On Stove Building and Being Vago

Over the last several weeks, I have been trying to build efficient stoves in the community.  The average stove, used for up to 8 hours of cooking every day, is a small table with bricks forming a U and maybe a few iron bars on top in order to hold the pots in place.  This design has quite a few flaws: it constantly burns wood without capturing the heat and produces lots of smoke as a result of incomplete combustion of the wood.  The food usually tastes smoky, which can be an advantage or not depending on what is cooking.  Fires are usually started by burning plastic bags or other flammable bits of garbage.  Depending on the placement, the entire kitchen can be covered in a thick layer of soot, sometimes an inch thick or more.  I can only imagine the health effects from standing over such a stove for hours a day. 

The model designed in collaboration with the Peace Corps and USAID has a small combustion chamber and is enclosed to capture a large percentage of the heat being emitted.  It has, over the chamber, a concrete slab with a hole in it big enough for a pot.  The smoke and heat then passes to another slightly higher slab that has 2 holes, one for a second container, and one for a chimney.  This design allows for less wood burning and higher temperatures, as the chimney forms a draft and sucks more oxygen into the closed system.  A new stove can eliminate time and money spent on firewood.  Money saved adds up quickly, as many people can burn lots of wood a day.

I have had a little bit of difficulty in the last weeks in terms of construction.  The stove requires a sturdy base, and few people have an adequate table to build on.  That being said, the town has not been able to harvest their products yet, so few people have enough money to afford one.  So, in that light, I have only been able to construct three stoves to this point.

Other than that, I have had a great time winding my time down and going around the country visiting various sites.  Recently, I have been to the Atlantic Coast, where small communities of English speaking former slaves and buccaneers live, where a few volunteers live.  It’s way far away from the rest of the country, and has until now been very separate from the rest of the country.  Normal Pacific Coast Nicaraguans are referred by the Creoles as “Spanards” and have been mistrusted for a long time.  During the Contra war, there was lots of resistance to the FSLN in the area, as they did not see a place for them in the new government. 

I also have recently gone on two volcano hikes in Leon, which brings my total to 8 out of 14 in the main chain of the country.  The first, Volcan Telica, was during the full moon and solstice, where we got to the top in time to see the moon rise and reflect off Lake Managua.  Later in the night, we saw some lava in the bottom of the crater cracking and reforming under a thick haze of rising gases.  The next hike was a few days ago, and with 17 other people, we hiked to the base for 6 k, and then we hiked to 1088 m in the next 6 k.  The next day, we went 14 k to a small lagoon for a swim before hiking out to the road and hitching a ride to the bus stop.  Now, we have a “Close of Service” conference in a fancy hotel and a meeting in Managua which will keep me out of site for a week. 

Overall, service is definitely wrapping up in tangible and intangible ways.  I am trying to get the stoves done, but after that, I can not seek funding for another project in my time here.  People have been asking me either to donate or sell my stuff(although it has picked up, someone asked me for my bed within weeks of me buying it).  Up for grabs is my bed, stove, table, chair, silverware, some games and  other knickknacks that I will not be bringing home.  Nicaraguans have a thousand ways of asking for money or other favors, so it has been interesting to hear the reasons any particular person should get an item.  For example, a neighbor that I have only said hi to in passing stopped me the other day and told me that she was going to kill a chicken for a going away party, and what was I doing with my bed?

Winter Came

Winter has finally started here in San Dionisio, and with them come some new challenges and opportunities.  Last year, there were sporadic rains during summer, and it seemed less hot.  By the end of this dry season, it was really dry.  This year however, I have been periodically without water for about a month and water storage has been a problem.  I try keeping two 5 gallon buckets filled with water- one for drinking, one for bathing and cleaning - but that has not been so easy.  The water sometimes came on for a few hours during the day or night, but I live alone and am oftentimes not home during the day.  So, I had few opportunities to fill up.  I bathed in the river a few times, not a bad proposition because the closest river to me happens to be the town’s best swimming hole, where a small creek cuts through a layer of rocks and there are some jumps and shade at all times.  However, by the time I got home I was usually muddy, dusty, and/or sweaty.

