 batch of ten sacks of ‘naturally dried’ coffee.
Chico in the cupping lab where we sampled Miraflor organic coffee.
Most of the coffee in Nicaragua is fermented and washed at a ‘wet beneficio’ to remove the fruit from around the coffee bean, and then the bean is dried at a ‘dry beneficio’ before being exported as green coffee. Naturally dried coffee, which is actually an older method of producing coffee, dries the whole coffee cherry like a raisin, and after about 12 days when it is good and dry the fruit is then removed from the bean by pounding it. There is a difference in the finished product, because the bean absorbs a different flavor from the fruit when they are dried together. Recently Mickey from Salt Spring coffee in Canada expressed interest in purchasing naturally dried coffee for using in expressos, opening up a new export market for a product generally considered lower quality.
Dolores, one of the women who have a new 'fogon' with a chimney and flu. She is stripping wild grapes that her family had just harvested. Small as wild blueberries and delicious. Even the cat likes the new stove setup.
The UCA has also has a myriad of social and environmental projects in addition to the vegetable gardens. They have installed solar panels, build improved stoves that burn less wood and have chimney and flu systems to keep houses free of smoke, funded coffee plantation renovations, build schools, and are in the process of building small improved ‘wet beneficios’ with an improved water filtration system to reduce contamination at individual farms. At the end of the day it was so cold and we were so wet it was hard to absorb so much interesting and positive information. Their list of activities kept going on and on, and when we thought we had gotten them all notated they would casually mention something else that sparked our interest. Luckily the city of Estili is a close half hour drive, and the muddy rough roads not so bad at all. This is an excellent part about dealing with sometimes rough travelling conditions here: if I’d never left Leon this year I never would have thought a hot shower in Nicaragua would be so delicious.
Adolfo Mareno Guttierez, a coffee producer who just received a new beneficio which will conserve water and reduce the contamination normally produced by wet processing coffee. Every farmer had several varieties of coffee. Adolfo had one that is yellow instead of red when ripe; which I had never seen before.
The rainy season, which took a long break in the middle and frustrated many farmers, is making the most of October. We´ve had steady rains a couple times a week in the late afternoons, which means gorgeous afternoon light in the city.
There´s alot going on right now. I´m trying to tie up a bunch of loose ends before I leave to go back to the states in two weeks (marking the end of my ten month Fulbright). Some of those are work related, some are just small things like making an effort to go to those museums and restaurants I´ve walked past for ten months and always thought, I´ll go there soon, but haven´t ever made it. Even though I´m coming back in December, it´s nice to have this mental deadline to give myself a push and be extra productive and thoughtful about how I spend my time.
Last Thursday my friend Sterling Vasquez, the director of a contemporary and folk dance company, invited me to dance some Irish reels at his 15th anniversary show at the municipal theater here in León. I somehow managed to get a nice costume together at the last minute. It certainly wasn´t what I used to dance, but it felt good to spend a week remembering some old material, making up some new things, and generally stretching and getting into shape. I enjoy representing that part of my culture and past here. Nicaraguans understand the importance of traditional music and arts, and are incredibly receptive when you offer to share yours. There was a Fulbright snapshot moment backstage with me in my Riverdance-esque black and all the little girls in their long satin traditional Nicaraguan dresses, each exclaiming over the elegance of each others dresses and dances.
Some of Sterling youngest dancers performed his Riverdance inspired choreography before I did my reel set.
The typical Nicaraguan folk dance dress for women is a ful billowy colorful skirt and blouse.
Yamilette, one of the participants from Las Limas, tries her hand at grafting a lemon sapling.
gave me an excellent opportunity to in turn thank all the farmers for being so welcoming to me at their farms. I ended by asking them all for two things: that they always be open and trusting in expressing their opinions of the project with us, and that they take enjoyment in the process of designing and diversifying their land.
It took us a full forty-five minutes to pick up a truckload of friends and family. I took this picture at about 1:30 am as we were getting ready to repeat the forty-five minute return loop. Javi and Anna are in front.
Last week was Javier´s birthday. Javier is a friend and young biology professor who is working in the mangrove forests along the coast at my favorite León beach, Las Piñitas. The traditional birthday song here starts ´En las Mañanitas´ (In the early morning). A birthday celebrants family should wake them up very early in the morning with gifts. Realistically I´m not sure how often that actually happens, as nearly all the birthday celebrations I´ve been to have been pretty late night raucous affairs. But Javi had plans to go to Granada with his girlfriend Anna and so wouldn´t be around to party in the evening. So at midnight the night before we rounded up a crew and, with some scheming with Anna, managed to sneak into his house and wake him up at 12:30 am on his birthday. According to the song, a very properly celebrated Nica birthday.
This is how to travel on the rough dirt back roads. Can you see the mango plants I'm holding onto as well?!
Santiago Sabino Sanchez Zapata picking up his 300 plantain corms with an oxcart. This particular area of Nagarote is arid and visibly deforested.
At the plantain farm where we bought the corms, a manager shows us how an incision in one of the tree stumps works to trap a damaging beetle pest, reducing the need for them to spray. They make about twenty traps per manzana, and check them every morning.
Where Vernonn and I waited for three hours at the house of Julio Cesar Torres Trujillo.
Saturday I spent the whole day with Vernonn Edilberto Beríos Bárcenos, the tecnico who is going to work with the reforestation project for two years. We left León at 5:30 am, and made a large loop delivering fruit trees and plantain corms, returning to León again at 7 pm. We accomplished everything we needed to, meeting with nearly every participant in the project and distributing 3,050 corms and 200 plants. There were a couple mishaps along the way, which added hours on to our day.
The first delay happened when the check to pay for the plantain corms had not been signed the day before and couldn’t be delivered. But the large truck to deliver them was contracted, and they corms had all be dug the day before, so we loaded them up and then negotiated with the manager at the plantain farm. Could we leave the motorcycle as a guarantee and continue on in the truck? No. Could they let us take them on the basis of trust? Well, that seemed less likely to me, but in the end they agreed, and we started slowly down the Old Highway to Managua, one of the worst condition paved roads I’ve ever encountered.
Vernonn had organized the day so that clients met us at crossroads along the main roads and loaded their sacks of corms onto oxcarts. Everything went smoothly but slowly. Some farmers had traveled 15 km with their oxen to meet us, and nearly everyone was waiting in the shade along the sides of the road for us. Only as we neared the last comarca, or village, did we get a phone call saying that the clients, who had arrived at our designated meeting spot two hours earlier, gave up and left.
We couldn’t leave the sacks at the meeting spot without any responsible client present, so we convinced the truck to continue an extra 5 km to the first farm. When we unloaded, we found that the client whose house we had come to was upset. Because the rainy season is already half over, we had selected only those clients who had available irrigation systems to give plantains to this year, and asked the others to wait until the following year when they can plant them at the beginning of the rainy season and ensure a better chance of survival. But this particular client had missed every one of Vernonn’s visits, and the decision to wait for next year had been made with his family. He wasn’t happy. He felt that the organization was retracting their commitment and felt cheated.
Inexplicably we had an extra sack of corms, and after talking to him for a while we agreed to leave them with him. There was still a high level of tension between him and Vernonn. Vernonn left to track down some of the neighboring clients, and I asked the farmer, Don Julio, if he would like to show me his trees. We talked about some of the possible reasons that the health of his trees was so varied, and how he could interplant