Day of The Race & Monsters Under the Bed

When we came to Nicaragua I knew we would need to hold our assumptions lightly, but I did assume we could remain confident about a few things.

For example, I would have been pretty sure that I'd never be dressing up my son for a national Day of The Race.  What we celebrate in the US as Columbus Day, is celebrated in most of Latin America as El día de la raza or the Day of The [Hispanic] Race.  For many Latinos in the US and indigenous rights groups in the rest of the Americas it has become a chance to celebrate culture and advocate for marginalized groups, but in Nicaragua it is largely a day for national pride and chance to remember Nicaraguan folk traditions.  So August went off to school dressed up in his embroidered “peasants smock” and straw hat.  It was pretty cute.

   

I would also have been confident that I would never actually have to catch monsters from under my children's bed.  But yesterday an iguana crawled into our garden, got spooked, ran into Solomon’s room, and hopped into his bed.  I had to catch him and let him go over our wall.  

Just in case any of you need to catch an iguana in your house someday, it’s not as hard as you think.  They often run themselves into a corner.  When they do, pin down their head with the end of a broom handle, slip in your hand behind and clamp their snout shut.  When you do that their whole body goes limp and it’s easy to pick them up and release them.  I do have to warn any gringo dads, however, that catching iguanas does make me feel cooler that it probably should.

 

And to keep with the challenging assumptions theme, I wouldn't have guessed that boys of mine could be so good looking or sweet.  It doesn't really have anything to do with Nicaragua, but I was looking for an excuse to throw in a couple other nice photos of Solo and Manuel.  All the boys are doing very well, and are happy (usually) to have a Skype chat with anyone who would like to fawn over them.  Hope you hear from some of you soon!

Finding Food Security

Most poor subsistence farmers live under a burden of constant vulnerability and uncertainty because they are dependent on a small number of rainfed crops grown with expensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  We saw the hard reality of rural poverty in October of last year, when many farmers in the communities where Nuevas Esperanzas works lost the majority of their bean crop.  Many were forced to sell off their assets, leave the community for work, and have been living on meager diets for the last six months.

To help bring more security to these families, Nuevas Esperanzas has been showing farmers how to grow a greater variety of crops, in order to spread out the risk if one crop is lost.  We have also been teaching farmers new techniques to maximize the land, water and other resources they already have available to them, so that they can grow more food and take on less debt.  The results of the most recent family gardens project have been hopeful: the gardens are helping to lighten the impact of last year's crop loss, crops to help with diversification are being identified, and farmers are experimenting with new techniques that will make their farms more resilient.

If you are interested in reading more about why poor farmers have a hard time growing enough food to eat and what can be done to help, read the full review of Nuevas Esperanzas' latest family gardens project.

Manuelito

Healthy Manuelito was born on June 29!  That little cat stayed healthy even though he was living with 4 mononucleosis-infested family members.  Our ‘life with mono’ is a long boring story which is punctuated frequently with the word ‘exhaustion’.  But we made it.  I don’t recommend it; avoid it at all costs.

August + Solo think Manuel is neat.  The addition of a new little boy around here was non-issue.

Luke has a hidden talent of designing houses, conveniently – as we bought one.  We hope to be living inside of it before Christmas, as we are making some slight tweaks to it.

The boys and I are still figuring out ‘normal’.  I’m keeping my eye out for any routines that I can establish.  I'm also scouring the city for the best sinks/showerheads/light fixtures .

August is enamored with Matchbox cars.  Most of the day + night he has one in each hand.  He (currently) likes school and daily improves in his Spanish.

Solo, also, can be found most of the day with Matchbox cars in hand.  He loves chocolate and talks and/or sings about it more than I would ever have assumed.

Manuel treats us with his smiles, is close to rolling over and sleeps like a champ.

Smile.  This reminds me of a Christmas card update. 

Alert: There are a lot of photos to peruse as I have not posted in several months.

Love from down south,

Stephanie, Luke, August, Solobaby and Manuelito

Moments: June - September

Us in June

NE-US 2011 Annual Review

Steph and I have put together the Nuevas Esperanzas US 2011 Annual Review and invite you to take a look.  The most enjoyable part about writing it was the chance to reflect on how change really can be achieved over time, even though the progressive steps feel smaller than we would like.

The annual review this year was also a project of small steps, and we finished later than we had planned.    Nevertheless, I hope it gives you a greater sense of the work's scope than is possible in a typical monthly update.   For those who prefer to skip right to the human interest story, in the previous blog post I copied an article from the annual review about what we mean when we say Nuevas Esperanzas' goal is to empower people, and what it looks like in the life of a bright, young man named Luis. 

