It's All Starting to Come Together...

You'd think that after killer sunburns, strange illnesses, and almost two weeks of non-stop work, our Feed by Seed team would be nearing the end of our energy levels and sanity. Yet here we are, entering the homestretch of our journey in Nicaragua and growing ever stronger as individuals and as a team.

Today was a monumental day. First and foremost, the field was plowed and irrigation has been laid out! The long-awaited tiller has yet to arrive (still held in Nicaraguan Customs in Managua) so we had to resort to an alternative in order to prepare the research field for planting…namely, a somewhat old-fashioned but still highly effective alternative: plowing with a pair of oxen! Some good searching allowed us to find a local man with a pair of oxen and a plow willing to not only plow the field, but also perform the work today, on a national Nicaraguan holiday! We were definitely lucky. The holiday also meant no school for the ag. education team , but that only meant more team members to help in the field!

After about six hours of work (and the opportunity for each member of our group to try leading the oxen ourselves!), the field was finished and ready for the next step. This was fertilizing each row and spraying herbicide, a task that seems easy enough until you outside in the hot sun carrying buckets of fertilizer and tripping over mounds of dirt.

Finally the last task of the day was laying down the irrigation that will provide much-needed water to all of the crops. We are using a drip irrigation system which meant laying out rows of black tubing along the tops of each row, connected to a central water line, which will allow water to “drip” out of tubing onto each plant at a constant pressure. Unfortunately, we still were unable to complete planting today and will be waking up bright and early to start at 6 am tomorrow in order to complete the task.

A Day in the Life of a Nicaraguan Missionary

I thought you'd be interested in learning a bit about my daily schedule here at Casa de Shelly, where there is always something going on and flexibility is key to success. So, here's a peak at my daily routine:

6 am - wake up to the lovely and joyful voice of Don, the "chief" of activities, announcing that it is time for us "gringos" to get up and start the day.

7 - all 20 or so volunteers make their way energetically and enthusiastically to the kitchen to grab breakfast, prepared and served by the wonderful "Mama Maria" and her fellow family/friends.

8 ish to 9 ish - (I say "ish" because we never really start the same time everyday) Each group prepares for the morning activities, which usually consists of my fellow ag. educators and I getting ready to head off to the school and the rest of the Feed by Seed team gearing up for weeding the field or fertilizing the garden. Other volunteers will usually help Mama Maria chop up food for lunch, travel out to a local village for food distribution, or help build a new house.

12 noon - everyone returns right on time for lunch! Once again, a delicious meal served by Mama Maria and then (if you're lucky) a quick break to reapply sunscreen.

1 pm - usually our entire group of volunteers, plus the translators, Don, and his wife, will load up into three vehicles to head out to a local village to play with children, serve food, and donate items like clothes and shoes. Besides handing out pre-packaged bags of rice to the women that will serve 6 people, we also cook a giant pot of rice, chicken, noodles, peppers, onions, and other goodies that we serve hot and fresh to each and every member of the village. Cooking takes about 45 minutes and once it is done, the entire concoction (christened "chicken gumbo") serves around 250 people.

3 ish to 4 ish (see 8 ish to 9 ish) - return to Casa de Shelly for showers (boy, do we smell after three hours in the heat!), naps, and just hanging out.

6 - right on time, we gather again for dinner which usually includes dessert (the part that I personally look forward to most...) and then return to the house for a group meeting to discuss the current and upcoming day's events

9 to 12? - any time, we head off to bed. Personally, I go to bed earlier than some, although lately I've been staying up playing the "paper game" with about eight other people, leading to good laughs and even greater memories.

~Margery

Seven Days - Endless Experiences

In only seven days, I have gained enough experiences to last a lifetime. Yes, this may sound cliche, but it is true: anyone who spends a week in a developing country surrounded by foreign cultures and delicious food cannot honestly say that they did not gain some sort of experience.

So here we are: entering week two with so much behind us and even more to come. My first week of teaching agriculture went perfectly, if you can call numerous translation errors and a classroom topping 80 degrees perfect. I really enjoyed working with the students, especially when it came to playing games that were fun regardless of the language barrier. It was also surprising but exciting to learn that many of the students were already knowledgeable about many of the topics we were teaching, including the parts of a plant and where eggs come from. The fact that these students already knew so much about agriculture and its importance was a good sign that there is hope for the future of the industry in this impoverished community.

As the house was pretty empty this weekend after the departure of our six new friends from Virginia, we decided to take a walk into the main part of Somotillo to purchase some more herbicide as well as check out the town. Literally five minutes from our house, the walk seemed to take twice as long thanks to the heat. It was enjoyable, though, as we greeted and were greeted by many friendly people along the way.