Doing laundry became a challenge.  I wash my clothes at my host family’s house, and when nobody is there, they naturally keep it locked.  On several occasions, their water resources were too low for me to use.  Other times, when they were home and there was water, someone was washing for them, making use of the limited times water was available.  Now that the water is back, I have quite a bit of clothes to wash, and hope that the aquifer recharges and the issues come to an end.  I live near the top of the community, and friends living “abajo” say they have rarely lost water, so it must be some sort of pressure problem, which keeps the water they do have flowing only downhill. 

Now that the rains have come, there is another problem in that hanging clothes outside does not guarantee they will dry.  Rains inevitably interrupt the drying process, and cause mildew and mold to accumulate if not watched carefully.  Sometimes my host family is on alert and will take my clothes off the line when I am not home, but sometimes they are not there to do me that favor.  Several pants and shirts have small black splotches on them, some sort of mold that is next to impossible to get off. 

After just a few rains, there are already some large puddles around town, and pools of standing water where runoff goes.  In larger cities, the sheer volume of trash thrown on the ground blocks up the feeble drainage systems and can cause flooding if not attended to.  The radio station in Managua plays a public service message telling people how many millions of Cordobas they are wasting each year by continually cleaning their drainage system, and I assume they do not include flood damage or other losses in their estimation. 

Rains also are loud and keep me up at night hitting my thin tin roof.  They make casual trips to town or even the local convenience store harder because you risk a soaking when stepping out of the house.  I am in the middle of a stove building project, and I can no longer leave concrete outside to dry.  Bugs and other critters are looking for new homes away from a flood prone place, and some flying ants seem to think my house is up for grabs.  I have also found a small snake in my house recently, and the frogs are everywhere on the street.  This time last year, I found a scorpion in my house, and I am on alert to flip shoes over before putting them on. 

With all that said, I have been really looking forward to the rains coming back.  It is a much needed change in pace from the heat and I no longer feel like I am being baked alive in my house midday.  The dusty, hot and brown summer is over after it seemed to drag on and on.  While it remains almost unbelievably bright, infinite shades of low grey clouds hang over the tired slopes around town, occasionally showering the land in live giving water.  The rains mean that the fire scorched fields in the countryside sprout new life - corn, beans, sorghum, millet or simply grasses.  The scrawny cows have food again, producing more milk and lowering the price.  Farmers will have something to bring to market in a few weeks, renewing their yearly economic fortunes and providing for some disposable income. 

For me, it also means that one of my jobs- planting school gardens, will come to fruition.  Although we could have started planning and building fencing etc. earlier in the school year, the rains have changed people’s mentality and teachers are much more interested in planting now.  This past week, I got some good calluses digging post holes with a 6 sided iron bar with a wedged end.  At another school, we reinforced their passion fruit trellis, and I gently pulled the clinging curly parts of the vine off a mango tree and twirled them to the new scaffolding while the kids did the real work attaching metal wires across the expanse. 

Although I never ended up buying a fan, it was hard to sleep without showering first, and my house has no shade from the midday sun.  The project house that I live in was built after hurricane Mitch by my host dad, the former town engineer, and was somehow kept by my host family, along with theirs.  It seems like an afterthought for them, and has not had a tenant until me, so nobody really planted trees or kept it up too much for the last 15 years (I finally got one of my windows to open after living here over a year).  When I got there, there were no trees planted, and the ones I did were sometimes killed during weeding. 

I guess that’s all I have to say right now, I am thinking of the states and especially the food as of late, even the lemonade on a TV show made my mouth water the other day!

-Dave

Vacation

The whirlwind of Christmas is behind me and I just thought I could recount some of my past adventures with you’all… Before Christmas, we wound down the school year.  I was surprised at how little formal assessment there was to finish up, and it seems that everyone who showed up over the year got pretty good grades.  Graduation from Sixth grade is a big deal because kids move to high school from there, and also traditionally it was the last grade required by the government.  That has just changed, and now each student is supposed to finish 9^th grade although there is no enforcement.  There are kids who quit coming to school every year to help their families or because school is too far away. 

