All Volunteer Conference, Turkey Day, and Somoto Carnaval

It´s been a wild couple of weeks here in Nicaragua and the hits just keep on coming. We apologize for not updating the blog recently,o but maybe after reading this post you´ll understand why. Last week Jess and I went to Managua to participate in the 2009 All Volunteer Conference. This is a time when every single Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua gets together to learn about other projects going on in country. On Tuesday morning over 170 volunteers arrived at Las Mercedes Hotel in Managua. The conference only lasted until Thursday morning, but it was several months in planning, as Jess can attest to. She was on the steering committee that organized the whole show.At AVC we had a chance to catch up with friends, meet newer volunteers, and plan for future projects. Our group, Health 46, is now the longest serving group in Nicaragua, which means we´re the next to head home. Also at AVC was a group that swore in as volunteers just a day before the conference started. So, we really ran the whole gamut of time in country. Also, every sector was represented at AVC. We´ve mentioned before that there are 5 different types of volunteers in Nicaragua:
- Health (us)
- Environment
- Agriculture
- Small Business
- Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)

Jess and I were able to walk around and see the kind of work these sectors are doing and imagine how their projects could be incorporated into the work of the health volunteers. For us, some of the most exciting projects are being done by the Agriculture sector, where improved stoves and ovens, biodigesters, and drip irrigation are all the rage. If anyone is interested in those ideas, let us know and we´ll put up a separate post.

The theme of AVC was “Food Security in Nicaragua.” Therefore, we were trying to tie in each sector’s work with the idea of improved food security. Jess led a session on cooking with soy, where she make all sorts of different veggie burgers. Another volunteer in the same session showed us how to make butter and buttermilk from scratch!

Another big piece of AVC was professional development. We had visitors from all walks of life who talked about their careers and the possibilities that lie ahead for returned Peace Corps volunteers. As you can imagine, that was particularly interesting for our group, as we´re all starting to polish up our resumes for March.

After AVC all volunteers had the option to spend Thanksgiving with an American family that works at the US Embassy. Jess and I, and about 15 other volunteers, ended up at the house of Richard Sanders, the Deputy Chief of the US Embassy in Managua. While the US ambassador is in charge of relations with the host country, Mr. Sanders is basically in charge of all embassy operations. He has an incredible house on a hill in Managua from where you can easily spot several volcanoes and one enormous lake. It was beautiful. Since we´re all so far from friends and family it was very nice to be able to spend some time speaking English and enjoying American traditions. And the food! We had a monster buffet that included all of the following:

- Turkey

- Mashed Potatoes

- Stuffing

- Gravy

- REAL cranberry sauce

- Eggplant Parmesan

- Meatloaf

- Vegetables

- Pumpkin Pie

- Lemon Meringue

- Brownies

- Ice Cream

- Cookies

- And more that I can´t remember but can still taste…

Friday morning Jess and I got up super early (4am) to get back to Somoto in time for work. We also had a lot of house cleaning to do. Saturday was Somoto´s famous Carnaval and we wanted to make the most of it. We invited a bunch of volunteers to our house for the weekend. Saturday morning we all went to the Canyon, and for the first time ever Jess and I made it through all 7km of hiking and swimming. It took about 7.5 hours in total. After the Canyon we all took a rest and got ready for Carnaval, which is a very famous Somoto tradition. Every November Somoto invites some of Nicaragua´s most famous bands to an all night music fest. 6 city blocks are fenced off and 8 separate stages are set up for the bands. The music started at 8 and didn’t end until somewhere near 6am. Jess and I only made it to 3 in the morning, but that was better than last year. Here are some pictures of the day:

These are the signs that were recently put up at the different canyon entrances. Hopefully they are the start of better protection of the area.

This is our Gringo Train just starting to enter the canyon. We walk for about 2.5 hours before finally cooling off in the river.

Here's Jess and our sitemate, Katie. Looking good, ladies!

This is fellow Nica 46er and married man, Kory, contemplating the route ahead.

You have to scurry your way back and forth across the river. A lot of fun, but it gets tiring!

This is our Peace Corps group, Nica 46, minus 3 people. We came into the country with 19 and now we're 14. With four months left, it's safe to say we'll all make it!
Here's a video from inside the canyon. This is the last part of the hike and the first part of the swim. You can see we had the option of lifevests or innertubes. The little boats were just for bags. Pretty exciting!

