American Thanksgiving Break

Because of Thanksgiving, we had Thursday and Friday off school. With the extra long weekend three friends and I headed four hours out of Managua towards the mountains. This is one of my favorite places to visit and I often wish that NCA was located there. The mountains are where the coffee grows and already the first round of coffee beans had been picked. Here are three workers raking coffee beans which need to be dried before they are graded and then roasted. Sometimes these beans lay out for almost a week depending on the amount of sun. Even though the beans grow in the mountains, they are shipped to the valley to dry where there is more sun and flat space.

Because of heavy rains during the rainy season the roads can get quite rough in this area. It doesn't help that large trucks use these roads a lot to truck coffee, beans, and rice. At one point in the road the traffic was reduced to one lane because the other half of the road had fallen away. This was a fun sign we saw of a bus and a person falling into a pothole. The sign says Jinotega demands their roads. And really they are right it is important for them to have good roads because alot of Nicaragua's exportable products come from this part of the country. With the poor roads, the truck drivers are having more breakdowns and it is taking longer to deliver their products; also gas prices have gone up. As a result, in the past couple weeks food prices have risen. Now the poor are speaking out in the capital about this. It's a vicious cycle.
The main goal of the trip to the mountains was to spend a night at an orphanage. We spent most of Thursday afternoon preparing a Thanksgiving meal for the kids who live there. This was the one day out of the year that they were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. As we were preparing the food the kids were most interested in what we were doing. Most of the kids I talked to had never seen or tasted ham before. They had lots of fun eating and even though we had made lots of food there wasn't a lot left over in the end.
Here the kids are gathering around to see the cranberry sauce be prepared and the duck (not turkey because it was too expensive) being carved. The kids had killed and plucked the duck that morning before we arrived.
After the meal we shared one or two things that we were thankful to God for in the past year. Most of the kids were thankful for good grades in school, for the meal they had just eaten, and that they were healthy enough to do their work well. Usually a common answer we might have is family, but for these children they normally don't come from good or supportive families. Thankfully this orphanage is run very well and these kids have really formed one big family there.