Then, I went to the US for Christmas, and recharged my batteries a little.  I started by seeing family and enjoying the better aspects of life.  It was funny to be in awe of some of the silly comforts in life.  For example, I saw a post on Facebook saying that a PC friend was having reverse culture shock.  I thought to myself that driving around in a nice car listening to NPR was not so tough; for me, I was just enjoying a vacation in a different place.  I also went skiing, saw live music, slept on a couch, saw friends, and drank good beer.  I really had a great time and was able to just relax for awhile without some of the pressures of Nicaragua on my shoulders.  I didn’t hand-wash a single article of clothing, I only spoke a little Spanish on a ski lift, was never woken up by my neighbors music, I didn’t have to take any public transportation (unless flagging down a nice pizza delivery guy on New Year’s counts), nobody stared at me, and the lights never went out. 

My return ticket sent me to Costa Rica to enjoy a little Central American R&R before coming back to site.  In San Jose, I used couchsurfing.org to find a couple people to go out with one night, and also spent one night at a computer programmer’s house who showed off his new health kick of weighing each of his six meals a day according to type of food  - while chain smoking.  I also went to some more touristy spots, including Manuel Antonio National Park, which put the summer crowds at some of the US national parks to shame.  It is a biological hot spot where there is enough rain on the Pacific Coast to support rain forest, which is primarily found on the East Coast.  It happens to be on a stretch of pretty beaches, with many easy to spot mammals, and easily accessible to a weekender or the un-intrepid tourist.  For these reasons, the park was wall to wall people.

I also went to a nature reserve opened initially by Quakers on the continental divide.  Started in the Vietnam War days, the Quakers were looking for a way out of the US, and so decided to raise dairy cows on the hills.  Realizing that there was an abundance of cloud forest in the area, a biologist helped them start caring and managing the land, promoting year round water and biodiversity.  The place became a tourist mecca when National Geographic declared this reserve the best place on earth to see the quetzal, a type of pretty bird.  (Yes, I saw one by dawdling near a tour group who had paid for a guide and looking up when they did)  Anyways, today there is plenty more than bird watching to do here, however I had no money or friends with which to share a bungee or kayaking experience, so I just hoofed it around the cloud forest for a couple of days.  On the top of one hill is the TV towers for most of the networks in the area, I hiked up, took advantage of the lack of fencing to do something I had always wanted to, and climbed one of the towers (not to the top, it was too windy!).  A cloud forest is essentially a swamp on the side (or top) of a hill.  It is super green; there are about 40 types of trees, and then many hundreds of plants that live on the branches of the trees, so everything is beautifully and dramatically draped over and on top of itself. 

When I got back to site after vacation, things got a little crazy.  Despite my best efforts, I had little success planning summer camp with my expected volunteers until it actually started.  Settling in to town took quite awhile (beans cook for about 4 hours on my stove, for example) and by the 13^th, I had a soccer game and then got peer pressured by my team to drink after the game.  That night, some other volunteers came to site to take part in the neighboring town’s religious event, which starts with a walk from my town.  The next day, we started off and made it to Esquipulas without a hitch, although I talked to a seminary in training who told me the Catholic Church has no problem with holed condoms.  By the time I got back on the 15^th, I was pretty unprepared for camp to begin that day, so I was pretty lucky that almost none of the kids took my radio announcements or permission slips I gave to each of them seriously enough to show up.   So, I spent afternoon going door to door looking for kids, which was exactly what I had hoped to avoid.  The next day, about 50 showed up.

Camp was a lot of controlled chaos, where we had events and a timeframe set up and could only hope that we stuck to it at all.  Some of the events were tough just for the sheer number of kids, although this year went better than the last.  I was able to get some help from some Young Life workers, which is an international Christian organization which has an office in town.  Their help really came in handy maintaining discipline, thinking up different games on the fly when the kids were bored with the planned activity, and to explain the activities in ways that make the most sense to the kids.  For example, basing the explanation of a new game on their shared experience really helped make some of them smoother.  Anyways, the school year is starting up again, so I will be back to working a more fixed schedule and have more on my plate. 

Hello all, just thought I’d walk you through a normal day here in San Dionisio. 

