Beans: from field to plate

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to pick beans with a family from the community. I'll be honest: I knew very little about beans before last weekend, other than that I liked eating them and that I eat them a lot here. One thing I have learned since being here in Nicaragua is that most foods involve much more work than we ever realize, and that a lot of factors go into the food business. For example, when we had crazy flooding in October, many crops died. For this reason, prices are now higher at the market for some staple vegetables.

I was excited to learn some more about beans and how they get from the field to my mouth. Here's a brief overview of the process, along with some pictures:

Step #1: Plant beans. This happens twice a year, and I haven't seen this step yet. Martha, Alejandro, and David have promised me that I can go with them when they plant in May, though...so expect an update on step 1 in May!

Step #2: Let beans grow. Pretty self-explanatory.


Step #3: Hike up to the fields where the beans are, wearing long sleeves and pants. Once you reach the field, you'll realize why you have long sleeves and pants on - in addition to the bean plants, there is a large amount of super prickly stuff intermixed with the beans. Ouch.

Step #4: Step on super prickly stuff, reach down, and pull out bean plant. Beans grow in little pods, which are on a small plant. When you pick it, you just pull the whole plant (including roots) out of the ground. You pick with one hand while you hold all your picked plants in the other hand, until you can't hold them anymore. Then you go put them in a pile to collect later.



Step #5: Pick the little pods off of the plant, and put them in something to carry them home.

Step #6: Open up the pods to get the beans out. Put the beans in one container, and the pod covers (my bean terminology is not very good. Sorry.) in another one to throw out. This step takes a deceptively long time....

Step #7: Wash and cook your beans!!

Step #8: Eat your beans!

Needless to say, I really do appreciate beans more now - and am still enjoying eating the beans I picked! It took a long time, though - we picked beans for about 1.5 hours, then it took at least 30 min to fill my backpack with beans (with 3 of us working on it), and then it took me a good 4 hours to granar the beans (take them out of the pod). I've enjoyed some beans Nicaragua-style with cheese and tortillas, and also made some pretty delicious chili for more of a taste of home.

The day before I picked beans, I watched a pig get slaughtered....and then ate part of him for lunch. That process, however, is not going to get its own blog entry, since it's kind of disturbing. However, I really do appreciate any opportunity to learn more about life here, and since many families have and slaughter pigs, it was an interesting insight. I was slightly worried it was going to make me become a vegetarian again...but never fear, I'm still eating meat!

This will probably be my last blog entry before winter break, unless I blog from the States - I head off on break on Thursday! Thanks for keeping up with me these past few months on my blog, and I wish each and every one of you a merry Christmas and a blessed New Year!

Thankgiving in Nicaragua

Despite being in a foreign country where people don't really know what Thanksgiving is, we had a great Thanksgiving here at the Manna house! Each person in the house contributed by cooking at least one dish, and our spread was impressive - the only big item missing was sweet potatoes, which sadly don't exist in this country. Our meal included turkey, stuffing, squash risotto, cornbread, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, beets, apple pie, and chocolate pie. It was all delicious, and I particularly liked that every person made something.

We converted our office table into a dinner table, and it was the first time we've all sat around one table and eaten together. Props to my housemates for some great decorating, both of the table and of ourselves...we had pilgrim and indian costumes. See the picture below to realize how awesome we are. Spending time eating together, playing a game, and watching a movie made for an amazing Thanksgiving. :-)


There are many, many things I am thankful for this year...far more than I could ever list in this blog entry. But, here's a sampling of things, big and small, which I am particularly thankful for this year.

• Communities, both here in Nicaragua and back in the US. In particular: the communities I have the privilege to serve in here, my housemates, and the young adult community at St. Clares back at home.
  
• My Spanish being good enough to communicate what I want to, most of the time.
• Bug spray. (things I am NOT thankful for: the crazy number of mosquitos)
• The fact that the weather is a bit cooler nowadays, at least in the evenings, and that it's not raining all the time.
• Hugs.
• All the freedoms and opportunities that I've been given in my life in the US: education, a well-paying job, a fair political system, safety, etc.
• Friends who constantly challenge me to grow, support me, and hold me to a higher standard.
• Public transportation that allows me to explore this beautiful country.
• Open doors and welcoming smiles.

The hard questions

If asked to summarize what I've learned in my first 4.5 months in Nicaragua, I think I'd say this: there are a lot of questions and very few clear answers.

That answer, or lack thereof, is contrary to everything that my natural personality would want to say. Let's face it: I was raised by two mathematicians, and have a degree in engineering...I have been taught that questions have concrete answers, and that there is a way to solve any problem given to me. I mention this to explain that I have struggled a lot to admit that simple sentence - "there are a lot of questions and very few clear answers" - and wish more than anything that I could have more answers. Not necessarily less questions, but definitely more answers.

Four years ago, I visited Nicaragua for the first time, as part of a group through the Catholic Student Center at my university. We spent two weeks working in a small remote village called Dos Quebradas. Dos Quebradas has 75ish residents, no electricity or running water, and a one-room schoolhouse. They make a living selling firewood and farming beans and corn on the hills around the village. I struggled a lot during that trip to understand what we could provide to Dos Quebradas that they would really want or need. Was an American understanding of basic necessities the same as theirs? Was the school we were repairing really the best thing we could give them? Is there anything wrong with the poverty they live in if they're happy and mostly-healthy? What does development look like for Dos Quebradas?

I have been faced with similar questions in my work in La Chureca and Cedro Galan. What is the lasting effect of our child sponsorship program? Is there a way we could help Chureca more? How can a mother in our program afford to buy enough alcohol and cigarettes to be drunk and smoking when we see her, but not to feed her family? Do the residents of La Chureca really want to move out of Chureca, like the Spanish government is trying to help them do? How can the moms and kids living in a trash dump still be smiling most of the time? Are we having any long-term impact?

Are English classes really what will help the residents of Cedro Galan and Chiquilistagua? Is me being here for a year really helpful to the people I work with and get to know? How can I possibly transition from this lifestyle back to my eight-to-five job at NASA without feeling like I'm being untrue to myself or the people I'm serving this year? Is my lifestyle here in solidarity with the community members, or am I living too extravagantly? What does success mean here?

I have always connected with music, and the album of the past year of my life has been Beauty Will Rise by Steven Curtis Chapman. He wrote this album after the unexpected and tragic death of his young daughter, and the songs show both his struggles and his faith, woven intricately together. One song is called Questions, and the lyrics include a lot of the hard questions that he had for God at that time. The chorus goes like this: And if you know my heart / The way that I believe you do / You know that I believe in You / Still I have these questions. It brings me comfort to remember that questions and faith are not opposite - I can have all the questions above, and so many more, and yet not doubt that there are answers, even if they haven't been revealed to me.

On Friday, I had the chance to go back to Dos Quebradas, for the first time in almost 4 years. Very little has changed. My favorite kid is in the same grade he was in four years ago and still not wearing shoes, and yet his smile still has the ability to truly light up the world. People still live in their mud houses, jump in the back of the truck to get a ride to town to sell firewood, and get excited when presented with a jump rope or a frisbee. One can ask if our work there really did anything helpful...but then little Henry, who was 5 when we were there and 9 now, asks if we can play duck duck goose like we did last time I was there. And in that moment, the questions don't really matter anymore, and I realize there's more to life than finding answers to all those questions. Maybe what really matters more than any of those answers is a quick game of duck duck goose.

Dos Quebradas, January 2008

Election Day

Today is election day here in Nicaragua, and as Nicaraguans head to the polls to vote, I want to try and give you a bit of an insight into Nicaraguan politics to help you understand both the importance of this election and the fragile state of democracy here.

