We're Fine

Hurricane Beta is now gone and amounted to little more than hot air. The amount of rain we received was pathetic in comparison to just the side effects we had from Katrina, Stan, and Wilma, thanks to God.

Tomorrow morning, we begin our site visit up near Jicaro, Nueva Segovia. We have already met our counterparts, and they are really nice, so the visit should be great. The main point is to gather information about the community, orient ourselves, and introduce ourselves to the community. Hopefully, next update, we will have much more specifics about what our next two years will look like.

Cheers!

Beta Test

We're in Managua, right across the street from the airport. On the TV, we see intimidating satellite images of a large, white spiral of storm clouds positioned right off the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. Two days ago, we were just meeting our new site community counterparts from Nueva Segovia, near El Jicaro, when we recieved news that our site visits are postponed indefinitely and all PC staff, volunteers, and trainees are being recalled to Managua. Stage 3 of the Emergency Action Plan is now in effect. Beta is set to smack us October 30.

At first, we all felt bummed and confused. Isn't this overreacting just a bit? It's just a big storm, and we're much safer up in the mountains than in the flood-plain of Managua. Well, today, after an hour-and-a-half briefing and orientation, I am glad the Country Director (CD) made the call he did. Here, at the end of the rainy season, the ground is saturated, and best-case-scenario includes lots of flooding and some impassable roads. Worst case scenario: total infrastructure degradation.

However, Peace Corps Nicaragua is prepared. All 160 volunteers are now reported in to Headquarters, we all have comfortable lodging, and all sorts of emergency measures are being taken. We have a cash stockpile, in case the banks close. We have water stores in case of electricity loss and pump malfunction. We have a hurricane-proofed radio tower and radios ready for loss of phone and internet. We have a ton of extra gasoline to keep the cars going.

If the best happens, we should all go back to work as usual on Tuesday or Wednesday. If the worst happens, Peace Corps may temporarily change objectives to deal with the relief effort. In that case, they would probably solicit help from the reserve Crisis Corps that is on call in the US.

So, we're just waiting and watching to see what happens. Please pray for the people of Nicaragua and Honduras that will probably be affected the most. All municipalities have been advised to convene their emergency action boards, and the northeast Atlantic coast is being evacuated. We all hope that a repeat of Hurricane Mitch doesn't come to pass.

New photos

Hey folks. New photos on the flickr page (link below)! Also, I got permission to start posting, so sit tight, more is coming!

Site Assignment

We're going to Nueva Segovia, in the North, a tropical savanna with fertile land and temperatures between 75 and 80 degrees F all year round, supposedly. They grow corn, beans, and sugarcane there, as well as raise cattle for milk.

Kris is still fighting this virus off. She gets fatigued extremely easily. She´s going to get more tests done in Estelí tomorrow, since she had diarrhea twice today. Her host mom takes fastidious care of her. She worries over Kris amlmost as much as her real mom. Kris gets the day off tomorrow to rest.

It looks like more rain is dues oon. Hurricane Wilma is smacking the Yucatan (the 4th Carribean hurricane this year, I might add). They say this is the rainiest season in 30 years. Lucky us. I read in Newsweek about the destruction of New Orleans by Katrina. I'm not sure what to think, exactly. It's terrible, the damage caused. I don't really understand the scope very well. What can people do against such devastation?

October 18, 2005

Quite a crazy last few days. Thursday, Kris' and my Spanish groups got together to make this huge, amazing Italian feast with lots of garlic and mozzerella cheese. Our elated celebration didn't last long, though. That same day, Kris started feeling really drained.

Friday, 2:00 am, Kris awoke with shooting pain just below her ribs on the right side. She had difficulty breathing deeply, but sleeping on her back helped. Around 9:00 am, during a class on food processing, the pain worsened and she started having a fever. We called the med office and they told us to come to Managua immediately. After a bit of bus schedule confusion, we caught the 12:15 express to the capitol. For Kris, the ride couldn't have ended fast enough. The pain and fatigue sapped all of her strength, and she had to go to the bathroom, yet she held on.

Upon arrival in Managua, we were greeted by a PC staff member and driven to headquarters where Kris was examined by the med officer on duty. The officer quickly decided to take Kris to a specialist at the nearest hospital. He examined her abdomen and said that there could be several causes, among which apendicitis, an infected gall bladder, or virus were all possibilities. She was rushed to another really new hospital for ultrasound and x-rays to determine if surgery would be needed. Thankfully, every test cleared as normal, so they decided not to operate. However, we had to stay in the hospital several days for observation.

This place was posh. It had a shower, sink, toilet, cable TV, full-wall window, pull-out sleeper sofa, and a mechanized bed that can raise both the head and foot of the bed in infomercial fashion. The nurses also possessed an incredible ability to draw blood without causing pain, even the fourth time in the same arm.

The following days passed slowely as tests for bacteria, parasites, apendicites, inflamations, etc. all came back negative. The only abnormal reading showed a decreased lymphocite count, indicating a virus.

The fever and pain had left the morning after arrival, Saturday. The whole weekend was spent eating overpriced hospital food (delicious and paid for by PC, by the way) and watching random shows on cable TV. On Sunday, we checked out of the hospital and into a local hotel. Monday, we got some more bloodwork done at a local lab and caught a taxi back to the hospital to meet with an infectious disease specialist. His professional opinion, based on the abdominal pain, fever, and lowe white blood cell count, is that Kris has Dengue. But in all honesty, I don't think they have a clue. Kris' pain was acute, and her platlet count has been normal, neither of which track with the Dengue story. We will know for sure next week, when Kris gets here syrology results.

Our language progress interviews have been indefinitely postponed until Kris gets better.

