two types of floating coffee are the ones infected with Broca and the dry beans. Dry beans are not ask good as fesh but are still usable. The problem is that the coopertive believes that here lies a difference in opinion. The cooperative name needs to represent quality coffee and if they are accepting inferior dry coffee it makes the cooperative as a whole look bad. But by doing this they are neglecting to reach an agreement with their farmers which could lead to unforseen consequences down the road.

That is all for now but I will write again soon.

Con mucho amor!

Mike D

foto foto foto

2009-09-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

and even more foto!

2009-09-24T16:23:00.000-07:00

tzucacab YUCATAN

2009-09-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

Dr. Devon y Don Alfonso con el K'aanchè

hello faithful readers, much like the

radio this blog world is full of faith and mystery...

quien sabe whose actually still reading these

ramblings from CAN clowns all over the world. well, as

long as my mom reads them,

i will keep writing them! so here is a little update:

i have been working in the SPICY town of tzucacab yucatan... the town is of 12thousand folk, mostly working in campo or in the tourist-construction-service beach zones. everyday i wake up at six in the morning to be at the junior high school by seven. it is the smaller and poorer of the two junior highs in the area, and it is called the technica because it has courses in information technology and agriculture.

i am making steady progress on my project which is called project teach the kids about k'aanchès. so what is a k'aanche you may ask yourself. well in maya k'aan means sky, and chè means wood or tree... therefore SKYTREES! they are raised beds filled with soil for the planting of small plants and herbs in the family garden. BUT WHY RAISE THE PLANTS?, you wonder. well there are a variety of reasons, could be to protect them from animals such as sheep or chicken. could be that the soil is too rocky to plant right outside your home. all we know is two generations ago every home had its own kaanche for the planting of radishes, cilantro, tomatos, hierbabuena, and chiles. now hardly any have kept the practice.

SO my mission (and i am contractually bound to accept it) is to go in with 180 kids aged 11-15 and get them to learn about stuff their grandparents used to do. no small task. luckily i have what Alfonso called the jesucristo charisma and the support of the director and all the teachers.

up until now i have been doing what is called a diagnostico de conocimiento, a diagnostic to see who knows what about the traditional system, specifically, what type of wood is good to use, what is planted in the bed, how is it maintained, built, etc. i have also been spending time with the kids so they get used to me and dont think i am bin laden or jesus christ. yesterday i presented the project to the parents of the families and it went really well. tomorrow we will clean the area where the posts are going to be dug in and next week we build the first one. our goal is to build six, one for each class.

as far as daily life, my energy is pretty much sucked out by the youngings and nonstop spanish maya speaking. between work at the school everyday and other investigations, intervciews, writing notes and reading, im pretty much in my hammock by 9 oclock. up and down with the sun.

i am here with Carlos, a guatemaltecan student that has been living in merida for eight years now. he is finishing his degree in biology. he is working with the coal producers in a neighboring town called ek'balam (star tiger!) later i may have another visitor, ivan, who is working on a species of tree called jaabin. also, david arrived safe and sound in merida from his adventures in oaxaca, bringing all the positive energy and love vibrations that we know and love. even though i just spent one day with him, his words and his attitude reminded me of our larger works and filled me with good feeling to carry through with the project, which can at times be taxing, to be honest. all said and done, i am in good spirit and good health, im stearing clear of mondongo and chichara, and all is well! tomorrow we will go to the monte alto to learn more about the trees and to explore the campo some more. thats all for now, much work and little time UNTIL THE NEXT INSTALLMENT, stay safe and eat coconuts!

signed,

tomas de jesus de santa cruz de la guadalupe

Oh how deeply my heart is filled with beautiful Mexico

2009-09-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

Mi corazón is truly full with the wonderful people of this magical land. I am just returning from inspiring moments of awe with my lips forming a grin of glee and my chest outwardly prested, for I just spent the afternoon in the most beautiful Ethnobotanical Garden here in the wonderful city of Oaxaca, Oaxaca Mexico. Strolling and chating with a group of passionate plant lovers we learned many a plant and the powerful people that have formed a relationship with these magical plants. Ethnobotany which has been dubed to mean the the relationship between plants and peoples. And here the Ethnobotany is incredible with the diversity of cultures and rooted peoples and the everchanging diversity of landscapes, where cultures are the land and the land is the culture. I have been enjoying myself in this good city full of good people for the second day now, arriving yesterday from a 5 week adventure and one of the best experiences of my life. I was living and working on a wonderful farm in the small pueblo of Ejutla, Oaxaca with some really good folk. The farm is planted in the mountains of the valley of Oaxaca and in the distant views the otherside of this valley are often blanked with clouds of rain and clouds of brilliant shades of pinks and reds and purples during the mighty sunsets. The sky in Oaxaca seems closer to the land and is full of power, with many a night the sky sharing its power with the land in the form of lighting that cracks open the sky and pours rivers down on the little town I was living in. The farm invites people all over Mexico to participate in different workshops, some lasting days, but living and working there I was able to better improve some good old farm skill, cob making, worm composting, and learning medicinal plants. But more or less the main reason I was there was to experience the culture of this part of Oaxaca. And I did this with an abundance of good conversations, sharing life with good meals, learning to make molé and other traditional Oaxaca foods with sweet grandmas and other powerfully strong women, sharing poetry with good friends of how wonderful our mother earth is, roasting corn on the cob in fires made by my own hands, making tortillas with those same hands of mine, staying up all night sharing wonderful words with a friend about the importantece, magic, beauty, and shear brilliance of love, family, community, and this PachaMama (mother earth) that all humans are sons of. I truly hold in my heart this little town. With week long festivals of long night of walking the streets with all the community together in the pouring rain with great music and people in houses and on the topes of houses throwing tamals and other food down to the crowd of celibrating people, and people passing drinks of warm coffee and atoli(corn/rice milk drink, really good). Other nights of traditional dances with the people dressed in brilliant colors and wonderful music, inviting the other regions of Oaxaca to all share and celibrate together. Long days of carrying for good plants and cultivating the land, preparing good soil for crops to flourish in this rich land full of life. Once I asked my good friend Feliz where he learned to farms so well and he told me that farming is pretty easy all you need is a good heart to help the plants grow, by watering and weeding and caring for soil and other such good things. One night to celibrate the town blasted the most amount of fireworks I have ever seen, I was standing under a beatiful Juarje (the tree that Oaxaca gets its name from) and the fireworks rained down and other sparks and flames of many bright and brilliant colors from many directions were like bombs going off and people and including myself running in all directions laughing and shoughting gritos de glee. Because I carry with me my open heart and am so passionate to experience this wonderful culture I befriend a good amount of wonderful people, a community of good folk and these people are sooo nice, warm hearted, and full of love. The quantiy of times I was invited into some ones home for a meal, has fleeted my mind, by the hospitality of those moments have been planted deep with in me. After my little time in Ejutla and know right now in this city of Oaxaca as music fills up the room I write in I am fully here imersed in this beatiful world because I understand this language (of cource everyday learning great amounts) and I am every day better at expressing my heart in this beatiful language. My legs now begin to move because of the live music I here just down the street and I race to type these words just to get back to this beatiful world, this magical land full of soo much. I love Oaxaca and am ready leave in the early morning of tomarrow because I know I will be back. Tomarrow I head to Meridad and am excited to walk the road of life that the Mayans walk. My life is soo blessed, I am soo happy and excited to live, to share life, to celibrate, to enjoy, to know with my mind, to know with my heart, and to help the community I will eventually arrive to. Okay I have to go, there is a little girl singing in I believe Mixtec and it is really cute and so more words of some of my adventures thus far will be shared latter, but for now I must go. May peace be with you all! Hasta pronto....

