El Sauce updates

As the new Scene is prepared to be delivered to SUNY Geneseo's alumni, friends and supporters, we have more good news from the service-learning program and El Sauce economic-development initiatives to share with our 52,000 readers.

Stay tuned to the blog to read more about El Sauce and how Geneseo efforts are having an impact.

• The School of Business, in concert with The Friends Project, a grassroots group based in Rochester, N.Y., arranged for an expert basket-maker to spend a month living with the women in Cerro Colorado. Right now, she is teaching them how to craft more uniform baskets, helping them hone their skills and helping them create more intricate thread patterns and basket designs with the pine needles that fall near their mountain homes. 

It will help the women sell their art for a higher price and compete in U.S. and larger markets.

• School of Business students will explore U.S. markets and importing the Cerro Colorado baskets this fall. The women are busy filling a $1,000 order from Geneseo to get started.

• The restaurant and welcome shelter at the base of the mirador, or "lookout," in Ocotal is nearly complete.

By summer's end, visitors to El Sauce will enjoy home cooking by Ocotal farmers and their families and have a central gathering place for tours.

El Sauce service-learning volunteer Yacarely Mareina-Dávila won a $10,000 grant for the tourism business proposal to buy supplies such as lumber. Nearly $2,000 in private donations were also raised, by friends and family who support the project.

•Allison Kornblatt '10 landed in El Sauce last weekend, June 7, to launch her award-winning dental hygiene program with children in El Sauce — with help from the Nicaraguan division of Colgate.

She has significantly expanded the project's scope with the company's teamwork.

Allison and Geneseo volunteers are visiting schools with Colgate reps, who will share proper brushing technique and a hygiene regimen with teachers. Colgate will also supply toothpaste and toothbrushes, so the kids can brush at school in morning and afternoon. Teachers will continue the education-prevention program.

Allison was able to use her $1,000 grant from New York Campus Compact to buy inexpensive ceramic water filters. This way, students have access to potable water so they can brush.

Originally, Allison was going to provide brushes and paste but families would need to brush at home — oftentimes they don't have access to filtered water.

Next steps

The programs we have started in El Sauce are working now — full-time English classes, the tourism initiative and training residents to share the highlights of El Sauce with the larger community and lure in backpacking visitors.

Why?

Because Kellan and Yacarely are working with the community and its leaders — old and new mayors — to develop what the residents want and need.

Some nonprofits come to work in El Sauce, says former mayor Ervertz Delgadillo, and their help is appreciated, but they come to carryout a mission set forth before they ever stepped foot in El Sauce. What is needed, he says, is to develop programs based on the needs of people.

Geneseo is doing that, he says, and it's working.

He opened the doors to the mayor's office for the first classes, and has worked closely with Kellan since day one. 

A few years down the road, programs are starting to pay off.

It's at a threshold now, says Ervertz; everything has been accomplished with little or no resources. Funding to promote changes in cattle and bean production, to market the tourism, etc. are vital.

And Kellan hopes to welcome more students through the doors of the New York School of English. Geneseo students from all disciplines, who can lend their expertise.

A club at campus to work on projects when someone isn't in Nicaragua — marketing the Cerro Colorado baskets, or alumni who appreciate the handiwork and think they can sell it in their stores. Students venture to El Sauce a few times a year, for set periods of time. In between, Kellan and Yacarely hold down the fort.

A long-term volunteer — maybe a graduating student or Geneseo alum — would be very important. Like a Peace Corps assignment without the 2.5 year commitment. Maybe 6 months. Maybe a year. But someone who will be there to implement programs that they now only can run when Geneseo students come — computer classes, personal finance, small business development. 

The El Sauce program was started with a community spirit — among professors, the mayor of El Sauce, Geneseo students and residents from Geneseo and El Sauce. To make it all it can be, for lack of a better term, is going to take more of that.

So I guess the call is out dear alums and students ... want to share in our adventure?

Where does this take us?

It's been a week nearly to the hour since Adam, Meredith and I returned from El Sauce.

The students are back in class, a few months shy of graduation. I am back in the office, showing off samples of El Sauceno coffee and the pine-needle baskets made by the able hands of the Cerro Colorado women.

Bracing myself in the back of a 1960s pick-up and staring up at the sky and into the crags of the mountain road seem very far off but close in my mind.

A few hours after going to bed the night I returned, I woke up, bleary eyed. Before I adjusted to the light and got coherent, I saw the wooden planks of the poorest homes before me instead of my closet, rays of light penetrating the holes and gaps.

"Oh, I'm in one those houses," I thought, just before my feet hit the carpet and I knew I was home.

The next night, I woke up disoriented in the bed; I had to think and reason out that yes, we had been at the Atlanta airport and oh yeah, I'm in Rochester.