To have any hope of understanding the current political situation, it's worth taking a minute to look at the past. Last week, I finished an incredibly well-written book about Nicaraguan politics called Blood of Brothers, written by former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer about Nicarguan history and the war in the 1980s and 1990s. I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the history of this little country, and will personally buy you a copy if it's not at your local library and you want to read it (yes, I think it's that important to understand more of the history of Nicaragua and Central America). But here's your one paragraph summary: after a 43 year dictatorship by the Somoza family, they were overthrown in 1979 by a political group called the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas were named after a man named Sandino who, in the 1930s, launched a guerilla war against the pro-U.S. government. After the Sandinistas took power, they themselves started to resemble a dictatorship, and many of the things they had fought against (censorship of the press, large human rights violations, etc.) were still occurring. So the contras (literally meaning "against") began to form an army, mostly based in Honduras, to have a second revolution. This led to a long and violent war - many of the contras were from Somoza's National Guard, and were incredibly brutal. The contras were illegally supported by the Reagan administration (many of you may remember the Iran-contra affair, where money from weapons sold to Iran went to help the contras here in Nicaragua). A peace agreement was finally reached in the 80s, and Nicaragua has been a democracy ever since, with multiple different political parties holding power during the past 30 years.

Daniel Ortega, the current president, was a big-shot in the FSLN (Sandinista party) during the revolution, and was president in the 1980s before losing power in a 1990 election. He then ran and lost in every election, until the 2006 election where he won again after, through a pact with then-president Arnoldo Aleman and his political party, changing the Constitution to allow a candidate to win with only 35% of the vote. The Constitution forbids a president from running again while in office, so Ortega shouldn't be running in this election. However, the Supreme Court (controlled by the FSLN party) ruled that it was a violation of Ortega's human rights not to allow him to run again, and changed the Constitution to allow him to do so. The other two candidates in the election are Fabio Gadea, a 79 year old from the radio industry, and Arnoldo Aleman, another former president who was EXTREMELY corrupt during his presidency in the 1990s. It's widely belived that Aleman is running as a way to thank Ortega for getting him out of arrest (for embezzlement of funds during his presidency), and is splitting the opposition vote to help Ortega win.

Still with me? That was a lot of information in two paragraphs, but I think it's important to understand the background. My point in telling you all of that was to make it clear that even though this election is "free" and "democratic", there's obviously been a lot of sketchy events to get us to this point. There have also been accusations of the FSLN-controlled voting authority expediting voter applications for Sandinistas and not having time to give IDs to the opposition. Ortega held 58% of the vote in the last poll, with Gadea having 15% and Aleman having 3%. This is not unexpected given that Ortega has used lots of money (mostly from his buddy Hugo Chavez in Venezuela) to have a HUGE campaign, and limited the campaigns of his opposition. He's also started handing out a lot more food, generally being more helpful, and doing things like improving roads in the past few months before the election. He also refused international observance of the election until very recently, meaning that all of the sketchy things were done before any observers were allowed to be here.

All signs point towards Ortega being reelected today, and many people who are a lot smarter than me believe this could be the beginning of the next dictatorship here in Nicaragua, under the guise of a fragile democracy which may not survive this election or another term of Ortega's leadership. If nothing else, I ask you to pray for wisdom for the Nicaraguans voting today, as well as for the leadership they elect.

In lighter news, the FSLN party was more or less sued for copyright infringement since their main campaign song is a rewritten version of "Stand by Me"...check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRixNma7loM&feature=player_embedded

Lastly, if you'd like to read more, here are some interesting articles from the Economist and the Washington Post:
http://www.economist.com/node/21536629
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-nicaragua-matters-to-the-united-states/2011/11/03/gIQACFOvjM_story.html?wprss=rss_opinions
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/guatemala-nicaragua-go-to-the-polls/2011/11/05/gIQAPZs1pM_story.html

Ve, que bonito. Ve, que precioso.

(I usually keep my personal hand-written journal completely separate from my blog, but I'd like to share something I wrote on my travels this past weekend, to a beautiful nature reserve called Tisey. This is more or less exactly what I wrote in my journal, which was written on Saturday night.)

"Ve, que bonito. Ve, que precioso." "See, how beautiful. See, how precious."
I couldn't even count how many times Alberto Gutierrez, the old sculptor here in Tisey who has carved 40+ meters of rock on the side of a cliff, said that to me today during our one-hour visit. He said it about everything - the incredible view of the valleys and mountains of northern Nicaragua, the 400 varieties of orchids that grow here, about other plants, even about his own work. And he was right - it was all so, so beautiful. The view stretched to Honduras and the mountains and plains between here and there - one day full of war and violence, but now full of more peace than I've found in a while. Alberto's carvings are, in his words, a representation of the culture of all of Nicaragua. How beautiful, how precious that culture is.

Alberto Gutierrez with part of his mural

As I walked with Alberto, he showed and gave me many things. He gave me an explanation of the symbology of his work, he gave me stories of his life, he gave me a bunch of limon dulce (a citrus fruit) and an orange, which he used a long stick to knock down from the tree and then hiked down a hill to retrieve it and peel it with his machete before giving it to me. He gave me a handmade bracelet and some flowers. The entire time we spent together, all he did was serve. He told me about how he dreamed of making this mural when he was young, and how lucky he is to be able to do it. He told me of all the things he hopes to carve in the future, "if it's in God's plan too." When we were finished, he walked me out to the entrance of the path and made sure I knew how to get to where I planned to go next. He gave me a better understanding of service: giving time, material goods, and knowledge to a random stranger who visits unannounced.

More of Alberto's mural

The most important thing that Alberto gave me today, though, was a new outlook on every person, thing, and experience I come in contact with. All day, his simple exclamation of "Ve, que bonito. Ve, que precioso." has been repeating in my head. Given it's been ten hours and it's still repeating, I figured it was worth reflecting on some more. So as I lay on my bed and just opened myself up to the words, I came to the realization that they're exactly what God says when he looks at any one of us. God looks at me, no matter how close or far I make myself from Him, and says, "See how beautiful you are. See how precious you are." As I sit in my cabin and let that simple yet profoundly important message sink in, I am crying. I find it easy to forget how beautiful and precious I am to God, and today's reminder from an eighty-something year old eccentric Nicaraguan artist in the middle of a nature reserve was something I needed.

God says the same thing to each dirty child I see in Chureca, to the 12 year old troublemaker who likes to make our lives hard in Cedro Galan, to every unborn child, to every person who may not believe that they are beautiful and precious, and to every person who has never heard that message before. And He says it to and about you: "See how beautiful you are. See how precious you are." Will you let yourself believe it, maybe even for the first time?

Alberto kept telling me to take pictures so I could show his work and the landscape's beauty to my family and friends. While I can easily share those, I really hope the main thing I share will be his message: "Ve, que bonito. Ve, que precioso." It is a message the whole world needs to hear.

Tisey, Nicaragua

I'm right where I'm supposed to be

I feel like a recurring theme in my blog posts is my need and desire to be present to where I am and what I'm doing. In past entries, I've focused on the need to be present in Nicaragua instead of being mentally in Houston, but I think that my biggest obstacle to presence isn't location. Instead, I think it's the fact that I constantly overanalyze everything and try to think 10 steps ahead of where I am. I like to know what's coming next and be looking forward to it - and don't get me wrong, I love the fact that I'm a planner and that is never going to change about me. But sometimes, I need to just recognize the beauty in the present time instead of preparing for beauty in the future.

I have moments where this is easier for me than others. This past weekend, for some reason, I just soaked in the beauty that was presented to me in small moments throughout very normal experiences. On Friday, I went over to a family's house to help them with some English, and ended up staying for 2.5 hours and just chatting. One of their extended family members who was there asked me a ton of questions about spaceflight and orbital mechanics, and things I hadn't really had a reason to think about in a long time. For the record, even with a very good grasp on orbital mechanics, it's really hard to explain it in Spanish!

