Evidently, Sunday was Australia Day

Cricket is a requirement for proper Australia Day celebrations, even when said celebrations occur while you're in Nicaragua. We went along with it. Few pulperias reliably stock cricket bats, so plan on making your own. Also, it is best if the rules are explained in humorous, half-sensical Spanish, because no one is going to understand them anyway.

Intimidate your opponents with flying-crane, rum-hand cricket stance.

Scald them with piping-hot sopa de mariscos from Nereyda's birthday.

Or, just wait patiently until they give up and play futbol.  It won't be long.

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Decidedly Fictional Tuesday

There are countless things to prepare and organize for our first extended trip to Kahkabila, so postings have been set to the backburner. Items to collect and pack so far include: rubber boots, solar panels, buckets of dried goods and spices and oatmeal, teaching materials, LED flashlights and soldering equipment, machete, medical kit, toolbox, raingear, extra diesel, turbine monitoring equipment, rehydration salts, chlorine, and spare buckets.

In the meanwhile, Ken has been trading off rum-monitoring duties for occasionally getting some writing done in the evenings, and (as a few of you have already heard) recently got a short short piece of fiction accepted to an online journal, elimae. It will be posted around the 15th of next month. Given time restraints, the contraints of flash fiction have proven useful.

Below is something that hasn´t been published (an earlier attempt at the short-short form) and that, having been posted here, discounts it from getting published elsewhere and allows him to let it rest appropriately. Ali will post pictures from over the weekend (including a Nica friend´s birthday festivities) over the next few days, to maintain a semblance of balance.

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21 June, 2006
by K. M. Weaver

Only once have I fully experienced irony expressed in another language. The road heading to Marrakech could have gone elsewhere, past melon vendors, past pushcarts (past children riding horseback, pulperias, past Louisiana lean-tos…), seated beside her while she thumbed a book: "The Art of Listening." We paused at a roadside stand, where the pepper sauce could have sterilized the water and an attendant stood waiting with her bucket to wash away one's shit. GPS and cameras: hidden in the trunk. After they'd gone in, I was approached outside by an old man grinning widely and toothless, speaking only his native tongue. I spoke none. Most things here couldn't be understood with a thousand years. But, he continued: our shoes know the way, everything suggests that woman's bucket will keep her employed, and behind you there is absolutely nothing to fear.
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The Long Road to Kahkabila

(Figuratively, of course. There are no roads.)

After a preliminary visit in December, after a winter vacation no one bothered to mention to us ahead of time, after countless documents read and re-read and forgotten about and read one last time, for good measure, after bugs and oranges and piñatas and endless disappointments related to imbibables in general and an overall blog flippancy underscoring a slight rambunctiousness from waiting around reading, we're finally finally finally going back to Kahkabila.

Hold on to your turbines.


Current departure date is looking to be around February 4th, and we're organizing supplies for about a six-week initial stay. Then three-and-a-half weeks back in Bluefields (slightly longer than expected, but the Semana Santa week around Easter makes it difficult to get anything done), then another five weeks in Kahkabila, then two back in Bluefields.

Somehow, that puts us into June.

Widely: we'll be working with the energy commission (the community operators who maintain and manage the bE energy systems) and teaching. Formal English classes are of primary interest. We'll be teaching health and wellness classes (as suggested by the KKB doctor), along with classes on the environment, energy, sanitation, and basic math and accounting workshops. Ultimately, this will be working towards better utilization of the energy systems and building community development in a way that allows those in Kahkabila to have more control over where their community moves from here. They'd like to clean up their water supply, boost tourism, and improve their livelihoods, and we would like to help them do so.

We do not have a coherent closing today. We are giddy on Oreos and coffee and new-found project management, and we've got plenty to do.

