I thought I would post some more pictures of our trip to Granada!
This picture features my new pretty birthday-present necklace, yay ...
THESE are the amazing milkshakes (coconut and pitaya is the pink one) we drank multiple times a day ...
I think this picture is hilarious. Traveling!
Coconut milk!

new outhouse roommate

we have finally arrived back at totoco after our "2 day"/week-long trip to get molly from managua, and we have a new volunteer with staying with us! not actually with us ... in a tent that is about a 1 minute walk from our little hut, but we will be working together in the gardens. he is from australia, but apparently he has been working for the last three months at another farm in nicaragua learning about permaculture, and he seems to have lots of ideas for the garden. unfortunately he also has gastritis at the moment - which we have been hearing about in great detail, and holy cow, i sincerely hope that i never experience gastritis in my life, ever - so the work has been put off at least until he gets better. we have been urging him to go to the hospital (again) and it seems like he will probably go tomorrow ... we have been feeling pretty bad for him. however, i am mentioning all of this because i learned another natural remedy from him today:

for ulcers (especially) and other stomach problems ---- aloe vera smoothies! not creamy smoothies (no milk, obviously), but just aloe vera pulp, honey, water and maybe something unoffensive like watermelon. apparently they help a lot, and they seem to have been giving him a lot of relief. i tried some today and they dont taste bad at all.

anyway - i forgot my camera again but soon i will post more pictures. we have finally bought our bus ticket so we will officially be here for 2 more weeks. our bus leaves nicaragua on the 21st, and we arrive in panama on the 22nd. our apartment seems like it will be "ready" by then (it will be a surprise when we get there! who knows!), and i will start my job at the foundation right away.

enfermedades

i have been collecting some natural remedies/healthy-body advice while we´ve been traveling and i have decided to post them here ... it has been very helpful for me to know these various things, especially in areas where things like ice or antibiotics or drugstore-medicines are not readily available everywhere:

burns --- toothpaste! im sure i have told this to many people who will read this, since ive been raving about it since the first time i went to honduras, but it is just amazing. if you happen to burn yourself, maybe with hot oil all over your hand like i did, put toothpaste all over the burn. i keep reapplying it (without washing it) as much as i can, probably sleep with it on and perhaps use some the next day. every time ive done this the burn has healed completely, with no swelling and no pain and no scarring!

urinary tract infection --- aloe vera and very hot baths. having one of these infections in the jungle is no fun, but i discovered that direct application of aloe vera is very soothing, and sitting in hot water (in a pot of hot water, for example) is extremely helpful if you arent going to be able to get to antibiotics for a few hours/days. also, avoiding taking a cold shower right after sitting on something hot or sweating a lot in hot weather is a good preventative measure.

upset stomach/stomach pains --- sodium bicarbonate with orange juice and lime. very helpful! but i would not recommend this or any other lime-heavy drink before or after drinking milk. bleccch.

walking in the hot, hot sun for many hours --- gatorade or powerade! this might be obvious to some people, but i always thought that gatorade was like any other soda ... its not! it works wonders, the label is completely true. clearly drinking water is a very good idea, but if youre really feeling faint or extremely tired, gatorade will fix you up.

weird fungus-like skin problems from humidity or wearing the same clothes too many times --- lavender oil. nancy actually told me this before i left, it works really well!

i also saw someone put gasoline on a cut to avoid infections ... but i would not recommend that. that was more upsetting in terms of the lack of medical facilities, not in terms of how to deal with a cut. also, i will post more pictures soon!

out of the jungle

Here is Elvin and Molly and I at the festival in Managua - check out Elvins Oberlin shirt! Yes!
This is Molly and I in front of one of the beautifully-colored houses in Granada.

