How to Make Hermosa Paper Beads

In Spanish, the word "hermoso" means beautiful.  In Nicaragua it means beautiful as well as fat, or voluptuous, shall we say.  Whenever I see one of my former Casa Materna ladies with their babies, I am always sure to tell them how hermosos (beautiful and chubby) their little ones are.  So when I started to make paper beads with them, I was afligida (upset) to see how flacita (skinny) they were.

Pretty, but definitely not hermosas

I kept seeing all these big and beautiful beads that others were making, and couldn´t figure out how they were doing it, seeing as how I was using up all of the magazine paper, but still kept getting these skinny little beads.  Eventually, I decided that it has to do with the length of the paper you use to make the beads, and since I couldn´t find anything longer than the magazines I´ve been using, I decided to put two strips of paper together to make one long one.  Here are the instructions with photos, so if you´ve never made paper beads, or you´ve never figured out how to make them hermosas, you can learn.

Everything you´ll need
Paper, toothpicks, ruler, pencil, scissors, and clear nail polish.

Fashion magazines are great, since they´ll always have crazy colors.  This is the side that will be showing when the bead is done, so all marking will be done on the other (wrong) side.

Make a one inch mark on one end of the paper.

Make two half inch marks on the bottom

Draw a line from the one inch mark to the two half inch marks

Cut along the lines (wrong side showing)

Connect the two pieces of paper (right side showing)

Starting from the wider end, roll the paper around a toothpick, make sure the wrong side is up.

Keep rolling...

Roll until you get to the end, and then glue the tail on.  Once it´s secure, coat  with clear nail polish.

Then let it dry.

Enjoy your fun, sustainable, and hermoso art!  

How to Make Bottle Cap Earrings

There are a ton of creative activities that some people much cleverer than me have thought up to recycle common items, and reinvent them as something beautiful.  One such activity is turning bottle caps into earrings, which I have started doing with the women in the Casa Materna.  It's a fun and easy project, so I thought I would post information on how to do it here!

First, collect bottle caps.  It's easy here in Nicaragua, since many sodas still come in glass bottles, which are left at the store where they are bought to be cleaned and reused, so I just stopped by a store, asked them to save the caps from the soda they sold in an afternoon.  They gave me a bag of about fifty when I went to go pick them up

They have a little plastic disk on the back that you will have to scratch off.  Apparently Pepsi caps come off cleaner than Coke-brand sodas.

Then you can flatten the caps with a hammer.





Then make a hole where you will attatch the hook.  A nail will do fine.

Then comes the fun part!  Paint the newly-formed disks anyway you want.  Acrylic paints and nail polishes work great.

The finished product!

Of Baking and Brigades

Just under a month ago, a medical brigade from the U.S. came and visited my town, which was big news for all of us, and a great opportunity, because they asked me to give health talks in their public health section while the patients waited to see the doctors.

My audience is enthralled with what I have to say.

The brigade was there for four days, and every day saw more and more people coming in, most of them from the many outlying communities, so that by the end of the brigade I had given charlas to about 500 people.

Most everyone in the brigade was really nice, and all of them seemed amazed with the conditions of my town, often asking me how I can possibly manage to live here.  And it was really only then, looking through the eyes of other Americans, that I realized that I can live here because I am happy here now.  I really am.
It hasn´t always been easy.  The lack of paved roads, and drinkable water, and a varied diet, and general hygiene all take their toll, as do the occasional funks of boredom, loneliness, and self doubt, but most of that is behind me.  I have friends here now that, granted, took me a long time to make, but are real and true.  I play soccer and practice English with them almost everyday, and whenever I feel unsatisfied in my work, I can always go to the Casa Materna to talk and do crafts with the women.  So when the brigade left on their last day, and my friends teased me, asking me if I wanted to go back to the States with them, I smiled and said, "no hombre, I´m staying here for now."

In celebration of this revelation, I bring you the photos of the Great Baking Extravaganza that my host family and I had the day after the brigade left.

Danelia, Maylin, Esmeralda, and Marlen.

Our handiwork, ready to be baked.

This first involved cleaning, boiling, and grinding the corn, which we then formed into rings, or into tortillas which we then filled with the sweet dough and folded in half, like an empanada.

On the left is the sweet corn dough, on the right is the savory.

Since this process would have taken so long in our gas oven that it probably would have used up the majority of our gas, we had to invent our own.  What we ended up doing was putting the hornada (baked goods) in a pot, and then covering that pot with a piece of metal, on which we lit a fire.  This distributed the heat evenly throughout the pot so we could bake.

To take them out of the oven when they were done baking, someone other than me removed the burning metal sheet, placed it on the ground, and scooped out the hornada, still resting on their now burnt banana leaves.












