Goodbye, San Nicolas!

It didn't hit us that we were really actually leaving San Nicolas until two days before we left, when our good friend Maria came over to say goodbye. She had crocheted me a little bag and made the long trek from her community, Potrerillos, just to see us one last time. During the time we spent together that afternoon, a sudden, unexpected panic came over me. Of course we would visit Maria and all of our friends here again, but, I realized, we will probably never live in San Nicolas again. It will never be the same.

Before that, people had been telling us for weeks, “Don't go! Why do you have to go?” Even people we didn't really know very well said that, so we assumed it was just the thing to say. Responding to them, we always felt a little guilty, because when it came right down to it, we didn't really have to leave. In all honesty, we felt ready to leave – to be back in the US, closer to our families and in a more comfortable, familiar culture.

But once we realized for real what leaving San Nicolas actually meant, we were struck with a serious case of the lasts. Here are just a few things we grew nostalgic about in the subsequent days:

The mini- library at the school is finished!

- The last time we washed our clothes by hand

- The last time we walked to La Garnacha to wash carrots

- The last time we walked up the hill to the school

- The last time we sang Catholic Johnny Cash hymns at mass

- The last time we murmured along to the Nicaraguan national anthem at school

- The last time we used our latrine at night

- The last time we saw the amazing view of San Nicolas, Volcan Momotombo, and Lake Managua from the top of the hill that descends to San Nicolas

- And of course, the last time that we would see each of our Nicaraguan friends

Bombarded by all of these lasts, it suddenly became clear to us that the two years we've spent in San Nicolas, Nicaragua have changed us. Nicaragua has taught us so much. One very tangible thing that Nicaragua gave me was the ability to speak Spanish. It feels great to leave Nicaragua with such a useful skill that I will have for the rest of my life. Now that I speak Spanish, I also feel very committed to finding a Latin American community in the US where I can keep speaking Spanish and stay connected to the Latino cultures that I've come to love.

A second thing that Nicaragua has shown us is that we don't really need all of the things that we think we need. We lived for two years without indoor plumbing, without a washing machine, without unlimited internet access, among other people who have always lived without these things, and ultimately, we didn't really miss this stuff all that much. Since we didn't have a gourmet bakery down the street, we learned to make our own sourdough bread. Since we didn't have a grocery store in town, we made a lot more food from scratch. We admired the self-sufficiency of our friends and neighbors, who have never learned to count on the luxuries we take for granted, and when we tried living like them, we realized it was actually pretty easy.

The final thing Nicaragua taught us is to pace our lives differently. There is a pattern of life here in Nicaragua that inevitably prioritizes people and relationships above time and work. Here, friends are always more important than to-do lists. We've often been annoyed by the seeming inefficiency of Nicaraguan life, but the benefits of this flexibility and people-oriented culture always outweigh the annoyances.

A perfect example of this happened on our very last afternoon in San Nicolas. Our bus was going to leave at 4 p.m., so for our last hour in town, we sat out in front of our house on plastic chairs, watching people go by. Gradually, people walking by began to join us, stopping in to talk for a few minutes, and then poaching up on our front stoop. It was a work day and most of them probably had work to do, but they thought nothing of skipping work to hang out with us during our last hour in San Nicolas. We didn't even talk that much; once it started to rain, we couldn't hear each other over the sound of the rain pounding on the tin roof anyway. They just sat there with us silently, simply giving us their presence. Then our bus honked its horn and we put on our backpacks to leave, and with a slight tremor, we hugged them. And when we boarded the bus, they stood there watching, holding us with their eyes, giving us the warm gift of community as we rolled out of San Nicolas for the last time.

P.S. This might be our last blog post for a while. If you want to continue following life in San Nicolas, you can read about the next volunteers, Alli and Kyle's experience on their blog: http://allikylenica.blogspot.com/ 

A Confrontation With Carnivory

Maybe some of you more avid blog-followers might remember that a few months ago we wrote about buying a goat, Cena, to raise and slaughter for our farewell meal. This whole ambitious project came to a bloody climax last weekend, and it ended up being far more poignant than we ever imagined.

