Matagalpa Treck

It has been great in Nicaragua so far. Just would like to share a couple highlights. The taxi driver from the airport mentioned he hoped there was going to be a coup this summer because he wants Ortega out of office, then the lady at the front desk of the hotel said only positive words about the work Ortega has done for Nicaragua. Then others claim, they don't care who is in office, as long as they help out the community.

Also, we had a meeting at the Ministry of Education with the Director of Primary Education. His assistant started the meeting by quoting the bible, separation of church and state? Then on the wall there were pictures of Che Guivara, Sandino and FSLN. During the meeting he boasted how Nicaragua has an illiteracy rate of 3.3% which is the 4^th lowest in all of the Americas, only following Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. After a small amount of probing different reputable sources claim illiteracy rates are anywhere from 15 to 30 percent! I would like to know from where this information is obtained? Who did the study, how it was conducted? And more importantly, why aren’t people asking the right questions to uncover the discrepencies?

Another note I took was how it looked like a fashion show walking into the US Embassy! It just seemed that the only local Nicaraguans who worked there had to have some connection to get in the door to that privileged job, but I could be wrong… Guthrie? :) However, it was a beautiful campus though and it made me really appreciate how lucky we are as Americans since our government takes such good care of us even outside of our country! It also made me think that it was a great decision on our part to choose to be born here...

Another note, the meeting with a local NGO, ADP was such a positive experience. It was amazing to see what the good people are accomplishing around the world and the impact it has on people’s lives. They showed us a picture of a waterfall from 20 years ago that was a small trickle down the side of the mountain, then after 20 years of planning trees around the water source and along the path of the river, the trickle now has become a healthy down pour. They mentioned deforestation is causing water sources to dry up and even mentioned specifically that if nothing is done in Matagalapa, water will stop flowing there in several decades. It really puts our work into perspective about what we are trying to accomplish this summer.

Projects

Under a week until I travel to Nicaragua. I have been swamped with work, projects around the city, classes – so I am really looking forward to next Tuesday, Feb 16, leaving the daily grind! I have been talking to a friend who as an undergrad took an engineering course about the development of third world countries and she gave me some great ideas about projects she worked with in her class! To be brief, one is a corn husker that was “found” in Ghana, used to de-kernel the corn.

Last summer in Costa Rica, families would go through hundreds of ears of corn by hand, and when there is this simple tool, that costs under 2 dollars to make to help speed the process and would make it easier on their wrists so they can dedicate their time to other activities, it would be nice that they could know about it. I am excited on sharing this with Nicaraguan families and I hope they find it beneficial.

This other idea gives instructs on how to turn a bike into a little machine that can easily turn a blender, a washing machine or anything that needs rotational force. What is nice about this idea, is that it doesn’t require complicated equipment to convert this rotational energy into electrical energy which is difficult to repair and is expensive. We'll see how well these ideas are accepted in the field.

Well - not too much else to say right now, I'll have updates from the field soon.

Introduction - Matagapla 2010

This year it turns out that I will spend my summer in Matagalpa, Nicaragua as the project director . I have a trip planned in February 16 - February 27 to set up some logistics, then training in March and finally summer which starts early June.

First, all the posts on here before 2009 are from my stint in Honduras/Costa Rica.

Second, the slideshow at the right will be of only Nicaragua pictures after February once I return from survey.

And third, I have been thinking about the summer quite a bit mostly because I am really looking forward to it, and also because I really want this to be a positive experience for everyone involved: from the team, to the communities, the youth (North American and Nicaraguan), locals and families in Matagapa, etc. If I am travelling down to Nicaragua, I want it to be for something positive, and of course that is why I chose to go down with Amigos. And of my many goals this summer, one is to empower the staff team and help foster an environment of growth over the course of the summer. Imagine a team where all members are capable of being project director (PD), all are empowered to make decisions when warranted and all have the confidence to step up when needed. I think knowledge is power and so one way I am going to help achieve this goal is by sharing the information that I have.