Saturday, I took a bus to one of the malls in Managua to buy more notebooks for our kids English class. I really enjoy the buses here, even though they are fairly run down and always about 3 times as crowded as they probably should be. For me, the buses are a great way to see a cross-section of life here in Nicaragua. There's always such a variety of people, and on the ride across the city, it's impossible not to learn a little bit more about what life is really like. On my way back, I decided to get off at the community and go hang out with community members for a while. As I walked from the main road back to my friend Dayana's house, I passed a birthday birthday for an 8-year-old, where 10-15 kids were having fun with music and a pinata. After stopping to talk to them for a while, their smiles and laughs were contagious. After sitting and visiting with Dayana and her mom Lorena, I walked back out to the road to grab a ride home. On the way, another 8 year old from my English class, Axel, stopped me to ask me some questions and to ask me to say hi to my housemates for him. As I walked down a dirt road in the middle of a small community in Nicaragua, and Axel shouted another question down at me from halfway down the road, I felt an overwhelming sense of being in the right place. I can't exactly explain why - maybe it was how much time I'd spent in the community on Friday and Saturday, or maybe it was because the weather was nice for the first time in a while, or maybe it was because, for just a moment, I wasn't thinking about what would come next.

Sunday morning, I left the house at 6:15am to walk to church for 7am Mass. It was a beautiful morning, and the temperature was perfect. Besides the rooster who crowed right into my ear as I walked past (thanks, rooster, but I promise I was awake), it was a peaceful walk and a good time to reflect. I ended up walking the last little bit with one of the men who plays music at Mass each week, and it was nice to get to chat with him. I had never actually met him before, and yet he was extremely friendly and welcoming as we walked together. It was another reminder of how amazing the community I have the priviledge to work with is.

The best way that I can say "thank you" for the gift of being here is to live each day in the present and to recognize those small blessings which are EVERYWHERE each day. As important as it is to have a long-term plan, it's equally important to actually LIVE the plan for me in each day and in each moment - and recognize, even when it's not always clear, that I really am exactly where I'm supposed to be for this moment of God's plan for me.

Welcome to wherever you are,
this is your life, you made it this far.
Welcome, you gotta believe
that right here right now, you're exactly where you're supposed to be.
- Bon Jovi

Rain, rain, go away...

It hasn't stopped raining here for more than a couple hours since Tuesday. I really wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not. I feel like this is the first time that rain has become a MAJOR inconvenience for me in my life. Life here is SO much more dependent on the weather, just due to doing more things outdoors and not having great infrastructure to handle heavy downpours. A few of the reasons why the rain has made daily life a bit harder this week...

- As I think I've mentioned before, the road which leads into where we teach in Cedro Galan is a dirt road which has a tendency to become a river when it rains a lot. On Tuesday morning when we drove by, it was WAY more of a complete river than we had ever seen it - we could literally see no road. I didn't capture a good picture then, so it had drained for a few hours before I took this one, but you can still get the idea. At multiple points throughout the week, it was a fully flowing river with no visible land. Even when land was visible, it was REALLY slippy and difficult to walk down without slipping. We weren't able to have classes Tuesday since no one would be able to get down the road to El Farito.


- The power system here has a lot more power outages than at home, but most are short-lived. With all the rain, we had some long power outages on Thursday and Friday. We weren't able to have classes on Thursday afternoon/evening due to having no power. If you can tell from the theme, it's been a slow week....it's frustratingly hard to have classes here with the weather going crazy.

- Our two poor dogs do NOT like the rain. They have become experts at sneaking into the house if we leave the gate even a little bit open, and we've had to physically push them out of the house multiple times this week. Cola spent a lot of the week standing at the door whining at us (which he is doing as I type this...), and when he and Sydney did get in, they beelined for the bunk room, where our couches are currently living, and made themselves at home.



- I seriously don't own anything dry anymore. The moisture hanging around means everything's wet, even things that never started out wet. I tried to find a laundromat that would also dry clothing, since my clothes were all dirty and wet and i wanted them clean and dry. Turns out that those are hard to find. So, I just used our washer at home, and hung clothes up to dry. I'm hoping they're dry in under 72 hours, but who knows.

In fun news, I took an overnight trip to Granada, a colonial city about an hour south of Managua. It was nice to get away for a night, be a tourist, eat some delicious food, and enjoy some more of Nicaragua's beauty. I also was able to go to adoration and Mass at the Cathedral in town, which was an unexpected treat!! All in all, it was a great trip. I'd have better pictures if it hadn't been raining the whole time....but here are a couple anyways.



Here's hoping for less rain soon! I did see the sun for a few minutes this morning....

Quarterly Review

Last weekend, we had the opportunity to take a few days, get out of the Manna house, and reflect on the past 3 months. It is crazy how quickly the past three months have passed - I still have some days where I feel like I just arrived! Particularly in the past few weeks, I have been very, very busy, and sometimes it's easy to miss the bigger picture when I am so busy with the details. Having a few days to relax as a group, reflect on where we've been and what we've accomplished, and discuss what our goals are for the next few months was both beneficial and enjoyable.

As a group, we made a list of our successes and the things that we are most proud of from the last couple months, and I'd like to share a few of them with you:

• Community relationships - it has been a huge blessing to get the chance to connect with the families who live in Cedro Galan, Chiquilistagua, and La Chureca. I have really enjoyed just having the opportunity to spend time with them, learn more about their daily life, and understand this country and these communities better. I don't have as much time to do this as I wish, but I really enjoy the time I do spend in the community.
• Good transition and continued high attendance in programs - due to the turnover with Manna PDs each year, it's sometimes difficult to have continuity in programs and to maintain attendance as things change. Many people have remarked that we have done a good job picking up where last year's PDs left off and continuing forward with each program. It has been great to see our program attendance remain high, and in some programs even increase.
• Our first milk day without the old PDs, the day where we hand out food for the month to our child sponsorship kiddos, went off incredibly smoothly. A lot of this had to do with two qualities which kept coming up again and again as successes: everyone's ability to be proactive and to be flexible. A combination of these two is definitely needed here - as a group, we've been able to do quite a bit due to everyone being proactive, and have a clean house, a restructured English program, and some new partnerships to show for it. However, as with everything here in Nicaragua, nothing ever goes exactly as planned, and flexibility is key. :)

There's many more, but those are definitely a few of the highlights for me from the past few months.

We also took the opportunity to make some goals for the next few months. They ranged from small things, like trying every flavor of ice cream at the store next to Farito and keeping the house clean, to bigger goals like reaching out to more families in the communities, saying thank you more often, and planning ahead more for our programs. I hope that, in a few more months when we have our second retreat, we're able to look back on these goals and count them as our successes.

I also took the time to reflect and make some personal goals for myself, which I'm still working on follow-through for. My main goal for myself for the next few months is to stay present in Nicaragua and make sure I'm mentally here all the time. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, it's been a balancing act to determine how much to keep in touch with friends from home. It continues to be a balancing act, and is easier some days than others. This past week, I have done a pretty good job of being present here regardless of things happening at home - probably due to being so busy that I didn't have time to think about home much even if I wanted to. As the next few months pass, I hope to fall into a natural rhythm of continuing friendships at home, but also deepening relationships here and making sure that my focus stays here in Nicaragua with me.

Here are a few pictures from the retreat - a group dinner at a real table (which we are lacking in our house), and a Pacific ocean sunset.

Getting ready for a delicious meal of lasagna

I had some fun playing with photography on the beach - the sunset was gorgeous!

A (slighty crazy) Wednesday in the Life

Hello all! First of all, thanks for your support of Manna in the Chase Community Giving competition. We didn't end up winning, but we got an incredible number of votes given how small the organization is. I appreciate your support, as well as your tolerance of my spamming. Now that that's done, we'll go back to normally scheduled blog posts!

I still plan to write a blog about the group retreat we had last week, but today was such a ridiculous day that I feel like it merits a day-in-the-life post. While life here does tend to be crazy in general, this happened to be a particularly crazy Wednesday, so don't consider this a typical day by any means. I figure it's fun to share about the ridiculousness of Nica life as well sometimes!

