Those were pictures Nina took.

Just so you know. 

The class day!

Hi again. Continuing the story of Nicaragua! 

The next day was the day with the class led by Miguel on how to prepare your cacao for fermentation. It was really very interesting, and about an hour and a half along jouncy roads from Boca de Sabalo by truck, only this time with the bed filled to the gills with people. 

The class looked a little like this:

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

And this when it was outside: 

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

I don't know how much in the way of details you care to know about this class and the process, but rest assured, I now know details if you want to ask. Basically you separate the pods by type, ripeness, disease, and size. The two groups of large-enough, undiseased, ripe pods of the two different types get fermented in special ways, and all the rejects go into the "local market" bean piles, where they are fermented in the old, traditional way. 

Ethically it's ok to leave the locals with only rejected-and-possibly-diseased pods and beans because they'll be getting a lot more money with the good ones that they can export, and they would have used the rejects anyway if the class wasn't in place. At least that's what we decided to tell ourselves. 

For a period of time I was entertaining myself with how to best take pictures of broken beans (my main function for Miguel), and I made friends with this little guy, Jorge:

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

He was thrilled to help, and didn't mind that I asked random numbskull me-being-bad-at-spanish questions all the time (like, "how do you say not.. nearby?" - "uh, 'far?'" - "ok. 'Far.' This here is only good when this other thing is far" - when describing lenses). He learned really fast how to take pictures with my camera, too - though him handling it at all made me super nervous for a little while, but he was careful. He even figured out how to change some settings on his own, which made me a little more concerned that he'd randomly press the button sequence that would delete all pictures without knowing it, so I had to lay down the rule that he can turn the knobs and dials, but not to push any buttons but the shutter. It worked out ok in the end. Then I went outside and he went to work helping them all gather banana leaves and cracking open cacao pods. 

Speaking of which, look at what chocolate comes from:

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

That's an open pod held by Nina. Neat, huh? There's all this white, melony stuff inside the pods that you can eat, too, but the real stuff is in the beans, which you put into a box to ferment for a few days, seen here: 

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

Maybe it was my imagination but it seemed like the women, who comprised about half of the class, did about 80% of the work. 

Anyway. See the banana leaves in there? Apparently banana leaves have with them the necessary microbes to ferment the cacao beans correctly. Neat. 

You can go to my picasa album from the class for more details of what the process is like. I wrote a lot in those captions. 

Oh, and here's an example of a bad bean next to a good bean: 

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

Bad on left, good on right. This is post-fermentation, and the purple color on the bad one comes from... well I wasn't too clear on what it comes from, but "some kind of problem during fermentation" is probably general enough to be correct. Whether it was too hot, too cold, unripe, diseased - I really don't remember. Oh well. I'm not the expert. But you can see there's a difference, clearly. (These are about quarter sized, for reference.) 

So yeah! bascially this was a really cool thing to see. And, supposedly, if these farmers/fermenters follow the process laid out by Miguel, their cacao beans will be worth 4 times as much as they were before (pending inspection). 

I talked to a guy there who knew a little english. He said that his friend said that I didn't speak spanish, but he corrected him: "I said you don't speak spanish, more-or-less." I thought it was an appropriate way to put it. He insisted I come to a house nearby and have some of their water with him. I'm still not sure if he knew them or anything or if he just figured they wouldn't mind us barging in. As for the water - so far so good...

Then we went home and had dinner. We had worn our tall rubber boots ALL DAY because Jan said that we should, in order to "better fit in." Yeah. Wearing tall rubber boots in a tropical climate only to come home that night with them perfectly clean, but with the parts of your pants tucked into them soaking with ankle sweat, is not worth the minor level of "fitting in" that they provided. Just so you know. We did not wear them for dinner.

Then we planned the next day!

....To be continued!

Continuing the saga...

... from where I left off. 

Now. The town we were in was called Boca de Sabalo. I don't know why I couldn't remember that. I guess all the car-jouncing kinda loosened my brain or something.

The town is called that because it is where the Sabalo tributary river meets up with the bigger Rio San Juan, so, its mouth ("boca"). 

Uh oh, re-reading what I wrote before I now also realize I skipped almost a whole day. In this day, we did, indeed, go to Jinotega. It was nice. We were pretty darn lucky because a DED professional whom Nina works with was able to take us in her truck all the way there and back, so we had a very relaxed trip. 