We said from the beginning that we wouldn't get too close to the goat. Everyone told us not to name him, but we thought that giving him the name “Cena,” or “Dinner” would keep us sufficiently estranged from him. We were wrong. The word “cena” became not a meal, but his name. As we walked him around town on a rope leash (yep, that happened), kids popped out of nowhere, shrieking “Cenaaaaa!” The whole town knew Cena by name; when we weren't with him, complete strangers would stop us and ask, “Where's Cena?” No one believed us that we were going to slaughter him, and we almost didn't believe it ourselves.

So it was that against all our best intentions, we did get close to Cena. He would sit there in his fence at the back of the yard making pitiful, annoying goat cries until we took him out for a walk. Sometimes we let him out in the yard, and he would run around eating everything in sight: basil, mangoes, and once even a lesson plan that he ripped out of our class planning notebook. He followed us everywhere we went.

This is a good place to pause for a disclaimer. Our whole idea to raise and slaughter an animal to provide food for a special occasion came directly from Nicaraguan campo tradition; people here slaughter chickens and pigs and cows for birthdays all the time. That's why we thought it was so fitting to do the same for our goodbye party.

But getting to know the goat changed everything, and everyone seemed to sense it. On the day before our party, just hours before we were supposed to do the “deed,” as we euphemized it, I went to order tortillas from our tortilla lady. “Are you really going to kill that goat?” she asked me. “That's so sad.” As if I didn't feel terrible enough already.

An hour before dark, the butcher showed up wearing a windbreaker and asking for a knife. Somehow, the fact that he would need a knife had completely slipped our minds. In a panic, we rifled through our collection of dull kitchen knives before Kyle, one of the new volunteers, produced his Swiss army knife.

I struggle to write these details plainly, but to deny them is to deny the impact of that night. The butcher strung Cena up upside down on the branch of a tree in our back yard, Cena crying helplessly until the butcher knocked him out with a rock. Then, very swiftly, he slit Cena's throat, and it began to rain. We all stood there for a minute, watching as the blood spilled and mixed with the urine of the goat's last pee. “Thank you Cena,” we murmured. Then it began to rain harder and we ran to the house to seek shelter as the goat died.

For a while I couldn't go back outside. I hid in the kitchen, dropping cupcake batter into cupcake tins (cupcakes suddenly seemed so innocent) and trying not to cry. But a strange fascination drew me back to the tree, where the butcher was mechanically and silently cutting the animal's skin off of its body all in one piece. Before it was dark, Cena was no longer Cena, but a tub of meat.

Davie and I have talked a lot about that night since then, struggling with what transpired. In Spanish, when a person feels squeamish about something, they say, “Me da lastima,” or “It gives me shame,” and this was exactly how I felt about Cena. I've never felt bad about eating meat before, but actually witnessing a living animal die so that I can consume its protein not only made me feel like, “That's a shame,” but also, “That gives me shame. I am ashamed.” There is something so selfish about taking an animal's life to incorporate that life into your body in order to continue your own life. I have to keep reminding myself that this is a natural phenomenon that has been happening between humans and animals for millions of years. It only means that as elevated and “civilized” as we think we are, we are still part of the food chain.

In many ways, this challenge that Davie and I set for ourselves of killing and eating an animal played out as the most difficult confrontation with eating meat that a person could possibly have. The easiest way to go about eating meat is to simply buy it in a grocery store, not knowing where it came from or what it ever looked like as an animal. Doing this in the past, I never had any qualms about eating meat. A step up in difficulty might be buying part of a cow, for example, that was raised locally. The carnivore in this situation knows in some concrete way that their meat was a living animal with its own unique story, but the details are all fuzzy. An even more difficult challenge would be to hunt the animal. In this scenario the meat-eater has to actually kill the animal but never spends more than a minute or two in its presence. By comparison, I would argue that our situation was one of the hardest to face. We spent three months with Cena getting to know him and then watched him be killed so that we could eat his meat.

