It´s been a while

Yes, we are still here. I know it has been quite a while since we posted anything, but we’ve been busy so back off!

For almost the entire month of July it seems as though someone was visiting us from the US. First, our friend Marilee came to see us and spent a few days in Malpaisillo helping us out with some projects and getting to know our friends. We left her in Granada where she stayed to study Spanish for some time and we met some other friends from back home (and Chile), Mandy and Pablo, who were traveling in Costa Rica for a while and came up to Nicaragua to see us for a weekend. We came back home only to be visited a few days later by our other friends from CO, Jacqueline and Mike. They spent a few days in town with us, helping us plant trees at a local high school and they also went to some of our schools with us. After a couple of days with them here, we headed to the island of Ometepe (in Lake Nicaragua) where we again met up with Marilee and Ryan, who had just flown in to join her and us for a little over a week. So the six of us spent a weekend on this island where we stayed at a hostel/organic farm and were able to climb a dormant volcano covered with rainy cloud forest called Volcan Maderas. After this trip, Jacqueline and Mike flew home to Denver and Ryan and Marilee went to other parts of the country. We went back home to work. Some days later, we met up again with Ryan and Marilee to climb another volcano (this one active) called Telica, which is really near our town. That was a great trip, spending the night on the slopes of an active volcano and being able to peer straight down a couple hundred meters into the crater. They say that if it is clear and dark you can see lava in the crater, but when we were there it was putting off a lot of sulfery smoke and we saw no lava. Still, it was really cool. After this, Ryan left, Marilee went back to Granada to study Spanish and we went back home to work in our schools and whatnot. A couple more days later and Brenna’s parents came to visit. With them we spent two days here in Malpaisillo where they got to meet many of our friends and students. We then went to a beach town called San Juan del Sur for the weekend and then headed to Granada for a couple of days. It was really great to see both of them and also really nice to stay in some nice hotels and take hot showers and eat good food for a few days. When they left, it was really sad for both of us. I think they may come back down next year though.

So, we came back to Malpaisillo and immediately had to move to a new house. Our landlady decided that she wanted her house back and we knew all of this ahead of time and already found a new place. We just had to move our few things over there. Apparently, the day before we cam back to town, there had been a big storm and the town water pump had broken. They said it would be out for about 3 days. We had been gone and had hardly any water in storage (a fact of life here is that the water could go out at any time and almost everyone has some water in storage) because our water rarely goes away, in comparison to other Nica towns. So we had to move from one dirty house into another dirty house without being able to really clean either of them and without being able to clean ourselves at the end of the day. Needless to say we were really dirty and sticky and we felt bad about leaving our old house with a partially mopped floor and a toilet that could have been cleaner. As we neared nightfall, somehow Brenna heard about a big well just outside of town where people were going to fill up water. She quickly grabbed every bucket and jug we had and jumped on a triciclo(a three-wheeled bike taxi) to fill up the water. She was gone for about a half an hour and when she returned she was soaked and had about 15 gallons of water for us. Showers!! Apparently there was just a huge gushing water flow at this well and throngs of people desperately filling what they could. The owner was theoretically charging people, but it was the family of one of Brenna’s students so we got our water for free. The next day the water came back and we were able to clean a few things. (Oh yeah, we had been traveling for so long before all of this happened that almost all of our clothes were really dirty and we were unable to wash them.) Within a few hours of the water coming back I was doing some yard work in our HUGE new yard (more than an acre) and I accidentally stepped on our main water line (1/2 inch PVC pipe running above ground) breaking it in half. There went our water. We quickly found out from the neighbors who could fix it (after about 7 people came over to look at it) and luckily this guy only lives a few houses down. He’s a high school kid of course. He told us what we needed to go buy from the ferretería (hardware store) and he sent a neighborhood kid to his house to bring his tools. Within an hour it was fixed and we were back in business. Also that day we paid another neighborhood teenager to clean up our yard with a machete. A lawn mower could have taken care of it in 20 minutes, but since there are no lawn mowers here this kid spent about 5 hours swinging a machete. He charged a whopping $6 for a half days work. Once the yard was all clear of the weeds we discovered a huge pit in the back where the owner put all of her trash. Since the city just takes all of the trash it collects and burns it, we are thinking that we will use this pit instead. Sort of a personal landfill. We are thinking that environmentally it will be better than burning, since almost all of our trash is plastic (we compost everything else).

