How Does Your Garden Grow?

Meet the kids of Hogar Comunal del Niño, the local daycare at site:

The approximately 25 children who come daily range in age from 2 to 8 and live in the surrounding villages. They come each day to receive 2 meals, breakfast and lunch, meals they would not receive otherwise due to extreme poverty.

Our municipality is one of the poorest in the nation; 70% of which lives on less than 1 USD a day. The inhabitants are primarily Lencan, an indigenous group that has been residing in the region for hundreds of years. Running water and electricity in homes are the exception, and most of the families live a subsistence lifestyle, sell homemade food and artisan items in the local markets or work as day laborers for the local coffee or lumber producers. While the food is delicious and artisan items are beautifully made, they often don't provide enough income to truly increase their standard of living. Too many times, the market is over saturated with women selling the same food and/or artisan items in the same small area (this is a whole other blog post, better written by the business guru, Jacob, so I'll let him tell that one).

A side note: Several local and international NGOs in the area have been working with the local villages to improve the standard of living for many in the region, but the process is slow: 2 steps forward, 1 step back kind of situation. So, while this post may seem a bit depressing, progress definitely has been made in the region... now back to the story.

Our host mom is the director of the daycare and she has put her heart and soul into improving the center, traveling monthly trying to recruit donations and necessities like shoes and clothing for the children.

The first month we were at site she invited Jacob and me to the daycare, and we were met with beautiful smiles and hugs from the children. She showed us the dilapidated facilities, and while there is a roof over their heads (which is not the case in some places), it is nothing compared to a daycare in a more developed country.

Breakfast (like in the photo above) is usually rice milk, made from grinding the rice and running it through a sieve in water (a pound of rice is less than half the price of a carton of milk) and a single pancake per child. Lunch is often rice pudding (which sounds lovely, but has hardly any nutritional content), or rice and beans with a tortilla and sometimes eggs. Unfortunately, the price of eggs just went up .5 lempiras this week, making it even harder for the daycare to purchase protein for the children. On special occasions they'll make chicken and rice soup.

I asked her if they had tried to start a vegetable garden, and she said they could not afford the seeds. So, not wanting to cough up my personal funds (which as a volunteer are tiny anyway), I spoke to my boss in Peace Corps and was put in contact with a Rotary Club in California. After a few emails, I received a certified box full of 250 packets of vegetable seeds, all donated to be used for the daycare. It felt like Christmas!

I brought the box to the daycare and the 3 ladies who make up the staff were elated. We wrote out a plan for the coming months, pinpointing dates to start an abonera (organic compost), to plant the seeds, and to transplant. Unlike most of Honduras, our region gets relatively cold (high-30s to 40s) during December and January. So, we chose mostly root vegetables and hardier crops to withstand the temperatures.

Side note #2: USAID has initiated a program this year throughout the Western corridor of the country, called ACCESO. Focusing on food security, the program, among other things, is intended to diversify the rural Honduran diet through gardens and provide assistance for marketing and selling the surplus, etc...

So, with that in mind, the staff, Jacob and I made the decision to research bio-intensive gardening, as it promotes growing a diverse range of vegetables all within a relatively small space. Only if the garden is so successful that they have a large surplus will we move onto selling the vegetables. That's where Jacob's business skills will come in to play.

Regardless, with bio-intensive gardening we can produce more food in a smaller space by using open pollinated seeds, a double-dig method, companion planting and organic composting. (It's much more complex, but to get the basic idea). We aren't making use of commercial fertilizers for many reasons, one of the main being that they simply can't afford to purchase the fertilizer when they need to purchase necessities and pay the electric bill.

The hardest part will be getting the parents to come and help with the digging and planting. Of course, all of the parents work when they can and taking a day off isn't really an option. The daycare staff thought that the best day to begin digging would be on a holiday when the parents are off. I hope they're right. To compensate for their time, we plan to give a packet of seeds to each family so they can try out the model in their own home, and encourage seed exchanging among their neighbors to further diversify their gardens. Much of the time will be spent demonstrating the double-dig method, creating fresh compost for the spring, and trying to explain why bio-intensive is better to people who have been using the same method of planting for many generations.

I was incredibly surprised to find such a low rate of family gardens when arriving at site. I assumed in my naivety that every family in a developing country has a garden and lives off of it. But, this is not the case, and many people go without vegetables on a daily basis. When families do have a garden, often times (at least in my region) they grow a large amount of a few crops and then sell them at the market. They then use those profits to buy more seeds of the same crop (further depleting the soil). Instead of buying other vegetables at the markets, they usually use the profits to also purchase items such as soft-drinks and processed foods like baloney, chips and candy for their families to show the local community that they are good providers. While being a good provider is very admirable, it doesn't help the family in the long run and only exacerbates chronic malnutrition in the region.

