Soya Success

A while ago, after finishing a charla at one of the three day-care centers in my town, I asked the mothers gathered there what they would like to learn about next.  One of them surprised me by saying she and the other women had been curious about cooking with soy, and would like to learn more about it.  It turns out the organization that helps out this day-care center gives the women in charge a whole sack full of soy beans every month, but never having cooked with it before, they didn't know what to do with it.  So the next time we met, I brought some recipes and the ingredients, and they brought two pounds of soy beans that had been soaked overnight.  It's quite a process to turn the raw bean into soy milk and soy meat (and even longer if you want to make tofu), but two of the mothers, one of the women from the daycare, and I worked as a team...okay, actually they did most of the work because I am not confident in the kitchen...and we were able to make some darn good soy milk, flavored with cinnamon and sugar, and soy chorizo.  Once we were done sweating and gossiping in the kitchen, I took some pictures of the kids with their lunch.

Serving up the soy chorizo.

This little boy picked out all the onions, but said it tasted good.

 The best soy milk I've ever tasted.

Here I am with some of the leftover chorizo I took home with me.  I experimented by putting some beans in the mix when I heated it up again, but it tastes good either way. 

There were definitely some hiccups with our little cooking experiment; it took us longer than we expected to get it done, and some of the kids had already gone home by the time we got around to serving it, and we forgot to cook rice to accompany it, since a meal with no rice is no meal at all.  In the end though it went really well, mostly because the women took charge, and learned through an actual hands-on experience, but most importantly because they invited me back to cook with them again.  So what soylicious recipes should I make with them next time?

Spaced

Last night a toad decided he wanted to be my new roommate.

I prefer him to the chickens who will occasionally sneak in and poo on the floor, but I didn´t want him in my room if I could help it, so I started trying to shoo him out with my shoe.  He proceeded to hop around and hide behind things, until I had finally chased him under my desk when he started hissing at me.  At that point I decided I needed help, mainly because I had never heard a toad hiss before and was freaked out, so I called my host cousin who promptly screamed and ran away when she saw the toad.  I stood there, alone (except for my new warty friend) with my shoe in my hand, thinking that maybe it was a bad idea to have told someone, and deciding that I would have to take care of this myself.  I eventually got him out from behind the foot of my desk, and had him hopping away when my cousin can back, and with a squeal, threw a steaming liquid on my departing friend.  She told me it was hot lemon juice and salt, which would kill him.  Apparently there is the idea that these toads leak a poisonous "milk" from their skin, making them extremely dangerous.  I´m not sure if this is true, in fact I´m fairly certain it´s not, but it explains the screaming...I just hope the lemon juice doesn´t actually kill him, otherwise I will feel like a terrible host.

The Return of the Baby Alien Fruit!

While I was in Ecuador I discovered the granadilla, a fruit that looks like the pod for dozens of alien eggs, at least that is how one friend of mine described it.  I though that was as weird as most of my fruit adventures would ever be.  I underestimated Nicaragua.

This is a mamon chino on the outside, all spiky and blood red.

Inside it harbors its sweet tasting alien goo...I mean fruit. 

They are in most markets now, and cost about 70 cents the dozen, which means that for less than a dollar you can infect your face with as many baby aliens as you could possibly want.

Don´t You Mean Sardonic?

Sarcasim is a languange not spoken here often in Nicaragua, but obvious questions are very frequent.  This will help to explain what happened when I carried my dirty clothes and laudry soap over to the lavandero one day, and my host niece asked if I was going to wash my clothes.  Slightly amused with what I thought was a silly question I told her no, that I just like carrying around my dirty clothes and soap arround.  Just por gusto.  She then said good because she had a lot of washing to do, and proceeded to wash for one hour while I waited for her to be done.  Serves me right, I suppose, for being a smarty pants.

Favorite Things (Way Better than Oprah´s)

If I were in the U.S. I would say that my prized personal possessions were things like my computer or other electronics, but since I don´t have many of those fancy new fangled devices, my priorities have changed a bit, and I have, perhaps, a surprising list of things that make my life a whole lot better here.

1.  Headlamp  My wonderful brother Daniel gave me his, complete with extra batteries, before I left the states, and it has been of immeasurable help to me.  Not only is it useful for power outages and for trips outside my room at night, but it allows me to read before I go to sleep without getting out from under my mosquito net to turn off the overhead light.  Speaking of which:

2.  Mosquito Net Or mosquitero, which is pretty much my favorite word to say in Spanish now.  Mosquitero.  Not only does it protect me from malaria carrying mosquitos, but from all other sorts of creepy crawlies in the night.  When I´m under it, I imagine that I am surrounded by a force field that keeps me safe from cockroaches and snakes and scarab-like beetles, and now that I´ve discovered that they are, indeed, entering my room, rats.*  If I had to pick just one thing from this list to keep, this would be it, because I wouldn´t be able to sleep without it.  It is the emotional safety blanket that just happens to hang above my bed.

3.  Jumbo Box of Crayons  I´m not sure my mom knew what a great thing she was doing when she put one of those huge boxes of crayons (complete with sharpener) in a care package to me.  In the work I do, I make a lot of posters for presentations and the like, and because I always have to be aware that some of my audience might be illiterate I draw out most of waht I want to say.  Now I actually have crayons to make my drawings look good.

4.  Jackpot This is my electronic kettle that has a distinctly retro feel to it (I think it´s to do with the goofy flowers on the side), but it works wonderfully, at least when there is electricity.  I imagine it symbolizes independence for me since with it I don´t have to rely on my host family for breakfast in the morning, which can be a hectic time.  Instead of waiting for the beans and tortillas to be done, I can instead make instant oatmeal and tea for myself without getting in anyone´s way.