Speaking of our new yard, I love it. We have so many trees and there is so much potential for making gardens and doing cool things back there. There are approximately 7 mango trees, 15 papaya, 25 plantain, 4 orange, 2 lime, 1 cacao, 3 avocado (too young to fruit) 2 tamarindo, 2 guava, 1 cashew (I planted that one), 1 almond, 1 nancite (a little fruit that everyone here loves, but I have yet to meet a gringo who thinks they are anything but disgusting), 1 mamon, and a couple of other non-fruit trees. We have already made a few compost pits where we put all of the leaves that fall constantly (since there are almost no seasons here, leaves are always falling and growing) and our kitchen waste. We have plans to make a vegetable garden soon and also have some worms and will start to do some work-composting. I hope to take a lot of what we do in our yard and share that knowledge with my students and our neighbors. Also, with all of those trees in the yard, I was finally able to sting up a slack-line in the yard. As if people didn’t stare at me enough.

One negative about this huge yard full of fruit trees is that it is relatively unprotected from the outside world. There is a barbed-wire fence, but that doesn’t really hold back anything but livestock. So, we are spending a good amount of time telling the neighborhood chavalos (kids, but much more naughty than normal, US kids. Although it is all cultural and they are usually sweet and respectful, just in a different way. Also they usually have a slingshot.) that they can’t just come into our yard whenever they want to hang out and climb our trees to get fruit. They are slowly learning to come to the door and ask permission to take our fruit. I have no problem giving it to them, I just want them to learn to ask and to say please and thank you. Also, with lots of fruit trees come bats. We have a couple living in our ceiling. Not much we can do about that though. We also have a big iguana that lives in our ceiling. We hear him running around occasionally, but don’t know what we can do about him. We don’t want to kill him, despite the advice of the neighborhood chavalos with slingshots who would love to make soup out of him, seriously. He sure does drive Poster (the cat) crazy.

Clavo was a bit unsure of the new yard at first and the first few times we left him, he escaped from the yard and was in the street in front of the house when we came back. We have a big iron gate leaning against a tree that separates the front yard from the back and he tried to jump over this gate to escape again and it fell on his leg. It weighs somewhere around 80 pounds and he yelped and cried and didn’t know what to do. It swelled up and he hobbled for a day but seemed to be ok the next day. Later he and the cat were playing and Clavo went to pounce on him and he landed wrong on that leg and started yelping and crying louder and longer than the first time. This time it swelled up more and stayed that way for quite some time. This was about a week ago and he still isn’t using that leg. It is swollen a bit and looks deformed. We have had 2 vets look at it and both say it isn’t broken. We gave him some anti-inflammatories and also used the Nica method of making a tea from mango leaves and chamomile and swabbing that on the injury. I think that worked better than the drugs. So he hobbles around now and spends most of the day lying down in the corner. He is scared to go out now too. We hope he heals soon and can start to enjoy this big yard to play in.

One last thing in this way-too-long entry. We have been slowly trying to work with the mayor’s office to build a new trash management facility here in town. As I mentioned earlier, they collect trash and take it to a spot outside of town and burn it. Most people, however, don’t pay the monthly fee (less than $1) for this service and burn their own trash in their yard or in the street. Or they pay one of the triciclo drivers to take it somewhere away from there and throw it out. During training, we visited waste treatment system in a little town near our training towns that really impressed us. There they separate the trash into organic and non-organic. With the organic (80% of the trash they collect) they make compost and worm-compost. With the non-organic (the other 20%) they recycle the glass, plastic bottles, paper, cardboard and metal. All the rest they bury. We have been talking with some people in the mayor’s office about this facility for some time and finally we were able to visit it with 3 members of the mayor’s office earlier this week. They were all very impressed and are excited to try to do something like that here in Malpaisillo. We are very excited about helping them with this challenge, although we realize that with the speed in which things happen here, it will likely still be in the planning phases when we leave next November. At the site we visited, they also use their compost in a huge tree nursery that they have started there. They grow all sorts of trees (fruit, ornamental, hardwood…) and sell some and use some for municipal projects. They also sell their compost to local agricultural producers and they sell the worms from their worm composting to others who are interested in starting worm-compost projects or to people who want to use them to feed to chickens. It is a really progressive idea that makes a lot of sense and could help with a lot of the trash problems here over the long term. We’ll keep you posted.

I think I’ll conclude this entry now. But first I want to thank all of our visitors and everyone who has sent us care packages and fun things from home (especially those beers that Ryan brought down!). Adios, and enjoy the one time of year where it may be hotter in CO than in Malpaisillo. Happy 30^th B-days Zac and Nic! And also happy b-day to Ryan and to Mandy. Congrats to Brian/Tracy and Dave/Jill! Maybe we’ll have to come home unexpectedly for some weddings?!?