After a long day in the canyon, here's the group getting ready for carnaval. You can see the white blur of Astro, who was upset he didn't get to do the canyon. No doggie lifevests here...

Good friends were made at Carnaval, here's Kory and I with a couple of Nicaraguan friends.

So, as you can see, we´ve been very busy. Tuesday was a huge day for Jess. It was World AIDS Day (all over the world, surprisingly) so she organized a concert here in town. Jess was able to get a fairly famous Nicaraguan group to agree to come to Somoto and give a concert for free. We had an informational fair focused on HIV and then a concert from 5 to 7. Overall, we had an attendance of about 400 people. Look for more on this event and pictures later in the week!

Here´s some more photos for the Astro and Yoda book:

Photos of the Family

To all of our loyal readers,

Lately we have been receiving a lot of requests for photos of Yoda and Astro. So, here are a few of our two furry friends that will make you all go "awe..."

More interesting blog posts to come!

-Matt and Jess


Here's Astro pouting because he doesn't want to brush his teeth. Every night it's a struggle, but his breath can get really bad...

Yoda is truly a tropical cat. He loves bananas and all sorts of other fruits. Here he is getting fed an entire banana by a friend of ours.

After a long Saturday of doing laundry, it's good to relax for a while.

This is Yoda pondering his future, and his next escape out the front door.


A nightly tradition in our house. Astro gets brushed and the cat tries to help. Somehow the Yoda always ends up devouring the hairballs we pull off of Astro. We think it is a form of revenge for all of the times that Astro has plowed Yoda out of the way to get to the food bowl.


Ahh, to be inside the mind of a cat...

I think it's almost dead now...
The beast has been slain. We can all go about our lives without fear of being attacked by dust bunnies.

Costa Rica

Me, partaking in some authentic Central American Cuisine.....


Last week, Matt and I took a little vacation. We had been talking for a while about taking some time off from work and Matt had been talking to some people at the Regional Office for Disaster Assistance in San Jose about a possible informational interview. So, we decided to go to Costa Rica.

The trip started in Managua, where we caught a bus at 5:00 am for Costa Rica. The ride wasn’t that bad, only about 7 hours to a town a bit over the border called Liberia. It would have been a bit shorter if the driver had actually stopped and told us we were in Liberia – instead he just drove through. When we decided to ask how much further it was, he informed us that we had already passed it. Lucky for us, he just so happened to have a friend driving a bus in the other direction that let us get on and go back for free.

From Liberia, we made our way to Playa Tamarindo, one of Costa Rica’s more developed beaches. And when I say more developed, it is a different world in comparison to Nicaragua. There were a number of hotels, condominiums, grocery stores, surf shops and pizza places. We stayed at an adorable little hotel run by a retired Italian woman, and had an amazing room complete with its own little kitchenette.

Our Room at Los Flores, Playa Tamarindo

As many of you may know, Nicaragua and much of Central America has been suffering this year from a virtual lack of rainy season. It normally rains all of September, October and November, but for the months of September and October, there was no rain at all. As our luck would have it, the rain decided to return the week that Matt and I choose to go to the beach. So, while our hotel was great, we didn’t really get to take advantage of the ocean or pool because it was raining so much. But we did get to spend a lot of time watching TV and nursing upset stomachs after a bad piece of cheese cake.

The Pool at Los Flores, which we didn't use that much because of rain.

Our wonderful meal of bread, cheese, peperoni, black olive paste and yes....they do have Arbor Mist in Costa Rica.

From Playa Tamarindo, we decided to make our way to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. We were completely astonished. We are both used to Managua, a dirty, ridiculously hot, evidently third-world city. San Jose felt like New York after almost two years of frequenting the capital of Nicaragua. It was much more developed, there were people walking everywhere, and you felt safe walking almost downtown. We filled our two days in San Jose with visiting museums and other attractions, and eating really, really good food.

An amazing Argentinian Restaurant in San Jose. To give you an idea - my meal was homemade pasta, filled with ricotta cheese and smoked halibut in a broccoli, pistachio, garlic pesto. Again, amazing.

This was a reposteria/panaderia that we found. Also amazing.

This guy was our favorite at the San Jose Zoo - a dwarf Jaguar that was rescued from the wild!