With this model, the parents won't need to use very much space and can add [more] vegetables to their family's diet, still being able to sell the other crops they have been selling. And, hopefully with nutrition classes, maybe they won't use the profits to buy soft-drinks and candy for their children quite as often.

So, how does our garden grow? Well, we've only started composting and have planted 350 seeds, most of which have germinated. We plan to transplant the last week of October and watch the garden grow through the holidays.

The Director of the daycare at left and staff member at right working on the abonera.

I purchased a plastic seed bed holding 200 seeds for my personal use, but decided to break it in using seeds for the local daycare. A plastic seed bed costs roughly 75 Lempiras ($3.96) and is too costly for many here to purchase. So, we gathered up some empty (and free!) egg cartons from around town and are using these as well. Each carton holds 30 eggs, so with 5 cartons we added another 150 seeds to be planted.

Because Jacob and I travel for business/health presentations and trainings, we made a green house to retain moisture, etc... when Jacob and I are away from site. It's our first green house, don't be too harsh :) The staff decided it was best to leave the seedlings at our house, so 50 little hands could get into them, lol.

This process will probably take a full two years to create sustainability. The garden won't truly be bio-intensive until then, but we'll get there. We'll harvest everything shortly after the beginning of the year and have our next compost ready for a spring planting of crops which can tolerate the heat (beans to help bring back nitrogen, peppers, tomatoes, watermelon, etc...) We plan to add gardening, seed saving and nutrition classes for the parents of the children at the daycare each month. When the harvest is ready, I also hope to teach a healthy cooking class for the parents using some of the vegetables we grew. Next year we can continue on a similar rotation, giving the staff and parents plenty of repetition to work from. At some point I hope to bring in someone from USAID to present to the parents and staff, but first we need to get the project off... or better yet, in the ground. Baby steps :)

Our Home Sweet Home in Honduras

We've been at site for over 4mths and are just now posting pics of our house. Oh, well... here they are!

The front porch, complete with a little moat. It comes in handy during the rainy season, believe it or not.

The back.... our landlords love yellow. All of the wood on the first floor is used for our fogon (below)

Our fogon... and the other half of the kitchen below. The fabric for the curtains was given to me by our host mom.

Dining area (Jacob's recent birthday present in the foreground)

Guest bedroom

Our bedroom. Jacob bought the bedspread for me at the local Lencan market. The woman who sold it to him said these types of quilts are traditional Lencan wedding gifts. Love it!

The view from our back porch

Our neighbor. I started feeding him our old bread, and now he comes up to the fence every time he sees me outside expecting to be fed. I have created a monster. The USA canisters can be found all over our backyard and around town. They housed food donations several years back, and now mine hold sage!

And, last but not least, an updated photo of our local waterfall. It will continue to grow in size until about mid-November when the rainy season lets up.

Have a great week everybody!

Eat Your Weeds

Much of my job entails going out to the surrounding villages, giving a presentation on nutrition and pneumonia and/or diarrhea (as these are the 2 leading causes of preventable infant deaths in the country), and the class follows with a cooking demonstration in one of the women's kitchens. We make everything from soy milk from scratch, soy chorizo, tortillas fortified with green leaves or pureed carrots, and chicken and vegetable soup made with local vegetables brought by the women.... all in a Lencan woman's tiny kitchen with no modern amenities.

During one of my first trips out to an aldea, the women and I were gathering leaves to grind and add to the maseca for tortillas, when someone shouted, "mira, espinaca!"... they found spinach. You couldn't have imagined my delight at hearing the word! Someone has spinach?! So we walk on over to where the women are pulling the leaves, and my heart sinks. "Ummmm.... that's not spinach. That's a weed..." I wanted to say, as they smiled and fervently pulled bunches for lunch. But, I didn't say anything and just watched as they added the leaves to the mixture and we went on with lunch. I figured if 10 mothers were eating the stuff, I wasn't going to die. And, low and behold, I didn't :)

So, being me, I went home and scoured the internet until I found an identical leaf structure and started researching exactly what it was. Turns out, it's what we would call Lambs Quarters, and most people in the US just pull it up like it's a weed. I then went to nutritiondata.com (only go there if you really want to feel bad about eating something unhealthy.... there are always way more calories than you think.... don't do it!) Anyway, I compared the nutritional content to that of what we would call spinach, and it's pretty spot on! So, feel free to eat your weeds! Well, this weed (I read somewhere that it has a large amount of oxalic acid, so in case that's an issue...)