Sometimes, leaders can keep information to themselves, whether intentionally or not, and that leads to the effect of having that one person required to make all the decisions, thus becoming a crutch for the team. I believe in transparency (as haughtily liberal that may sound) and through the dissimenation of information (when applicable, because of course there are exceptions!)empowers others to make their own decisions and allows them to rely on their own knowledge to act. As the PD, I have all the information from last year at my disposal, I have contacts from the prevoius projects and I will be on survey meeting with local partners. Sharing all this information is difficult and maybe even impractical, but I will try to have most of it available for those who are interested - currently in gdocs.

Maybe I am coming into this from a different perspective, as I was a little older as a project supervisor, I was already thinking about the next step, the next growing opportunity, so I wanted to access all the information my project director had. This is why I am sharing the information now, even if no one on the team decides to read it, it is completely fine as it is not imperative, but for those who are thinking about growth opportunities, it is my goal to provide no barriers for anyone to achieve their goals!

Also, as a side note, I have been in contact with many local NGO's in Matagalpa and I am exteremly excited about the connections the team and the program will have during the summer.

Caution: Sloth Crossing

On my last day in Costa Rica when I was in the airport heading home, I was about to write about beans, how hard they are to harvest, how they are good for us and how lucky we are to have access to them with such little effort ($1 a pound!!!). But I got bored of that and instead let my mind wonder... as you will see, my mind jumps around. Now that all the volunteers have returned home and the communities are now satisfied I have nothing to write... Now I will lecture for better or for worse, because it was just one of those kind of days:

I was sitting and waiting at the airport in the food court. Surrounded by the bright and inviting lights, the sweet and delicious smells, and of course the fried and unhealthy foods. I couldn't help but look at the people around me filling their mouths with the edible manifestation of the sights, smells and sounds. Eating fries, drinking coke, commenting on how hungry they were, never satisfied. It is a strange world we live in, it is not a natural world with everyone in a symbiotic relation with the earth, but a world of over consumption, with industrialized and unnatural products.

We are a society that thrives on marketing to the consumer anything that sells with little thought of the consumer's need or anything else for that matter. The bottom line drives. Now with our new Green Revolution in full swing, why would companies not use this gimmick to sell their products? Companies are driven to market (and of course sell) to us all the best energy star technologies that they deem we are required to buy, because in this Green Revolution, it is still all about buying. It is about consumers purchasing the best item and then replace it the following year with Version 2.0. This is the only way us, the consumer, can get even more savings year after year and thus help the environment more year after year. Forget about the environmental costs due to producing these items: mining for the materials, forging the material, transporting the item. All this needs to be ignored. The items have already been made, we need to focus on the immediate energy savings that buying the bigger fridge will save us (and the environment). It uses less energy than any other large fridge around and now that's an accomplishment. Of course smaller fridges use less... Not necessary. How about no fridge? Heaven forbid! These are not possibilities. In our Green Revolution, it is about buying more, the more we buy the happier we are and the happier the planet is, period. Our Green Revolution is not about what is logical and actually, gasp, reducing our consumption to save on energy costs around the globe.

With its faults, it would be unfair not the mention what is positive about our America and foremost is the freedom. Albeit some of these freedoms are hard to obtained because they are constrained by social control. All the social norms about consumption, body image and fashion to name a few make it harder for us, the obedient pack, to act outside of the self-loathing, self-gloating and self-satiation. We are never good enough in the eyes of others, so we compensate by continually telling and reminding people about how good we are, while always yearning to have more for ourselves to catch up to our neighbor. However, even with the ubiquitous norms, we are given the choice to write about what we think is wrong in the thoughts and actions of the world around us. We have the choice to sever the ties of consumption by living frugally and to giving our share to others. We have the choice to unplug from mainstream media and ignore the expensive dress code and accessories it requires from us and to instead live a simple more meaningful life. We all know that their will be obstacles to being an individual, to be the one who can step outside of the pack and to look at a social norms from the outside, objective view to see the illogical idiosyncracies that us humans in the obedient pack are conforming to. (Eating, drinking and smoking excessively, french friends, fancy cars, diamonds, red meat, and huge houses...) Its important to live the life we want and to think outside the framework that is provided by the norms. Choosing a lifestyle is akin to choosing a religion, how can we know which lifestyle we prefer if we know only one lifestyle and have not explored others.