7:00am: Wake up and eat some delicious French Toast while getting some papers ready for the day and checking in on e-mail (which I'm WAY behind on - sorry if I owe you an e-mail!) Also finish hand-writing all our milk day forms, since I realized last night that our printer was out of ink.
8:00am: Do some final Facebook spamming for Chase Community Giving competition.
8:10am: Pack up the car. It's milk day, one of the days where we pass out milk, cereal/oatmeal/beans, and vitamins to the kiddos in our Child Sponsorship program.
8:20am: Leave the house to drive to Chureca. On the way, pick up the nurse who works with us, who is waiting on the side of the road with 100+ lb of cereal.
8:50am: Arrive at Chureca. We can't drive in the front entrance today for some reason, which we normally do for milk days. So, we park at the back entrance, and wait for the father of a former Child Sponsorship kiddo, who has agreed to meet us with his horse and buggy to carry our stuff in down a path which isn't drivable with a car. Between the hand-written milk day forms and the horse and buggy entrance, we seem to have regressed technologically as far as milk days go.
9:05am: Horse and buggy arrive and we load up all our stuff and then, after a short chat with a passing policeman who seems kind of confused by us, walk behind the horse and buggy to the clinic.

9:15am: Arrive at clinic, set up for milk day, get jumped on by Esteven and later by Douglas, two of my favorite child sponsorship kids. Look how cute Esteven is...he's also a little monkey and loves to climb on us all the time.

10:30ish: About halfway through milk day, realize that there had been a misunderstanding between me and the nurse who works with us, likely due to my far-from-perfect Spanish ability. This led to me giving some families too much food...so we had to retrieve some. Slightly awkward. Note to self: ask for clarification a lot of times to make sure Spanish isn't a failure in the future.
11:00ish: Walk out of Chureca, stop by the ink store to refill our printer cartridge (which doesn't work for some reason....boo), and stop by the grocery store to buy some snacks for a kid's English pool party!
12:00pm: Arrive home and eat lunch while working on some finance stuff and lesson planning for my math and literacy classes.
1:15pm: Head out for math and literacy, with two copies of my worksheets since I've only had two students for the past couple weeks. Drive to the place we park our car during programs, and then walk the 1km to El Farito for class.
1:30pm: Math and literacy starts. Our attendance has doubled for some reason today, and we had 3 less PDs to run the program than usual...so we improvised! I will say that one skill that I'm getting very good at here is reacting to changes on-the-fly, since things rarely go as planned in Nica. I worked on letters/the alphabet with one of the preschool students, and simple words with a low-level first grader. Then, during math, I had four students instead of my normal two, so I very quickly made two more worksheets, and I think they learned at least SOMETHING about inequalities with fractions!
3:00pm: Leave math and literacy as soon as it ends to walk back to the car, and drive to pick up 16 kids and 3 adults to come to a pool party - an attendance prize for one of our kid's English classes. It was our class with our youngest students, so we stuck to the shallow end of the pool. They were pretty cute!

4:40pm: Herd all the kiddos back into the car to drive them home and make two trips to get all of our teen English students to class. A bunch of our kids decided to help me out by walking partway so I didn't have to return as far on my 2nd trip. Have I mentioned that I LOVE our teen English students?
5pm: Help out with teen English. I don't actually teach this class, just help with classroom control, attendance, sharpening pencils, etc - basically whatever I can do to help it run smoothly for Sam and Maggie. I LOVE this class and it's usually a highlight of my Mondays and Wednesdays. :)
6pm: Class ends, and I do two trips to drive students and fellow PDs home before heading to El Farito for an extra beginner's English class Sam and I are teaching. We weren't able to have class yesterday due to no electricity and our students being unable to read their papers without light, but we have a placement exam tomorrow and they wanted a review day. About 20-25 students show up to a weirdly-scheduled class to review - I was so excited they all came! And, on the whole, they knew most of what we were reviewing, which is good news.
7pm: Leave El Farito, pick up some friends who are coming to meet with us about the nonprofit they run, and head home.
7:20pm: Eat some dinner while meeting with Fabricio, Norman, and Gabe about the work that they do with preschools in the area. They are doing some great things and it was a lot of fun to learn more about what they do!
8:30pm: Realize I've been working for 12 hours straight and am exhausted - time to be unproductive!
9pm: Almost fall asleep while drinking coffee sitting at the table in the office. Ooooops.
9:15pm: Catch up with a few friends from home online, and write this blog.

As crazy as the day was, I was incredibly joyful for most of it, even when exhausted. I always prefer being too busy to not busy enough, and having so much to do here helps me stay present. I also just have to laugh at the randomness of life here sometimes - it definitely keeps me on my toes!

Lastly, I mentioned earlier how we don't take many pictures of La Chureca, since we want to build trust with the families and not be "slum tourists" (which there are a ridiculous number of - groups of Americans who come into Chureca with police escorts and walk around and take pictures from their cushy air conditioned bus). However, I do want to share Chureca with you, and today I snapped a picture of the trash workers from a distance as we walked in. As new trash is dumped, many of the people who live in Chureca dig through it to find recyclables or things they can sell. Many, many people work in the trash each day, as vultures circle around overhead. As you'll see, the view is actually beautiful around Chureca, other than the piles of trash. Hopefully this will help start to paint a picture for you in your head, even though it still doesn't show you anything about the homes or lifestyles of our families - that will come in time. Click on the picture (and any other picture I post) to see a bigger version - I know this one is super small here, but click and then you'll be able to check it out!



Although we didn't win the Chase competition this week, it made me realize how large Manna's support system is, and how large my personal support system is. To each of you, thank you so much for your support - whether it be prayers, financial support, encouraging words, or just a quick e-mail to say hi. I have been incredibly blessed by each of you, and I only hope that I can also be a blessing in your life.

Five more days to vote!

If you haven't already taken 30 seconds to help Manna Project win $1 million, please go to http://www.facebook.com/ChaseCommunityGiving?sk=app_123284047772276 and do it now!! Then, tell all your friends about it....we're in third place now, so need a big push to move up!

Our team here in Nicaragua had our first retreat these past 2 days, and it was a great time to get away, refocus, and look back on what we've accomplished in our first two months and what we hope to accomplish in the future. It is quite amazing, to say the least, to think about everything that has happened since arriving! The money we could win from the Chase competition would allow us to continue doing what we do, and to do even more - we'd have more resources to provide for our students, more ability to provide loans for our microfinancing, and the chance to expand our work in La Chureca - among many other things.

Please help us do this and so much more by voting and sharing the link with your friends! I appreciate your help!

Help Manna win $1 milllion!!!

I have some very exciting news to share! Two year ago, Manna Project participated in the Chase Community Giving competition, and won $25,000. This year, we’ve been invited to participate again, and we have the chance to win up to $1 million!! We are extremely grateful for the chance to compete, and excited about all the ways that the money could help the communities we work with in Nicaragua, Ecuador and Guatemala. Here in Nicaragua, the money would allow us to provide more financial support to the clinic in La Chureca, more microfinance loans to start-up businesses in Cedro Galan, and much more.

We need your help to win! Do you have a Facebook account? The competition takes place on Facebook, and voting starts today and goes for a week – can you take 30 seconds to help us? All you have to do is go to this link and cast a vote for Manna Project under the "youth developers" tab. If you have 30 more seconds to spare, can you help us even more and send this information to your contacts to encourage them to vote, as well?

Thank you again for all your support of my work here in Nicaragua and of Manna Project in general. I am incredibly appreciative, and feel blessed to have the opportunity to be here in Nicaragua for the year. I truly believe in the work Manna Project is doing here, and am excited about the additional possibilities we would have with this additional funding. Thanks for your vote, and please ask your friends to vote too! Let me know if you have any questions.

So close, but so far

First of all, I owe you all an apology for not posting in over two weeks. It's amazing how quickly I get busy here, and I am starting to make a better effort to schedule my time better - let's hope this leads to more blog posts and quicker e-mail response times!

A lot has happened in the past two weeks, and I may double up on blog entries this weekend to catch you all up, but the biggest occurence in my life was a 4.5 day trip back to Houston last week! For those of you who don't know, one of the major things I did during my two years in Houston was help run the high school youth ministry program at my church, which consisted of general high school youth ministry and Confirmation preparation. Even before getting to Nicaragua, I had decided that I was going to fly home to be there for my kids' Confirmation, which was September 17. As luck would have it, the 14th-16th of September is a big Nicaraguan holiday, so I was able to fly home on Wednesday and not miss any days of work here! It was an extra blessing to have a few more days to spend with friends and family in Houston.