Traveling plays funny games with your mind. You don't realize that a place has so entirely crept into you and become a part of your daily life until you're suddenly jarred out of it. Suddenly you become very aware of the things you grew accustomed to.

Bucket showers in the day, chickens serenading in the morning hours. The 6-block commute from Xiomara's to the Geneseo office past the church.

Walking off the plane and into the Atlanta international destinations wing, we had some culture shock. Before us was a huge food court — options of 20 restaurants — with a bar and a piano player and a duty free store and newsstands, jewelers, anything I could look for. Before we left Managua, Yacarely suggested we take a spin through the super market and get whatever snacks or necessities we might want for the week; you can't find much in El Sauce. You never know what can be bought.

The kung pao chicken, chicken wraps, fudgy brownies ... it was all overload and it was so .... so plenty. I felt a little gluttonous; the choices and immense differences were staring me in the face behind a deli case.

I am often reminded of what Kellan said about running the El Sauce program: it's the step between college and graduation. Like the world after you toss your cap in the air, and in real-life Nicaragua, you need to figure out things yourself. He guides the students and gets their projects ready, then lets them figure it out. He walked us all to the projects the first day or so to make sure we knew where we going, but then on, it was Meredith who met Yuritza each morning, took the bus and spent the days alone with her in the communities. No professor or director standing over her, showing her how it's done. She became a member of the society and she liked it that way. "What I like about this," she said to me one morning as we rode the bus to the stop, "is that it forces you to be independent. I would never be doing the things I'm doing here otherwise."

How else would we sit in a family's small house with its dirt floor, talking about families and helping grind corn, in a community that's an hour off the road and down a path, over streams? Meredith could have asked for help and Kellan would have been there. Adam too. But they didn't.

I'm not sure how the El SAuce experience will settle into my psyche over the next few days, months, years. I am still learning lessons 20 years after I, as a college student, jumped off a bus in the middle of rural Brazil and asked a remote community of protesting farmers if I could live with them for a project. Will I be 60 and remember these moments from the last 17 days, each time with new insight?

Surely so.

It's the beauty of travel. Of immersing yourself in a new culture. Not just as a tourist, walking past the landmarks, but becoming a member of the community. You soak it up like a sponge. You get to be full of the memories and slowly see what shakes out.

Surely we won't remember all the details but what is most important will stick, and shape us in ways we can't yet imagine.

On posting

Even though I was in a place where some families in the city center did not have plumbing and indoor toilets (including our own office and the house next door), and often times no phone, it was incredibly easy to do post live from El Sauce.

The Geneseo office has WiFi. Once Yacarely gave me the password, I just had to choose our Geneseo network, give the letters and numbers and get typing. Often times I would be there after English class, alongside Kellan and Yacarely, til 11 p.m. posting away. Other times they were at dinner and I'd stay put, posting.

Sometimes those times were a bit surreal. It's always hot, so everyone leaves their front doors open for a little breeze. I could hear the banter outside of passing families, of bike taxis, look out and see the family across the street gathered around the day-glo lights of a TV in rocking chairs, me alone. Next door, the nice family that lets me wash my hands in their basin during the day would be sitting in the backyard, or maybe cooking on the open fire of their outdoor kitchen.

There's no real addresses in El Sauce, and I only once spotted an actual street name. There's no postal delivery; why locate it. I wondered. Marisol, the school teacher, had never seen a computer before taking Kellan's introduction class. I thought of the famers in Ocotal, who were asleep now in their small mountain homes and would wake up at dawn with the sunlight to hand harvest coffee and shed bean skins with a machine that looked like it was made in the era of the cotton gin and ride their horses with sacks of beans to town down a mountain path.

And here I was, hunched over a keyboard, sending photos of the Ocotal farmers into "space" with the zap of button and seeing it broadcast to whomever in the world happened to sign in a second later.

Fare thee well, until we meet again

During our last English class, we were joined by Ron and Christa, volunteers from the 4 Walls Project. It seems every night we had visitors who wanted to see what it was about and sometimes came back. 

I'd come too.

I haven't exactly put my finger on it, but Kellan and Yacarely are doing something very right.

It's not just learning. It's FUN. It sounds like a commercial but whatever. The students — between age 17 and late sixties — come, read presentations to us for stamps of approval for that lesson, learn some conjugation and tenses and then for the next hour or so it's all interaction all the time.

There's  no hiding under the desks like when I took Spanish in high school. We play "hot seat," where a teammate sits in front of the white board and has to guess the person or place written behind them with clues. Trinidad jumps up to be a hot seater and Henry is already half out of his chair. He's got to wait two more rounds before he makes it to the front of the class to get his turn.

Everyone wants to go.

They want to sing even if their voice stinks; they want to participate and soon the class is not a class it's a little mini competition and party.

