28 March, 2006

Cultura Comica

Adjusting to Nicaraguan food challenges even the best Peace Corps volunteers. It's not that the food doesn't taste good. It's actually quite delicious. You just have to get used to a very different diet, based on a completely different system of nutrition. In the US, we have the food pyramid to guide us in the six basic food groups: oil/sugar, meat/fish, bread/cereals, fruits and vegetables, and milk/dairy. Nicaragua has its own major food groups, which are outlined below.

The beans/tortillas/rice/curds group

Sure, these are all very different foods, but I include them as one group here because they make up the main sources of protein in the Nica diet. A typical breakfast consists of gallo pinto, a salty boiled-then-fried rice and beans dish, with a fried egg and a hunk of cuajada (salty curds) on the side. For lunch: more beans and rice; perhaps some veggie soup if you're lucky. For dinner: oh look, more beans and rice!

The sugar group

A helpful adage for volunteers trying to come up with recipes that Nicas will like is, "if it's sweet, they'll like it." One part sugar to one part coffee is pretty much the standard Nica drink, and most fruit juices have sugar added as well. Once, a PC volunteer running a mini-marathon was offered a red Fanta soft drink with extra sugar floating in the bottom!

The oil group

One of my Nica friends from the office says that Nicaragua is the only country where even the salad is fried, and that's not far from the truth. Many traditional Mexican entreés like tacos and encheladas appear in the Nicaraguan diet as well, only here they are all deep-fried. Other commonly fried items include chicken, pork, bananas, potatoes, and a white and purple tuber called malanga.

The salt group

Hunger might be the best seasoning, but a close second in Nicaragua would have to be salt. Salad, rice, beans, curds, eggs, and tortillas all bring an excess of salt.!

We can hardly believe that we left home for the Peace Corps over seven months ago. While training seemed to never end, our time in-site has really flown. Projects are starting to coallesce and take form before our eyes. Our 275 students have finished planting their fourteen school gardens and are now waiting eagerly to see the first greens start to poke out of the ground. We're starting a tree nursery and garden of our own in the front yard as well, so the community can identify us as the people to go to for home garden info.

One of our pet projects is promoting a particular kind of Asian tree called Morango. It's basically a miracle food, with the leaves offering calcium, protein, and vitamins A and C. It grows really quickly - 4 meters tall in just the first year - and is resistant to drought. It regrows even if you cut it all the way to the ground, which makes it perfect for intensive leaf production in small spaces. You can plant a 4 meter by 1 meter plot of ground with 400 plants, and harvest half of each plant when it reaches 60 cm tall, ensuring a steady stream of nutrition to an entire family. Right now we're putting the finishing touches on a promotional pamphlet and waiting for the seeds to come. The people we've talked to thus far seem enthusiastic about the project, and we already have promises to plant from four families.

Soon, we should be meeting with our local 4H club to meet the kids and get started on some home gardens in the community. In the past, they have done lots of community service projects with our Ministry of Agriculture partner, so the prospects for practical education with the group seem promising.

Some somewhat unrelated news is that we now have a functional email notification service for our Photo Blog. Just enter in your email to the field next to the picture at the top of the page and press the subscribe button. For those who haven't been keeping up with the stream of photos, we last uploaded new pictures just a week ago.