Nonetheless, we have to be confident in our actions if they are led by compassion, we have to stand by our decisions to be nice to someone who has offended us. We need to be confident and drop our insecurities and realize that the person next to us has the same insecurities of inferiority as we do and lift these people up instead of putting them down. If we see arrogance, if we see pride, we need to see the mechanisms of defense these people are carefully constructing around themselves to enclose the true self that they are not comfortable sharing with others. We need to find their true selves and elevate them with kind words, not by fighting pride with more pride.

We can all do this, we can help someone around us and we will have changed the world for that one person. I hear many people talking about their grandiose goals to help others that are measured by numbers and figures and graphs and statistics. The person with the best numbers wins. Yet in the meantime, the people around them who are most important to them (or rather, who they are most important to) are treated poorly. This is a concrete change we can all make and instead of waiting for our ephemeral dreams that escape us further at the purchase of each new calendar and the building of new obstacles. We need to ensure those around us are happy and feel our positivity towards them now and not wait.

People selfishly say many times that they want to live for themselves right now before they change to live for others, but living for others is living for yourself. It is rewarding, meaningful, positive, fulfilling, etc. The yearning of wanting more is thwarted by these compassionant actions. So we need to ensure that those around us are happy before we go off and save the world for others far off. Let us all start with the world around us and change the world for our family, friends, acquaintences, strangers and everyone we encounter. That is saving the world little by little.

P.S. I saw a sloth crossing the road in a community. It was slow.

Random Stories

This project in Costa Rica is winding down, its bitter sweet. There is still more than a week left for me, but the volunteers are quickly wrapping up their assignments and about to head home later this week. I will have to stay around to hold community meetings to see how everything went and what not, but I have been thinking about life back at home a some and I am starting to realize how the world will never be the same. The world I left, is completely different that the world I am returning to.

First, Micheal Jackson, has died. I am not sure what I will do in my house after his death. Thriller, Billie Jean, Beat It…. I’ll figure that one out.

Second, I am completely addicted to caffeine right now, I have a pounding headache as I write this because I haven’t had a cup all day since it is the weekend and I am not being served by generous host families in beautiful communities. In these communities I drink an average of 2 cups of days, but it’s not rare to have 4 cups. Every breakfast it is served, and then again after lunch, and then since I travel between communities, it is common to have a cup before I leave one community and then am welcomed with a cup in the second community. Nonetheless, I don’t like this addiction and need to stop the coffeeeeeeeee.

That’s really all why the world has changed for me, for better or for worse.

I have been asked by several community members to sell their land to rich Americans. They told me they have land for sell ranging from 500,000 to a MILLION dollars and ask me if I know anybody who wants to make an investment. I told them I don’t, but that I will ask anyways, so if you want to buy some land in Costa Rica let me know. They say it’s a good price and “gringos” buy it for 500,000 then a couple years later sell it for a million bucks. Let me know if you are interested.

Well, I learned that Costa Rican’s are the hardest workers in America. They say they go and work in roofing, in New Jersey and always in Trenton. They work 7 days a week, they work 12 hours a day in the heat, through the cold, anytime and they get paid 15-20 dollars an hour. They work for three years, they come back to their communities and they build a nice home for about 10-20 thousand dollars. A pristine home sitting on the side of a mountain that has a view of a gorgeous landscape sitting by the river. Then they buy a car and buy more land and live pretty comfortably. But to do this, most of them pay around 7 thousand dollars, usually borrowed from the coyote at about 40% interest rate. The coyote only charges them though if they get across safely to the other side, failed attempts are free of charge. If they don’t have the money, they can put up their house as collateral. (Side story, met a lady whose husband did this, then once in the states after three years stopped sending money, last time I went to her house, it was condemned and boarded up, presumably by the coyote). Its also a dangerous trip of course across the border, they tell me once while crossing the border into New Mexico, a group of bandits with guns and knives came up to the group and robbed everyone of the money they had on them to help get by once arriving safely in the states. (Robbed everyone but the coyote of course…)

