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.