The Campo

I returned today from a week living in the Campo (Nicaraguan Countryside) in a community named Horno Dos (literally, Oven Two). I stayed with a family of bean pickers who walk over an hour to and from work every day and often leave the house by 5am.

Five other students from my program were also living in Horno Dos and we spent the days with a few of the leaders of the community learning about rural life in Nicaragua. The community is in the municipality of San Ramon which is a center of organic and sustainable activism in Nicaragua. The entire community practiced organic farming and had banned transgenic seeds from their farms. Many community members are also involved with municipal, national, and international organizations engaged in environmentalist struggle. Most people in the community did not own their own land and were employed as wage laborers working on large farms. Many families were not able to make ends meet through campesino work and had men working in El Salvador, Costa Rica, or the United States and sending back remittances. For the most part, women ran the community. The community is strongly political and mostly FSLN, with lots of ties to Environmentalist NGOs, as mentioned above.

Some of the work we did over the course of the week was plant beans, tend plantain plants, make pineapple preserves, sorting and construction work at the seed bank (which was constructed to preserve/spread biodiversity in the area), and pick up trash. Rarely were we actually doing hard physical labor or really even lending a significant hand to the work being done. Our schedule was clearly set by community leaders to give us an overview of work and activities common in the community. We also spent a lot of time playing with the kids in the community.

The week was physically and psycologically challenging for me. I slept in a room with the kids in my host family on what was basically a wooden table with a sheet. The food was very oily rice and beans, with the odd plantain, hunk of cheese, or piece of fruit thrown in for good measure. They had a latreen and the bathing area was a bucket of water with a bowl. Everything with either caked with dust or mud, depending on when in the day it had rained. Surprisingly there was some limited running water and electricity, but it was clearly limited and not very strong or always present. The spanish was very thick and fast, and I was not able to understand very much of it or communicate very well. I was often treated like a child because of my limited language skills.

Despite the fact that the level of material comfort was far different than I was accustomed and my limited ability to communicate with members of the community, I learned a lot about myself, life in Nicaragua, and rural poverty. It was a positive experience.

The community was strongly organized and well informed poltically. They were anti-transgenics, pro-organics, did work around patriarchal violence and gender equity, and did considerable anti-poverty and development work as well. It was great to be in such an active community.