I remembered there being a 4 foot tall stalk of lambs quarters in the backyard when we went to look at the house we are currently renting and instantly got excited. Of course our landlords, who were trying to be very nice, chopped (well... macheted) down our entire back yard right before we moved. They left a few flowers and the huge elephant ears, thankfully. So, I've spent the last three months waiting and hoping more would pop up... and just like a weed, I found 10 sprouting all of the yard.

Yesterday, I cleared out a spot in our yard and transplanted every single one to the new space to cultivate. And, nicely enough, while clearing up the spot, I found 5 small green bean vines!

Lambs Quarters

Green Beans!

Over the last month, while poking around in the yard, I've been finding edibles all over the place. While clearing out some sugar cane (it's taking over the backyard!) I found what the locals call pepinitos, or mini cucumbers. They're growing on the back fence and are the size of a chubby pinky at maturity. We also have swiss chard from the former volunteer living in the house, our sweetsop tree is overloaded with fruit, we're getting 3-5 patastes weekly from our vine, and our plum tree just started producing. We've made some good friends out of neighbors by giving them fruits and veggies from the yard... Neither one of us can stand pataste, and I can only eat so much sweetsop, so it works out for everybody :)

I can't believe the garden I have... and I barely did a thing! To compensate, I've planted pak choi and more swiss chard, garlic, ginger root, lavender and rosemary so far. I hope to plant much more, but Jacob and I are currently working with the local daycare on a vegetable garden, and that's taken up alot of time and energy (will blog about that later).

Anyway, I'll end on a few pics of flowers that just popped up in the yard this week... so nice!

MARV Meeting in Tela, Honduras

On a side note, we'd like to thank Susan and Hatch for sending us a care package, and Jo and Aaron, too!!! Thanks so much guys, sorry I didn't post pics... it only means we devoured the box of goodies before I could get ahold of the camera :)

Marv, or Married Volunteers is a Worldwide Peace Corps group focusing on the needs of just that, married volunteers (Married coupes only make up about 7% of the volunteers serving). Twice a year, we marrieds get to meet in a location of our choosing for 2 nights and catch up, swap stories, etc... without having to use vacation days or personal leave.

Not that being a married volunteer is that difficult, I actually believe it to be easier. You come to Peace Corps with your best friend, you always have someone to talk to in your native language, and you can always get advice from someone who is not a host country national. Plus, being a woman in a foreign country isn't always easy, so there's the added bonus of a male traveling companion. And, as much as I hate to say it, having a husband in such a machista society seems to make my work more credible... they all assume he did it anyway.

But, regardless, having this meeting semi-annually is helpful. For this trip, we chose Tela on the North Coast... not too shabby, right? Please be aware that the US Government is not funding a get away for couples twice yearly. Yes, they do provide a small stipend to help with traveling to/from the meeting, but it comes no where near the amount of the cost of the trip for each couple. Other volunteers like to give us a hard time about it... we just tell them to get married :)

Tela, Honduras

Anyway, the first thing we all decided to do was jump in the water, a stone's throw from our hotel. The tourism industry in Honduras is still small and according to the locals here, tourism fell even more in 2009 and hasn't fully recovered. So, the beach was rather empty.... nice for us, but not nice for the locals trying to earn a living. There was one other family on the beach that day...

That night we decided to have our official meeting over dinner at Maya Vista... if you ever come to Tela, the restaurant has a great view...

During dinner we all simultaneously discovered that no one at site invites us couples to anything... weddings, fiestas, birthdays, or even lunch. People in all of our sites seem to assume that we have our own daily agendas and can't be bothered. Our single volunteer friends all tell us of the crazy fiestas they've been to, and Jacob and I kept thinking maybe the locals didn't like us too much. But, at least now we hope it's just because we're married, and I need to be at home to cook my husband's breakfast/lunch/dinner/wash his clothes.... you name it.

The next day, Honduras celebrated it's 190th year of independence, so we headed down to the central park to see the Garifuna marching in a parade and several Honduran marching bands from the local area schools.

Next stop was the boardwalk. We had piña coladas while watching a group of men play for people on the beach, and later ate pizza at a restaurant (Bella Italia) owned by an Italian woman. It was great! She spoke with us for a little while and told us she moved down here about 13 years ago with her husband. It's a small world when you can have authentic Italian pizza and wine in a little town on the edge of Honduras.

I'm already looking forward to our next meeting in March. It's always great to catch up with other volunteers, but especially nice to see the other married couples who sometimes face the same issues, and more often than not, provide great advice.

Christmas in July, Part Tres!