I keep telling myself that there was nothing inherently evil in killing and eating Cena; it's only because this was the most difficult encounter I've ever had with eating meat that it gives me shame at all. I've eaten meat so many times before, and none of those times did I eat it any more nobly than this time – only more ignorantly. In some ways, because we got to know Cena so well and in such a public way, our goodbye party meal was perhaps the greatest sacrifice we could have made for our friends in San Nicolas, and I hope they recognized the significance of it.

In no way do I regret this grand challenge that we set for the end of our time in San Nicolas. Cena's sacrifice hasn't gone unnoticed; it has impacted completely how I think about eating meat. Neither Davie nor I has decided yet what we want to do with this new consciousness, but it is something that we will carry with us forever. And in the mean time, our friend Stephen is making a drum out of Cena's skin. The goat lives on in the music.

Thank you!

Now that our two years here in San Nicolas are drawing to an end, we want to thank all of you out there who have connected with our experience through the fine strands of the world wide web (and more specifically, through this blog).

When we started this blog, we had no idea how many people would actually care to follow our two years in Nicaragua - we assumed it would mostly only be close family. But every time one of you commented about a specific blog we posted or just generally mentioned that you liked following our blog, we realized that our community of support was broader than we had ever imagined. At times throughout our experience here, we've felt alone or isolated - two gringos in a tiny Nicaraguan town with no other English speakers for miles around. But each of your notes or emails or comments about our blogs showed us the enormous web of support behind us, holding us up and sustaining us. So thanks to every one of you who have cared enough about us and our community to follow our experience throughout these two years.

We also want to thank a few specific people who donated to help us accomplish certain projects that we otherwise wouldn't have had the money to do. When we decided that we wanted to work with local reading programs to encourage kids to read for fun, these people willingly supplied the books and the money to make this happen. When we realized that the school P.E. classes really needed extra balls to practice with and that the school could really use support for the after-school sports teams, these people stepped up to help us accomplish these things.

With the support of these people who donated towards our "Balls and Books" projects in San Nicolas, we were able to:

- Buy 13 new athletic balls for the school P.E. and sports programs
- Install a volleyball court at the high school
- Donate a total of 35 books to an elementary school, the high school, and the public library
- Hold a book club with five high school students
- Use bilingual picture books in our elementary school English class (students were SO excited about reading these books)
- And, most impressively, construct an entirely new building at the high school that will function as a library / study room for years to come.

Thanks so much to the following people, who made all of these things happen:

Members of Akron Mennonite Church
Juniperro Serra and the Archdiocese of San Francisco
Mark Rich
John Harder
Roy and Barbara Simms
Paul Wiegner and Sue Peterson
Mike Owens
Gretchen Nyce
Tom and Ann Hurrish
Jonathan Larson
Donald Mellinger
Billy and Kristin Byrnes
Audrey Engle
Gwyn Howard and Remy Matthonet
Sally Rich
Joan and Raymond Spatti
Christopher Youngs
Peder Wiegner

Here are some pictures of cute kids using the books and balls that you all donated:

We also want to thank everyone who donated, on our behalf, to Volunteer Missionary Movement (VMM), the organization we're with. We wouldn't have been able to have this experience at all without the support of these people:

Mark Rich
Steve Larson
Andrew and Sally Rich
Jim and Sara Wiegner
John Harder
Don Mellinger
Ruth Larson
Jim and Amy Brumbaugh-Smith
Jonathan Larson
Evan Richards
Chani Wiens
Susan Passage
Young Lee
Jeff Thomsen
Andy and Jodie Larson
Sam Larson
Gordie and Bette Dean
Alyssa Kreider
Maria Osborne
John Harder
Claudia Milligan
Mary Mason
Mary Trinh
Jan Shetler
Jonathan Stuart
Dawn Harms
Marissa Kauffman
Annie Martens
Chase Snyder
Susan Klingler
Billy and Kristin Byrnes
Kay Douglas
Jessica Baldanzi
Peder Wiegner
Mylinda Baits
Chelsea Reiff
Emily Graber
Rachel Halder
Lindsay Miller
Ann Hostetler
Katie Gencay
Tori Yoder
Rosanna Kauffmann
Miriam Rich
Timothy Doran
Josh Hertzler

We still have at least one more blog planned before we leave on August 31, so stay tuned.