So there you have a brief list of my prized possessions here in Nicaragua.  All I need now is a good mouser, and I´m set.


*On my scale of emotionally distressing discoveries, this ranked higher than finding cockroaches, but not quite as high as finding fungus growing on my clothes and shoes.  My mom is convinced the only solution is get a cat to eat up all the rats.

Dropping Anchor

I have been at site for three months now, and though I am still struggling to find my niche here, I have carved out a bit of a schedule which has helped me keep sane, and avoid the common temptation of new volunteers to ensconce themselves in their rooms reading book after book until they have left a pile of novels in their wake. 

Nicaragua seems to wake up at around 5:30 am, at least that is when the chickens outside my room begin clucking and I can hear abuela splashing water around to start cooking and cleaning.  I usually, with a kind of futile stubbornness, stay in bed until around six, telling myself that I might be able to sleep for a bit longer, but by that time my host family is pounding out tortillas, blue smoke from the cooking fire is drifting through the crack between the wall and ceiling of my room, and there is no reason for me to pretend that I will sleep anymore.

A little before eight I set out for the health center, greeting the people I know, ignoring the catcalls, and avoiding the many puddles of mud.  When I arrive at the health center there is always a huge group of people waiting for appointments, which makes it difficult to give educational talks to them since I inevitably end up yelling across the waiting area to be heard.

Then I play this game I call "Keep busy, or Fake it."  It involves sitting in my shared office and either preparing materials for charlas or reading one of the many Peace Corps books on how to be an effective volunteer.  Sometimes I write out a blog entry in my notebook to type out later in a cybercafé...just an example.  This game does serve a purpose though, as I am visible to the staff and patients, so they know me better and are more willing to work with me.  As I start to involve myself in more projects though, I am spending less time there pretending to work, and more time out in the community actually working.

After lunch, and after I have sweat to an unprofessional degree in the tropical heat, I head to the Casa Materna to hang out with perhaps my favorite people in site-the pregnant ladies.  I really do enjoy spending time with them as it is time to just sit and chat with the women.  I often give little talks on nutrition or breastfeeding, and lately I´ve been trying to teach them how to crochet, but most of the time we just sit there enjoying the company and teasing each other.  One of the doctors at the health center said to me once that he liked to go over to the Casa Materna to joke around with the women, and, more often, have them make fun of him, because there is nothing more beautiful than a laughing pregnant woman.  When he said it I thought he might be right; it really is wonderful to see a woman, one hand on her back, one on her baby belly, laughing happily.  I think that is why I enjoy my afternoons so much, the woman in the Casa Materna don´t seem to be as shy as in other regions of Nicaragua, and we are able to laugh together, which is a beautiful thing.

By the time I arrive home, my host family is stationed around the tele, flipping through a variety of shows, occationally landing on a news program, which is one of my few opportunities in the day to actually catch up on what is going on in the world.  But, at this point I am exhausted, and I usually retire to my room to knit or read, and fall asleep by eight.  That might seem a bit early, but that is my daily schedule, which my mother assurred me would not be boring to read, which doens´t seem like to best precedent on which to base a blog post but there you go.

Happy Fourth Day of the Seventh Month of the Year

My cousin sent me a letter a while ago, and in it she said she didn´t know many people who would put their lives on hold for two years to serve in the Peace Corps.  When I read that I immediatly thought, "I´m not putting my life on hold, I´m living more than ever now," but in some ways I think she is right.  My mom also sent me a postcard not too long after that telling me the african daisies were blooming in Phoenix, and I was shocked.  It seemed I had forgotten that the world back home was still going on ahead without me.  I left Phoenix in the winter, it should stay that way until I get back, those daisies should have just kept their little orange spring-heralding heads under the sand for two years.

Maybe it has something to do with the lack of discernable seasons here.  A friend of mine in Ecuador explained to me that the sheep get all sorts of confused there since there is only one season, seeing as how it´s on the equator.  The non-native sheep then don´t know when it´s time to make babies because they need the change of seasons to tell them when the time is right.  That´s not a perfect analogy for my situation since there is no baby-making going on here except for the several buns in the oven over in the Casa Materna, but it might explain my state of general confusion.

Since I don´t have much access to internet, or newpapers, or television, or anything of that sort I loose track of holidays.  Without the bombardment of advertisments, I forgot which Sunday of the month Mothers´and Fathers´Day was, which resulted in slightly awkward phone calls back home.  The highlight of my phone call on Fathers´Day was when I asked my dad what he had been doing and he said, "well, we just got back from dinner since today is Fathers D-"
"HAPPY FATHERS DAY, I totally knew it was today...yes."

And then, about a week ago another PC friend asked me if I wanted to do something for the Fourth of July.  I had just been going over my schedule, looking up important dates - when I would have to go to the capital, when a medical brigade would be coming in - and I totally neglected to notice our nation´s day of independence.  I feel like I am suspended in my own personal little bubble, full of my own thoughts and frustrations and insecurities, and I have forgotten to come out of my head and look at the world around me, not just in my own little site.  My life is not on hold, that much I know, but I cannot expect that others, or nature for that matter, will put theirs on hold either.  Nor can I sit in my own head, only acknowledging what I feel is important to me in my own self involved way, which does not include, apparently, holidays.

Anyway, be it weather or narcissism related, I vow to break free of my own personal time-space contunium flux-thingy.  So happy Fourth of July everyone, I´m going to celebrate by doing something very American, like refering to the United States as America.
...
America.