Hey Friend,

I am currently in Managua, planning on leaving for the Atlantic Coast tomorrow morning at 5:00 in the morning. I will be spending approximately nine days in Pearl Lagoon visiting friends I’ve made there over the last year during my four visits. I also hope to spend at least one day out fishing and if at all possible I’d like to try to learn to sail one of the little dugout canoes with a mast. Who knows? I might even learn Nicaraguan Creole, this time for real.

This past week I have been working full days with the two young men (Eddy and Guillermo) who have been working with me now for over six months, trying to finish up some tasks that we had set for ourselves these last two weeks. My hope was to leave the farm with at least a relatively clear conscience, having met the goals Eddy, Memo and I had set for ourselves. That goal was made somewhat more difficult by the three days I spent last week traveling to Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua with my friend Nóriko.

Work on the farm is becoming more and more interesting, but that also means it is requiring more and more concentration. This is part of the reason why I have been much worse than usual at responding to e-mails. Another aspect of my problem is that although I can write replies while I’m at the farm, I can’t send them. The farm has a cellular phone, which does not work with my modem, and I hate writing e-mails and not getting to send them off the same day. I used to ride my bike the four kilometers into Niquinohomo to hook up, my computer strung over my back. I try not to do that anymore (dust, rain, accidents), so my connection times are when I am in Managua, which are on average every 10 days or less, but the trips to Managua are usually very brief and very busy.

I don’t necessarily expect your forgiveness if you have written me within the last two months or so and are still waiting for a response. But I do want you to know that I value your communication very, very much and will eventually respond. That may be after you have ceased to remember who I am and where you met me, but so be it.

One of the projects at the farm requiring more time and focus is a goat study. I am now supervisor for a project that includes six goats, most of mixed breed, including "native" stock. Our goal is to develop a system of management that allows the goats to produce more milk while not retarding the growth of the kids, which are needed as rapidly as possible for communities interested in beginning to raise goats. Currently we are producing from four milkers a little over two quarts a day in excess of what the kids need for their growth. The two main differences in our system from the main herd are (1) We leave the kids with their mothers rather than bottle-feeding them (bottle-feeding allows for more consistent growth, since the milk of mothers who give more can be fed to the kids of goats that give less) and (2) We focus on feeding the animals tree foliage from leguminous tree and shrub species, versus just grass forage.

The tree foliage can provide as much as four times as much protein as most grasses, which means more milk production and better quality milk. It also leads very nicely into my other work on the farm, which is in soil conservation using leguminous tree and shrub species to protect and recuperate the soil. By providing the goats with higher quality forage, we hope to increase milk production sufficiently so that all the females are producing much more than the kids can possibly consume. This makes sharing the milk unnecessary and therefore, makes bottle feeding unnecessary.

It is very interesting work, very important for the farm and very important for me in my ongoing transformation into someone who appreciates goats. But it does increase my nervousness caused by a constant barrage of questions: Will this goat give birth without problems? What to do with a retained placenta? Is the swollen udder mastitis, or something more innocuous? Are the goats eating enough tree foliage to make a difference? Are the kids growing at the rate they should, compared to the main herd? What is the best way to use the milk we produce? And so on.

While not exactly a quantitative result, both Eddy and Memo have noted that the milk from our goats tastes better than the milk from the main herd.

At any rate, here I am now, in the house of my fellow missionaries, David, Wendy, Nico and Tasha Gist, preparing to forget the farm for a week or so and enjoy myself in a very laid back town on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.

In the meantime, I’d like to leave you with these thoughts:

May blessings of all kinds surround you this holiday season and may the New Year find you with a smile on your face, surrounded by people you love.

May this coming year bring you more good things than bad, more happiness than sadness, more health than not.

May your ties of friendship multiply and may the depths of your friendships grow ever deeper.

May your most secret dreams becoming reality.

May the joy of life suffuse your being and spill out in all that you do. May our Creator’s love surround you and fill you and never leave you.

God’s Peace.

Mark Hare