Empowering Luis

One of Nuevas Esperanzas’ main goals is to empower communities. An important element of empowerment is the ability to take full advantage of the talents and resources one already has. Nuevas Esperanzas works to provide communities with the addtional resources, training and confidence they need to realize their potential.

Luis Tercero is beginning to enjoy new benefits from three things that he has had all his life: trees, rain and intelligence. Luis is a bright teenager from the small, hillside community of El Ñajo. Luis’ father passed away a number of years ago, and he and his brothers have been providing for the family since Luis was a young teen, growing beans and corn, and making a daily trip to gather water from the well, a quarter mile away.

Two years ago Nuevas Esperanzas built a 10,000 gallon rainwater tank at Luis’ home, giving his mother easy access to clean water all year. We’ve also started training Luis and his brothers how to beekeep. While the hills where they farm are not ideal for beans, their forest cover is an ideal environment for bees. There also happens to be an excellet market for Nicaraguan honey. Luis is one of our most promising beekeepers, and if he keeps it up, he could easily double his family’s income and help establish a whole new livelihood that will benefit his entire community. 

It was never hard to see Luis’ potential. It just required someone to look.

Recent Moments

Someone to Help Make Tortillas

Development often fails due to simple oversights, and my job is largely about trying to plan and monitor projects to avoid these oversights.  This month I was helping to evaluate training sessions in people’s homes about how to maintain the filters they had received through NE’s arsenic alleviation project.  We came to a house at mid-morning to find the woman that we wanted to talk to busy milling corn and making tortillas.  She tried to give us her attention but was obviously distracted.  

During the training I was sitting at the woman’s kitchen table, watching her work at the corn mill while the trainer was trying to tell her how to filter poison out of her water, scribbling in my notebook about how we would need to improve the timing of these visits, when it occurred to me that I may be able offer more than notes on the need to be sensitive to domestic responsibilities when scheduling training sessions.  I can also turn the crank of a corn mill. 

And so I asked the women if she would mind if I took a turn at the mill.  She wiped the sweat off her brow and said that would be just fine.  The rest of the training went very well and by the end she seemed to have a good grasp of it.  All that had been missing was someone to help make tortillas.

In development it is important to pay attention to detail and make thoughtful plans, because the situations are often complicated, because intervening in people’s lives is a serious responsibility, and because development often fails due to very basic mistakes.  However, because the work is serious, it is easy to make the mistake of taking our plans and ourselves too seriously.  I am as guilty of this as anyone, and for that reason I found my morning of milling corn quite satisfying.  At least in this case, I was able to avoid such a simple oversight. 

When They Say Christmas is Magical

Just into the second week after Easter our lives are settling back into their routines.  Holy Week is the biggest celebration of the entire year in Nicaragua.  How people celebrate differs, for some it’s a week at the beach and for others it’s the high holiday of the church year, but one way or the other, half the country is on vacation since the Friday before.  There are special rituals, parades, fireworks, full churches, and huge parties all week.  The only thing I could compare it to in the US would be the Christmas season.  And in that respect, it has been a gift to experience in a new place that feeling people are trying to get at when they say Christmas is magical.   

Our family has started to build its own set of rituals, one of which is going to visit the sawdust carpets on Good Friday.  Each year in the Sutiava neighborhood on the night of Good Friday there is a big procession.  In the afternoon artists from the neighborhood start creating murals of colored sawdust in the procession route.  They usually depict biblical scenes or some famous site in León.  Crowds start showing up mid-afternoon to come and see the artists working and by the evening the streets are packed in anticipation of the procession, which will pass through the carpets.  The centerpiece of the procession is a funeral bed carrying Jesus, with his weeping mother following behind.  The atmosphere is not quite like anything I’ve experienced before.  The crowds make the whole event feel quite festive, but the symbolism of the carefully created carpets, like the palms, laid down to honor the sacrificed Christ is solemn, sad and beautiful. 

If you've never experienced Holy Week in Latin America, we'd love to share it with you.  It's a time made for visiting with family and friend, and our door's open. 

Action against Arsenic

In January, Nuevas Esperanzas started a new project to provide families from five rural communities with filters to remove the arsenic from their drinking water.  (The arsenic is naturally occurring.  See my reply to Ben Sadler's comment below for an explanation.)  Last year Nuevas Esperanzas coordinated a health study which found that these families were ingesting significant amounts of this poison in their drinking water.