A nice long dose of Nicaragua

2009-09-08T09:58:00.000-07:00

It has been difficult posting info on this blog, there is so much happening around me that evades description. At the same time, I have been writing quite a bit about my experience for my academic journal. Thus, I have decided to pull bits and pieces of reflection from that journal and place them here. There is no organization to my thoughts, but hopefully the entries will weave together and create a comfortable Nicaraguan hammock and project some of my thoughts and feelings here in a way that makes sense.
From August 4:
The folks from Witness(es?) for peace were an interesting bunch. I know nothing really about the organization, and was struck by the diversity of constituents representing the organization. During the presentación de cultura I sat next to an old fellow from Indianapolis who's name I fail to remember. We chatted about my work here and he told me that he and his wife have taken multiple trips on behalf of the organization. After their short visit to La Pita, they were headed to the American Embassy. He noted that the embassy always manages to explain situations in a manner the exact opposite to what they are seeing in reality. When I expressed my exasperation towards the media and their assistance in promoting these generally false realities, he recounted one of the trips he and his wife took to Mexico to see the effects of NAFTA on the Mexican communities. He couldn't believe how different things were in reality when compared to what the Embassy was telling them about it. “I'm in the states just trying to make my living, wondering where the jobs are going, then blaming the Mexicans for taking my work. Then I come down here and see that the Mexican people are losing their means of living and trying to move to the states for a better opportunity, blaming us for their problems.”
The group was composed of Americans from various states living very different lives. The best part of the night though, was it's end. Pedro's son, who was controlling the boombox during the presentation, put on “Beat it” by Michael Jackson, and everybody began dancing. The groups oldest member, Bob, a sprightly 86 years of age, was one of the first people on the dance floor shaking his money-maker. Americans, Nicaraguans, everyone was dancing. I couldn't help but appreciate one of the less harmful effects of globalization, smiling as I danced with a Nicaraguense.
From August 6:
I had a great conversation with Vicente last night about his past and the formation of La Pita. He arrived in '85 with his father and brothers and cousin, when the coop was only six years old. His father left with a brother and his cousin to fight the contras. None survived the war. He told me that the land was originally used for growing oranges, on top of it's success as a mining region. When the owners left the country following the revolution, the cooperative struggled for many years to subsist, fighting both land rights and inconsistent membership (many men left to fight in the contra war). Vicente is an adament supportor of the Sandinistas, explaining that the only gains made in relation to social progress here in San Ramón only occurred with the Saninistas in power. When Alemán held office from 2000-2006 (a non-Sandinista), the Sandinista government-sponsered radio program was discontinued. Tomasa, my mother, begin volunteering time for a radio station in Matagalpa, working with other volunteers to maintain the literacy program despite the lack of government support. I also learned that Tomasa was one of the core members in creating the recycled paper plant here in San Ramón. Furthermore, she assisted the group of women from Estelí in the creation of their own recycled paper plant, the very plant I visited one of my first days here in Nicaragua. It's inspiring to see such a network at work within this country, and how cool that I have the pleasure of living with such an influential member of Nicaraguan society. The other night, Selvin was showing me old family photos, and one photo was of Selvin, no older than four years, sitting on the lap of El Presidente Daniel Ortega, Tomasa at his side giving her best expressionless facial-pose. It's a classic photo; I couldn't help but wish I had a photo with our president, and wondered if getting a photo-op with a “President of the people” was easier than one with our commander-in-chief. The more time I spend here, the more I am touched and impressed by the ubiquitous political enthusiasm, respect for and protection of local communities, and general perseverence of society despite their tragic and still very recent past. Vicente, only a hair over thirty, has already lost his father, brother, and cousin to war. His story is one of many that I've heard already in this country, a country with a much more intimate conscience of war and it's ability to tear lives apart and bring people, communities together. It is a reality that few in the states can relate to (including myself, fortunately). If only the respect and care for others that I've witnessed here came at a less violent cost. Many communities in the states would benefit from a little charity, and I'm not talking about Red Cross I-made-a-donation-can-I-return-to-my-life-now charity (note: this form is better than no charity at all), but treating your neighbors, all of them, with respect and helping those around you when they need it, knowing they would do the same for you in an instant if in their shoes.
I'll step off my soapbox now...my thanks to this beautiful country for solidifying my views on true community behavior. I never doubted this trip would be life-changing, but affirmations of this truth still feel great.
From August 12:
This morning on my walk into town, I saw cows grazing in the fields of La Pita and thought about the agriculture here as a system of processes. Aside from the import of fertilizer and export of cash crops, there exists a closed agricultural system. Almost nothing is wasted here. In the case of the cows, they clear fields that have lain fallow, which saves the farmers hours of labor and provides the cows with food. In return the ganador shares a portion of his meat or milk produced with the various families or cooperatives that have lent him grazing land. Such beautiful cooperation within a community is the stuff of dreams in the United States right now, and the more time I spend down here, the more I realize that the US is destroying itself by embracing and supporting all the worst aspects of capitalism. The people here depend on a capitalist system, but lack it's viciously competative nature and socially depricating individualist notions. If I don't end up working down here in Central or South America after college, I will have to figure out how to bring about a new-capitalist system that favors community support and friendlier (more pragmatic?) competition, one that doesn't dismiss social welfare so carelessly.
From August 13:
I've spent a lot of time over the past weeks thinking about religion. Reading about it's past here in Nicaragua, seeing it's effect and how it's viewed here by people, and thinking about how I see religion in the US, I don't know what to make of religion, especially christianity, being the dominant religion of the states. I see religion as an especially touchy subject in the US, so I want to first clearly state that I have no religious affiliation, nor have I ever held an affiliation. At the same time, these last few years of my life, especially my time spent here in Nicaragua, have awakened a religious side of me I never knew existed. I want to read the bible (maybe in Spanish), as well as other religious texts. I don't know if I will ever end up a dedicated religious person, but I believe (hooray for puns!) religious texts have a lot of enlightenment to offer me.