Afterwards I ate so much hornada it hurt.  It was awesome.

Arts and Crafts Time

One of the activities that I have tried doing with the women of the Casa Materna is teaching them how to knit or crochet.  Sometimes it is successful, like with this woman, who learned fast, and kept crocheting in her spare time, which is always plentiful when all you`re doing is waiting for labor to start.

More often than not, though, it is struggle to get women to try crocheting, let alone actually teaching them the correct stitches.  For women who don´t have a lot of practise with fine motor skills, it is sometimes an intimidating task.  I decided that I needed to find another activity that they would enjoy, and that would be slightly easier to learn.  My friend, Anna, has been very successful with making earrings in her Casa Materna, so I bought some supplies and gave it a shot.

They really got into it.

They were less enthusiastic about me taking photos.

Our supplies

Finished product

I, meanwhile, was knitting and playing with my doll that I use to demonstrate the process of labor. 

Please note how I have to support his head if I don´t want it to flop around.  Our next arts and crafts should be them teaching me how to sew properly. 

Esa hembra es MALA

In the last few months, various people, from the nurses in the health center, to my host sisters, to the owners of my local corner store, and beyond have taken to calling me "la hembra mala" completely independent of each other.  For those of you who don`t speak Spanish, "hembra mala" means bad or evil woman.  So why would people who I am close to start calling me the evil woman?  Am I really that bad a person?  Well, yes I am malita every now and again, but that is not the reason for my new nickname.  It is all to do with the popular Mexican novela Teresa, in which the title character is, indeed, a hembra mala.  Since everyone in my town knows me as Teresa, it has become everyone`s new favorite joke.  The show itself doesn´t do much for me.  It doesn´t have enough absurd humor, like Hasta que el dinero nos separe, or a cutie-pie lead male like Cuando me enamoro (I`ve had a big fat crush on Juan Soler ever since La fea mas bella), so it really holds no attraction to me.  The best thing about Teresa is the theme song, which is where the hembra mala reference comes from.  I seriously can`t get enough of it, and everytime I`m feeling sassy, I will sing along to it in my head, pretending that I really am la hembra mala.

Tough

Last month I translated for an eye-care and dental brigade, and on the last day, after staying in the eye-care section for most of the time, I moved over to help in the dental section.  Not only did I translate, but I helped with the suction too.  It has instilled in me a vast respect for the dental profession, and a horror of what happens if you never brush your teeth.  I have taken to flossing multiple times a day. 

The husband and wife team up there in the photo were incredibly nice and patient with me for the whole day, even when I accidently suctioned off the filling of a cavity that hadn´t set yet.  It was a great and difficult day, my back was sore from leaning over, and my thumb and index finger that held the suction was tingly for weeks afterwards (it vibrates slightly as you use it), and this was after one day.  They worked like this for four days, often going without a lunch break so they could see more patients.

I had sat on the bus next to the man in the photo in the morning as we both traveled to the next town over, where the brigade was situated, so when it came to explain that they wanted to remove all the teeth that were left on this upper jaw, I asked if he was going to be alright with that.  He smiled, and told me not to worry, saying that he was tough.  Even as rotten away as they were, it wasn´t exactly easy to remove the four teeth he still had, and I winced as I looked on. 

Later, as we sat waiting for the bus to take us back home, he told me of his time fighting for the contra forces, only stopping his narration to spit out the bits of blood that were still filling his mouth.  He had been shot during a battle, and as the bullet passed through his lower leg, it had carved away some of the bone on his tibia.  After he showed me both the entry and exit wounds, and I saw the marked deformation on his shin, he explained that the infection was so bad afterwards that it was only the grace of God that saved his leg and his life.

And I knew that when he had told me not to worry, that he was tough, he knew exactly what he was talking about.

Where You From?

Accents are funny things.  I know I have one when I speak Spanish for, as my host niece so delicately put it, I speak "feo."  Yet, I don't think I have as much of an accent as other people from the States when speaking Spanish.  It depends on the day, if I've been talking or thinking in English, and if I am tired or nervous, but most of the time I can keep my accent at least a bit in check...or at least I like to think I do.  The point is that I definitely have an accent, but it is not so obvious that people from my town know where I am from, which has lead to some very interesting questions about my nationality.  What follows is a list of guesses as to my place of origin, from most to least common.

1. Spain
2. Costa Rica
3. France
4. Chile
5. Brazil
6. Nicaragua
7. Colombia
8. Puerto Rico

As odd as these might sound, the prize for weirdest place people have though you were from definitely goes to my friend Lindsey with Mongolia.