Choco Suave

The chocolate project is progressing extremely well. We managed to produce a soft, grainy, sweet dark chocolate with incredible flavor. We're starting to sell it to gringos at a 233% markup, and we've already sold 10% of it in the first afternoon. Tomorrow, we hit up all the volunteers at once during our weekly group meeting. I hope to sell about 33% more there, with the rest getting sold off over the next week. We already have one offer for a subscription, since good-tasting chocolate is expensive and hard to come by here. We still have enough materials for another batch, and I hope to improve the recipe until we get really good, hard chocolate.

The Rainy Season

Jason: Today marks the 17th straight day of rain. We had a short period of partially cloudy with some sun on Sunday, but it was quickly replaced with more rain. It's not really dark, but just really wet. Clothes don't dry, and they become easily covered with mud on the unpaved roads.

Last Friday, the morning after sleeping at a volunteer's house, we spent most of the morning doing nothing. Some local kids accosted us early in the morning and followed us around the rest of the day. We eventually visited a neighbor's yard to see some worm-composting in action - which consists of throwing some worms in a box of manure and waiting a week for them to create some of the best organic fertilizer in the world. We also saw some Noni bushes. Noni is this fad miracle fruit that has spines all over, tastes terrible, and is reported to have a wide array of medicinal properties, as well as great nutritional content. My language instructor drinks some Noni juice every night to help her blood pressure. She says if the juice is chilled, you can hardly detect the aweful taste. The real miracle about the stuff, though, is its price. At C$80 per pound, it's a veritable cash cow.

We also visited a farm that uses inter-cropping of red beans and corn, also called associated planting, a fairly common practice here. It uses the land space more efficiently, reduces pest problems, and cuts the risk of loosing your entire crop if plague or weather destroy one type of crop. The only problems are that it makes planting and weeding a bit harder, and it makes crop rotation more difficult, since you have to plant a rotation of something not corn or beans. Virtually no one here uses crop rotation.

The weekend at Kris' place was wonderful, as usual. Her host father narrated to us the last 50 years of history of his family farm. He owns 70 manzanas, about 120 acres, but he can't find workers for more than half of it due to the fact that kids are getting jobs at the tabacco factories in Estelí as opposed to working in his fields. Strange that he says that, with so many people complaining how they can't find jobs and sitting around idle. It's also more expensive to control pests now than it was 30 years ago, he says. Now they are dependent on chemicals.

Yesterday, my language group started our commercialization project. We are trying to make chocolate from cacao beans. It's not incredibly hard, and we seem to be having success thus far. I'll update the progress as we move along.

I also did some power shopping in Estelí. I bought a universal power adaptor, another pair of $9 blue jeans, more socks, and various food items from the super. I wasn't able to find a heating pad, though, which would certainly be handy.

October 6, 2005

Jason: Today was awesome. My language group had its turn to visit a couple volunteers in situ. We made banana/pinapple jelly, pithaya and lime jelly, peanut butter from scratch, and some really yummy bean burgers with cumin and garlic. Then, we got to see a Nica community bank in action. These community banks the PC is starting have a lot of potential. They are unofficial community savings and loan centers that get the campesinos saving and earning interest on their own money. It's great for small business owners trying to get a little start-up capital.

Aftwerwards, we encountered a bus blocking the dirt road going up the hill to our volunteer's house. It was stuck in the ditch crossways. Every time it tried to get back on the road, it would slide back because of all the mud. So, Keenan hitched it up to the Land Cruiser by a thick chain and helped pull the buss back onto the road. It was scary, since there wasn't much communication with the bus driver during the manuever. Unbelievably, it actually worked, and no one got hurt. Some real power in those Land Cruisers.

Today was also the birthday of another volunteer that is ending her service. We all got together and had cake and a wonderful dinner. She had a lot of advice for us. For any project to be successful, she said, the motivation and leadership need to come from the local community members, not the Peace Corps. We are there as a resource: as facilitators, not leaders. That might prove difficult for all these self-starter gringos that are used to leading something. We will need to let people know the resource is here for them, educate them about opportunities, but wait for them to take the lead. Sounds like this could get pretty frustrating before the end, but I think there's a lot of wisdom in this advice.

October 5, 2005

Jason: It gets dark around 6:00 pm, now that daylight savings time is over. It's kind of sad, because I really enjoyed the evening daylight. Kris is sick with diarrhea again. It's been robbing her of some class time, but she continues to stick it out. We're completely baffled, because there doesn't seem to be anything consistent about when she gets sick. The conditions are different. The days of the week are different, she eats the same food some days and is fine. Others, she gets sick. She tested negative for amoebas and protazoa. It's crazy.

We've been having trouble drying our laundry with all this rain. I'm running out of dry socks. I'll need to start ironing them dry, soon.

Tomorrow morning, my training group leaves for a two-day visit to two volunteers near Condega, Estelí. We're going to learn how to make peanut butter and jelly, and generally enjoy ourselves. It should be a blast!

We need to come up with some sort of "value-added" product to sell as a commercialization exercise in our training towns. My group is slacking. We still don't have a viable idea. I'm thinking some cheap food product would work great, like cookies.

Kris and I talked to the Associate PC Director today about our potential site assignment, and it seems like we'll be in either Jinotega or Nueva Segovia. More when we find out.

Technical difficulties

Well, the bloglet updates have been fixed, now, but I have a moratorium on posting to my blog until I get approval from the country director. Apparently, there is a Nica-specific handbook rule that requires any website contributions to be discussed with the country director, first, so that he knows about it and can monitor for anything that might hinder the Peace Corps' mission in Nicaragua. I guess it is to make sure no-one creates a scandal, which is a good thing. In the mean time, hold in there. There is more to come. :)