That said, religion here in Nicaragua feels very authentic. I've seen this kind of authenticity in the states as well, but I shudder everytime I find a channel spewing bastardized Christian rhetoric in search of profits from well-intentioned followers. In particular, what impresses me about the Catholic church down here is that it takes pride in it's separation from the State, both historically and now. There have existed religious figures using their religious position to spew political rhetoric, but the most powerful and well respected cardinals have rigidly stood up for their principles, even when such actions brought about censorship and attempted stigmatization from the State. In contrast, it makes me sick to see politicians use their religious stance as a means of pushing their own political agenda. They stand on their religious high-ground and patronize those that don't agree with their morally, religiously sound political stances. It ridicules and delegitimizes the credibility of our political system and makes a mockery of religion. Such a beautiful and spiritually enhancing thing like religion has no place in any political arena, especially the current US government, which is filled with spineless grubs who only care about scratching enough corporate backs to ensure campaign funds for their re-election. Clearly, my faith in US politics is low right now, but I can't stand the manner in which many liberal atheists so hastily place conservative, religiously-driven idiots in congress in the same group as sane, loving, patriotic (don't get me started on the politicization of this word...) conservatives that also happen to be religious. It's no way to go about mending the deep rift that has divided our “red” and “blue” states; making religion any sort of scapegoat in our accusations about conservative beliefs is just ridiculous and disrespectful. My friend Xiomara really drove this point home for me in our discussion about religion, “Here in Nicaragua there's always a place for science and religion to coexist. The Bible talks about science. Belief in God does has nothing to do with your beliefs in science...”. I can't even picture a politician saying something that outrageous in the states right now. Clearly there is a lot about religion I can't discuss since I lack knowledge on the subject, but when it comes to politics, Nicaragua has shown me how easy it is for the two to coexist in a country as separate and powerful entities. It's a shame we're too proud in Washington to learn from our “lesser”, third-world neighbors.
From August 21:
I want to again reflect on my experience here with religion. Clearly my views on religion in the US are strong, and likely misguided in some cases, given that I was born in a very liberal town in Northern California and raised without religion of any kind. Since entering UCSC, these prejudices and misconceptions have been blurred by my education and experience outside of my hometown, and I now have a significant amount of curiousity towards religion. I don't simply wish to understand on a basic level the idea of popular religion, I want to read religious text and try to form an opinion of my own about the whole concept. Ignorance always makes it easier to judge something, but I want to go deeper than judgement.
During my time here in Nicaragua, two events in particular have both separated my concept religion here from religion in the US and fascinated me immensely by their almost contradicting nature given the US worldview of religion. The first occurred a few weeks ago while I was in Matagalpa with Ramón helping him rebuild and paint centrifuges. We had just finished lunch at this mechanics house and were watching the midday noticias on TV. At that moment, I was breaking out in hives from the chicharrones (and learning that I have an allergy to fried pig skin...) but unable to leave the room and figure out what the hell was happening to me because the high priest of the Catholic church was sitting down to make a live statement.
Just the weekend before, there had been a political rally in Managua. Held by a few conservative student groups, the rally had every intention of being peaceful, but an overzealous group of young Sandinistas threw rocks at the buses and started street fires. The police did nothing to prevent much of this from happening, and the Church had some choice words for the government in response to the police inaction. Quoting the bible with more force and relevance than I've ever seen before, this priest ripped into the government, blaming the President directly for this violence and emphasizing the importance of freedom of speech in Nicaragua. Seeing such a clear separation of Church and State is quite shocking, despite Nicaragua having a history of strained Church/State relations. It's almost a joke in the US the way Church and State are supposedly separate, with religion constantly being used in response to political topics and churches telling their congregations who they should vote for.
The second event was todays religious service here at La Pita. Of the few (we're talking less than 5 in my life) services I've ever attended, none were anything like this. The priest was funny, but very loud and passionate with his words. When songs were sang, the mood was celebratory; people would clap and hoot and shout “amen” amongst other phrases. When head were bowed for prayer, instead of one uniform prayer, or a silent prayer, every single person made their own prayer or counted their own personal blessings, the room became a cacauphony of religious individualism. During the entire service, people would get up and leave, others came in to sit down, people talked to eachother quietly. The behavior wasn't intrusive, and furthermore, never seemed to bother anyone there. The whole experience was radically different from any religious service I have attended back home. It was more relaxed and laid-back, it was more raw and passionate, it was more entertaining and personal.
From August 26:
His tiny pair of feet pitter patter across a floor of dirt and stone, stopping only to pick up a dead insect or piece of filthy styrofoam and thoroughly investigate the find. His curious eyes seem to search for something intangible and unknown to everyone else.
Our kitchen door frames her eyes and long brown hair. No older than four, my neighbor only ever reveals this much of herself in my presence, as if my foreignness grants me the power to dissapate the rest of her body in a puff of smoke should she reveal herself.
The whirlwind of noise and confusion that is the Matagalpa bus station. My senses are blurred by the skirts of Nigaraguan women selling cookies and nacatamales, the wheelbarrows of janitors attempting to maintain a manageable level of litter, the putrid smell of diesel exhaust mixing with that of delicious but dangerous meat cooked just outside the station on scraps of metal (I distinctly remember the rim of a car tire under one tent), the constant shouting and whistling of just about everyone: bus-boys announcing destinations, vendors selling food or drinks or fake American imports, drunks asking for change. Wide eyed toddlers can't stop staring at me, half expecting me to transform into a dinosaur or alien and not wanting to blink and miss such a spectacle. Never knowing for sure if the Nigaraguense directing me to the proper bus has the best of intentions and takes pleasure in getting travellers lost. Listening to the most eclectic, often terrible music on my journeys to and from Matagalpa on a bus decorated by the driver himself, adorned with Nicaraguan flags, Sandinista posters, religious trinkets, and whatever else suits their fancy.
My cousin laughs uncontrollably after I tell her that I smoke donkeys while attempting to tell her that I smoke cigars occasionally.
The rain beats down on the tin roof with such force, I can't even hear my music through my headphones. Thunder rips across the sky; I feel it's sound and force in my very bones. The individual cracks and rumbles move from one side of the sky to the other, it's 30 second trip envelops our valley. Never have I felt inside a storm until La Pita.
I step of the bus from Matagalpa and purchase a half-stale loaf of pan from my favorite corner store. San Ramón is unusually alive with activity. Ranchero music invades the air, as does the stench of Toña, Nicaragua's favorite beer. I encounter two men sleeping on the side of the road, a consequence of too much beer too early in the day. Packs of chavalos make their way to the covered basketball court in their finest clothing, hoping for a night of romance at the dance about to conspire.
One very happy CANista still can't find a way to put his experiences into proper words, a casualty of sensory overload and self-criticism. This will have to suffice for now.

