Happy Birthday Mom!

This blog post is dedicated to my mother, for her birthday on Friday, March 2st. She's a great mom and I love her a bunch, so I took some
pictures and am going to take you on a little tour around the farm. This here is volcano Concepcion, an active volcano that forms one half of the island.

This is a view of the kitchen from the treehouse. We have all open-air structures on the farm, so there are pretty much no walls. While at home making time to be outside can be difficult, here there is no inside! Sometimes it's a bit stressful though because the wind is blowing all the time now and there is nowhere to escape it. The kitchen has a thatched room and the dining area has a metal roof. The tables are built on the farm, as are the benches.

Another kitchen view. Clemencia and Meerta, two sisters from the village, make us breakfast and lunch every day. Volunteers take turns cooking dinner. Tonight we had yucca and bean patties with pesto chili sauce, fried curry jackfruit seed, salad with starfruit and green papaya, fish and Mayan spinach in pumpkin sauce, and jackfruit pudding. Jackfruit is a the biggest fruit in the world, and you can eat the ripe fruit (juicyfruit gum is jackfruit flavored), cook the unripe fruit, and boil the seeds which are a large starchy chickpea-like food. All of this food comes from a tree-which you only have to plant once, and it requires very little care. It helps prevent soil erosion, attracts rain, and turns carbon dioxide to oxygen. Food from trees is more sustainable than food from annual crops because you are reforesting, whereas a garden is basically a disturbed landscape that we cultivate. Annual crops are not bad or wrong, but it is good to have trees that give us food for years to come.

I never want to eat jackfruit again. My left leg is made of jackfruit. Biggest fruit in the world, guys. We got lots.

This is an aerial view, from the treehouse, of the annuals garden. It´s in very bad shape this year because it didn´t get started on time, because volunteers were building a new garden for some of the workers. The workers now have an organic salad greens microbusiness, which is really great both for them and as an example to the community how a team of farmers can be super successful without slash and burn crops like beans and rice. There is also a lot of transience on the farm, and gardening in the tropics is

nothing like gardening in the north. There is heat and wind to deal with, and most seeds you get from the USA simply won´t grow.

They don´t like it here. Also, many plants only produce when there is a shift in the number of daylight hours, which, because we are near the equator, is less marked. Also, tropical soils contain most of their organic matter and nutrients in the plants themselves, and nitrogen goes very quickly. It´s a whole different ballgame, so when someone comes for three weeks, or even three months, it´s tough to be successful here. I am on the garden crew, and we had some frustrating times in the beginning. The weather is getting hotter so few new plants can be established right now, which means that we are mostly planning for the rainy season. We´re designing extensive perennial beds in areas of the farm that are not being used right now, and are close to the kitchen area. We´ll draw up plans and get some perennials started in the nursery (see pic) so that the volunteers who arrive in a few months will know exactly where to start.

These are our guard dogs. They guard our ipods and solar pannels. Peggy has three legs and licks

everything.

I am trying to find a way to get her to dislike me so much that she avoids me completely, without abusing her in any way. No success yet. By the way, I am having an awfully hard time formatting the pictures on here, so please forgive the sloppy layout. This is a cobb oven built out of bricks, mud, cow poop and straw. We make pizza and banana bread here. This is an example, actually, of a poor design. It is too big, so it takes a lot of wood to heat, and the dome is too high, which wastes more wood. When you build your next cobb oven, don´t build it like this! You can see the wood behind it, all of which comes from the property, as do the stones (we live on an erroded volcano, you know). We do a lot of natural building on the farm. We grow bamboo, and you may be able to see that that is what forms the crossbeams of this structure. We also grow timber trees and make things out of cobb. When we cement, we fill in with stone so that we use as little of an outside source as possible. As a longterm goal we are looking into putting in a natural floor in the classroom, which is

basically a cobb floor glossed over with linseed oil, and it becomes smooth and durable.

Very cool. Here you see thatch palm for roofs, and bamboo!

This is my tent where I sleep. It´s a cement platform with a bamboo structure that is covered by a tarp. Behind the trees you see is the lake.

Things have been going extra well since the permaculture course, mostly because there has been a huge influx of new age hippy type people. Now that we use non violent communication skills and make gratitude circles before we eat, we all get along better! I have been teaching some yoga classes on the farm, which also brings people together and destresses them, and is great practice for me. As some of you know, this fall I did a yoga mentorship program in Boston with Ame Wren and learned a lot more about teaching, and this is really the first time putting it into use. I have only three weeks left at the farm (CRAZY!), and then I´m going to a 10 day silent vipassana meditation retreat. Then I´m going to travel for maybe three or four weeks up to Guatemala, then go back to the states. This trip is flying by so fast it´s incredible. I gotta buy a plane ticket home! Last trip, because I had no plan, everything felt relaxed and slow, but now I feel like I´m running out of time. This week Alice is coming to visit me, which is very exiting. I miss and love all you guys and can´t wait to see you stateside in a couple months!

In Which I Leave Home and The World Is a Very Big Place

I cried at home. I cried in the car. I cried in the airport bathroom. I cried on the airplane. I cried in the hostel.