Matt did his best to blend in and make friends, but I'm not sure that it worked all that well.

The Museo de Oro in San Jose (Gold Museum)

The next stop on the trip was La Fortuna and Volcan Arenal. La Fortuna is a tiny town about 4 hours north of San Jose, situated directly below the enormous and very clearly active Volcan Arenal. We stayed in a cabin just outside of town and filled the two days with hikes, visits to one of the local hot spring resorts (with 25 different pools of varying temperatures, sizes and themes) and a lovely evening trip up to the observation deck for the volcano. While the rain made it a bit difficult to see the characteristic red lava flowing down the side of the mountain, we were able to spend the evening chatting with a nice older couple from Oregon who accompanied us on the trip.

Matt and I on our way up the mountain in La Fortuna.

A lone Bromeliad, blocking the view of the volcano.

Volcan Arenal emerging from the mist.

After two days of outdoor adventures, we left La Fortuna at the crack of dawn to be able to make it back down to San Jose so that Matt could spend some time talking with the Director of the Regional Office of Disaster Assistance. For those who may not know, this office is a branch of USAID, the US Agency for International Development and it mostly does what its name implies – it provides international assistance in the event of disasters in Central America and the Caribbean. Disasters can include anything from hurricanes, to earthquakes and volcanoes to political coups. Mat is really interested in Disaster Preparedness and Response and spent a morning learning a lot about what the organization and its director do.

That was about it for the vacation. We came home to find Astro and Yoda happy to see us and just as energetic as ever.

A Very Successful Project

Hello again to all of our family and friends. Jess and I just got finished with a spectacular project, so we´d like to take this blog post to fill you all in on our recent activities.

A few years back President Bush created the “President´s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief,” more lovingly known as PEPFAR. The program makes funds available throughout the developing world to fight the spread of HIV. Here in Nicaragua, Peace Corps was given the charge of managing these funds and tasked its volunteers to spending the money on HIV prevention. So, in July of these year our group of health volunteers were asked by our program director, Pilar, to put together a few PEPFAR workshops around the country. Jess and I were grouped with the volunteers in the northern departments of Jinotega, Matagalpa, Nueva Segovia, and Madríz (ours). That made a total of 9 volunteers working on this one workshop.

As a group we decided on the date, time, location, content, and participants. Probably the easiest decision of all of these was the content, as we knew we needed to focus in HIV. As for participants, we were told there was a budget for a total of 50, but that was just the beginning. Should we work with men? Should we work with midwives? Should we work with nurses? Finally, we agreed that we would each invite 4 youths between the ages of 15 and 20 to participate. We went back and forth on the date because, believe it or not, any closer to November and we would lose a lot of participants to the coffee harvest. Any earlier and we would have trouble meshing with the bean planting season. We were able to find a compromise during the week of October 6th. The location was up in the air for weeks to come as volunteers scoured for locales that could accommodate 50 people with lodging, food, and meeting space, all for under $15 a day per person. We settled on a hotel in Estelí for it´s central location, charming atmosphere, and rock bottom prices.

So now, that the particulars were sorted out, we went back to the content, which is of course the whole reason we´re having the workshop. We have all worked on HIV prevention in our site, so it was clear from the start that our participants would already be familiar with the theme. We had to come up with something different and exciting that would really help the message stick with our youth. Jess and I thought it would be great to do an all night “lock-in” event with tons of sugar and activities to keep people awake and excited. We lobbied hard for the idea and the whole group got on board. Since the workshop would be three days, we decided to hold the lock in the first night, let the kids sleep well the following night so we could send them back to their parents more or less recovered.

A few other volunteers thought an all night event was a ridiculous idea since half of these kids don´t stay up past 7:30pm due to no electricity in the house. In retrospect, they were probably right, but we settled on 7 hours of activity between 8pm and 3am. Jess and I were put in charge of the planning and we came up with 5 hour long activities with 20 minute side activities buffering each main session. We designed each session around HIV-AIDS, to be sure the kids understood the information. Our sessions had the following themes:

Casino Night
Olympics
Jeopardy
Fashion Show
Channel X

In Casino Night, the Peace Corps volunteers dressed the room up like a classy casino, down to us in white shirts and bowties. We had 4 different casino games focused on HIV. I ran the roulette table where participants could win or lose chips based on their actions. For instance, the wheel had a spot for abstinence, which paid out 4 times the bet. Another spot, “sex with a prostitute” left the player without any of his chips. I put the game together without every actually having played roulette and my table was paying out loads, but the other tables had the house winning, so it all evened out in the end.
At another table we had a craps style game, where students rolled the dice to find out how safe the behaviors were. Low rolls meant abstinence, fidelity, and always using protection. High rolls meant promiscuity, not using protection, and risk of getting HIV.