new day, new way

2009-08-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

i had a nice, nostalgic final day in morelos post all written up complete with rainy day outside and deep reflections on the inside. then the power went out. promptly after the computer lab closed.
so i try to imagine that lightning and thunder of a playful dios chaak here in blistering yucatan. but its hard to piece together those tender musings. like the rain, they have gone leaving only SOL. i miss the friends i have made, so many friends, so many good times. i hope to return as often as i can, with the excuse of holding english language learning groups, keeping up with projects, but really i just want to see all those nice people again... a ver, schedules permitting.

as i move from quintana roo and uimqroo onto merida, yucatan and the universidad autonoma de yucatan i feel excitement for new projects, and fear for making presentations and writing papers in spanish. dr juan gave me a stack of books to read, and a deadline of thursday to present my project to a gang of university professionals. quite different vibe, to use the parlance of our times.... it looks like the good dr has a bucketload of work planned for me. i alone will be responsible for the presentation of the project before the PROTROPICO team, its excecution in the school and the community and the write up of the final report.

i will not be working with david or with any team. simply i will be in the community working everyday, mornings in the school gardens and afternoons on the kaanche project. LIFELAB in spanish. in any remaining time i hope to interview any other students working in the communty as well as community members. supposedly there are numerous students working on different projects... one with a group of women hammock producers, another with campesinos. i would be interested in interviewing them for my film as well as David when he arrives and we are able to meet. for the meanwhile i will do my best doing my homework and trust that karie knew what she was doing when she suggested that i come up to merida. monday i will go to tzucacab. now i am with alfonso eating watermellon and i am very grateful to be here.

Para que llorar?¡?¡?

2009-08-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

The end of my stay has come, the adventure is almost over. Reflecting upon my expereince I can truly say that ten weeks in this beautiful regoin of "Mexico" has altered my vision of the world. A gigangtic plate of different people, emotions, and ideas filling up my metaphorical belly. These elements that I have consumed have nurtured my mind and body in ways that humble and energize action. I am ready for the next step what ever it may be. The illusions are melting evoporating into air. The illusion of self and the powers the torment our brothers and sisters accross our blue green planet. Generation upon generation of people from pueblos, counties, cities, and nations whos view has been coerced into seeing only the rat race chasing mirages only to hug a cactus (and get taxed for it). I have read the most powerful thing is good intention the desire to want help create better world can move mountains and alter futrues. A person cannot do these things alone, there needs to be community there needs to be relationships that are not determined upon how much mula can be milked out of the endless pastures of people. People who work together because they feel compassion and enjoy each others company.