Over the weekend, one should peruse the new blueEnergy site, which just went online a few weeks ago. If you look at the "about us" header and go to blueEnergy Nicaragua people, you'll see us!, as well as a link to our blog. From there, you can click on the above link to the new bE website, and then follow the above instructions to return here. Endless amusement.
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The W stands for "Waiting for Barack Obama to be President"

Obamanauguration: One More Excuse to Buy a Piñata

This morning, at around 10:30 Nica time, one nonprofit office inside INATEC (or at least a few of us) will sit quietly around a single computer screen to save bandwidth, in anticipation of an event happening thousands of miles and days of travel away, in a country that, for many, isn’t necessarily their own. They will wait patiently a few minutes longer, then perhaps a touch less patiently, for a slow internet connection to buffer the video feed, and during this time they will be thinking of the altered course ahead of them, ahead of all of us, the changing manner in which world affairs will be directed, considering the powerful words and refreshing honesty to appear whenever the video feed finally loads. I will be thinking about the piñata.

Sure, there will be many things to look forward to: an improved economic course, the closing of Guantanamo, the fostering of an American green-collar workforce, an intelligent and more transparent approach to world affairs. Health care, education, social programs. All valid and heartfelt reasons to celebrate, but, one has to ask, are they filled with candy?

Of course, this is to say nothing of intangibles: the endorsement against eight long years, the racial tug, the collapse of a right-wing politics, people in the streets, this feeling of elation, of feeling something other than numb. Being able to read the paper again. But, is that what I was really focusing on in the mercado, eyeing up paper maché forest creatures, salivating, thinking of that exuberance of being blindfolded and swinging a stick?

The Pooh-bear, for instance, overhead after the Iowa primaries should have suggested a sense of excitement outside normal bounds of political fervor. Inexpensive, it fell with a few hard thwacks. I didn’t even eat all the candy. November 2nd: a large white cat dressed in a ballerina skirt, spilling M&Ms over a freshly polished floor. It seemed appropriate, destined, at the time. Perhaps it suggested something much deeper than surface feelings, a certain unfilled void, maybe from childhood, maybe back to an emptiness even larger than the last two terms. Maybe. This is normally where a voice quiets into soft introspection, where the intensity before just simmers...

Maybe.

But, tonight, we’ll write Bush in magic marker and swing for the hills.
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Wait, We Have a Blog?!

You'd never know it by the frequency of the posts lately...

(Been busy. Article with piñata pics tomorrow.)
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The Rites and Passage of the Nicaraguan Orange

Fine. In Bluefields, personal vehicles are switched for tricked-out taxis and pangas. The coffee, rum, and tobacco products you’ve grown to know and love and develop slight-but-loveable addictions to are only memories, as fleeting as Toña’s palate. You didn’t come here to be amused, pampered, patted on the butt and given a lollipop. Lollipop? It’s next to the Camembert. You’re just asking for a thread of normalcy upon returning home after a ten-hour workday. At least eating an orange can’t possibly lead you astray.

Right? Right?

Anyone who said “right” (and especially anyone who said it aloud, to their computer screen: you, especially) should be ashamed of themselves. Put the orange down. Your long fingernails are of no consequence here. Peeling and wedging won’t win you friends.

First, grab an orange. Hint: it will not be orange. As a reliable fallback, grab a lime, which might also look like a lemon. Then grab something similar, but bigger. You’re halfway done!

Peel in a careful circle around the outside of the orange with a sharp knife, leaving the integrity of the rind intact. The first couple times, this will not make you proud of your knife-handling skills. You will not feel like Crocodile Dundee beneath a bridge (“that’s not a knife…”). Go with it. Use an Australian accent. Eat more oranges. Switch to an orange-based diet for weeks on end. Also, picking out oranges with thicker rinds will let you peel more quickly, in wider slices, without looking like a rind-poking gringo.

Cut off the top. Begin nibbling. Do whatever comes natural. Go nuts.

If you’ve successfully managed to follow the above directions, you should have nothing on your hands at the end of things, the juice safely captured in your suddenly-pliable Nicaraguan orange. Try not to get any in your nose.