Final English Projects

We're wrapping up our after-school English class; last week our students turned in their final projects. We wanted them to do something creative, drawing from the cumulative English that they've learned this year. We gave them a long list of ideas - they could make a music video or write a story or narrate original drawings, for example, as long as their project had something to do with English. And from this list, they adapted these ideas and created their own original works.

Some of these impressed and amused us so much that we want to share them with you. The following are just a few excerpts from our students' final projects. 

Very Short Story: The Rabbit and the Cat, by Ana Iscela

Once upon a time was running a rabbit for the fields and it finded a cat, it wanted eating him. So the rabbit beging to run and cat behind. I run very fast said the rabbit. Ahahahah said the cat I'm going to eat. So the rabbit run, run and the cat bored.

Book of Narrated Original Photos, by Mayqueling

This is a picture of our goat, Cena. In case you can't read it: "The goat is nice and amicable."

Book of Poems, Riddles, and Drawings, by Rosa Melia

Original Poem: No Drugs

Young of the present,

an environment surrounds us

of a lot temptations

that drives to perditions.

Drugs can destroy you.

The dark ways can not let you leave.

They forsake a healthy life you can enjoy

because in the day and the night

they can kill you.

Trouble there is in the life.

Drugs are not the solution.

For a lot of youth it is the way.

Make an exception and choose

your destiny.

Book of Narrated Drawings, by Yerix

"This is the path of peace for people not like me."

"This is a shark. Wildest ocean creature."

"There are people who act as if they really wanted to help."

Beginnings and Endings and Mini Libraries

Yesterday, we returned from orientation with the new VMM volunteers to find the mini school library already half built! A lot has obviously been going on around here. Here is a quick update.

To start off, there is a sense of finality to everything we do these days. We leave Nicaragua on September 1. This only leaves us three more weeks to finish work, kill and eat our goat, do orientation with Alli and Kyle (the new volunteers), oversee the completion of the new library, pack up all our things, say goodbye to all our friends, and leave Nicaragua.

It's hard to believe that we've been here for almost two full years, but that became a lot more real last week when we went to Managua to greet the new volunteers, who arrived in Nicaragua on August 4. Alli and Kyle will take our place in San Nicolas and Natasha and Clare will take over for Erika and Kelsey, our fellow VMMers who work at the Batahola Cultural Center in Managua. We had a good week of orientation with them in Managua, learning about Nicaraguan history and Nicaraguan slang, showing them around Managua, and spending the weekend together at Laguna de Apoyo (one of the most beautiful places in Nicaragua).

The familiarity of this whole orientation felt like the end of a story – the kind of story that ends the same way it started. I know I overuse this technique in my own writing – closing the circle by harkening back to the beginning. But I guess I overuse it because it's a motif that really resonates with me. As we toured the Loma de Tiscapa lookout in Managua, I remembered being there two years earlier and looking out over the city. As we ate pupusas together, I remembered the conversations over pupusas that we had with the previous volunteers two years ago. Somehow, these traditions – these returnings to the beginning – make it easier for me to think about handing over the reins to the new volunteers. Of course, the fact that they are all extremely capable, amazing people helps too.

The new volunteers are all in language school in Matagalpa this week. Alli and Kyle will arrive in San Nicolas next weekend, and we'll have a good two weeks of overlap to orient them to San Nicolas before we leave.

