Santo Tomas, Nicaragua

Our trip to Santo Tomas, Nicaragua, was filled with visits to the many worthwhile projects of the Community Development Committee that is supported by our Olympia TCSTSCA.  Dirk quickly skirted around his problem of having no Spanish speaking skills by playing with puzzles with the preschoolers. Apparently airplane and truck noises sound good in any language!

For 5 afternoons Dirk and his Spanish teacher met in the Comedor Infantil and hammered away at beginning Spanish.  Since his teacher knew no English, Dirk relied on his I-phone translator as a helper when they got stuck.

We quickly got in the groove of rice and beans or beans and rice.  Our host "mother," Facunda, was great at adding interesting accompanyments and catering to our desire for fresh produce. Here the locally grown melon and the fresh squeezed orange juice were a great delight.  We also learned to like the little green things on the left, called jocote, but liked even better making jokes about Santa Claus saying "jo-jo-jo-cote."

The primary reason for our trip to Santo Tomas was to visit the community library funded by Dirk's Westside Rotary Club.  This sign recognizes the "contribution to the literacy of the Nicaraguan town."  We were truly impressed at what an infusion of a few thousand dollars could do for the education of the community.

The two librarians, supported by funds from the Olympia TCSTSCA, used the $2000 grant to purchase close to 200 books to support the primary and secondary schools of Santo Tomas.  Since classrooms and kids do not own textbooks, the students come to this community library and use the books on site.  The purchase included all sorts of text books on many subjects and lots of literature at many levels as well.  Money very well spent!

After so much hard work in the hot Nicaraguan "summer,"  Dirk took a much needed siesta in the back yard of our host family.

While Dirk siesta-ed and took Spanish lessons, Dixie offered four nutrition classes to patients and staff at the Clinic Popular.  The staff learned to interpret and enhance her bad Spanish and somehow she muddled through with no bilingual translators.

An extremely impressive project is the daily feeding of about 120 kids at the Comedor Infantil.  Especially impressive is that the cooks are volunteers who use these model wood burning stoves to do volume cooking.  Although the staples of rice and beans are always available, the program struggles to provide protein foods and only serves dairy foods four times a month.  Veggies and fruit are on the menu about half the time.  It would be great to get funding to round out the menu that often is the primary meal for some of the poor kids.

We had a fun potluck evening with these recipients of college scholarships from Olympia's TCSTSCA.  Thirty dollars apiece per month enables these students to attend universities and technical institutes.  Very enterprising kids. Played a great game called cabbage....remind us to teach you how!

Got to visit one of the school teachers who visited Olympia two years ago.  She now has a baby!  It was great to see her in her own environs and to be served a lovely meal in her home......fried chicken and rice and beans!  Our host mom took us by bus for this visit, conditioning us for our future 4 hour bus ride to Managua.

Side benefit of touring the projects was sampling the products of this baking school class!  Small enterprises like home cake baking can bring helpful supplements to a family's income.

After a few frustrating learning games, Dirk and I learned the favorite Nicaraguan card game, Desmoche, from Facunda and Jose Maria.  We got the hang of it and it served as a social lubricant on the second half of our Nicaraguan trip.

Facunda helped me to fulfill a longterm goal, the making of tortillas from scratch using nixtamalization.  Here we rubbed down the corn after it had been boiled and soaked in calcium salts, "cal."

After a night of soaking and an early morning trip to the neighborhood corn grinder, we produced these not too shabby tortillas!

And used the coals to make beef "al carbon" for a hearty breakfast!

In preparation for our upcoming river trip, Facunda used her ancient Singer sewing machine, foot pedal powered, to repair my falling apart tote bag.  The machine was just like my mom's and worked very much like my super modern one except that it does not require electricity.

Had some laughs on our last night trying to get Jose Maria to smile!  It was amazing to get to live with such gracious hosts who were tolerant of our communication challenges, proud of their lives and accomplishments, and a lot of fun to be with.