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I have to admit that it has been nice to get out of the isolated jungle for a little while - it is absolutely beautiful there, without a doubt, but I like being around lots of people and lots of different places to walk and visit ... and less spiders is a plus for me, too. We went to Managua to meet up with Molly on Friday, and we found each other at Hostal Dulce Sueño that afternoon. It was a lovely reunion, and I was so happy when Molly and Elvin finally met each other! We had planned to just stay in Managua for the night and go back to the island early the next morning, but when we were having lunch before getting the bus to Ometepe our waitress mentioned that it was a holiday in Nicaragua and there was going to be a huge celebration in Managua - Fiesta Patronal de Santo Domingo. It is a huge celebration for the patron saint of the sick, intended for people who have prayed to Santo Domingo throughout the year during illnesses to celebrate the miracle of being healed. A lot of people had shirts on that said ´Viva Santo Domingo de Guzman,´who we learned that from a taxi driver was a campesino (peasant) to whom Santo Domingo appeared while he was chopping leña (firewood). This was not particularily obvious to us from the celebration - there was a huge street fair with sporadic parades and huge dancing puppets and lots of marching-band style drumming. Lots of helotes (grilled corn on the cob) and dulces (candy) and algodon (cotton candy), and of course, Toña (one of the national Nicaraguan beers). We missed the parade that involves carrying the statue of the saint from one church to another, unfortunately, but we did go to the parade of tons and tons of people riding horses (which we never really figured out the significance of). It was quite sight - the road was full of horses and riders trotting down the street, or making their horses do all sorts of tricks, and there were no barricades or anything, so we spent a lot of time manuevering around to make sure that we were never directly behind a horse (!!). It was so much fun, loud music and dancing and TONS of people on the streets. Ive attached a video of Elvin and Molly dancing while some of the huge national beer company-sponsored parade floats were going by (which followed the horses, this event was full of surprises) .


We´re in Granada now, we sort of randomly decided to stop here on our way to the island, which I think was a great plan. We found a really cheap hostel and we´ve just been walking around and enjoying this beautiful city. Elvin bought my belated birthday present yesterday (a very pretty necklace) from some French hippies selling jewlery on the street, and after chatting about music and my problems with my wrist, they ended up giving me a copper bracelet - that the guy made in about two seconds - because apparently copper is good for joint problems. We´ll see...! Tonight we are going to go see these particular hippies play gypsy music at some cafe around here, it should be interesting. And tomorrow were finally heading back to Ometepe ...

angry snake in the outhouse!

I unfortunately forgot my camera when I walked up here today, which is too bad because this is the first day of internet access after a long hiatus of non-responsive servers. However, we are finally going to Managua to see our friend Molly tomorrow, who is coming to live in this area for the next year ... so we will have fast internet and we can upload lots of píctures.

So as the title of this entry implies, I saw my first snake so far in Nicaragua, in the most unfortunate of situations. I had gone to the outhouse at night, which is absolutely not my favorite things to do but sometimes, you know, its necessary. So after shining the flashlight all over the place (I thought) I felt comfortable enough to sit down, and a few seconds later I happened to point the flashlight into the corner nearest to me and there is a snake coiled around a post, with its head sticking up and darting out back and forth in my direction!!! Most people reading this probably know that I am quite terrified of snakes - I was so startled that I jumped up, obviously, and after deliberating for a few seconds about grabbing the toilet paper the snake started moving towards me and lashing its head out back and forth SO unfortunately for my dignity, I ran out of the outhouse with my pants still around my knees ... luckily only Elvin was around, but as you can imagine the whole event was pretty hilarious. Hopefully that will be the only snake I encounter.

Otherwise things have been good here, I have been realizing that I am a fairly pathetic manual-labor worker, which I have been (hopefully) making up for with less arduous/domestic tasks like sweeping and cleaning and cooking. I am constantly humbled by the amount of work the employees here do, especially those who work with the reforestation project and walk up and down this uphill trail 15 to 20 times a day in the hot sun. Elvin was helping one of the workers for a while today, and came back absolutely drenched with sweat - he was amazed that he was carrying one avocado sapling and just barely making it up the hill each time, and the guy he was working with was carrying six! Neither one of us is used to this kind of work, thats for sure.

Today was a good day in terms of food - it was raining for a lot of the morning so we didnt work as much as usual. We made beans, rice, pasta, tomato-basil sauce, lemongrass tea and popcorn with carmel sauce, which was amazing! We have both been craving sweet things, because we havent really been eating any dessert-type things at all other than fruits and sugar in our coffee, so of course weve been trying to invent things but this was the first one that worked! It was amazing.