The family that I was with in Tihosuco, taught me alot about unity and solidarity. I came into their home as a stranger, and in many ways I still am. No need to sugar coat the situation, I did not grow up in the same enviroment. I have never gone into the jungle on bicycle, spent 14 hours chopping wood, and carried it back home. The hardship of this type existance creates a ferocious bond within their family; which was enormous mother father, ten children, and recently adopted another boy. The father is a catholic missionary, though I am not a big fan of the faith, Catholocism has helped them. Many think of Mexicans and have two images a drunk man wearing a sombrero under a cactus the other a Narco traficante (drug trafficker). The family does not drink, they are as pure as mountain spring water; as was the case with the majority of the people who were at the prime age for rowdy binge drinking. Beside this fact they are not sheltered or oblivious to reality. The constant reminder of drugs are presented everyday in Mexican News papers. They are loyal, there were no arguments just discussions, talking in a way tht I have only seen between close friends. It is a strange thing that in Western Univeristies there is a constant drilling of developing an "argument", forced to fight with like minded people. An individualistic ideology the can be dangerous. The family worked together the mother made sure everyone was fed and in good health. The father being a missionary was constantly out of town, but it didn´t matter. Rather then wine about, take meds, and go to a therapist. The oldest brother played the role, guided the family. It was team work at its finest. Their family structure was not strict of rigid, no dont do this or that. They love by example and guide the best they know how. Right now the brothers who can, are working in Cancun, sucked into the world of debauchaury and mayhem of globalized society. They are difinetly affected by this experience, but they don´t go for the booze, drugs and rock n´or roll. They go so they can help their family. One day the oldest brother and I were talking about the the Mayan prohpecy of 2012, and I asked him what he thought was going to happen. He responded "things are gonna change because thats the year I graduate and am able to get a better job to help my family". Until we learn to love with this type of devotion Ill qoute one of my favorite hip hop MC´s "People are people, but I still love em"-Atmosphere

Moises Plascencia

You want a blog here it is...

2009-08-03T17:45:00.000-07:00

Aug 1st, Philipe Carillo Puerot. Got up today after a long night of good times and deep existential conversation. What is existance? How does the mind function? Past, future, and present ralities; all that rubbish (Not rubbish but in a way, Yes, Universally nothing). 9AM, Cathryn (an english in Philipe Carillo Puerto) told us that she was going to teach english class. An nasty check out too early for the lathargic and comfortable. She never showed, a fib that worked as an alarm clock for the scoundral that we were that day. Carillo Puerto is an interesting place. Beer is sold 24 hours a day, bars don´t close til´4Am. The social bussinesses work at the schedule of what the humd hot climate allows. Happy hour is non existant, noone wants to go out when your sticky and smelly. Showers for me have been far and in between events, but the people here shower 2-3 times a day. Drinking here is all or nothing for the local ladies and gentlman, social drinking is a concept not well understood.
Went to the local market, walked around the dozens of fruit vendors which is towards the entrance area. In the center the butchers, cleavers at the ready, set up theri choice cuts of meat. In a fashoin that in a way resembled a horror movie. Ribs, legs, and heads are on display dangling, like a scene out of Texax Chainsaw Massacre. The smell almost made me puke. A reality that as an American, spoiled and used used to my meats prepared and ready for consumption, I never really knew. What was seen as delicious and prestigous to the population, was grotesque for me. A strang cultrtural norm, I can not imagine Santa Cruz with a butcher system like that.
The journey continued, Had lunch in the restaraunt section of the Mercado. the system of restaruants service is confusing and intricately beautiful. Tables of different trademarks (Pepsi, Coca Cola, Superior Beer, Corona, Sol etc...) seperates your selection of restaurant. Goddam impossible to eat where you want to. I spotted a fat Narco Trafficante looking mother hefer, whos lardacious appearence at the front of one of the restaurants promised deliciousness. Within the hustle and crowds, I thought "How the sam hill Im I gonna get there?". The sorrounding table were full. Shit, Oh well. Second choice, or so I thought. Sat down with Tom in front of a taqueria, where 3 healthy looking old ladies cooked, that looked like it offered tastiness in a taco form (or torta form) and was bamboozled. The server was a double agent working for two restaurants. Well hey that´s Mexico life is a hustle. Here are some images of this trip so far enjoy....

My Adeventures in San Ramón Begin

2009-07-27T07:52:00.000-07:00

It's been some time since my last post. This is the result of three main factors: 1. I've been busy 2. I'm having too much fun to take time and share with others 3. Internet connections have been notoriously inconsistent/non-existent these first two weeks in San Ramón. I'll do the best I can to re-hash the events leading up to this wireless café I managed to find in Matagalpa, which is my savior, as I will explain.
I felt a great weight lifted from my shoulders driving away from Estelí, replaced by an infectious excitement for my true calling in this country: bees! As I drove down the Pan-American towards Matagalpa, Juan Miguel and I discussed agriculture, Nicaraguan life, and most importantly, country living. We made a brief stop in Matagalpa, which gives off a very San Franciscan vibe (the hilly streets are partially to blame for this feeling), ate lunch, and made our way towards my new home and family. The road quickly became almost undrivable, all potholes and cattle. Suddenly, San Ramón unfolded before me, nestled comfortably in a valley surrounded by breathtaking mountains. It was love at first sight, the quaint tranquility of the pueblo inviting me to explore the roads beyond heading East into the mountains. My cooperative, La Pita, lies 3 Km outside San Ramón, a beautiful walk I have the pleasure of taking just about everyday. In these first two weeks I've met some extremely valuable contacts with a wealth of information about Central American beekeeping projects, including a wonderful and boisterous Honduran woman named Rosemary, who emailed me close to 40 pages of beekeeping project info I've slowly been translating. As an added bonus, she's taken the unnoficial role of maestra de Español, teaching me various phrases, some wildly innappropriate, so that I can communicate in a less university trained dialect with my coworkers. Today was my first time journeying into Matagalpa. I would be happy spending every weekend with my amazing family in San Ramón, but due to some torrential storms these last few days, our house has been without electricity since Thursday, and won't have power again until Tuesday. As a result, my computer has been dead since Friday, and many of my documents are on here since I don't want to waste paper, a principle that may need to change if these outages become commonplace.
Lack of power aside, my days have been full of good people and lots of learning. I arrived not knowing much about beekeeping, and I still have a mountain to learn, but my project is coming together wonderfully, and I look forward to meeting the neighboring cooperatives this coming week. Luckily for me, the president of the Beekeeping coop lives next door to me in La Pita, a jolly man named Pedro Torres.
The coffee is out of this world, the pace of life out here couldn't be better. What a way to receive school credit! The other day, I visited the cooperative's fruit orchard with mi hermano and picked fresh mangoes and cacao fruits. It was my first taste of raw cacao, an experience I will never forget. I don't know when, but I do know that I'll be returning to this wonderful community sometime in the future, it has already built an irrisistable place in my heart.

