Los puros

Another day of Spanish class down. We had a great lesson where we each picked social topics to talk about. I chose women’s rights, someone picked nutrition and dietary information in Nicaragua, another the music and culture...I heard some mariachi music today. It was playing in the house when I got back to my home stay family for lunch. I stumbled my way through asking about the music to Juana, one of the hired help; she seems to enjoy our bumbling and helps us along. 

After two hours of conversation, the entire group of us headed down to a tobacco factory, where a guide showed us the process of making  los puros, cigars, under the brand “Mombacho.” The tobacco is carefully cultivated and grown in either the shade or the sun. Those that grow under the sun produce a more aromatic and flavorful leaf that is used in the cigar. Among the leaves that are grown in the sun, there are four kinds that can be additionally differentiated, and are all treated in different ways to be combined in the end into one cigar. All cigars were made by hand; among the five workers at the factory, four hundred cigars are produced every day. All the cigars were then pressed into shape in a press  for twenty minutes, wrapped in tobacco leaves that were grown in the shade, sealed with a natural, odorless paste from the yuca plant and then storied in a temperature controlled storage room that smelled amazing due to the cigars. It didn’t smell like tobacco at all, but more like the aromatic smell of dried reeds or herbs. Parents; do you want cigars?

Lots of cigars!

A tobacco plant growing in the sun; the tobacco factory also  harvests leaves at different heights, affects the flavor. 

In the back of the factory there was an open courtyard, so typical of Nicaraguan households. There was a beautiful pool in the middle of an open courtyard, surrounded by a raised patio and decorative trees. I guess if you made a larger purchase of cigars, the owners would allow you to sit there and sip some flor de cana, a type of liquor made from canes. There seemed to be plenty stocked in the factory. 

Making the cigars by hand

Katelyn Wong, you wanted a picture! Here you go...super awkward shot of me holding a cigar. Yes, that sheen is pure sweat.

I wanted to dive right in. 

The rest of the afternoon was spent in orientation, where we discussed issues about development, the idea of mutually reinforcing, mutually inclusive objectives that may seem contradictory, like focusing on community development or self-interest. We discussed some misconceptions about developmental models; I’m looking forward to a future discussion about foreign aid and Dambisa Moyo...otherwise what we discussed was certainly important and needed to be explicitly discussed, but bored me to death, as it was either intuitive or common sense. 

We got introduced to some of the products that we’re going to be helping sell. I think that we are actually selling some goods ourselves and also helping other businesses sell these goods. I’m actually not sure, so I hope that SolCom will clarify these things later. The program leaders here, who all have worked here for more than a year, some for upwards of five years, are all extremely committed and enthusiastic about their work. They have foregone much better paying jobs, in much more comfortable conditions to live in a country to which they are not native and in which they face daily challenges for tasks as simple as setting up meetings with local townspeople. I can’t question the passion everyone has for the work they do, but I can’t help but question how they maintain this passion. It has taken them two, slow years to even reach the point where they say they are ready to start a stove campaign in a nearby village. The goods they sell are definitely sorely needed, like glasses that help with farsightedness, which is very prevalent, and sunglasses that prevent a kind of cataract-forming disease common among those who work in the sunny fields all day. However, it’s at once frustrating that infrastructure is so lacking that it takes a group of intelligent and committed individuals years to build up the networks necessary to distribute something as simple as lenses and therefore difficult for me feel like I can contribute meaningfully to alleviating certain elements of social problems. I guess I’ll just have to see what fieldwork is actually like. Our first trip to one of the Granada-based sites will be this Saturday!

Upon coming home, I got trapped in a huge parade. Students in front were carrying a likeness of the Virgin Mary and a band played behind them. This Thursday (tomorrow) is some day in celebration of the Virgin Mary (and when the fireworks finally stop - today, they were especially loud right before the parade and scared me immensely because they sounded like gunshots). Thus, some school organized a band and students to have a parade through the streets to some church somewhere in Granada. The band would play festive music, and in the breaks a woman on a microphone recited devotional odes and declarations to the Virgin. It was beautiful in its own way, especially since I’ve never been religious, largely due to its peaceful nature that attracted many bystanders who walked in solidarity with the parade. 

It took me forever to get home because of the slow-moving parade.

We stopped in front of the Iglesia Merced. In the right side of the picture you can see  a bit of the facsimile the students were carrying. 

Finally, I also went through another difficult ordeal in trying to find a place that was still open that sold phone cards for the specific type of phone that I had. Stores were either closed or didn’t sell the type of card I needed; I finally found a store that did sell the cards about a block from my house. The same thing, I later found out, happened in my search for an internet café last night; the Internet cafe was right near my house and I made it all the way right in front of the cafe, without realizing I had accidentally found the place. Great. 

Goodnight!

A chinese restaurant that I pass everyday on the way to Spanish class. Maybe I'll try it out one day.