Hey friend,

It's been quite some time since I wrote an e-mail report of life and work here in Nicaragua. Since December 19th, in fact. It would be fair to say that I have not failed to write because there was so little to talk about. Here in Nicaragua, for the last year, daily life has been more than sufficiently surprising and I've found that for the first time in my life I need a date book to avoid a sense of complete and utter chaos.

On New Year's Day, my Peace Corps friend, Barbara Jo comes to visit and we head out to the Atlantic Coast, first an hour by plane to Bluefields on the southeastern coast, then an hour by public motorboat up the coast to the town of Pearl Lagoon, a community of some three or four thousand whose wealth is the shrimp and fish in the lagoon 50 long and quite wide in places. We are hosted by a Canadian pastor named "Miss Les," who is serving the Moravian church of Pearl Lagoon. Because of Miss Les's connections and because people on the Caribbean Coast are extraordinarily open, we get to know a lot of people in just four days. We play dominoes, we go to church and are invited to a Christmas party (12 days of Christmas, good right up through Epiphany on January 6th) where everyone is invited to dance and dance. We spend one day out on a Key island fishing, swimming, and talking all sorts of talk with Miss Les and some of her Pearl Lagoon friends. We spend another day helping paint Miss Les's mission house, listening to Caribbean tunes, and learning to speak the Atlantic Coast English Creole from our boss man. One night, we hang out at the diner of Miss Cherry, a friend of Miss Les's, eating fish and lobster and listening to Miss Cherry tell stories. This woman can tell a story like no one I have ever heard, and the fish she serves us, caught that morning, is like prime rib. Never have I eaten as well or laughed as hard.

Here are some of the things I've been up to so far this year. In Chinandega I spend a day in each of three PROVADENIC communities meeting with the health committee and, with the help of my driver and assistant, Carlos Ibán, we talk about some of the community's needs and wants, particularly as they relate to the damage caused by Mitch. I focus on some of the benefits that trees can offer with respect to some of the priorities the community leaders outline. All three communities decide to put together a tree nursery plan, selecting the species according to their priorities of food, lumber, conservation, animal forage, or shade.

The second week of February, I travel with some colleagues to a community in Estelí, Sabana Grande, where we carry out a fairly comprehensive diagnostic to outline some of the basic social and agricultural structures of the community, as well as a comprehensive list of the needs and wants of the community. After a long, intense day, during which we accomplish only half of what we'd expected, feedback from my colleagues helps me see what I'm missing from this process of analysis, prioritization, and planning. Time is one factor. The process needs more time to make sure that the community is truly in charge of the process. I also need to learn more techniques that fit the people's abilities--written surveys don't work adequately for people with a sixth grade education or less. Offering "solutions" to rural people is only part of the process. Helping people define for themselves what the problems really are is the first and more important piece of work. This is the process to which PROVADENIC and CEPAD are committed in their work at the community level.

March is a month of workshops at the farm--workshops on rabbit raising, goats, chickens, and a longer, four-day workshop on chickens, rabbits, and goats for PROVADENIC communities that have been involved for a year or more with small livestock-raising. In all workshops, Francisco includes aspects on nutrition, ecology, and soils, the component for which I am responsible. Based on a series of well-illustrated pamphlets Chico and I acquired, I use hands-on techniques to talk about soil texture, soil porosity, and the dynamics of rainfall and soil erosion. In some of the workshops I've facilitated, I have had the pleasure of moving off to the edge of the group of farmers and watching as they, having mastered the particular technique involved, use it for themselves to discover how soil and water interact in ways they realize will affect their crops. The same dynamics I see creating themselves in the soil workshops are the ones I want to learn to help facilitate the process of community analysis, prioritization and planning.

Also during March, I participated in an ecotour excursion to the tropical humid forest of Bosawás in northeastern Nicaragua. Enormous, beautiful trees, a fer-de-lance viper, a wild turkey-type bird, parrots, including brightly colored macaws, tracks of an ocelot, scratchings of a jaguar, toucans, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, dozens of other birds--it was a rich experience, sufficient for another letter of its own. We were led into the jungle by a group from a community adjacent to the protected land, the ecotourism committee of Hormiguero, which is dedicated to finding non-destructive ways of living with the forest. One of those techniques is the ecotourism industry they have been developing in cooperation with CEPAD. For more information, drop me a line and I will connect you with the appropriate folk.

The last week of March I go to Costa Rica for a retreat sponsored by the Presbyterian Church (USA) for Presbyterian mission workers in Central America. If you are related to a Presbyterian Church, know that you are represented by some good folk in Central America. The retreat also offered me the opportunity to talk at length with my boss in Louisville, Julia Ann Moffett, who confirmed for me that the request for extending my work with CEPAD and PROVADENIC has been approved.

In sum, I have learned a great deal over the last four months--and perhaps accomplished a little--but most of all, I have been challenged and daunted by what I still need to learn, such as strategies that can become the right tools for communities that have chosen to own their own destiny and are ready to choose positive options for change. The first step, for me and for the rural farmers, is to reject a spirit of apathy, cynicism, and fatalism and believe, truly believe, in our Lord's promise of abundant life in all its fullness and the fulfillment of God's Kingdom, here on Earth.

God's Blessings be with you.

Thank you again.

God's Peace,

Mark Hare

The 1999 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, page 243