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!