Catch Up Blog

So, this blog is going to have a lot more photos for you to look at. It will try to catch you up on what we have actually been doing for the last month or so. This has been a month of helping out the Peace Corps by doing things to help the new recruits. These new trainees are in the same program as we are, so it falls to us to help out with all of the activities during training. I apologize if there is some weirdness to the formatting on this thing... blogger is great, but the photos really do weird things sometimes!

First though lets go back to a few weeks ago when we started the pine basket project. We have been talking about doing this almost since we arrived here. Another volunteer, in a community near here started a pine needle basket project. It was to make money, I think they even had a potential market in Nicaragua. We have never considered that kind of thing, really just wanted to add to the art using local products. There is a market for the stuff down in our pueblo, if anyone really wants to try making money, but that is not the primary focus.

The first step is to go and collect the pine needles. We finally got a day selected where the kids could go. It is surprising, between chores and church, it is hard to find good times for everyone. It doesn’t help that the Catholics and the Evangelicals apparently plan everything to be at different times! So, if the kids from Catholic families are free afternoon on Saturday, then it is almost a given that the kids from Evangelical families are busy at the time, but could be free in the morning. In fact, this is just what happened to us. So, we planned a morning trip and an afternoon trip to catch all that we could.

We hiked up the mountain to a small pine plantation on my counterparts land. The kids really enjoyed getting out and goofing around up on the mountain. They also did manage to collect some pine needles. Each kid was supposed to collect enough for their first basket. The kids had more fun climbing the trees and goofing off. At one point it started to rain so we all “hooched” up. Hmmm, I don’t think any of you all who read this post know that phrase… it is from Hotshot days and mean that you take advantage of any kind of shelter you can find, either ready made, or you take the chainsaw and make something. The kids just found some down branches that made a natural shelter.

After the trip up the mountain they all returned to our house and started pulling off the pine fascicles, and saving them in bags to be dried out at their own house. To make all of the work “vale la pena”, Katie decided it was a good day (windy, cold, light rain), to introduce the kids to S’Mores. She had purchased Marshmallows and chocolate bars in the capitol, as well as some grahamcracker-like thing. So all we need was a fire, which our host family happily provided. Soon the kids were learning how to roast their first marshmallow! Funny stuff! What was great is that even the adults found it strange and fun… they acted like big kids and enjoyed themselves thoroughly. It was all a big hit, which we had to do again with the afternoon group.

So, as I had mentioned above… We had a bunch of trainees up our way and had to find a bunch of activities around our site for them to do. The idea is to learn some technical skills that you might actually use at your new site, and to have fun with the community. In the spirit of all of that, we decided one of the activities would be going over to Maria´s house to make "Pan de Zanahoria" also known as Carrot Cake.


What follows are a bunch of photos from that activity. First is a photo of Maria with a trainee named Courtney, in front of the earthen oven that we used to cook the bread in. Below is making the "broom" to sweep out all of the coals once the oven is hot. Followed by loading the oven, and then unloading the oven...exciting, eh!
















And last but not least is a picture of the new addition to our family that we live new to... her name is Brenda.