Well, today has been a good day, so far. This morning I left early to go to a Ben Linder meeting (side note: in addition to being the name of a professor at Olin, Ben Linder was also the name of an American electrical engineer who came to Nicaragua in the years after the revolution. He was developing a hydroelectric system when he was assassinated by the Contras. He also had a habit of riding a unicycle around Managua while dressed like a clown. There’s a statue of him doing this. Anyway, he represents what’s good about gringos). So anyway, there are a bunch of people (mostly foreigners) who meet every Thursday at the Ben Linder house, which is run by FUNDECI. Each week there’s a different guest speaker. Last summer, Shannon put me on the email list for the group, and I never bothered to unsubscribe. So I show up on FUNDECI’s doorstep, and who is the first person I see but Vallardo, the man who always works as a driver for Community of Hope’s trips to Chacraseca. He remembered me, and we talked for a while. It was so good to see a familiar face. I also greeted Octavio and Carolina, who run FUNDECI, and they told me that FUNDECI is “at my service.”
When I got back to where the meeting was actually taking place, people were introducing themselves. I missed most of the introductions, so I don’t know much about the other people who were there.
Today’s speaker was a employee of CEPAD (an interdenominational Nicaraguan church group that has been around for 32 years). This guy was incredible. He apparently went to some conference in Managua several years ago and saw a display on coffee processing that was being presented by a group from another country. They wouldn’t give/sell him the plans, so he basically memorized the system and recreated it on his own farm. Basically what it does is process coffee beans without contaminating water. The traditional method uses tons and tons of water, and the dregs pollute streams and kill fish by stealing the oxygen from the rivers (chicken farm runoff in Oklahoma, anyone?). The new system sends the “berries” (coffee beans with their outer red flesh still on) through an auger, which somehow strips them of their skins. Then the beans sit around and “bacteria” (bear in mind that this was explained in Spanish) finish cleaning off the beans. He said it was kind of like a septic tank (?).
After the meeting, I met Juan, aka “A.J.”. It amuses me how people here selectively use English pronunciation in their names. AJ, for example, pronounces his name ey-jay, rather than ah-heh, which is what I would have expected. Last summer I worked with a teacher named “hey-dee,” spelled “Heidi.” Why pronounce the “h” but then use Spanish pronunciation for the rest? I don’t know.
I got back to la UNI around 10:30. There’s some kind of festival being set up on campus, so the gate was closed, but the guard let me in. When I got to the office, Carolina was giving a “charla” (lecture) on what she had learned at her internship in Colorado. I wish I hadn’t missed the beginning, because it’s really interesting. She learned all about wind power (it was an internship/class(?)), and she explains what the professor said, and then everybody gives their two cents on how to adapt that to Nicaragua. For example, Carolina’s professor says that there is no way you can make your own components for the windmills—you have to buy them. Grupo Fenix’s engineers are sitting here going “pshh… we could totally make that stuff.” It amazes me that they are actually optimistic about this stuff. Knowing how expensive a windmill is (or a solar panel, for that matter), I would immediately dismiss it as impossible to implement in a country as poor as Nicaragua. But somehow it works.
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