26 Feb Update

Hello Everyone…

The days are slow but the weeks fly by. I can’t believe we’ve been out of the USA for 6 months already! We’re pretty busy now that we’re both in the schools. Also, we’re working with a couple of different NGOs. One of them wants our help building a vivero (tree nursery) and with the other we have plans to start an after-school program for “at-risk” (they even have that term down here) kids. Brenna is working with that second one much more than I am. They are at the very beginning stages of being an NGO and are spending most of their time looking for money and trying to get organized. Those things seem to take a greater understanding of the Spanish language than I have now. Also, the two of us are really trying to work on different projects to be a bit more individual. I am planning on starting a conversational English class for the High School English teachers in town. Some speak well and others don’t. I think that if I can teach the teachers better English they will then be better teachers and the idea of learning English in the High Schools will be more successful.

Also, we have our work in the schools. I will try to build a vivero at two of my schools. I’d love to build one at the other but there is no water. Maybe I’ll try to get the bomba (pump) on the pozo (well) fixed instead. That poor school… They have no shade, power or water and it’s so hot and dusty. There are only about 20 kids (1-6 grades) in the whole school and there is one teacher. My teachers still don’t understand why we don’t have schools like that in the US.

Now we are going to each school at least once a week and giving classes about the environment. We are both starting with trees because we want to build viveros and with the rainy season a few months away, this is the time to get started planting seeds. It is amazing how fast everything grows down here. I planted the seeds from a papaya that we were eating about 5 weeks ago and I now have 22 baby papaya trees from 4-6 inches tall. I also have an avocado tree that sprouted about a week ago and is now 5 or so inches tall. It’s really cool to see an avocado tree grow. I took the seed from one that we ate and buried it with the pointy part up and the top 2-3 cm sticking out of the soil. I did my best to keep the soil moist. Oh yeah, I also scratched the seed a little bit with a knife before I planted it. Slowly over 4 weeks or so the seed split in two and now a sprout is coming out of the opening in the seed. It’s too bad that it won’t give fruit for another 8 or 9 years (in the Peace Corps, we call that a sustainable project). Oh well, at least the papayas will be giving fruit in a year or less. I plan on planting a few papayas in the yard and I will regalar (give as a gift) the rest to friends and neighbors. I was never a big papaya eater before, but they are all over the place down here. The fruits are huge too! We’re talking a couple of feet long. It’s pretty cool to be eating all of these fruits and vegetables that we don’t regularly, or ever, have in the States, but I really miss berries. Aside from that, we have most of the same fruits as home plus a whole lot more. I’m hoping to plant a couple of banana trees in the yard, but they are different because they don’t come from a seed and I will have to break off a piece of a currently growing banana tree. We’ll see…

I’m running out of thoughts here, so I’ll give you some pics. Hasta luego.

Here are my papayas and avocado. They are planted in the bottom half of soda bottles, which are easy to find in the streets here.

A close-up of the avocado.

We climbed a volcano the other week called Cerro Negro. This is the view looking North from the summit. On the left border of the pic, about 3/4 of the way up is a darker spot. That is Malpaisillo. Notice the black lava flows from the most recent eruption in 1999. Pretty cool.

This is another volcano close to us called Momotombo. A volunteer lives here, on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. We hope to climb this soon.

Another view of Momotombo with an old fishing boat.