I won't lie - I was VERY ready for a short break and some time away from the ins and outs of daily life here. The break was well-timed, I think - I had been in Nicaragua long enough to be settled and feel at home here, and I was ready for a few days away from rice and beans, cold showers with no shower heads, and communal living. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE life here, and most days don't mind any of the things I just listed, but a break was good for my sanity.

The flight from Managua to Houston is a direct, 3 hour flight - a fact that many people were very surprised by. It's no longer than it was for me to fly from Houston home to see my parents in Michigan. In some ways, I am so close to Houston and to the USA - after all, I can leave Managua in the early morning and be in Houston by noon. I can get on a computer and chat with or e-mail a friend in the USA at almost any time I want (as long as the internet is cooperating), and I can pick up my phone and call someone in the US whenever. I can get on Facebook and feel fairly caught up on people lives via posts and pictures, or read other friend's blogs and know what's going on with them. The world is so connected that, in many ways, I'm always so close.

Once I arrived in Houston, though, it was also clear that my life in Nicaragua is so far from my life in Houston. In some ways, the fact that it's a quick three hour flight made it more difficult emotionally to deal with the fact that I had literally gone from a dump to a fairly upper-class Houston suburb within 24 hours. The first day or so that I was home, I was overwhelmed by almost everything around me, whether it be people or material things or infrastructure. It was a very interesting feeling to feel like I was "back home" in many ways, but also to recognize that Houston isn't my home for this year, and isn't supposed to be my home for this year - day-to-day life there is so far from day-to-day life for me right now. I struggled to put my thoughts and feelings into words, even with the people I'm closest to, which was probably equally frustrating for me and for them.

I stopped feeling as overwhelmed once I has been home for a day or two (and had gotten some more sleep), and the visit turned out to be a huge blessing for me. It was amazing to have a chance to reconnect with friends who I had only talked to via internet and a tiny bit on the phone for two months - even when I was struggling to express myself in words, there's something about being in the same place as someone which transcends words. I also did have some great conversations, and I was challenged in different ways than I am usually am here in Nicaragua. Daily life here challenges me in ways that I'm definitely not challenged in the USA, but I hadn't been challenged spiritually by anyone in quite a while. It's definitely been a transition for me to go from a super strong Catholic community in Houston to not having that community around here, and the lack of community makes it much easier to get sloppy about prayer and spiritual life in general. I had the chance to go to a newly formed women's group with friends, a prayer brunch, and daily mass. Having a few days to recharge and refocus was definitely beneficial to me, and I've implemented some changes in what my prayer life looks like here to help keep that momentum going. In doing that, I've made some other changes as well - scheduling in more time for myself, whether it be to read a book or just hang out with a housemate; playing my guitar more; sleeping 8 hours a night. Even just in this first week of my new "schedule", I've seen the difference it has made for my happiness and energy level.

I am happily back in Nicaragua after my short trip home, and coming back here felt like home as well. I am where I'm meant to be - I see that more clearly now after my trip home than I did before. And where I'm meant to be, though it may sometimes seem so far, can also be so close - the trick is finding the balance between the two.

Things that made me smile this week

One thing that I am loving about life here is that, even though I have a routine, it's much more varied that my 7:30am-4pm work routine in the States. It's not only that I have more varied tasks to do here - it's also that life here is just more spontaneous, more random, and less planned. This week, I started making a list of some of the things that made me smile throughout the week, and hopefully something on my list can make you smile today too. :)

• Marcos (7-ish years old) making car noises as he ran from the classroom to the bathroom during his English class. Don't worry, the noises included a shift once he got too fast for his first gear.
• 14 year old Jorge randomly showing up at our house since he left his backpack in our car after class. We're still not 100% sure how he knows where we live...
• Randomly running into our of our teen English students, Francisco, at the market on my way to catch a bus, and him actually being excited to see us.
• An amazing mother helping her three year old daughter start learning English, by attending class with her and practicing outside of class as well.
• Going to Mass with a bunch of the community members on Sunday at a newly-discovered (by me) Catholic church. I had missed knowing people at Mass...enough to wake up early and go to a 7am Mass!
• Randomly running into the one other American I know who lives near Managua at the mall. Apparently Nica is a smaller country than I realized. :)
• Having a ridiculous 20 minute conversation with 5 of our teen English girls before class. I had almost forgotten how silly 8th/9th grade girls are...don't worry, I've been reminded now. One of the best parts of the conversation:
  Teen: Where's your boyfriend?
  Me: I don't have one.
  Teen: Oh, okay. I have three....one here, and two at school.
  
• Hearing Lesther, a two year old in our child sponsorship program in La Chureca, laugh for the first time.
• Douglas' (another one of our child sponsorship kiddos) laugh as I catch him and spin him around.
• Good conversations with my fellow PDs - which I've had many of the past two weeks, and am extremely grateful for.
• Jose Raul, one of my math students, understanding equivalent fractions!
• Delicious ice cream that costs 1 cordoba (slightly less than $0.05)
• Using the emergency exit on a bus (most of the buses here are old school buses from the US) as a legitimate way to exit when the bus reaches my stop.
• Passionfruit and mamones, two of my favorite fruits here.
  
• E-mails/phone calls with friends from home.
• A feeling of peace, most of the time. :-)
  

A Thursday in the Life

Last Thursday, I was planning on writing a day-in-the-life blog post about my day, since it had been fairly ridiculous (and therefore completely normal for a day in Nicaragua). As you may recall from my last blog post, however, Thursday ended with our dog almost dying, and that was just a whole new level of ridiculous and thwarted my blog post plans. But alas, Thursdays seem to be good days around here, so I'm going to try it again: a day in my life.

7:15AM: Wake up (before my alarm?? That's a new one.) Walk out of my bedroom into the office to finish making a worksheet for my adult English class - past tense review, and some new vocabulary.
7:45AM: Fight with the copier (really, copier, two paper jams within 20 copies?) to copy my worksheets for my English class.
8:00AM: Eat deliciously unhealthy French toast that our cook, Elena, made for breakfast. We have a cook Monday through Thursday to allow us to focus on programs during our four busy days of the week. She's awesome and takes fantastic care of us.
8:15AM: Take care of some logistics for our child sponsorship program - we have 5 new children who will be entering the program this month, which is exciting!! Two of them are younger siblings of kids who just graduated from the program, and the other three are new families to our program. I'm very excited that we can expand our reach in Chureca slightly.

9:00AM: Pile into our micro (15 passenger van) to head to Chureca. Recently, instead of driving into the dump, we've been parking near the back entrance and walking in - less wear and tear on the micro, and less stress for whoever is driving.
9:45AM: Once we arrived at the clinic in Chureca, I checked in with Esmo, the Nicaraguan nurse who works with us, about the new kids who will be entering the program. Then Carrie, Maggie, and I walked around to visit families and check in with them. We often have mothers from the program who will walk around with us, and yesterday Laura, the mother of the boy I sponsor, was walking around with us. I really enjoyed getting the chance to talk to her, and learn more about Alfredo and his family. We also had some good visits with families in the program. When we first started walking around Chureca and visiting, I was doubting how effective it was, but as we've started to get to know the mothers better, I'm recognizing the value in it.
11:00AM: Head back to the house. On the way, pass a dog carrying a full zucchini in its mouth - clearly the dog was the winner of the day.
11:40AM: Arrive back at house, eat a quick lunch, and get ready for the afternoon. Elena had made a cake as well! When asked what the cake was for (thinking that there was perhaps a special occasion, since we don't often have cakes), she responded that the cake was for eating. Duh, I don't know why we didn't think of that one ourselves.

