Milkin' it Son
Well here goes another round of life in Nicaragua by Brandon… try not to fall asleep in the middle of it this time. Well I keep plugging away at might my site and really enjoying myself. I continue to plug away at work trying to get a good sustainable project going, but in the mean time I just finished up painting a world map *picture soon to come* 
1.4 meters by 2.8 meters a the local school. It is definitely something that will help the community with their geography. When I was about 90 percent I had several people young and old ask me what kind of map of was doing… the continents of Africa, Asia and South America did not seem to get their attention so instead they ventured guesses ranging from a community map to a map of Nicaragua. Some of you maybe thinking… wow Brandon must have done a terrible job if the don’t know what kind of map he is doing. Well let us hope that is not the case. In reality it is that some people have not been exposed to things as simple as a world map. I am definitely looking at getting some more things started here in the future and will try and keep you posted on those.
That is my house in the background full of smoke… not it is not burning my host mom is just cooking. They use open fire wood cook stoves made of dirt.
To keep you guys from skimming this and not actually reading it I will now talk about something that relates to a lot of you and that most probably know nothing about except the fact that it gives you that nice pick me up in the morning…coffee. The coffee harvest is coming to an end at my site so I thought it would be a good time to tell you all about it. If you look at the coffee picture below from the other post it shows immature coffee “berries” when the are ripe they turn a beautiful red color and actually have a sweet flavor to them not the bitter flavor that most people associate with cup of regular black coffee (not the caramel macchiato at Starbuck’s). Each of these berries has to be hand picked in a series of three pickings. This insures that they only harvest the mature berries and hand picking is essential because if not harvested properly and the stem breaks off from the plant itself and remains on the berry it will never produce another berry in the lifetime of the plant which can last several decades. Harvesting coffee would not exactly be desirable work for most Americans. They head out in the cafetal early in the morning and starting picking the berries with can range from a foot off the ground to around 10 feet depending of the age of the plant. Not to mention that they are usually placed on steep hillsides that makes the job even worse. My first day I managed to pick about ¾ of a lata which actually means tin in Spanish but in this context a four gallon container. A good picker with do about 4,5,6 latas in a day ( I have a host brother who can do 8 or 9 which is exceptional). For my hard days work or ¾ lata of coffee I would have earned a whopping .75 cents instead I just used mine to top of others who were short of a full lata (I am sure they wished I had picked more). Of course with practice I improved and I was not working full steam ahead mostly because I was busy talking or thinking about how much this work sucks. If people had to pick all of their own coffee they drink, tea would be in great demand. So after the day if over and you have sticky hands from the sugary juices that leaked out of the skin of the berry you have to dehusk them. This is an easy process where a machine does basically all the work. After the skin has been peeled off this is what everyone would recognize as a coffee bean, except its color. The bean has the fairly slimly sugary substance covering it in which it ferments overnight. In the morning they wash off all the substance and begin to dry and sort the coffee. This is pretty much the process before the send it to the people who export and toast the coffee. An interesting side note, most of the cafetaleros for personal consumption leave the husk on the coffee (which holds in all the flavorful sugars) for several days and the take off the husk by crushing it which results in a coffee that is much more flavorful and delicious. Hope everyone is doing well.
The lake that I go swimming and fishing in almost daily.