Another community member told me about his story and said as they crossed the dessert at night, because it is always at night, and its always a dessert, they heard people coming from behind so the larger group of about 20 had to split up into groups of 5 and in his group, one of his friends who was overweight and couldn’t move quickly was trying to catch up with the group but couldn’t. He said he remembered looking back at his friend wanting to help, but was not able to, so he moved on ahead and no one heard of his friend again. Another said he was in jail for 2 months because they confused him for a Mexican who had been accused of murder, after this Tico (Costa Rican) proved his identity, they deported him back home. These people who cross are young and in shape, and they are old and slow. They do it for money and they do it to see family members, but its always the guys who go. Women only go if they get a visa, but to get this prized permission, they need a lot of money in their bank account, they need to own a lot of land, precisely the kind of people they are not, because those people are less risk to stay and work as a roofer in Trenton, New Jersey and extending their stay illegally.

Gringos have come to Costa Rica to buy up a lot of the land, they buy it and then they do nothing with it, except reforest it. The community likes this, they say by allowing the trees to grow, this makes the area rain more. They like this because they don’t have cows that pollute the water stream. They like this because they usually buy land that has a water source and with the trees the water source won’t dry up. They like this because the gringos are allowing the land to replenish its nutrients instead of growing coffee beans on the same land year after year. Twenty years ago, there was no need to use fertilizer because crops were always being rotated, if coffee was grown there for two years straight, for the third year they would leave it to replenish its nutrients naturally. They wouldn’t use pesticides and would kill all the brush with only machetes and sweat. Now, to stay in business, they need to buy fertilizer for the plants to be productive enough to sell. The pesticides they use on the brush is leaving the land without nutrients. Its harder and harder, they say, to make a profit year after year.

On the way back from a community, a community member offered me a ride back to center because he had to run some errands. The errand was going to a cow auction, which he invited me to. This cow auction made me appreciate being a vegetarian, the cows were stored abnormally close together, in one bin, I saw one cow smashed so close to another cow’s rear end that his neck was at a 90 degree angle. And as I walked passed, the cow who had his friend in his rear, began to release his excrement which of course just dropped down all over the cow’s face. Due to the close quarters and lack of room to move, all the cow did was blink his eyes as this feces fell on his face. Then another pin was completely filthy, not an inch of feces free ground. Even with this, I suppose the cow was tired enough that he just lay in his own excrement. People say cows are dumb, but they must be adverse to this.

On the flip side, I learned that cow tipping is made up. Cows don’t sleep standing up and if you try to push them over, they will run. Good luck trying.

Every time I tell community members I don’t eat meat, they are at first shocked, then they always say, yeah, that’s a good thing, the meat is bad for you and its costs a lot to raise. But they always end it with, but I like the meat so much. I like to eat the flesh of animal, the muscles. I had a conversation with my brother before I left for this trip, he said animals always eat meat, it’s a natural thing in the cycle of life. I told him animals also have sex in public. They don’t have a choice, they eat meat to survive. We have a choice to eat the flesh of another living being, or not eat the flesh of another living being. We can survive either way, it’s our choice.

My job on a somewhat typical day:

Thursday night, I was in my last community ready to wrap up and come home on Friday morning to start the work on the computer and then I realized, I had forgotten to pick up these evaluation forms from my volunteers and given that I was supposed to type them up and put my comments on them before Sunday, I really had to make another round of the communities before going back to the town center. Only problem is, there are 3 buses a day 5 hours apart and the communities are either an hour or an hour and a half apart from each other.

So I wake up the Friday morning at 5:30am to catch the 6am high school bus that will take me to the next town. When I walked to the bus, the hood was up and the driver was taking the engine apart because it wouldn’t start! So I waiting around for 45 minutes with the high school kids waiting too see if classes were going to be cancelled because of the bus not working. In these towns where it would be about a 3 hour walk to high school, if its raining too hard, or the bus breaks down, classes have to get cancelled. Nonetheless, I was the only one hoping against the odds that the driver will fix the bus because I was not looking forward to the hike, while the kids around me were hoping of course that the bus would stay broken.