12:15PM: Jump back into the micro, drive down the road, and then walk down the dirt road to El Farito, where we help run a feeding program on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was actually a pretty normal, low-stress Comedor day today - almost all the kids who signed up to help clean actually stayed to clean, no one threw any toothbrushes on the ground, and I didn't have to tell people to be outside the gate tooooo many times. Impressively normal, since Comedor has the potential to be quite a headache if the kids are in crazy moods.
1:15PM: Get handed an "ice cream" (small frozen deliciousness which is more like a popsicle than an ice cream) by one of the cutest five year olds ever. The store right next to El Farito sells these ice creams, which come in small plastic baggies and you bite a hole in the bag to eat the ice cream. The one Brandon gave me was a flavor I had never had before, but it was pretty delicious. My favorite ice cream flavor is passion fruit, but that one hasn't been around in a few days - there are plenty of delicious options though!
1:30PM: Time for kid's English! Christin and I let the kids back inside the gate to Farito, and start passing out the kids' notebooks and pencils. All of a sudden, Farito is REALLY full. We had 54 kids come to our English class!! We're not quite sure where they all came from, and it made for a bit of a crazy class, but I found it pretty fun actually. I also found it exciting that all of them wanted to come to class! By the time class is over at 2:30, my throat is slightly sore from shouting to get 54 kids to be quiet. Also, kids here LOVE to steal pencils, particularly those with erasers. I'm not quite sure what the appeal is, but it's quite annoying.

2:30PM: Clean up from English, take a few minutes to sit and enjoy silence, and walk back to the car to head home with Carrie to prep for the rest of the day. On the drive home, we realized that the gate to the neighborhood, which had been broken off for the past two days, was back in place! Then we had to wait for the guard to open the neighborhood gate since he was taking a bathroom break (outside in the bushes right near the gate)....slightly awkward.
3:00PM: Try to catch up on e-mails and Facebook messages - I seem to get behind on those very easily nowadays, but catch up at least once a week. Sorry to anyone who has been waiting on a response from me...I'm working on it, I promise!
3:40 PM: Head back to Farito to get ready for women's exercise. I don't teach women's exercise, but I help out by playing with kids while their moms attend the class. At yesterday's class, I also helped out by measuring the height of all of the women for a BMI calculation. After that, I played with Duplos with some pretty cute three year olds, chatted with one of my kids English students, and just hung out with the kids. Three of the girls, who are around 6, danced along with the women as they did Zumba to a variety of popular Latin American music - adorable and hilarious at the same time. :)
5:00 PM: Re-arrange the tables in Farito again so that they're ready for my adult English class.
5:30 PM: Sam and I co-teach adult beginner's English. We reviewed past tense, introduced some new vocabulary, and did a worksheet incorporating both of those things. While Sam was teaching the vocabulary, I confiscated a note from some of the teenagers in the class - there seems to be a bit of a love triangle going on at one of the tables of my English class. Also, it was the second note I confiscated this week, and both were passed when I was literally within 3 feet of the person passing it. Solid work, students, solid work.

6:30PM: Walk back down the now-dark dirt road to the car and head home. Eat some dinner, do some dishes, and then head up to the roof to play guitar and hang out with Dayana, one of my friends here who lives in the community. I often will go to advanced English class in the evening to help out, but about 5 PDs went last night so I took the night off. It was nice to just spend the evening relaxing!
10:00PM: Drive Dayana home, and come back to the house and hang out and talk with people for the evening. One of the great things about working with Manna is that all 9 of us PDs live together, and I have really enjoyed getting to know everybody in the group and spending time hanging out with them. During the week we all get busy and don't have a ton of time to just sit around, but it's great to find time to do that on Thursdays or on the weekend.
12:00AM: Realize it's definitely past my bedtime and I'm falling asleep sitting up, and head to bed.

In writing this, I have realized that it's actually impossible to express some of the ridiculousness of life here. It's often not that any one ridiculous things happens, it's just a bunch of small things throughout the day which keep life interesting, enjoyable, and hilarious. Maybe throughout the year I'll get better at explaining them - but for now, I hope this gave you at least a little glimpse into what I do here on a "normal" day. My Tuesdays and Thursdays look pretty similar - Mondays and Wednesdays are a separate beast. I'll do a day-in-the-life for Monday or Wednesday next week, and then between the two, you'll have a good feel of my work week here!

The dog and the toad

I have always found that God uses unlikely avenues to teach me important lessons, and the past 24 hours have been another reminder of that for me. When I came to Nicaragua, there were many things which I hoped to get a deeper understanding of. Some of these things were concrete and measurable: teaching ability and Spanish fluency, for example. Most of them were not as concrete, but yet more important: compassion, faith, what truly is and isn't important to me, and many more. In my head, these lessons would come in clear, powerful ways, when I was ready to experience them: maybe a particular jarring day in La Chureca, maybe during a conversation with community members, or during scheduled time for reflection. Obviously, that was an unrealistic expectation, since God's timing rarely works nicely into the schedules we create for ourselves. Last night, I got home from a busy day and expected to have a quiet night and get to sleep early. Instead, between 7:15pm and 3:15am, I came to understand both compassion and surrender on a deeper level, courtesy of a large cane toad and a dog named Sydney.

Along with the nine of us PDs who live at the Manna house, we have two more inhabitants - two Rottweilers named Sydney and Cola. Nicaraguans are terrified of Rottweilers, and Sydney and Cola can be viscious if they don't like you, so they provide some extra security at our house as well as keeping us company. They're great dogs, but have a habit of attacking any other creature that moves around the yard. Here's an picture of Sydney with her last kill (in the grass to the right), an unlucky iguana:
And thus began last night's situation: a large cane toad, who had been taking a swim in our pool, hopped out of the pool. Sydney jumped on the toad and bit/licked it, but instead of killing the toad and being proud of herself, she instead began foaming at the mouth a lot, while the toad hopped away to safety (we think). Cane toads, which is our best bet of what she got her teeth on, are incredibly poisonous toads and are capable of killing dogs and humans with their venom. We called a Nicaraguan vet whose number we had, and told him about the situation. There was a shot which we could get for Sydney, he told us, but it was almost certain she was going to die even with the shot. We could also try feeding her charcoal to absorb some poison and potentially induce vomiting. However, despite the low likelihood of her surviving, he was willing to meet us to administer the shot. Our van had broken earlier in the day, but with the help of some friends, we got Sydney to meet the vet and get the shot. On the ride there, she vomited all over Jesse (one of my fellow PDs) and the back of the pick-up - disgusting, but it may have saved her life.

After Syd got home from the vet, she seemed to be doing okay at first. I really thought that we were in the clear, until I walked outside about half an hour later and heard her panting frantically and gasping for breath. She was barely able to walk, and had almost no control of her back legs. For a dog who tends to snap at people when they try and pet her head, she was incredibly calm and too weak to argue with us about anything. The hallucinatory effects of the poison were evident, and she seemed intent on going into the pool which she is normally not interested in at all. We got the contact information for another vet, an American who has been down here for around 8 months teaching at a university and doing mission work. He graciously agreed to drive 20 minutes to come over and check on Syd, even though it was around 11pm by this point. He did a physical exam on her, gave her another injection, and explained more to us about what was happening to her. He left yet another dose of the "antidote" with us to administer later in the night, and explained to us very honestly that we should prepare ourselves for her death. She was in grave condition, as he explained, and very close to death when he saw her. He also told us, however, that he hadn't lost a patient yet in Nicaragua, and that there was definitely hope.

We spent the next 4 hours sitting with Sydney as she rested. She was so, so weak, that she wouldn't even open her eyes or lift her head when we touched her face. At multiple points, she seemed to stop breathing for 10 seconds and I truly thought she had died. At around 1am, Christin and Maggie went to make muffins, and I stayed outside with Sydney. I sat next to her with my hand on her side so I could feel her breathing and let her know, if she was conscious enough to notice, that someone was with her. At some point, I came to accept that we had done everything that we could do for her. It was out of our hands, and literally all I could do was sit there and lay my hand on her side and pray. As I stared at the stars and prayed for her to keep breathing, I think I learned something deeper about what surrender means. I think there's often a negative connotation to the word surrender, and people associate it with giving up. The truth is that it's not giving up - it's handing the situation over to God and recognizing that we're not the ones who can solve the problem. There was literally nothing I could do except sit and pray, a fact which would often stress me out. But I wasn't stressed out - I was at peace with the fact that I had played my part, and that I couldn't play a part bigger than me. As I sat there alone and prayed with Sydney, one part of the Passion of Jesus kept repeating in my head. "Stay here and keep watch with me." That was literally all I could do for Sydney last night - watch and pray.