In other news, the school will probably have a new library by the time we leave! When we received a generous donation several months ago from Davie's home church towards San Nicolas projects, we asked Idalia, the principal of the high school where we work, what we could do with the money to improve the overall education at the school. Together, we drew up a plan to build a mini library. This will be a quiet place where students can go to read or study, or where teachers can go to hold meetings or one-on-one conferences. Since the school currently has only one all-purpose teacher's lounge/ director's office/ storage space, this addition is definitely needed.

Thanks to all of our friends and family who donated so generously towards this project, we were able to get the construction going quickly. Many parents of students at the school have also seen the value in building a library and have donated towards the project as well. Construction started last week, and in the single week that we were gone, they already finished the foundation and have built it up about waist-high.

All of the workers hired to construct the library are from La Garnacha, the small community where we help with farming and tourism projects. One of the workers also happens to be the father of two of our high school students – students who walk six miles a day to get to and from school. To see this man being able to invest his work in something that will also benefit his children and their education is really cool. We feel lucky to be able to end our two years in San Nicolas by being involved in a project that is not only giving work to people in the community right now, but will also benefit the children and grandchildren of those workers, hopefully for generations to come.  

Recipe: Homemade Chocolate

Chocolate is one of my very favorite foods, right up there with ice cream and bread. So when two of our students asked me if I would help them make chocolate for a class project, I was totally game.

I had never made chocolate from scratch before, but since cacao beans are plentiful and cheap here in Nicaragua, it seemed like the ideal time to try it out. Farmers in southeastern Nicaragua began growing cacao years ago as a cash crop for export to chocolate-making hubs like Switzerland, Germany, and the US. Only more recently have a handful of Nicaraguan companies been taking advantage of the abundance of Nicaraguan cacao to produce chocolate domestically as well.

We visited one such company just outside of Matagalpa when we were first in Nicaragua almost two years ago. El Castillo de Cacao, like other Nicaraguan chocolate producers, makes a rustic chocolate that isn't as smooth and creamy as the kind you get from industrial chocolate factories. But it has its own unique appeal all the same, with a grainier texture and a strong cacao flavor. This was the kind of homemade chocolate we set out to make, with a recipe from El Castillo de Cacao itself.

El Castillo de Cacao Chocolate Recipe

(This recipe makes a lot of chocolate. Feel free to half it for a smaller batch).

Ingredients

2 pounds and 2 ounces of cacao beans

2 pounds of sugar (You could probably decrease this for a more bitter chocolate).

2 cups of milk

1.5 cups of powdered milk

1 teaspoon of salt

Nuts or dried fruit (optional)

Directions

The first step is to toast the cacao beans. We did this in a big, cast-iron pot over an open fire, but I imagine you could do it in a big pot on the stove over high heat as well. Stir the beans regularly to toast them evenly for 20 minutes. They should seem slightly burnt but not completely charred when you remove them from the flame.

Let the beans cool for a few minutes. When they are cool enough to handle, peal them by rubbing them in between your palms and letting the dried skins drop back into the pot. When they are all pealed, remove the skins by pouring them into a bowl in front of a fan, which will blow the skins away as you pour. Do this several times if necessary, pouring the beans back and forth between bowls.

Next, mill the beans. This step is fairly easy here in Nicaragua, where nearly everyone has a hand-crank mill in their homes – and, failing that, where there are industrial mills to grind corn for tortillas in every small town. If you can't find a mill, you could probably use a food processor or blender. You may need to mill the beans several times – the finer the grain, the better the chocolate will be. At this stage, the cacao oils emerge and produce a sort of thick cacao paste.

Now, in a big pot over the stove, heat up the milk and then add the sugar. When the sugar melts, add the ground cacao paste, the milk powder, and the salt. Stir it all over low heat, mixing it constantly. When it has boiled and is well mixed, remove the pot from the fire. Let it cool.

Before the chocolate has cooled completely, shape it. We rolled them into little balls and let them cool like that. You could also try making special shapes with cookie cutters, or just letting it cool in one big mass on a cookie pan. If you want to add nuts or fruit, roll them into the chocolate or just put them on top.  

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