Con amor,
Taylor

P.S. Apologies for the lack of photos, the server I'm using might kill me if I tried to upload anything. Curse the finicky internet down here! We're far too spoiled up in the states.

brief post

2009-07-22T16:02:00.000-07:00

greetings from jose maria morelos

moises and i have been holed up in the library working on papers.

as i slave away on field notes for mr mike rotkin, you are all in my thoughts

the program seems to be moving real fast now, with many friends to see, many places to go, papers to write... SO LITTLE TIME

soon we will leave this computerland and we will go out to kancabchen again

where there is no phones, no internet, no running water...

just buckets, jungle, turkeys, nice people,

and 1000 year old maya ruins

sitting on an ancient well, in the
jungle. from left to right: Fabian, Edgar, Alma, El Tom, Don Mambo, Yuli

out on the weekend...

maalob kiim

some grand adventures por David Sussberg

2009-07-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

Wow, as I sit and wonder how I could possible put to words the feelings I feel so deeply in my chest a mayan woman dressed in her beatiful atire, bursting with viberance and color walks a pig down the street and I simply know all I must to do is write about a few adventures and experiences I have placed inside my bag of stories and directly into my heart. I am in the Guatamalan Highlands right now, in the little town of Chi Chi and tomarrow morning Scott and I are head to live with a small mayan community in this quilted landscape of awe and brillantly loved farming landscapes. We have befriend an amazing and strong man that is helping different mayan communities around Lake Atilan and he has set up us for a homestay and we are going to help with various community projects and see and live how the mayan do. It is so incredible and quite funny to me because I came to central america for a few reasons, to strengthen some good roots (my good friends, from forever) of the tree I am, experience life from other rooted cultures live life and help the communties I find myself with, all of which will change mylife and further empower myself, por su puesto. So I have been traveling with 5 of my bestest friends in Nicaragua, learning from good folk all along the way. In Nicaragua I reunited with a good friend and fellow CANista Taylor and we all had a wonderful opportunity to learn plant medicine and work on in agroforestry (food forest farm) . Planting coffee, drink coffe, share food and life and celibrating merrily. From Nicaragua we traveled to old mayan ruins a poco gringo but always connecting with the locals, I learned all about different trees and about the old ways of the Maya. Traveling now for a little over two weeks I have experienced some amazing things, even with such a large group. One day my friends and I voyaged to the top of a volcano only to experience the shere magnifigance of lava. Where fire and sun melted rock to act like a river and flow out of a gaint mountain. We toasted bagels over the lava and celibrated life with bagels and creamcheese staring into liquidfire and looking into grand distances of vistas hermosas of forests and bursting clouds and other towering and majestic volcanos in the distance. Yesterday I snuck away from my friends to call the woman I love and came back an hour late, so Scott and I had to run to catch the last bus, and hanging on the back as it drove away only to break down a few miles later, three Guatemalan Ladies joked that I should show some leg and so I did and to toot my horn, a truck pulled over and so we jumped in the back of a truck with fifteen others, (the way people travel here) to make it to a little town. Only to arrive an hour too late for the next bus so we stumbled upon a quaint resteraunt to enjoy good chirizo tacos and talked about the importance of community and how to really go about creating/strengthen them. We walked to a hotel near by a little to price of our pockets so we bartered with them to sleep outside and camp for good price, to only to discovered by a man that felt bad that we were out in the cold, not understanding that we enjoy nights like this he invinted us in and soo over a cerveza or two we talked all about life, different cultures and thier relationship to the earth. We learned that he was mayan and we talked all about our desires in life, what we are studding being students of life and basically score this opportunity of a life time to live with a good community and share life for awhile. I will write more in a little bit and will also fill in more for there is soo much, especially when my belly rumbles for some good handmade toritillas, and my friend scott looks weirry as I type these feelings and thoughts. I am simple being in the constant state of giving my gratitudes to this amazing life, full of soo much love, compassion, beatiful people and this mama of an earth.
Adios con paz y amor,
David

2009-07-08T13:23:00.000-07:00

I was wonderfully reminded last Thursday just how small our world is. While returning from an informative afternoon activity through my language school learning about Nicaragua's abundance of natural medicinal plants, (they even have a book cataloguing the different species and their medical benefits that I had to buy) I ran into none other than our fellow CANista David on the side of the Pan-American! Had either of us had any idea of each other's stay in Estelí, our sudden meeting would have been less incredible, yet there we were, clearly not in Santa Cruz and absolutely ecstatic to have found each other in such a coincidental manner. We spent the afternoon at the serene and beautiful cafe la casita drinking juice, sharing bread and cheese, and discovering just how connected our lives are at this point in time. He was in Nicaragua travelling with a group of his childhood friends, and I happily agreed to join them for a weekend trip to the nature reserve Miraflor. While the sights and sounds of Estelí are certainly exciting, I was ready for a few days of serene beauty and farm life that characterizes the population within the reserve.