As I go about my daily life here, I see situations which I need to approach with an attitude of surrender. The stories I hear and the poverty I see are not always things that I can fix. I can play my part, whether that be an English class or a conversation or some oatmeal and milk. But once my part has been played, all I can do is watch and pray. If I approach this year thinking that I can fix every poverty, physically and spiritually, that I see, I will end up frustrated, discouraged, and helping no one. By recognizing where my part in the bigger picture ends, I am able to focus on nothing more than doing my part to the best of my ability, and accepting that many situations are ultimately out of my control.

Surrendering, recognizing that a situation is beyond me, doesn't mean that I walk away - in fact, I think it means the exact opposite. So what does "stay here and keep watch with me" mean in my everyday life here? Compassion. The Latin root of the word compassion means "to suffer with". With Sydney last night, I was able to be more compassionate once I was able to surrender - instead of focusing on all the things which I wanted to be able to fix, I was able to focus solely on thinking about how she was feeling and being with her. That's all I could do, and maybe that's just what she needed me to do. In my interactions with community members, or with friends and housemates, am I able to do this? When I refuse to surrender, I spend my time trying to fix a problem which is out of my control, instead of letting go and making myself free to focus on walking through the difficult situation with the person. When I recognize that I can't feed every child in Chureca, I can shift my focus to sharing love with the people I do get the chance to interact with. When I recognize that I can't give a person a job or money to provide for her family, I can shift my focus to learning more about her and perhaps guiding her towards avenues that can help her or employ her. I am a small piece in a big puzzle, and my job is to be the best small piece I can be, not to try and become a bigger piece - in other words, to have the humility to surrender.

Sydney made it through the night, much to the surprise of many of us and the vet. As today went on, she started to regain her strength - and her personality - and is now interested in food and water again. She is going to be fine, and has hopefully learned her lesson about biting toads. It has been a roller-coaster for all of us, and we're all a little sleep deprived, but all is well. Sydney is healthy, and for that I am incredibly thankful. I got a new glimpse into what it means to be compassionate and to truly surrender, and I think that both these lessons will be important for me throughout the year.

Who knew I could learn this much from a dog who decided to bite a toad?

Cedro Galan and Chiquilistagua

Time seems to fly during the week here, and all of a sudden I realize it's been a week and I haven't written a blog post. It's not for a lack of topics to discuss - I always have new things on my mind to share - but my weeks are pretty busy! I've been trying to focus recently on time management and priorities, and determining what I should be doing with my time. Blogging and communication is definitely on the list, so hopefully I'll get better at having a routine of updating twice a week!

As it stands, I still owe you all an introduction to the other communities we work with, other than La Chureca. There are two others - Cedro Galan and Chiquilistagua (pronounciation: chee-kee-lee-staug-wah), which are neighboring communities a few kilometers from our house. I work much more in Cedro than in Chiqui, since more of Manna's programs in general are there. So, this will be a double-update: an introduction to the communities, and an introduction to the programs which I'm working on this year!

When Manna Project first started in Nicaragua (2004), we had a partnership with some Christian missionaries who had been down here for a few years before we arrived. Halle and Kathy August came down to Nicaragua about 9 years ago, and began working primarily in Chiquilistagua with some work in Cedro Galan. They now own and run a fantastic sports center in Chiquilistagua called El Salero (the land), which gives kids a safe place to hang out and play sports, read books, and use a computer. They also run a preschool in Cedro Galan, and own a small school building there which is named El Farito (the lighthouse). Although we run our programs mostly independently from the August family, they graciously allow us to use both of these spaces for our programs.

Here's a picture of El Farito from our hello/goodbye party we held before the old Program Directors left:

I have been spending a lot of time in Cedro, between programs and just hanging out with families who I've gotten close with. It's a wonderful community with wonderful people. Most people live in small concrete houses or sometimes tin houses, depending on how well off they are. Most families are able to get by and have the basic needs, but there's definitely still a lot of poverty and a lack of opportunities for advancement in a lot of cases. Manna has provided some microfinancing options, and our loans have helped jumpstart some businesses in the community, which has been really cool to see! Some examples are a lady named Laura who runs a small food shop out of her home, and a man named Henry who used the loan to build a structure around an oven to allow him to make and sell bread. It is very rewarding to see how a simple loan and some business training and advice can allow these people to provide for their families!

The programs we run in Cedro include English classes for kids and adults, math and literacy classes for kids, a kid's art class, a feeding program and a women's exercise class. Of these, I am responsible for coordinating the feeding program (not cooking - moms from the community take care of that!), co-teaching kid's English, and co-teaching adult beginner's English. Kid's English has definitely been my most challenging program so far. We usually have between 30 and 45 kids between the ages of 5 and 15 in the class, so it's a lot of kids. I've been told that that would be hard to handle even with an education/teaching background, which makes me feel a bit better about my inability to adequately control the class at times! The kids are great, though, and it is definitely growing on me. We're currently working on learning professions...and I think the kids are learning something. :) My adult English class has truly been a joy to plan and teach. We usually have around 20 students, and they are eager to learn. The variety of levels within the class is sometimes hard to plan for, but we've made it work so far and I think are catering to the needs of the students to the best of our ability. It's a very rewarding class and I've loved getting to know my students so far.

In Chiquilistagua, I help two of my fellow PDs with their teen English class. It's two half hour classes with around 15-20 students in each class, between the ages of 12 and 16. The kids are great, in their own way - but they're middle schoolers, and so they can be difficult. I must say that my youth ministry background from the last two years has come in handy here more than once! The kids in this English class have really grown on me, and even when they're troublemakers, they're definitely winning my heart and I'm excited to keep building relationships with them throughout the year. Other programs we run in Chiqui include a younger kids' English class, computer class, and a girl's soccer program. I don't spend much time in Chiqui other than for classes, but I hope to try and get a bit more involved in the community by going to one of the youth nights which the Augusts host for the community. The last one got canceled due to lack of power (welcome to Nicaragua, where the power goes out randomly...), but hopefully I'll be able to go to one soon.

Other than programs, I am starting to get settled into a routine. All of the old PDs have left, I have moved into my room, gotten more comfortable driving the car with crazy Nicaraguan traffic lack-of-enforced-laws, and am getting used to what life looks like here. In some ways, it has been very nice to feel settled and at home in the house and in the community. In other ways, a bit of homesickness has set in as life has slowed down a bit here. Prior to now, there was enough action at all times to stop me from thinking too much about home, and so I didn't really miss it. The past few days have been a bit rough for whatever reason, and I find myself really missing the in-person support of my community in Houston. While this has been a hindrance, it has also pushed me to start forming deeper relationships here and creating an equally strong support network here. I know that this takes time (and that God is teaching me patience even if I don't want Him to right now...:-)), but even just making progress on it is helping put me in a good mood and feel excited about being here.

Thank you for all of your support, whether it be financial, emotional, or spiritual - I appreciate it more than you know. If there are any specific topics you'd like to hear more about in the blog, just leave a comment and let me know!

What it means to make a difference: reflections after one month

Today marks the one month anniversary of my arrival in Nicaragua, and it's hard to believe that it's only been a month. I have done a two week homestay, two weeks of Spanish classes, shadowed last year's PDs for a week and a half, and started teaching classes with my fellow PDs. Somewhere in between all of that, I've met a lot of people, tried to remember the names of the 40 kids in my kids English class, ate a whole lot of rice and beans, adjusted to living with 8 other people, and started forming some amazing friendships with the communities we work with. It has definitely been a busy month, but an amazing one as well.

I could tell you story after story of the things I've seen and experienced in the last month. Some of it is just hilariously funny, and other parts are heartbreaking. At orientation in Miami, we were told that this year we'd experience the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, and that's definitely already proving true. I was talking to a friend from home last night and telling her about La Chureca and some of my other experiences here, and she asked me if I felt like I was making a difference here yet. That question isn't as simple as it may sound, but I think it's a very important question to be conscious of throughout my year here.