Continued from the last post...

Since the boxes my mom sent were also from other people, including Joyce and Megan, I'm not quite sure who sent what... but I think Joyce sent the some of the seeds, art supplies and The Week, thank you!

My parents have had to listen to me moan about how cold it is in our municipality (which I'm sure pisses off all the other volunteers in Honduras with their 90-105 degree days sans air conditioning), so they sent an entire box of hoodies, flannel pajamas and fleece... you guys are the best! I'm proudly sporting sweatpants and a fleece lined hoodie as I write this... so much better.

Enough art supplies to outfit an army of child artists... yay!

Aside from the seeds sent by the booster club (all of which will go to the daycare and other community projects), I now have an amazing personal stash of herbs and veggies. The only thing I have to do now is pick up a ton of rocks in the backyard and tier the space for a garden spot this November!

Christmas in July, Part Dos!

When Jacob and I came home yesterday, our host mom gave us a call. Jacob's boss was driving through our town on the way to see another volunteer in the West and dropped off 9 packages with our host mom! We were thinking we'd have to travel 5 hours to the capital to go pick them up, but no!

So, this post goes out to Megan W., Linda L., Ramona M., Joyce J., and my parents.... THANK YOU!!!! (another post to follow) You are all wonderful, thank you so much for taking the time to send us so many goodies! I now have 20 sticks of chap stick... seriously, I'm not kidding... and they will all be used within the year.

We also ended up having 5 containers of Lemon pepper! A few host family relatives came over last night with fried plantain empanadas for Jacob, who recently got 2 stitches (I'll let Jacob tell that story). So, we gave our host mom and her mother in law each a thing of lemon pepper, which made them very happy. Please don't be offended that we gave away a gift, it's sort of expected to share your gifts here, so this allowed us to do so without giving up something we only received one of... and nobody uses chap stick here, lol.

No packages were opened or rummaged through, our only uh-oh was not realizing that chocolate and gummy bears should not be sent during the hottest summer in a really long time. The gummy bears look like they're having an orgy... all glued together and such, and we're eating the chocolate in huge chunks... doesn't mean we're not going to stuff our faces with either, though.

Also, one package was from a Booster Club in California which donated over 100 packets of seeds for a garden we're starting with the local daycare (will blog about that later).

Anyway, here's what nine packages looks like... to a Peace Corps volunteer, these are diamonds!

All things awesome!

Ramona, I didn't know they made M&M bags this big! Also, thanks for the magazine... missing my New York fix.

Megan, we put the pic of the girls on the fridge, too cute! Our host mom came over last night to see the loot and wouldn't stop talking about how beautiful they are!!

Linda, you are now my husband's best friend... he ate all the jerky already, lol. Thank you!

Christmas in July!!!

Last week, another Peace Corps Volunteer passed through the capital and she gave me a call, saying there were "a ton" of packages at headquarters for Jacob and me, and she offered to pick up 5 of the smaller packages.

Yesterday, she was passing through our little town (and in very Honduran fashion) the bus driver stopped in the middle of the dirt road outside the church, and she passed them to Jacob and me through the bus window. Then the bus driver gave us a honk and went on its merry way, lol.

So, a heartfelt thanks goes out to the PCV to went out of her way to help us out! Only another PCV really knows how wonderful it is to receive a package (or several!) from the States.... it's like a tiny piece of home. There are still a few more boxes in the office, which means more Christmas to come!

Anyway, we want to thank my parents and Sue W. for sending boxes... look at all these goodies!!!!!

Nuts = nom, nom, nom!

I can't wait to have my first miso soup in 5 mths! A side note, I found a good recipe for tofu that I plan to try with my schmorgasborg of Japanese ingredients: Quick and Easy One Hour Tofu — La Fuji Mama

We now have enough nuts to hold us for at least a little while (I doubt the pistachios will last the weekend), and enough Japanese food, too... and lots, and lots of herb seeds, and stickers out the wha-zoo! I plan to plant several seeds in the next few weeks, and will also donate some to the local daycare where I'm planning a vegetable garden. The stickers and art supplies will be going to the local orphanage where I hope to start a large art class this Fall. The colorful band-aids will be going to the daycare and orphanage, but I may steal a few, too :)

My mom also sent my winter coat, which you'd think was a bit weird here in Central America... but apparently it gets down to almost freezing November-January up at our altitude, so this will definitely come in handy.

Anyway, we just wanted to send a great big thank you to Sue and my parents so being so very awesome! **Don't worry if we haven't received your package yet, apparently there are still several at headquarters and we'll be getting them shortly.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

Lauren and Jacob