The picture-uploading abilities of this computer seem to be working today, so Ill take advantage of the internet connection and post some more pictures ...
This is me working hard, washing the disgustingly dirty dishrags in the rain after I washed practically all of my clothes ...
This is Volcan Concepcion this afternoon, which you can see from our shower and sleeping area. This is the view from the road a little bit up from where we are staying. Every day the clouds are completely different, but always surrounding it in crazy patterns!
this is the view from our little hut -these are the gardens weve been tending to. in the front there is a papaya tree, basil, oregano, lots of peppers, spinach, that plant between the two poles on the right side of the picture is a big vine whose flowers are used to make loofah sponges (is this a commonly known fact? because i did NOT know that!) and some banana palms in the background. and thats the table where we have been spending inordinate amounts of time.
THIS cat is the Gus-imposter: his name is Donald and he is the biggest whiner Ive ever met. He really does remind me of my cat in Minneapolis though, its incredible. He has gotten so used to us yelling at his to stop eating the food that he has no shame - he climbs on the stove, tries to get into my bowl while Im eating, and so on ... but he also is brave enough to scare away stray dogs that try to come into the kitchen. I mean, literally, he ran off a dog last night that was trying to look for food. Hes our guard cat!
This is a picture of a HUGE snake that I took a picture of from a high vantage point! Just kidding, it was a baby sabanera snake about the size of a worm, but it still scared the pants off of me and I had to stand on the other side of the kitchen while Elvin took the picture. Luis, one of Totocos employees who works in the fields, brought this snake in his BAG to show us on his way home. I almost fainted when he said he was walking around with a little snake in his bag. Apparently I really have a snake phobia, but at least we got this picture!

pictures!

Here is where weve been spending tons of time - the table, the swinging chair, the hammock in the background and about half of the kitchen area is shown here. Our little room is directly above this space ... Ill try to get a better picture of that soon.
Better pictures of the monkeys! Elvin has taken it upon himself to take the best pictures ever of the monkeys and all of the birds. I think this one is pretty good.




Today, after I got over my two-day fight with various travelers ailments, I chopped palm fronds and cardboard (to mix with some water and make mulch) with a machete for two hours. exciting! I am still finding it hilarious that this is what I decided to do with my zillion dollar Oberlin education, but I guess its only temporary. I was feeling pretty awesome and campo-savvy until Elvin came over and chopped way more, way faster and in way smaller pieces, but we decided that I am still pretty great. Although my right arm is now very sore, but it was worth it. It looks like I FINALLY got some pictures up here, one of these is of me trying to chop down a small tree in the jungle (for a post to help some little trees grow straight) - which was a lot harder than palm fronds and I didnt do a lot more than just posing for this picture! The other is from our pizza night a few nights ago, where Im enjoying the pizza made by my fellow Oberlin friend. The picture of Elvin is him holding the daily batch of passion fruit (maracuya, or kalala in this country apparently, thoug Elvin keeps aciddently calling it kelele, which has transformed into kilili and kululu and kololo) that we picked up from the little orchard. Delicious - we used it to make pinneapple and passion fruit jam the other day.

And I finally got one of the pictures of the spiders! I personally didnt take this picture, since I didnt want to get that friendly with its terrible eyeballs, but we noticed this guy hiding in a corner the other day and decided to take a picture. Elvin also saw a snake yesterday (the first one so far), but luckily for me and my potential panic attack I wasnt with him at the time. However, I have been noticing that Im getting used to the cockroaches.

We had another pizza night last night (thats four pizza nights this week!). This time the occassion was Patricias parents visit from Spain (Patricia is the owners girlfriend, who is running the NGO that Totoco is starting). Her parents were hilarious, full of great Spanish accents and dirty jokes and pizza-making skills. Her father couldnt remember either one of our names, and kept calling Elvin either Pepe or Jose, and called me Mari, which turned into Maria Cecelia when he saw me this afternoon. I told him that my middle name actually is Marie, but I think he had just decided on my name and wasnt interested in any other options. Anyway, it was pretty funny.