Leaving was very hard, and I was very frightened. Sometimes the hardest part of missing people is realizing that they had secretly been protecting you all along and now they are not protecting you anymore.

I arrived in Managua late at night and crashed at a hostel. I had planned to leave the next day, but history would have it otherwise: Daniel Ortega was being sworn into a new term in office, a term bought with a constitutional amendment, at the Palacio de La Revolucion that afternoon. Two adorable Germans took me with them. The streets were swarming, and we tried on every pair of sunglasses for sale, looking for good imitation Ray Bans. They didn't let us into the Palacio because we didn't have our party membership cards, but we sat on the traffic divider and Ortega and Chavez waved at us from their car windows. Many other official vehicles passed by, and there was this music playing that sounded like a scene from an action movie when the good guys mobilize when they first strike back against evil. With police and official cars whipping by, I felt like I was in a blockbuster.

I went to Leon, a colonial city north of the capital. There wasn't too much to do; I went to an incredible art museum. Everything from rooms full of baby Jesus to art on an ipod touch. Great collection. I didn't do anything else in Leon.

Next I headed to Matagalpa, a city in the northern highlands. I stayed in a little family-run place where there was one other tourist, a sweet Japanese girl. We toured the chocolate factory. You can buy bars all over the country, and it turns out there are these three ladies in a tiny little factory making all of the chocolate. I knew quite a bit about making chocolate, but I learned more about their process and it was interesting.

The third city on my little whirlwind tour was Esteli, a cowboy city. A great place to do day trips from, but I was having tummy grossness and I was terrified of everything. You would think that I hadn't spent over 12 months of my life in Latin America, survived cliffs, public transportation, markets, poisonous catepillars, heinous room mates, dates riding horses in someone's lap, food poisoning, throat infections, cornea scratches, a month without running water, etc. You would think I had never left my bedroom. It was awful. So awful, in fact, that I cancelled my future destinations and went to the island.

I took a bus from Esteli to Managua, arriving in Mercado Oriental. The bus to the port town leaves from Mercado Huembes, so I had to take a taxi across the city. I am standing in the market talking to a cabbie about where I need to go. From behind, some guy grabs my ass. My jaw drops. "Do you know him?" the cabbie asks. "No." "What happened?" "He grabbed my ass."

Little did I know my cab driver is an ex-military badass nicknamed "el gato negro", the black cat, who survived the war of '84 and happens to hate sexual molestation with a fanaticism that not even I can compete with. All the police know him. He puts me in the car and disappears into the crowd for a bit of vigilantee justice. Meanwhile I am sitting in an unlocked car in the middle of the biggest market in Central America. Wonderful.

He comes back and we have a little bit of car chase action to the other side of the market, we sic the police on the perpetrator, the black cat drags me out of the car and away from my luggage to identify the man, on whom the police are strapping handcuffs. They stick him in the car and we start to drive to the police station. When I insist that I do not want to go to the police station, the black cat says that I MUST file against this man or else he will grope more North American women and then what will they think of Nicaragua? So we stop on the side of the road and the police take all my passport information. Then my taxi driver drops me off at the bus.

How did all this make me feel?

Stunned. It unfolded like an impossible dream. I didn't want any trouble, I just wanted to go to Ometepe and forget about it all. Which is funny, because every time men catcall me or whistle or say rude nasty things to me I always want to PUNISH them, I want cops to leap out of the underbrush and take them down with clubs. And then it happens, and it doesn't feel good or make anything better...

I've been at the farm for a week and a half now. It's great to be back. There are about twenty volunteers right now. It's an older crowd from last time, so people have done a lot more interesting things with their lives and conversations are usually fascinating. But it's a lot of people to live with day in and day out. I'm not lonely anymore, but I think I've hit the opposite extreme. Unfortunately, there is no better cure for miserable loneliness and fear of existential solitude than to be driven mad by the peculiarities of the twenty people on top of which you live. Yes, my nutty hippy friends have made the great void of god, death, uncertainty, whathaveyou into a comfortable and refreshing alternative to one more conversation about GMOs, mulch, herbal stomach remedies, or how we do shit around the farm. So I'm finding ways to spend more time by myself.

There are a lot of wonderful, endearing, strong, and eccentric personalities here. Last night we wanted to watch a movie and couldn't decide, so Yan broke out a computer algorithm where we could rate each movie choice on a scale of 0 to 5 and then it did math and told us which movie had the least restistance. It took an hour to pick out the movie. We watched "The Matrix". We're eating a lot of jackfruit seed, which is like a big garbanzo bean, and a lot of strange fruits that are like avocado but sweet and less delicious. Tons of rice and beans. We're making citrus soda and lemon ginger champagne.

I am working in the veggie garden a lot; it seems that's going to be my main project while on the farm. That's a good skill set to develop and is very transferable to other locations. Right now there are 3 of us on the garden and we spend most of our time making plans and passing our general ignorance around in circles. Do we mulch? Do we direct seed? Do we augment the soil?

The permaculture course starts next Friday, so about an extra fourty people will descend upon the farm. It's going to be an adventure.