Advertisement
Published: December 10th 2008
Edit Blog Post
post from last week...
6 December 2008
Saturday
I am locked in my room typing away because it’s Saturday and Eyebrows is away at school, so I have the morning to myself. Which means no one cares if I lock myself in my room to upload photos, sync my ipod, and type a blog to take to the internet later.
It didn’t matter if my family in Estelí knew that I had a laptop. But here, they saw with my ipod and now continually ask me to listen to it. Let them once. No more. They’re used to cameras because the last PCV had one, too. But they ask me to use my cell because they know I usually keep minutes on it. My other sister, Angsty Fro, was dismayed when she tried to use my cell today and my saldo had expired. Eyebrows used to ask for my headlamp all the time during my site visit. So I bought her a flashlight as a gift when we were in Managua. But she’s borrowed my Phillies camo hat, my favorite hat in the world. And today is wearing my awesome India shoes to school. And Eyebrows and Angsty
macheted cow
the vet sewing up the ¨carne¨... otherwise known as the muscle, of the cow Fro have borrowed C240, or about $12. I know they will pay me back, or rather, my non-existent mother will. And my hat is actually now with my cousin, 23 year old Heartbreaker, with whom I temporarily traded for his white Che Guevara cap.
The point is, no one is going to find out I have a laptop. Hence my stolen moments of typing at 9am on a Saturday.
I bought white Christmas lights and hung them up in my room. And, like in college, it makes all the difference in the box of a room’s ambiance. Lighting is everything.
I am still asking about and looking for a small house to rent, rather unsuccessfully. I remembered last night, though, that my counterpart might have mentioned that there’s a classroom open at the school, which might be available. He mentioned offhand once, and it just came back to me last night. And I wonder if it’s a possibility. One big room at the school would be freaking awesome - my own version of a Nicaraguan loft. I am so excited about it that I know I’m setting myself up for disaster by imagining it. I’m going to
ask him today if it really is a possibility. Because I will be outta here as soon as my obligatory 6 weeks of “family living” is up.
Moving on.
So the machete is the tool of choice here. Most men in the campo wear rubber boots, a baseball cap from some team in the States, and carry a machete. The machete is used for digging, cutting firewood, the flat end for slapping bulls or cows as they’re being herded, harvesting beans or corn, butchering animals. Every man has a machete, and every kitchen has at least two extra.
That said, however, when the men go and drink the cheap hard liquor, the machetes can become weapons. The number of machete deaths in the countryside is astounding.
So yesterday, Eyebrows rattled something off, and the only words I caught were “machete” and “vaca,” or cow. She clearly wanted me to go see something. Trying to gather context clues, I concluded that our neighbors were butchering a cow. So I went to go watch.
But no. Apparently the night before someone macheted one of their cows. The cow had about a 4 inch gash back by her
tail, cut down to the bone. Quite the scandal. Then the veterinarian came from Somoto and I watched over the fence while they drugged her mildly, wrestled her to the ground in the right position, tied her legs, and I watched the vet sew up the muscle inside and then the skin. Or, as they explained it, sewing up the meat and then the leather. But a cow’s skin, which does indeed become leather, was tough like it. He had to use an awl to poke holes in her skin to get the needle through. Looked like using the awl hurt more than the machete would have.
I asked how much the vet cost. And then I found out that the government pays. One of the nationwide programs here only started two years ago when the Sandanistas came into power with the election of President Daniel Ortega, is called Hambre Cero, or Zero Hunger. The govt provides communities - and Sandanista families - livestock. Pigs, cows, chickens. The idea is that the livestock from different families will breed, creating more, which can either be slaughtered or sold for profit… and ideally create a countryside with zero hunger. Ambitious.
I went to a meeting last week where every family involved with Hambre Cero received, free from the government: two bags of cement, a roll of chicken wire, a bag of mineral salts for the cows, 30 meters of chain link fence, a bag of nails and a bag of horseshoe staples, and several pieces of zinc tin. Presumably these materials are to build chicken coops, pig sties, or cover for the cows. In some families this will happen. In others, the materials will be used for home repairs instead.
I have mixed feelings about Hambre Cero. Yesterday I went to a meeting about the progress with the pigs. The lady in charge was a very campesino woman in her typical skirt, plastic flip flops, dark skin and missing teeth… but surprise! She was also extremely bright, capable, and well educated. She went over the four components of the pig portion of Hambre Cero, which are: Organization - the community needs to be organized, which they are, as evidenced by the numerous meetings and leaders; Capacitation - or what it takes to own a pig, what to feed them, how to castrate them, how to breed them, etc; Reforestation
- Nicaraguans are aware that their landscape is changing, that soil conservation and water management are important, but like most developing countries, the need for firewood and room to plant crops is more important now - hard to think ahead here; and last, Vegetables - promoting family gardens, nutrition, organic farming, growing your own instead of paying to go to town to buy them, etc.
And then they went into the numbers. How many pigs a family started with. How many piglets they had. How many they sold and how much profit they made. The four components of the program are great. They’re all the things I am promoting as a PCV. But the numbers reminded me of China during the Great Leap Forward. Reporting maybe a few hundred more córdobas worth of profit so it could be reported that the program is succeeding.
Clearly I realize that this is actually in no way comparable to the atrocity of The Great Leap Forward - to the mass starvation and death incurred. It was just the numbers. Seemed very Communist to me.
At any rate, it doesn’t really matter how I feel about Hambre Cero, because it’ll be
part of my life for the next two years as a PCV.
Okay I am hungry and am going to go see if my laundry is dry yet. And put this away so no one ever finds out it exists!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.323s; Tpl: 0.036s; cc: 12; qc: 62; dbt: 0.1609s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
wifeth
non-member comment
yes. very communistic
i miss you. i stalk you. :)