The town is very similar to that of Tijuana, Mexico (for those that have been there), except the buildings are more condensed and stores sell useful things like groceries rather than cheap souvenirs. Also, the popular method of transportation is what we call the "pedi-taxi" or "pedi-cab" - a sort of tricycle with a wide seat in the front and a bike seat and pedals in the bike. Two people can fit in the front seat and are pushed around by the driver pedalling in the back. I guess you could say it's a form of rickshaw with the passengers in the front. We passed places you would find in any regular town, including clothing shop, ice cream parlor, and a single-chair hair salon. The only difference was the amount of trash in the streets and number of people sleeping right in the middle of the side walk.

Today I also took part in my first hands-on farming experience. Three other team members and I loaded up two 5-gallon buckets with herbicide and set out to spray the half-acre plot we are using as a model farm for the community. The plot had been taken over by dead corn plants, struggling sugar cane crops, and endless weeds after an unsuccessful attempt by University of Nicaragua students to start their own farm. This afternoon the entire team also battled through the tormenting heat to have a "rock-picking party" or, in agricultural terms, spending two hours picking up all of the rocks from the area so that the tiller could successfully do its work. Although it was exhausting work, we were rewarded with a delicious fried chicken and apple pie dinner to enjoy with the arrival of the new 13-member mission team.

Somotillo - Changing Lives

I have developed a love for teaching - not in the "180 days in the classroom talking to texting high-schoolers" sense, but a love for teaching a specific subject to a small group of children who know barely any English. This passion started early this morning as four other team mates and I started our first agriculture lesson in a small Baptist school in Somotillo.

Yesterday all ten of us arrived safe and sound (mind you, with a few bumps on the head from the van ride over broken asphalt roads) at Casa de Shelly - the ministry headquarters which serves as part dormitory for volunteers and part educational center for the locals. Casa de Shelly was established by an American couple who have worked and lived at the facility for almost twelve years providing immediate aid for local villages (including food, clothing for children, and even building houses when a village is hit by flood or other natural disaster). We also met six other volunteers from the United States who had arrived the day before us and were only staying a week.

Since it was my first day officially teaching, as well as the first experience teaching agriculture in a foreign language (AFL, ha ha) for all five members of our ag. education team, we were all nervous as we arrived at the school just five minutes from our home away from home. We were accompanied by a translator but hoped to be able to teach and interact as best as we could without a language barrier.

Throughout the four hours spent at the school, we introduced the idea of leadership and the importance of agriculture to the students as well as started our first lesson: soils, the foundation of all crop production. Luckily we had two experts on our team: a former State FFA Leadership Coordinator leading the leadership aspects and a current middle school science teacher to talk about soils. The other two team members and I followed along, leading ice breakers (including the famous 'human knot' game) and passing out candy as rewards for volunteering (you won't believe how popular 'carmella' is for these kids!).

Overall the entire experience was fun and rewarding. Considering the poverty level in this community, almost every student knew something about agriculture and also the importance of a being a leader before we even had a chance to teach! This is why we are here: to educate, share our knowledge, and also encourage these students to be the future leaders for their community and their country, in an attempt to stop poverty once and for all.

Volcanoes and Cow Tongue and Frogs, oh my!

Today was my first official day in Nicaragua. Besides the constant rain, 100% humidity, and the feeling that my clothes will never dry, I have yet to experience any problems. Everyone here is very friendly and unlike my past experiences with countries like Ecuador and Peru, street vendors do not harass me when they are trying to sell me souvenirs - as soon as I say ´no, gracias´ they walk away to find another potential customer.

We started off the day with a hearty continental breakfast (who can say no to tamales, rice, and pineapple juice at 7 am in the morning?) and then all ten of us loaded up into the van to head off to church. On the way, we stopped at a national park located on top of a hill right in the heart of Managua. The hill used to contain an underground prison where prisoners were kept out of any light for the entirety of their sentence. Today, the cells remain empty and closed off but the ¨top¨ of the prison has been turned into a national park complete with a small cafe, restrooms without doors, and a zip-line ride across a man-made lake (which was really a sewage dump area leading straight out into Lake Managua).

After about a half hour at the park, we headed over to the western part of the city to attend the Sunday service of our tour guide and translator, Oscar. Here I would like to mention that while this area of the city would be considered extremely impoverished (we saw children defecating right next to the street due to lack of plumbing or even the affordability to buy a bucket), the entire city of Managua contains a mix of upper-class and impoverished people living side-by-side. Many parts of the city that you would consider the business/richer parts had giant walls surrounding the actual buildings to keep the homeless out of sight, as well as out of the property. Our hotel itself has security guarding the entrance not for safety purposes, but to keep homeless people from sneaking inside to sleep in the hotel.