It's difficult to answer the question because I think people have very different views of what it means to make a difference as a year-long volunteer in a developing country. You can look at the situation a few different ways, and come up with a very different answer for each viewpoint. I'll give you mine; obviously, feel free to disagree/challenge me on it as a comment/e-mail/whatever - I'd be happy to discuss it more.

So here's the thing - you learn quickly when you go places like Chureca that the situation is way beyond anything which we can hope to "fix". The problems in Chureca are way larger and more complicated than kids under the age of five who need food, milk, and vitamins every month, and mothers who need chances to learn more about how to take care of their kids. What we do in Chureca barely scratches the surface, and yet I do truly believe that we're impacting families in more ways than just giving them food. Lots of short-term groups come through Chureca, and most arrive in a big bus with a lot of cameras out the window. One that we saw the other day had policemen escorting them, and they walked around the neighborhood and took a ton of pictures of people, houses, and trash piles. The people who live in Chureca are exploited, more or less. I can't imagine what it's like to have people constantly taking pictures of your life as if it's a museum exhibit. Manna has a strict policy about cameras, or lack thereof in Chureca - we want to see Chureca and its inhabitants eye-to-eye, not through a lens. By forming relationships with people and learning more about their every day life, I believe we are helping to restore dignity to people who, often by no fault of their own, happen to live in a trash dump.

The other two communities we work with, Cedro Galan and Chiquilistagua (who I still owe you an intro blog post to - it'll happen in the next week, I promise!), are much less poor that Chureca. It's funny how standards change - they are both still pretty poor communties, but not in comparison to Chureca. In Cedro and Chiqui our focus is different - we don't focus on feeding, and instead focus on education and advancement opportunities. Personally, I'm teaching a kids English class, an adult English class, a computer class, working on literacy and math with a few kids, and helping out with a couple other things. I think our most important work in Cedro Galan is also in our relationships. It is definitely useful for the community members to learn English, for the sake of future employment opportunities, and our other programs offer useful services as well. That said, if the middle school boys only learn one thing from our English class, I hope it's how to treat each other and women with respect instead of treating them how they see many of their fathers treat them. I think encouraging people to strive for more and recognize the opportunities which exist for them is just as important as whether my English classes learned professions or past tense today. It's less measurable, for sure - I can't give a quiz to figure out what the community members have gained - but that doesn't mean it's less important.

So, am I making a difference here yet? I truly believe I am, but I think it's being made in small moments - in a conversation with a 14 year old kid about what's really going on in their lives (yep...I'm obviously still a youth minister at heart :-)), taking the time to learn people's names and get to know them, and in truly walking with the people that I have been given the privilege to serve.

Faith in the Darkness

Today I want to introduce you to one of the three communities that Manna works with here in Nicaragua: La Chureca. I have spent the past three days trying to figure out how to write this blog post to do justice to what Chureca is. Ultimately, I've concluded that it's impossible to adequately do so, but I'm going to do my best to show you Chureca in the next few paragraphs - both for the horror it is and for the rays of light I have seen there in this past week.

The word "La Chureca" is a Latin American slang term for city dump - and that's exactly what La Chureca is. It's the Managua city dump, and, until recently, the largest open air landfill in Central America. It started in the early 70s, and since then, there have been people who live in the dump, building houses/shacks out of whatever they can find, and making a tiny living by searching through trash piles for recyclable objects they can sell. It's estimated that about 1,000 people live in Chureca, and about half of them are under 18 years old. Manna's work in Chureca consists mainly of helping fund a clinic and running a child sponsorship program, where people in the US (or elsewhere) can sponsor a child for $20/month. That cost covers milk, oatmeal, and vitamins for the child, as well as a birthday and Christmas present. If the child is young enough that the mother is breast-feeding, the money covers beans and vitamins for the mother in order to help produce more nutritious breast milk. In addition, we teach a few English courses at Chureca as well.

I don't think it's useful to show you a lot of pictures of La Chureca, and I won't be taking any for a LONG time. Chureca and its residents get exploited a lot as is, and I want to form relationships without a camera lens between me and the people I am trying to connect with. But I will tell you about my experiences in Chureca so far, and about the people I've met there. As we drive into Chureca, there are two things that hit you right away: the sight of huge mounds of trash to your right and houses to the left, and the stench of the trash. It's an overwhelming smell - I'm not really sure how to explain it to you, but I promise you that it's unpleasant. A typical house in Chureca is made of plastic or tin, with sticks as the frame. There is electricity and running water, at least, but the houses are very basic, small, and made of whatever the family could find. There's usually at least one child outside each house playing, often naked.

We go to Chureca three times a week. On Wednesdays, we hold a health-related discussion for the mothers of the children in the child sponsorship program. This is a requirement for the program, and we think it's very important for the mothers to be committed enough to attend these "charlas" - not only does it show commitment, it gives the mothers information to help their families be as healthy as possible. The other two days we go to Chureca, Tuesday and Thursday, we walk around and talk with the mothers and kids in the program. This allows us to keep tabs on how they are doing, if there is any dire medical need, and also to gather information to send updates to the sponsors of the children.

On Thursday, we had the chance to spend some time at the house of a beautiful boy named Douglas and his family. We spent about 15 minutes just hanging out with Douglas and his mother, a wonderful woman who is very dedicated to her son and to the program. Here's Douglas' latest picture from our child sponsorship website:


Douglas was playing with the one toy we saw when we were in the house - a plastic fishing rod with three plastic fish. We had a good conversation with Douglas' mom, and then we got up to leave the house. Douglas' grandma also lives there, and she let us out the "door" (wooden piece which provides a break in the pieced-together metal fence which surrounds their house), and as we walked out, she said something which really struck me and has been on my mind ever since. She said, "One day, the Lord will give us a beautiful little house. But for now, this is what we have."

I stood there with tears in my eyes, and no idea how to respond. She continued and talked about how bad the conditions were at Chureca. We chatted about that for a few sentences, and then headed on our way. But her words echoed in my head the rest of the trip and have been echoing ever since. Douglas' grandma didn't say anything profound - she simply wished out loud for something which we all consider almost a right - a small house. What struck me the most was her faith. Yes, she was resigned to the realities of Chureca for now, but she had such hope in the way she said the sentence that there WOULD be something better in their future.

It's easy to get discouraged at Chureca or thinking about Chureca. I will be the first to admit that what Manna does there, or what any NGO is doing there, is woefully insufficient. We can not fix Chureca - that is beyond us. Walking around to visit the 33 kids in our child sponsorship program, we pass many more who could and should be a part of the program. Kids get sick frequently and stay sick for a long time. Many have skin diseases and parasites due to the rough living conditions. People literally dig through the trash as a living. If there is any place that I have trouble finding hope, it is Chureca. But I only have trouble finding hope until I hear a woman who lives there have the hope and the faith that I struggle to have. When I hear her hope, I find mine again - after all, if she can be hopeful in her situation, can't we all be hopeful with and for her as well? If she has faith that the Lord will provide, can't we all have that same faith?

Chureca, to me, is a screaming example of faith and hope shining through the darkness. I wish I could take you all there - not to show you the poverty, or the piles of trash, or so you could smell the stench. I wish I could take you all there so you could see the smiles on the faces of the children. I wish I could take you there so you could hear the faith and hope of the adults who live in the reality that is Chureca. I wish I could take you there to hear Douglas' laugh, to play with the one marble a sweet boy named Kevin owns, to play with the kids when they are on recess at one of the two schools in Chureca. Seeing Chureca has changed me as a person - interestingly enough, into a more joyful person and a more hopeful person, which may be a strange reaction to the closest thing to a living hell that I have ever seen. But I believe it would do the same for you if you were able to meet the people who live there. I will do my best, throughout the year, to share Chureca and the lessons it teaches me with you in the best way I can. In return, I beg you to pray for the people who live in La Chureca - for their health and safety, and that one day their simple dreams will come true. Please pray.

We currently have a wait list of children who are waiting on a sponsor so that they can participate in our child sponsorship program as well. If you are interested in learning more or becoming a sponsor, check out http://www.mannaproject.org/nicaragua-child or send me an e-mail at fiona.turett@mannaproject.org.