We also had a card game and a board game going. The Casino Night was a big success and will probably be expanded in time and tables in the future. We´ll see.

In the Olympics we had in the sack races (your normal sack race) and condom tosses (like water balloon toss, except with condoms). The participants paired off and competed in each activity. In the end we had gold tuna cans for medals. It was all very competitive.

The Jeopardy session was exactly as it sounds, only with questions about HIV as opposed to random trivia. We split 10 volunteers into two groups and they competed in front of the “live studio audience” of the other participants. Kory, a volunteer from Matagalpa, even built little bells out of bamboo and old telephone ringers to that the kids would have something to smack when they thought of the answer. We were all surprised and impressed with the amount of knowledge these kids already had. Perhaps we´ll post some of the questions up here and see how all of you do…

In the fashion show activity we gave 5 different groups a bunch of old second hand clothes. They had to create three distinct outfits (men´s formalwear, women´s formalwear, and casualwear). Next we held a fashion show with dance music and spotlights (flashlights) and three judges. Neither Jess´s nor my group won the fashion show, but that´s life.

For the last activity of the night, Channel X, we had the students create 30 second TV commercials about HIV. We borrowed a video camera and actually recorded them, too. Here´s one of the better ones:

Throughout the night we had different side activities going as well, which included the painting of a mural, which went to the highest scoring community and a photo booth. Our Peace Corps buddies Heather and Kory made some awesome backgrounds for the photo booth, and Jess and I brought different dress up props. The photos ended up pretty funny. Here's a few, the first is Jess with two of the girls she brought.

Besides the lock-in we covered the information in more traditional ways throughout the 3 days. We were also lucky enough to have an HIV positive Nicaraguan participate for the whole workshop. Frank worked with the kids for two full days as “an HIV expert” and didn´t reveal he was HIV positive until the 2nd evening. His story is very powerful and had a profound effect on the kids. Frank has known he has HIV for 7 years now and only found out when his wife died of tuberculosis brought on by AIDS. He has always been heterosexual and never taken any intravenous drugs. Basically, he was unfaithful with his wife and most likely brought HIV into his family. Since the death of his wife he travels around Nicaragua telling his story to groups like ours. When he´s not speaking he is raising his two kids, who still don´t know he is HIV positive or how their mother died…

So, that was our PEPFAR workshop in a nutshell. Personally, I was not that interested in HIV prevention before Peace Corps, but it really is important – even in the U.S. If anyone would like to hear more about specific activities or has specific HIV related questions, please leave a comment and we´ll do our best to answer.

Again, thanks for reading!

Food, Food, Food

As many of you are aware, Matt and I love to eat. It’s one of our favorite pastimes. And cooking, it turns out, goes hand in hand with eating, as does gardening. We’ve had a month full of activities and, not surprisingly, many of them have involved food and plants. I thought that a quick narrative of these recent activities would give you a glimpse at some of the culinary and agricultural skills that we’ve acquired and shed some light on some of the other things that we do!

Peace Corps volunteers rarely work regular hours and rarely focus on one kind of activity. So, even though Matt and I are primarily health volunteers, we also do all kinds of other things in our community. In my case, this involves one-on-one English classes. One of my students, the daughter of a former colleague, has been very adept at learning English, a result of the fact that she is part German and part Nicaraguan and has grown up speaking the languages of both her parents. The fluency in both German and Spanish has given her an enormous advantage in learning English. Because she is so advanced, I’ve taken the opportunity to involve her in as many non-traditional learning opportunities as possible to expose her to more conversational skills. As part of a recent class I decided to share a favorite food with her – bagels. Matt and I shared our recipe, walked her through the process and chatted the whole time. The family loved the bagels and I think that we used some new vocab!

Matt and Sophie cooking bagels:

And they were delicious!