However, I was not prepared for the sensational beauty of the Nicaraguan countryside. To the north of Estelí lies a nearly untouched landscape; the only signs of human existence consisted of a few free roaming cows and the occasional campesino driveway. We passed a never-ending blend of evergreen and green, stunning and expansive plains broken by cookie-cutter hills and mountains, lush forests and fincas growing bananas, beans, corn, and various agricultural products. The bus, not surprisingly, was stuffed like a thanksgiving turkey, with passengers eventually forced to ride on the roof. We arrived in Miraflor and made the mildly short trek to our home-stay. And what a hike it was! Every hill and turn presented another spectacular sight. White horses dotted the hillsides, happy cows munched on an endless supply of greenery (California cows have nothing on these guys), and a lone pig snorted happily as we passed despite being hopelessly tangled to his fence-post. This truly is a farmers paradise, I thought to myself as the sunset wrapped it's final rays around us and we arrived at our home-stay.

The family was polite and very hospitable, providing endless smiles and the best food on the trip to date. Every ingredient was grown on their farm, save the eggs, which I discovered the next morning had made the short trip from a neighboring farm. That night David and I had the first of many beautiful conversations with Jose, who contains an endless array of knowledge about medicinal plants and organic farming. While talking about the importance of organic farming and the need to preserve the natural harmony and symbiotic roots of organic farming in the region and beyond, I was struck by the pure poetry of his words. This place truly is a land of poets; David and I were giddy with anticipation for the opportunity to learn more as we fell asleep to the sounds of the finca.

The next morning, following another delicious meal, we assisted Jose in the planting of young coffee shoots using organic fertilizer and compost (!). Every few minutes he would stop to point out this plant or that, listing the various medicinal properties they held. There were even plants that we recognized from back home, plants considered nothing more than a weed by most accounts. I was sad to leave after such a short visit, but quickly remembered that I have ten weeks of finca life to look forward to in the very near future. David and I parted ways yesterday, but our mere acquaintance has blossomed with just a few short days into an exciting and promising new friendship. I wish him the best on the rest of his travels, including his eventual arrival to the Yucatán for a magical CAN internship experience of his own.

I can't thank CAN enough for the wonderful opportunity I have been provided, for the friends I have already made and will continue to make over the next 10+ weeks. My life is changing before my very eyes, and I wake up everyday excited for what lies ahead in this beautiful country that feels more and more like home with every passing moment.

Abrazos, besos, y la pura vida,

Taylor

P.S. I recently recalled a song titled "Sandinista" off of one of my more listened to CD's Drums and Guns by the group Low. It felt like a more appropriate time then ever to look up the lyrics while here:

Where would you go if the gun fell in your hands?
Home to the kids or to sympathetic friends?
Oh sandinista, oh sandinista
Oh sandinista, take my side

Deep through the clouds hear them marching up slowly
Fresh with the blood of your father so holy
Oh sandinista, oh sandinista
Oh sandinista, take my side

2009-07-01T16:38:00.000-07:00

Hola de Nicaragua! Upon safe arrival in Managua, I made the fairly short drive north into Esteli, located in the nicaraguan highlands. The city, with more than 100,000 inhabitants, is loud, colorful, and bustling with activity. Because of it's rich revolutionary past, many of the people here are direct descendents of the sandanista's and speak openly of their political views. I am currently living only a block from my spanish school, with a wonderfully polite family (abuelita, padres, y dos ninos) and a medical student visiting from San Francisco.
Classes are draining, and I am discovering my love of the afternoon siesta. Each day, the other students and I are taken to a different place of cultural interest. On Monday, we visited the Casa de Cultura and learned about Nicaragua's rich artistic culture. Esteli, in particular, is known for it's vast amount of colorful murals, which grace the walls of many of the buildings here. Yesterday, we visited Las Mujeres, a group of women who use the town's trash to make organic compost and paper. They then use the paper to create beautiful arts and crafts for sale to both Nicaraguenses and tourists. Today we visited the local library, which is powered by a solar panel! Classes are taught there, and the children learn about the various forms of renewable energy that can be employed in the more rural areas of Nicaragua. I checked out a book of famous Nicaraguan poems, for there is a saying here that, loosely translated, says, “everyone in Nicaragua is a poet until they prove otherwise.” The poems are tragic, symbolic, sensual, political, social, and above all, beautiful. What a way to view the Spanish language!

I haven't managed to take many pictures, but since it was father's day at my host family's house this last Sunday, I couldn't help snapping a few photos of their adorable children, Katherine and Michael (named after the one and only Michael Jackson. I kid you not, they share birthdays.)

Too cute!

I can't wait to get out of the city and into the Nicaraguan countryside, but for now, there is an endless supply of this fabulous country right here in Esteli, and I can't wait to discover more of it.
I miss you all back in Santa Cruz and beyond.