After it got fixed I got to the community around 8 and picked up the forms from those volunteers and since I had the forms from the first community, that meant I only had one more community to visit, except there was a bus at 1pm to the city center from a town that was a 1.5 hour walk away. The community was another 1 hour bus ride and 45 minute walk away so I wanted to leave sooner than one.

After waiting around for about an hour, the high school bus that broke down had fallen in a ditch unbeknownst to me so all the kids were walking home. Then a little later, after the bus was excavated from the ditch, I was able to hitch a ride. Then found another ride to the city center from where one of the volunteers was eating lunch, then grabbed a bus to the other community, got the forms and returned by 4pm back at home. Eleven hours I had been traveling around, ate two breakfasts, two lunches traveled on 5 buses, saw all my volunteers, returned home and had all the work for the weekend left. More or less that is what I do week after week. But usually a little more organized and don’t have to visit all three communities in the same day…

Picture Update from the Trenches

This is just a short little update to share a snap shop of the pictures from the summer and of the communities and volunteers. I wasn’t taking any, but then my sister sent me an email asking for some, so thats why I brought my camera around the communities and hikes to share the pictures. And to have pics of the volunteers for a final presentation, now that I think about it..

Things to look for, a bat that is in one of the rooms where I am offered to sleep. A protest about the lack of medicine in the public hospitals. An awesome river. And generally great things.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2784300&id=8302765&l=5f85457f2c

Tico Land

Costa Rica is a beautiful county and is much more developed than Honduras, the difference incredible. Nonetheless, the volunteers are doing good work for the communities that they are in. The three projects are to make a restroom at the soccer field, a beautification of the soccer field and to make a pantry at the soccer field. The reason all three towns (an many others of different towns) have chosen to improve their soccer field is as one proposal mentioned, “the soccer field is the source of the biggest income is for our community”. This is one aspect that I found very interesting about these small communities in Costa Rica (100, 200 and 600 people in my three communities), that almost every Sunday there is a soccer tournament at a different community’s soccer field every week so that all the communities get a fair chance for people to go and purchase food items and drinks during the event. This is how the community raises most of their money and how they have built churches, expansions to the school, community centres, eating halls, etc. They mentioned to me they look out for each other and respect when someone decides to hold tournaments so that no community is competing for people.

Another interesting thing that I learned here is about Costa Rica´s healthcare system. Most of the people that I interact with in the community are self employed since they rely on sustenance farming as their occupation, and are eligible for public healthcare offered by the government for 3000 colones, about 5-6 dollars a month. With this health card that they receive every month, they get 100% free doctor´s visits and free prescription drugs as well. Currently, the hospital does not prefer them to go there as there are medical centres called EBAIS in the small towns. The EBAIS operate by spending 2-3 days in a larger community and then visit the surrounding communities on rotating monthly basis so that at least once or twice a month each community gets a doctor that comes to their community to receive affordable healthcare. The reason though that I learned about this is because on Monday there was a pretty large demonstration (about 300 people) who came to Perez Zeledon, the capital of the region, because the state was saying that they are going to close down every EBAIS in the region. The reason the government has decided to close down these public healthcare branches is because of funding due to the economic crisis. On top of this, in this region all the pharmacies are employed by technicians and not by licensed pharmaceutics which means that across the regions, immediately, there were not allowed to dispense any medicine. (I am not sure if this was due to new legislation, or if it was just recently discovered)

Nonetheless, it now takes over there weeks to receive medicine, rather 22 days. (Costa Rica has the custom to count the days in a week by the number of weeks times seven and plus one. So 8 days means one week, 15 two weeks and so forth. I believe it comes from the fact that if you count the calendar and start the day you are on as day one, and reach the next week, it is 8 days but it is a incorrect because if you use that logic to say in 2 days, that would mean tomorrow, which would be very confusing!) Nonetheless imagine going to the doctor today for a serious illness and the doctor prescribes some antibiotics to be taken immediately and 22 days later, you can receive the pills, because they have to come from the 3 EBAIS that pay pharmaceutics to work at their locations. Nonetheless, the protest yesterday requested the Minister of Health to issue a statement today, so we well see what happens, and the public says there will be a large protest if the answer is not one that is pleasing to them! Imagine getting kicked out of Costa Rica too for large public demonstrations!