In addition to cooking, Matt and I have been slowly but surely been expanding our little patio garden. Many frequent readers will remember that we started a few months ago with a tire garden. Well, it turns out that Astro learned how to use the tire garden as a stepping stool, allowing him to jump through a hole in the fence, escape through construction next door and party with friend in the street while we were out of town. As one can imagine, these are not the most appropriate conditions in which to grow anything. So, after many reconstruction efforts and elevation of the tire, the garden has been reincarnated, and we have made the addition of two more tires. We’ve also built a small garden for mesculin greens out of old wood and an old sack. We’ve found that things grow best when elevated because at ground level they are susceptible to attack from zampopos or leaf-cutter ants that destroy anything in their path. After adjustments for the Astro factor and the plagues of ants, our plants (pepper, basil, parsely, cucumber, dill, lettuce) have been doing well, but only time will tell if we get another plaga of some sort.

Matt working on the elevated garden for the mescalin greens:

Working on the tire garden:

Some of our pepper plants growing in old yogurt containers, styrofoam cups, plastic bottles...


Lettuce! Lemon-Piccata eggplant with creamy rice and greens from our patio - ricco! (delicious!)
Many of you will also remember from previous posts that Matt and I lived with a Nicaraguan family for about 6 weeks when we first arrived in Somoto, and that we visit them every Thursday to eat, watch a movie, spend time with the girls and catch up. This week, we decided to show Ena Sofia and Adrianna (our two host sisters) how to make pizza. Matt made enough dough in advance to have pizza for the four family members and the two of us. He also made the sauce from scratch (its delicious!) and we used quesillo, a local cheese which melts and tastes very much like mozzarella, and a bologna-like product made from chicken. The results: deliciosa!

Adrianna rolling out pizza dough:


Sophie, with one of the finished pizzas:

Akhnatito, while he is adorable is really not of much help in the kitchen:




I also had the opportunity this week to share some of my culinary zeal with teachers from a local organization. Peace Corps has recently been very interested in the idea of food security. The term conjures up a number of ideas and images, but basically the gist is to help local people rely on available technologies and resources to aid them in creating local, sustainable food systems. The costs of food globally are difficult for already impoverished families. And, many countries, including Nicaragua grow food locally, export it for profit and then turn around and buy food for consumption. The sustainable food movement suggest that this seems a bit preposterous and that it makes more sense to simply eat locally grown foods. Many of you know that I am personally in agreement with this and a huge advocate (bordering on fanatic) of local food systems. So I was thrilled when I approached a local school founded by the Fabretto Children’s foundation (a catholic organization with its origins in Padre Fabretto, an Italian priest who spent many years working in Nicaragua) about a small school/family garden project. It turned out that they were already thinking about expanding their existing garden and invited me to help with a workshop about nutrition and huertos escolares (school gardens).

A teacher explaining what she learned about una dieta completa (a complete diet


The workshop was a huge success. I taught teachers about basic nutrition – carbohydrates, fats, proteins, water, vitamins, and minerals – shared some creative activities in which to involve students and then we practiced. We cooked! I showed them very simple ways to incorporate local vegetables and green leaves into everyday dishes, and they loved it. The second day of the workshop, the teacher responsible for the gardens showed them how to prepare soil, how to plant, etc.. We’re now in the process of planning how to follow-up on the activity and possibly make the school more reliant on its own garden system, saving it money.

Some of the teachers cooking in the school kitchen:



One of the recipes that the teachers made - chili (made with bought beans, and tomatoes, oregano and sweet potato leaves from the garden) with corncakes that have dried soy in them:


Gallo Pinto ("Painted Rooster" - beans and rice) with carrots cooked with butter and dulce (pure sugar cane product that resembles brown sugar with more molasses):

Teachers working on preparing soil for a garden:



So, all in all, its been a month full of great food and fun activities! For those who would also like an update on Astro and Yoda, the following series of photos says it all – they get along well, they have taken over our house (the following attack sequence happns in our bed) and they are just as cute and lovable as ever.


Everything's fine...every one is cute....
Until someone makes the first move...

A little paw swat is nothing....

Until it turns into a bigger paw swat...


A rebutal....

And finally a full-on attack - take that dog!....