Abrazos y Besos

Taylor

july first! ahhhh

2009-07-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

quick update from laguna kana

moi is better,
i gave him drugs
and he drank medicinal tea
with boiled orange leaves, i believe
he is no longer convinced he has worms
just a bad tamale or taco

i have started filming down here and got two great interviews. then i realized i didnt bring the charger for the battery. my camera works plugged into the wall... but the battery doesnt charge. D'oh! maybe i can get it mailed down, or maybe itll be more of an indoor production... we shall see. anyways im stoked because francisco is interested in being interviewed and so are the students. they speak real nicely about interculturality and wanting to teach and learn from different people. they are very curious and very smart.

this is my final week with my team at laguna kana and its bitter sweet. i want to check out other teams and communities, at the same time i want to stick with my friends through the whole process. the diagnostico stuff is going real well. we met with the president, secretary and tresurer of the town yesterday and they showed us the campo maps of the ejido, basically laid out all the lagunas, all the agricultural zones and the reserve which people are allowed to hunt but not burn or cut down trees. the most interesting parts for me have been interviewing people and doing the census. these are also the hardest for me because of the spanish. but i have been understanding almost everything and the group decided that i would partner up with one of them so thats really helpful. we learn alot about the history of the community, many of the founder's children are now the elders of the community. it is interesting and sad the way the older generation is full of maya speakers who work the milpa, while the new generation doesnt speak maya and migrates to the tourist zones to work for cash.

part of the university's work here is to revalue that maya language and culture within the community so that it doesnt dissapear.

the hardest part for me is 'being part of the team' because of how much of an outsider i am. maybe if i came back next year stayed for a year and started one up the following summer i could really be on the level. they are convinced that i am here to observe, so i have to find new ways to participate and interexchange... which has been fun. i definately get a million questions about how do you say this in english what does this mean, especially band names and song titles! everyone is also very curious about hebrew. edwin, one of my teammates says what he looks forward to in future intercambios is people from the US who are also from other countries.

also,
its hot.

peace and love and interculturality

a glimps of mayaland

2009-06-26T15:35:00.000-07:00

my room, hammock and mosquitero at jose maria morelos

camino de las iglesias

This first week at laguna kanab was very very very hot and educational. We are five students in one room. As you can imagine, hammocks everywhere! The diagnostico is a really cool process, we met the town delegate, the local doctor, principle of the elementary school and high school (colegio de bachierra) and talked to them. Another part is a census, going house to house, asking about economic activity, migration, religion, customs, access to sevices and government assistance programs. We have interviewed elders to learn about the history of the pueblo. Pretty much the only job is milpa, growing corn, beans, squash, jicama, chile habanero or as one milpero told us, ¨everything but mota!¨ Yes, i hope you all are well out there in the wide world.... here are some glimpses of mayaland, mayab, southeastern quintana roo mexico

ps heres moi and i in the local news

http://www.kontacto50jmm.com/nota_loc_19f_junio_09.php

a glimps of mayaland II

2009-06-26T14:12:00.000-07:00

party at antonio´s

our room and hammocks at laguna kanab

moi explaining who the fonz is

cenote, camino de las iglesias, casas bajas, and of course PAVOS!

Photos de Quintana Roo

2009-06-18T09:41:00.000-07:00

Hola everyone,

Quintana Roo has been going good so far, the weather hasn´t been too hot. The beauty here is off the charts. The people are humble, the food is awesome, and environment is lush and green. Mayan communities have an interesting belief system. Legends and spirituality that are not believed in by most secular societies, are ingrained aspects of the Maya world view. My first night in Jose Maria Morelos, as we enjoyed Xia beverages and food stuffs, The conversation lead to the topic of Aluxes. Aluxes are spirits that protect gardens (or milpas) from intruder. They are mischevous spirits, said to whistle and throw rocks at people. Alux are created by a Mem or Uxmal (shaman). Individual Farmers will go to a Uxmal and ask for them to be ritually created. They are spiritual beings that are belived in by most members of the community, even those who consider themselves modern. The first night that I heard of the Aluxes I had trouble sleeping and could of swore that I heard the chirping of an Alux. AHHHH! Enjoy the photos and video...

Canista en Jose Maria Morelos

2009-06-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

Hello all, Tom here in the computer lab at the

Universidad Intercultural Maya Quintana Roo

It has been quite a journey by bus, plane and tricicle-taxi to get here.

It is hot and rainy and very tranquilo.

I sleep in a hammock in a casa-de-baja in the backyard of my host family's house. I have a shower with nice cold water and a desk with all my books on it. I sleep next door to turkeys and they crawk (?) at all hours, starting a chain reaction all around town. My neighbors are constantly blasting TV or radio.

I have been meeting many people. Family, neighbors, friends, teachers, town elders and kids.

My host family is very kind, very pacient and generous. And very big.

I eat meals with them and its a rotating table of brothers and sisters coming and going.

Hilberto, my host brother, is a agroecology major.

When i first got in, he and Sharon took me around town.

He pointed out all the tree names and we ate lots of fruit.

Papaya, Mango, Coconut, Aguacate, and a million little fruits which are all delicious.

Its hard to remember all the new names, words in spanish and maya, fruits, trees, animals.

Everyone is ready to teach and learn, everyone is excited for the intercambio.

The other day we rode bikes around town, trading words in spanish english and maya.

We had a welcome dinner with Claudia and her husband Henry,

Moi, Francisco, Sussana, both teams of students and some other friends.

We ate tamales with jalapenos and salsa,

and drank chaya which is the local indiginous protein drink.

We sang songs in Spanish and Maya and English with the students.

The students love coldplay.

Edwin my teammate listens Blink 182 and european metal.

I met some other students that have a reggae band called Chan Santa Roots in Carrillo Puerto.

The students and professors presented us with a welcome to mayaland letter.

We hope that this will be the seed of many a intercambio to come.

I have just recently started trying to describe CAN and the goals of my study, little by little.

Beyond that, my time now is about creating the new relationships of trust and setting up for future interns to come in and collaborate on the projects the students are doing.

Earlier today Moi and I did a television interview for the local station about the intercambio.

There is a lot going on and its hard to put everything into writing

I love you all

perhaps you should come down here and party?

testing this whole thing out

2009-06-12T15:23:00.001-07:00

this is just a test.

i am still in san jose california

now i must do my homework for miss karie boone

then shove all my stuff in my backback

tomorrow i rally with sussane in felipe carrillo puerto

i love you all.