The church service lasted longer than we expected (2 hours!) due in part to an extended introduction of our group to the regular church members. I personally had no idea what was going on most of the time, as everyone was speaking in Spanish, and I tended to nod off while sitting thanks to there being no air conditioning in the building. At the end of the service, we each shook hands with all thirty members of the church, said thank you for their continued prayers of success for our upcoming mission, and headed off to lunch (McDonalds!).

My favorite part has arrived: our journey as official tourists (the only day we would be sight-seeing for the next two weeks) to the outskirts of Managua and beyond. Our first stop was the Parque Nacional de Volcans Masaya - Masaya Volcano National Park. Mind you, this was an active volcano, and we drove straight to the top to look right down into the crater! Over a mile wide and 200 feet deep, this volcano is said to erupt every fifty years (the last time being 1972, so we were okay for now. For safety purposes, though, our instructor was told to park the van facing towards the exit and leave the engine running in case of a need for evacuation. While the smell of sulfur didn´t bother me as much as other people, we were forced to leave after only 15 minutes of walking around as the gases became too much for our lungs to handle.

Next we drove through some beautiful jungle territory to a small fishing village located on the edge of Lake Nicaragua - the third largest freshwater lake in the world. I was told this was also the only location of freshwater sharks in the entire world and was excited to try and see one, but also learned that they had been hunted almost to extinction when the Japanese came thirty years ago to catch and export the sharks back to Japan. Today the conservation efforts to protect the sharks is very minimal, and raw sewage is being dumped into the lake each and every day.

While at Lake Nicaragua we took a quick tour (via boat, of course) around the thirty or so mini-islands in the middle of the lake. Our boat, barely holding all 10 of us and no one wearing life jackets, survived the constant beating of giant waves coming off of larger boats carrying tourists and skiers. Most of the islands were about the size of a half-acre and were the home of rich Nicaraguans, Americans, and others who could afford to build a palace-like structure onto such rocky terrain. Other islands contained the tin-roof homes of fishing families while some islands had no inhabitants at all. We stopped at one island which was home to four wild spider monkeys and fed them Oreo cookies (I did not participate, of course) and then headed back to the mainland.

This evening was by far the best part. We drove to the town of Grenada which was famous for its colonial-style Main Street and for having one of the few five-star restaurants in Nicaragua. It was here that we ate dinner. Another traveler and I shared a ¨traditional Nicaraguan¨dish consisting of fried plantains, beans, shishkebob steak, and some amazing fried cheese. We even convinced another traveler to try the cow tongue dish, which she had never tried before. It eas quite the experience. The highlight of the day was a quick shopping spree for souvenirs where we found dead frogs stuffed and dried into the shape of coin purposes, sold as souvenirs for $5 each.

It is on that lovely note that I leave you tonight. We head north for Somotillo and I can´t guarantee another post for a while. It´s been great so far!

Until the next time,

Margery

Touch Down in Managua

After over 15 hours of travel and some unsatisfying airplane food, I arrived in Managua, Nicaragua tonight at 8:30 pm. The humidity was the first thing to hit me; think of Washington, D.C. in the summer combined with the rainy season of Oregon. Of course a majority of the people on my flight were native Nicaraguans, but I also noticed many other groups of teenagers/college students who were also traveling to provide mission/development work. Getting my bags and going through customs was the easiest part and then I left the airport to meet my group.

What a welcome party I had! There are ten total people in our mission group and everyone was there to welcome me to the airport. Besides one girl from Lousiana (and me being from California), everyone was from Virginia and sported my favorite southern accent! We loaded up my suitcases (2 giant bags full of donated items and my tiny carry-on for me) and headed over to the hotel.

After settling in and discovering that even the A/C in the room doesn´t keep out the humidity, all ten of us got together outside by the pool and went over the plans for tomorrow. I don´t want to spoil anything for you, but if you check out my post tomorrow I can guarantee tales of volcano-climbing and traditional food tasting. :)

Until then,

Margery

Headed to Nicaragua!

Hey everyone,

I know it's been quite a while but hopefully you are all up to following my travels again, this time to Central America! This July through August about ten college students and I will be traveling to Somotillo, Nicaragua (a highly impoverish agricultural village) to teach agricultural education to children and help build a new farm. The entire experience is being led by the Feed by Seed organization (click the blog title for the link), which is a brand-new non-profit started by a college student from Virginia.

As I am majoring in International Agricultural Development at UC Davis, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to literally go out in the field and do what I expect to do in this field as a future career. I am leaving California on July 30 and may or may not have much internet access after I leave the States; however, I will be keeping a journal as always and will definitely put some posts up as soon as I can!

Thanks for your continued support in all of my travels!

Margery