Puertas Nicaraguenses (Nicaraguan Doors)

Big questions about the future of Peace Corps

Dear family and friends,

We’re sorry it has taken us so long to get some new material up on the blog. August was an interesting month for us, with lots of ups and downs, and we haven’t had much time for anything outside the realm of work, household chores, and sleep. So, here’s a quick few thoughts we’ve been having lately. We would love to see some comments from all of you about this post so please give us a shout!

Jess spent this past Thursday in Managua where she had the opportunity to meet with the new world wide director of Peace Corps. His name is Aaron Williams and he was sworn in about a week ago. Director Williams has worked for USAID, a private development research agency called RTI, and a few other interesting places along the way. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic in the 60’s. Sadly, he is only one of two or three directors who have ever actually been a Peace Corps volunteer, so it is exciting to know that he will improve Peace Corps from the mindset of an administrator but also of a volunteer. Jess will write a bit later on about her meeting with Director Williams, but let’s talk a little more about where Peace Corps is and what the future holds.

Peace Corps has about 8,000 volunteers worldwide right now, and surprisingly, that is not its highest enrollment. Earlier, I believe in the 60’s and 70’s, there were more volunteers than there are now. One of the big pushes in Washington D.C. is to expand Peace Corps to double its current size. You might actually remember hearing this from President Obama, who mentioned he would like to see Peace Corps doubled by 2012. Nobody really thinks that’s possible, but the spirit of it all is good.

There are others, including returned Peace Corps volunteers, who actually believe the number of volunteers should be lowered. They believe that by shrinking the size of the agency we can attract more experienced professionals and have a better impact in the places that really need (and want) our help. It’s tough to say what would be best of the agency overall. The last director pushed to increase the number of married couples and retired volunteers. Who knows, maybe that’s why we got a spot in the highly competitive Latin America region. The idea is clear: married couples offer twice the volunteer in the same community and retired volunteers have a career’s worth of knowledge that they can apply to their work. Those two categories, however still make up less that 20% of volunteers, with the majority being single recent college graduates.

For me, it comes down to what we expect from the U.S. Peace Corps. We have had the same three main goals since JFK set up the agency:
1. To offer technical experience in the form of American professionals to developing countries who ask for help.
2. To promote a better understanding of the U.S. and American culture in other countries around the world.
3. To promote a better understanding of other countries and cultures to Americans.

The goals, while maybe surprising to some of you first time readers, aren’t very specific in their purpose. There’s no Peace Corps goal that says, “Volunteers with effectively lower the transmission of HIV / AIDS between sex trade workers and those who solicit services from the sex trade.” In my opinion that’s a relief.

With such a non-specific mandate, however, we do need to set up some guidelines about priorities and resources. Is the goal of Peace Corps to put as many Americans on the ground as possible, trained long hours of sitting on a neighbor’s patio and chatting? Is the main goal to have a select group of development professionals working in the highest levels of program design to improve the way a country is run? Do we want volunteers to have to scrounge for funding (i.e. Jess’s Partnership Project) or do we want to give recent college grads American tax dollars to help third world countries at the volunteers’ discretion?

There are lots of questions above and beyond all this that get to the heart of what Peace Corps is. Somewhere buried behind the health care headlines (geeze louise, people!) you can find the stories about American image around the globe. While wars and industry usually are responsible for our global image there is the potential for Peace Corps, USAID, and other agencies to play a larger role. The bottom line is that someone needs to decide where and how. Maybe our new director is just the guy for the job. We’ll see…

Any thoughts from all of you?

By the way, there will be plenty of cute cat and dog photos in the next post. It's just around the corner, too!

Update: new member of the family

Well, I suppose we´ve hidden his existence long enough. Jess and I think it´s time to introduce you all to the newest inhabitant of our house. Friends and family, meet Yoda:

We know, we know. You all are thinking how silly it is to end up with another pet when we only have 8 months left in Nicaragua. Believe me when I say that we, as well, are having those same thoughts. For now, he´s just a foster cat with a very slim chance of actually immigrating to the U.S. More likely he´ll stay as a house warming gift for the Peace Corps volunteer(s) that follows us up. Either way, we know some of you would be interested in hearing about him, so here it is.