People drinking water contaminated with arsenic will not usually get sick immediately.  However, ingesting high levels arsenic can significantly increase the long-term risks of serious illnesses.  People regularly drinking water with more that 50 ppb (parts per billion) of arsenic may be at one hundred times greater risk of cancer later in life, for example. 

With the filter project the hope is to accomplish two things.  First, we want help some of the most affected families from the study clean up their water right away.  Second, we want to test to see if these filters could be applied more widely.  Unfortunately in appears that arsenic contamination could potential problem not only for these communities but also for communities throughout the entire region.

Nuevas Esperanzas finished building the filters last month and finished them to the families just last week.  The slideshow shows the training session that was provided before setting up the filters in each home, to explain where the arsenic was coming from, how the filters are built, and how they clean the water. 

If you’re interested in learning more about this there are articles on the NE website about how the filters are built and how they work, as well as about the clinics where the data was collected for the health study. 

Roads Change Lives: Google Earth Tour & Video

Nuevas Esperanzas started a new project in January, building an all seasons track to the community of El Ñajo. The goal is to help make life safer and easier during the rainy season, and to open up new opportunities for people living in the community. And I'd like to give you a narrated tour in Google Earth!

Aside from getting a feel for this project specifically, I also think seeing the communities where NE works laid out across the 3D landscape really helps to understand their context and our work in a new way.

I would recommend taking the tour in Google Earth itself if you can, as it gives you the opportunity to explore, zoom in and zoom out, as you like. This is the link to the tour file (kmz).

If you've never taken a tour in Google Earth before, here are directions for opening the file and playing the tour.

And if you haven't worked in Google Earth at all, but would like to you can download the free Google Earth program here.

However, for those of you who don't have time for roaming around in Google Earth at the moment, we also turned the tour this video. Because of the resolution, if you click the link to the video on our YouTube channel and watch it in full screen mode, you'll see the details a lot more clearly.

I hope you enjoy it!

Celebrating August's Birth and Baptism

See slideshow: Celebrating August's Birth and Baptism

 

A Snapshot of Us

We've been back in Nicaragua for just over a month after a wonderful 7 weeks of hugs while staying with family. It is also wonderful to be back home, though it seems that we're still settling in.

August started school the last day of January. The first few days he was in a 'honeymoon' state and loved it. He now seems to be a bit bored with a three hour day in a different language and has become prone to occasional 'flopping and dropping' fits on the way to school. He loves to learn and so we pray that as he picks up more and more Spanish that he'll be more engaged.

Solomon is a sponge. He pops out new words and habits each day. He amazes us as he speaks in full sentences quite often: I want cookies. I want TV. Don't touch. What is that? He dearly misses Augusto while he is away in the morning and I believe he is now discovering things that he likes to do rather than following big brother around - #1 favorite so far is dirt.

The little one en utero is about 4 1/2 months old and starting to test out his environment by punching/kicking. August is reading 'New Baby' books and Solo has taken to a baby doll that I dug out of my childhood box in the States.

Lukas has been working with his guitar - while the boys are in the bath, he plays and practices. He's quite a natural, I believe, and is learning from another natural at work.

I have been getting through my first weeks of school, as well - I had to call quite a few people to assure them that I made it through August's first day - as more people were worried about me than him. It kills me not to know what he does for three hours of his morning, but our parent/teacher meeting report was excellent. He is learning, imitates well and is not frustrated in his new environment. Solo and I are adjusting to our new daily routines and we figure each new day out together.

In Jesus' love,

Stephanie and crew

Visiting Farmers Impressed with Family Gardens

We’re currently working on a project to help four families from our communities, and a young farmer from another rural community, learn how to garden organically. The people we’re teaching are farmers, and they know about growing things. But unfortunately the knowledge about how to reliably grow things without depending on chemicals to control pests, weeds and to fertilize plants has been lost over the last couple of generations (as is true among many farmers in the US). Because it is only financially viable to buy these products for cash crops, these families don’t grow as much of their own food as they could with the resources naturally occurring on their own farms. So organic family gardens aren’t just about the environment; they’re also about making use of what we have, and having more food on a more regular basis.

A group of farmers from the US which gave the money for the project came for a visit in January and were really impressed with a couple things. For one, the gardens were looking good, and the plants were healthy. Doing things organically is much more complicated than using chemical products, so a healthy garden grown by new students to organic gardening is a great accomplishment! And second, the visiting farmers were really happy to see how much young man from the other community had learned, and that he was already teaching three other people from his community! It’s great to know that these solutions are spreading, and potentially helping people we will never meet!