I normally get up between 5:45 and 6:30, depending on the day.  Many days, I am awaken by birds (chickens start early!), dogs, the neighbor’s radio, etc. before my alarm.  The radio is local and typically plays the same songs over the course of the morning, and has a soundbite telling the time about 20 times an hour.  There are also soundbites saying things like “Sabes estillo” and “Fin de semana” which interrupts songs and drives me crazy.  I only listen to the radio vicariously, as my neighbors oftentimes play it loud.  On Tuesday and Fridays, I work in a small rural school about an hour outside of town, so I get up early to get on my way.  I get to school around 7:15, where the school has a quick assembly and then we start class.  I teach third and fourth graders Natural Science, and I try to make class more dynamic than the lesson book.  It should be noted that we only have one lesson book for the classes, so it is relatively easy to stray from the sponsored plan.  For most of the classes I teach at that school, we have a bit of a conversation of the theme, and then I dictate a lecture for the kids to copy.  Then, I have the kids read back a sentence or two at a time, and I comment on its meaning in context.  We then give some questions to answer, maybe some drawing and explanations of diagrams.  For older kids, I try to get more into analysis and conjecture, but it is tough because the textbooks are very narrow and teachers are unwilling or unable to get much more information into their hands.  I also try to do some experiments, like tracking the sun, making fossil replicas, decomposition of various objects, planting of beans in various soils and liquids etc.

Tuesday I get done at 12, and get home by 1.  It’s laundry day for me, where I wash with a “lavendero” which is a table sized contraption with a washboard with a tub of water attached to it.  Washing is slow and boring; many other volunteers are disposed to paying a woman in town to wash their clothes for them, but I figure right now I have enough time, so it seems worth it to do my own.  I have my own plastic bucket, where I soak clothes and then take one out at a time, rub soap on them, scrub them against the washboard, then rinse the soap off.  The average Nicaraguan woman is more thorough than me, but I think my status as a white male makes me rather immune to many of the material criticisms common to Latin American cultures.  So, while my clothes may be slightly off colored and wrinkled, I have no ambitions to improve my technique at this point. 

On Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, I teach at the urban school in the afternoons.   The noise level is always high at about 6:30 am, but by 8:30 it is much quieter, namely because my loud neighbors both work for the school system and have work starting at 8.  Sometimes their two kids start playing more contemporary pop around then, but other times everyone is out of the house.  I oftentimes hear the 10 year old boy, who I teach, whining like a champ.  Literally whining seems to be his preferred manor of communication.  Sometimes I make fun of him at school for it, but generally he is a good kid.  On the other side of my house lives a young couple with an 8 month old girl and one of their mothers.  They are much quieter. 

Monday morning is rather slow, and I generally work out a little, read, listen to podcasts, cook beans or something like that. On Wednesday morning, I teach basketball to some of the high schoolers.  The basketball/soccer court is right near my house, and I have also gone around 3 times a week recently to play around dinner time.  I can say that before, I rarely observed kids playing basketball, but once I started showing up with my ball, people have taken to playing much more.  Granted, double dribbles and lots of fouling is part of their game, but certainly the high school kids are improving a little bit each week.  On Thursday morning, I co-plan with one of my teachers before class for an hour or so.  

After school, I sometimes have time to play soccer at the fields, which are a little outside of town, about a half hr from my house and 15 min from the school.  The level is pretty relaxed and it is sometimes frustrating to show up only to have the majority of time spent watching others shooting against a goalie instead of playing.  At the beginning of league play, lots of people were playing, now the number is usually less than 10 who show up. 

I co-plan with one or two teachers in the evening, trying to get a good grasp on the subject we will be teaching and trying to guide the lesson plan to more amplified ends.  In total, I work with 6 teachers: 1 in 3^rd, two in 4^th, one in 5^th, and two in 6^th grades.  Because I do not teach each hour of Science and the classes have paced themselves differently, I sometimes teach the same class twice, or teach one aspect of a class and then teach the prior theme with the other section.  Sometimes my head spins a little trying to remember what we taught last time and where we were trying to take a certain theme, but generally my teachers are accommodating to my questions. 

By 7 pm I might not have done a whole ton during the day, but I am certainly tired.  As my site mate says, it gets late really early here.  I usually have some cooked beans on the stove which I heat up, cook some rice, and bring that into my host family’s house to eat.  They are generally in their own worlds, the mom lying in bed, cooking or chatting in one room with friends, while a few kids are watching the latest Disney shows like “ICarly” or something like that.  The older son is generally out at a friend’s house, and the mom’s nephew (his mom died of kidney failure 2 years ago) who sometimes sleeps over, come home around 9 or so.  Usually, I am already back home by then, and in bed around 8:15 to 9:15.