Jess and I both work at the Casa Materna outside of town on a regular basis. I think we´ve explained the Casa Materna in past blogs, but for those who are new here´s a brief description. Nicaragua has always had a fairly high infant and maternal mortality rate, mainly because it has always been the custom to give birth in the house. There is a network of very well trained women here called parteras who serve as midwives at the birth. While most communities trust their partera more than anyone else in the area, the knowledge of these women does fall short when it comes to complications during and after the birth. Therefore, the government made a big push a decade ago to encourage institutionalized births, where a birth with complications could get proper medical attention and save the life of the woman and the baby. The Ministry of Health has been asking women from rural communities to come in to the hospital to give birth, which is all well and good, except for one little hiccup: most of these women live hours away by foot, and starting to walk in when your water breaks (which, I assure you, is a very Nicaraguan thing to do) probably isn´t a great idea. To the rescue is the Casa Materna!

A bunch of Nicaraguan women came up with the idea to have very low cost lodging available within a short distance of hospitals, where rural women could go a week or two before their delivery date to basically wait. The Somoto Casa Materna is one of the area´s best, as the lodging and food are completely free. The actual building is also located about a 2 minute drive from the hospital, so as soon as a woman goes into labor an ambulance is sent to bring her right in. Also, as our Casa Materna is managed by the Ministry of Health, there is a nurse at the CM 24 hours a day. Overall, it´s a great idea.

The CM also is a great place for Peace Corps volunteers, where we can go to speak to several women at once about maternal health, child nutrition, and the importance of family planning in the future. We have a lot of women come through the Casa Materna, but unfortunately, plenty still give birth in the home. Their reasons vary, but unfortunately the two most prominent are a general distrust in government services and a machismo attitude by the fathers and husbands. Jess and I have actually had conversations with men who say, “I don´t want some doctor looking at my wife´s private parts. Those are for me only.” So, you can see that we still have a long way to go.

What does this have to do with Yoda, our new housemate? Well, apparently the benefits of the Casa Materna are evident across species. Yoda´s mom came to the Casa Materna sometime in May and not being able to use the services at the hospital, understandably, chose to give birth to her litter of kittens right there on the Casa Materna grounds. We´re not sure how many were born or how many are still alive, but we first met Yoda when he must have been only a few weeks old. Jess and I were at the Casa Materna dropping off a mural when Astro pointed us to a wooden shack on the property. Inside the shack was Yoda, all by himself, and not at all interested in playing with “the white giant” drooling in front of him. We went home alone that day and prepared for our visit to the States. As Jess was making her rounds post-vacation, she came across Yoda again, not much bigger than the first time we saw him and covered in fleas. EVEN THEN, she was able to restrain herself another week and let him be at the Casa Materna. The next week, however, when Jess made it back to the Casa Materna, the nurses informed her that they had to do something with the cat because it was too dirty and annoying to keep around. That´s never a good sign in Nicaragua and usually involves a shovel. So, that day, Yoda came home.

Jess cleaned him up using Astro´s anti-flea shampoo: By the way, his name comes from this photo, if you can't see the resemblance.

And he settled right in:

Here he is next to a pineapple, for size comparison. We weighed him a couple of days later and he came in just under 1.5 pounds.

So, now we´ve had him for about a month, and while he´s grown, it isn´t much. Every day he gets a little more bold, exploring our backyard and the property next door. Astro has been great about sharing his food and his family, and they are just getting to point where you could call their interaction “playful.” Here is a photo montage of Astro's opinion of his new foster brother:

Welcoming a new family member to the house that is of a different species and 1/50th your size....confusing.

Sharing your food and water...unsettling.

Realizing that you have a common bond of abnormally large appetites...

Priceless.

So, that´s our new friend. More interesting things to come soon!

Tourist Video of Somoto

Hello friends and neighbors. Below is our first attempt to upload a video to the blog. It looks like it worked. This is a video we just got a hold of that is being used as an introduction to Somoto for tourist groups. The song is about Somoto, as well. We'll try and translate the lyrics later. For now, enjoy!

-Matt and Jess

UCDVO 2009 - A Photo Diary

Yesterday we said goodbye to this years UCD Volunteers Overseas. They were only here a month, but accomplished incredible amounts in just 4 weeks. Below are a bunch of photos that show the progress of their work, all the way to the finished product. Expect more this week, but for now, enjoy!

The Multi-Use Court:






The Tree House:




The World Map:







Thank you for a great month!