Nina in Jinotega:

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

Part of the mission was to see off a DED volunteer who will be living in Jinotega for a year and a half. Jinotega is a very, very pretty little mountain town (about Marquette sized, but surrounded by cloudy forested mountains) that unfortunately had the opposite of a warm welcome for this nice girl, whose pre-arranged living arrangement-keepers basically told her "oh, we're not ready for you. I guess we forgot. Get a hotel or something." We all felt pretty bad for her, especially because she was a volunteer and not making money, so couldn't really afford a hotel for this undisclosed amount of time. But being white meant having money to her future landlords, so on the street she went. There was another nice couple who agreed to take her in for the time being, but what a crappy welcome to your new home!

And we bought boots and things for our voyage. When I told  my dad that I wasn't bringing a hat he said that I should get one like the locals wear, and they'll be happy with it. So I did, and bought a NY Yankees cap. Seriously. Baseball, and it seems the Yankees in particular, are huge there. Plus my head was way too big for the Boston and Oakland caps I tried on first (hey, the yankees cap was black. I didn't really want to deal with that extra heat). 

THEN we went to Managua, stayed at Anja's house, THEN went to Boca de Sabalo. Phew. 

Crossing the Sabalo river itself: 

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

Ok, now we're up to speed.

Boca De Sabalo. At time of last posting (with actual content, that is) I still had no idea where we were going to spend the night. I wandered back up to the mayor's office (where the development meeting was taking place and where Nina and Miguel were), just in time for: the sun to set, a storm to roll in, and the power to go out. All 3 of these things lasted pretty much all night, (especially the first one,) and made everything awfully dark. 

Like this:

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

We had dinner at the same place that we had lunch at (there were apparently only 2 options for sit-down, roof-over-your-head dinners in the entire town, and one of them was across the river and so was not an option during the storm) and it was good and candle-lit, but the exact same food as their lunch. This is where I met Jan, the DED guy trying to start up a new program in the area, and so the in-charge DED guy there. 

But then as I found out, it was our very own Miguel (the one who drove us down the entire way) who is the seriously big-cheese of the whole event. He is the representative from this german chocolate company who is basically in control of quality of exports to Germany. (You can find these chocolates in the US in World Market stores, at least.) Nina said she was surprised to hear everybody referring to him by the most formal "you" and "him" words in Spanish. It's sort of like saying "sir," but in Spanish you have many more parts of speech where you can express that kind of respect. Make sense? Anyway. He was the bottom line here, clearly, because exports had to pass his inspection to be bought by the company, and most of this workshop was to explain how to achieve the quality he was looking for, as well as how he will be doing the testing. 

So he's basically a supply quality engineer, like Vishaka. Only he's one that's supposed to be able to taste smoke contamination in raw cacao beans, for instance. So basically Vishaka would've loved to tag along, I'm sure. 

We ended up staying the night, and the next couple nights, at the company house that Jan lived in. It was a really nice, big, wood-interior house, and we woke up each morning to a combination of roosters crowing and howler monkeys going insane outside. 

This was "my room" of the house:

From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan

Pictures!!!!

Pictures of Nicaragua are up, alls. 

This is the first album, with pictures of Managua, Granada, and Masaya (and the Vulcan Masaya, and Las Isletas near Granada):

http://picasaweb.google.com/keith.pennington/NicaraguaManaguaGranadaMasaya#

This is the other album, featuring the rest of my trip there. This includes Matagalpa, Jinotega, the car ride to Rio San Juan, Boca de Sabalo, the cacao bean fermenting/quality class, El Castillo, and a bunch from a boat around Rio San Juan:

http://picasaweb.google.com/keith.pennington/NicaraguaMatagalpaJinotegaRioSanJuan#

They all have captions! so read up!

ALSO: Might I suggest using Picasa's new-and-improved "slideshow" setting, only pausing it and advancing as you want so you have time to read the lengthier comments. That's just a button in the upper left you click, then use the controls on the middle of the bottom of the screen. It's pretty neat. 

good ol" bells...

Hi everybody. I'm sitting at bells in kalamazoo waiting for my tempeh reuben, and things are good. So i made it all the way home, with luggage, with no problem whatsoever. I've gone about a third the way though my pictures which will be posted as soon as they get captions, and of course i will continue the blog for a bit with the last few days of CRAZY ADVENTURE. SO expect more tomorrow.

back

... in houston. man i have a lot to tell you guys... (pretty much good news only, don't worry). 7 hours on a boat two days ago, 10 hours 4-wheelin yesterday, and 13 ish hours in planes and airports today.

tomorrow, probably a spaceship! for... 16 hours!