If ever Geneseo gets a strange new mandate and orders me off campus and into the English classroom, I'd have a grand old time.

Our last class, I wanted to show the students my images I took for the possible cover slot of the Scene. Ten hours later, I forget my computer at my host mom's house. Kellan bikes off to get it and while we think they are all waiting for his return, they are actually doing a stealth hit job on us: organizing a farewell party.

Kellan arrives with the computer at the same time Ileana and Yeremileth arrive with a bag of Eskimo Neopolitan, bowls and spoons.

"Thank you to all of you from Geneseo," she said, who have come to help us.

Grouped in a circle in the small office, Adam says it's been very very fun to teach and he loves El Sauce, and Meredith says it's been a life-changing experience.

Standing in the middle of Nicaragua with members of the community thanking us and sharing a celebration, I think all of us have been changed in ways that will reveal themselves over the next days, weeks, years.

We'd like to return and Trinidad, Wilfredo say they will be waiting for us.

They hug us and we trade e-mails with Manuel, Henry and those who have electronic e-mail, and just sort of stare out into the darkness of El Sauce's main street as we hug them and they turn to wave and walk off in the night.

The seats are silent with cheers and protestations over missed pronunciations.

Class is over and no one wanted to see it end.

The last thing Ileana says to me: "Next time you come, Kristina, you stay at my house."

A way up

Right now, 17-year-old Manuel de Jesus Munguia ferries people to and from their destinations in El Sauce on a borrowed bike taxi Monday to Friday. He doesn't have time to go to school when everyone else does, when he's helping his mom pay for home expenses. He attends class on Saturdays and thinks about the day he might hop off his "caponera" for a full-time job. Maybe in construction.
Better, in an office.
Best, working for the town in the mayor's office. Or as a translator, meeting people from other cultures.
"If he told his friends that, they'd probably laugh at him," says Yacarely, "because to be in an office here is like 'wow."
It would be a much longer way off if Manuel didn't spend three nights of his little spare time learning to conjugate present-tense verbs and master the who, what, when, where and why of conversations in the New York School of English.
"He's our best student," says Yacarely. Manuel isn't the best English speaker, but he's there every evening and so willing to practice his classmates tease him that he hogs the discussions.

In reality, says Kellan, this is Manuel's way out.

With unemployment hovering around 40 percent and the El Sauce mayor, Ervertz Delgadillo reaching out to Geneseo and others for help, there's few jobs to be had in El Sauce. Manuel said he looked for many there wasn't any, so he drives the bike taxi.
Renting one costs 40 cordobas a day — $2. Manuel can use his brother's until February, when he comes back to town. Most days, Manuel earns 50 cords a day — 10 more than the cost to rent it.
"Sometimes I make money, sometimes I don't," he says. It depends on the luck of the draw for customers. This day we talk, he has made nothing. The day before, 100 cordobas in fares. It all evens out to about a dollar a day take home.
"I give all I make to my mom for expenses in the house," says Manuel. His two older brothers are in Costa Rica for work and send money home; it isn't enough so Manuel pitches in to care for him, his mom and younger brother.
Without any other skills, options are pretty limited for what Manuel can do in El Sauce, says Kellan.
Knowing English automatically boosts his marketability.
When he's good at it, Kellan says, Manuel can be a tour guide in El Sauce, Léon or another town. He can interpret. He can work in a business that wants to do business with the United States. He can work with nonprofits like World Vision, where communicating overseas is key.
Not all that many people speak English in Nicaragua; Manuel will become a commodity if he keeps it up.
He could even earn a spot in the mayor's office.

When you talk to Manuel he's polite, smiley and entirely shy. He fidgets with his backpack strings, shifts in his seat. Clearly, it's a struggle to overcome his shyness each night in English and sing about seeking words of wisdom with the U.K's Fab Four.
Volunteers in English sing a song in English every night and even though he looks like he's going to high-tail it out the front door before he opens his mouth, Manuel always raises his hand.
"Let it Be" is a favorite and the class is his only chance to practice his skills.
"That's what moves me to get up and stand up and use what I'm learning," says Manuel, "because there's no other way of using it here."

"It was unbelievable," says Manuel, "how lost I was. Sometimes when I used to talk to Kellan I had no idea what he was saying. Now I feel like I can understand."
He loves it so much that oftentimes on his bike taxi, he'll pedal by a street vendor or a doorway opened, and hear the families inside relaxing to music.
"If I hear the music I'll stop and try to figure out if I can understand what they are saying, if I know the lyrics," he says.

Manuel remembers the very day he signed up for English claass — June 3, 2008. He was riding his taxi, saw the sign posted on the plain blue door. It was an easy decision.
"I would be able to speak another language and I could talk to people from other cultures," remembers Manuel. "Maybe someday I will have the opportunity to travel and I would know English too."