So I was wrong about this place being without its comforts...

...Because I apparently found an internet cafe! It doesn´t exactly have even 3 walls but it does have an aluminum roof and 3 computers side by side, so it´s ok.

But yeah. Nina and Miguel and Jorge (those were the two guys we rode here with) are at this meeting that they said would be very boring and last 2 hours. It´s kind of a preparation of the presentations that they´re going to do in the next couple days here, and lots of the presenters haven´t really met each other yet. I think. Something like that. In any case, we all decided I would be bored witless and I set out to explore the town of ... I can´t believe I forgot the name of it, but I´ll tell you later so you can look it up on the map. (Note: it may not be there.)

In Nina´s guidebook this town has a population of 1000. That´s an "eh?" figure if I´ve ever heard one. This town has one street. No exaggeration. One short street that ends at the river. The town took approximately 5 minutes to explore. The town is really not that big. I seriously doubt the ´1000´ figure.

But it does seem to have this internet place, kind of back from the road and denoted by an extremely faded sign that seemed to used to say a lot, but I saw this: INTERNET... De SKY! that was originally written with marker, and it caught my eye. Other than that it just looks like every other shack around here. (No offense.)

So remember how I said it would take 7 hours to get here? Within a country about the same size as New York state? well, somebody decided that because of something of a drought they´ve been having here in this part of the country (yeah, what with all the rain just a couple hundred miles away I would never have guessed) that the road that we would otherwise have to bypass by riverboat is indeed passable, so we drove the whole way. It was 9 hours, 2 hours longer than it would´ve been had we taken the boat. Arg.

It is pretty far, but not that far on a map (by american standards, anyway). It seemed like the last 5 hours were all on very, very, let´s say "rural" roads. Poor Nina must have a headache as big as anything because of how many times her head smacked against the inside handles of the truck. (and sometimes her head hit her fingers holding that handle, so her fingers are also probably very sore.)

Therefore it was not the kind of road trip that you can get any sleep on - and when you get picked up at 4:00am, well, you kinda want that kind of trip.

We stopped for breakfast, which were quesillas. They make a good breakfast food in addition to the other controversial things i suggested them for. They also had coffee there, but it was ultra-sugared instant coffee. Not so good.

Most of the ride, despite being jouncy, was very scenic. It turns out that really most of this country is very, very nice to look at. And that when you need to pee, you say that we need a "technical stop." Everybody thought that was pretty funny for longer than we all should´ve, I think.

Now, I told you about the animosity between Nicas and Ticos. I should tell you that the river I am on is either the border between the two countries or very, very near it. (it depends where you are, see.) Supposedly the ´famously ecological´ Costa Ricans have plantations all over where they have deemed protected area, where the always good Nicas have made no such promise, but still don´t have plantations down by the river. From what I´ve seen this isn´t really true, but maybe it is somewhere else along the river. I don´t know.

Anyway. Nicas>>Ticos is a common theme, basically.

Now, this river we are on: has sharks! has caymans! has big ol fish! and shrimp! and didImention SHARKS! Not too many rivers have actual sharks, so this is cool to me. Don´t worry, they don´t really get bigger than a person. But about that big.

There are also hot springs somewhere nearby. We may investigate, time permitting.

There are now several people crowded around me, talking. It´s sunny out. I guess they´re just hanging out here. I don´t blame them though; there´s a nice fan in here.

I decided that the next time I decide to come to Latin America I will definitely want to know about a hundred times as much spanish as I know now. Well, 4 or 5 times as much would be good. I basically understand the gist of what´s being said about 1/4 of the time, what is exactly said much less - and don´t even ask about when it comes time for me to say something. If for some reason I have more time, then I´d want to go to a spanish language school which seem to be everywhere for $190ish/week, which includes room and board.

But those are all just thinkin´s.

(PS: I bet you all are interested in what exactly Nina is doing here, huh? she tried her best to explain to me the whole situation, but that would take patience and concentration for me to repeat. Plus I need to go to the bathroom right now, so that may have to wait. But you know what? My very own pictures may be in a kind of single-sheet instruction manual for fermenting cacao and/or PR thing that Nina is preparing! I need to actually shoot them still, but some of the people in the DED seem pretty excited about my camera being here right now. I´m just happy I have some kind of role on-site, what with my limited communication skills and all.)