Wednesday. Esteli to Yali with the Padre

More waiting in Esteli - the assured lift from another Yali Co-op guy didn´t come through, and eventually we got picked up by the priest of the district of Yali. Never a cooler priest have I met - jeans, t-shirt, groovy smile... He drove us up through the Miraflor reserve (getting still higher and greener all the time) in his 4x4 at a pace that sometimes caused us to entirely leave our seats. And I discovered through talking about this experience that the word for roller coaster seems to be "Russian Mountain" - but no-one knows why. I was also surprised that I was able to use the word for priest so soon after I´d read it in my Spanish copy of the Alchemist- I knew I might, but I wasn´t expecting revision to happen that quickly!

So we arrive late afternoon and get straight down to business. I´m to teach computing to the members of the cooperative and their families, which means farmers from Yali and surrounding area of coffee and cattle. Some may be in English, some in Spanish, and there may be English classes too- but they´re covered at the moment. As they´re explaining a little of what the cooperative does, I just about understand that they are working on particular types of fodder for cows that is drought resistent, and how artificial insemination has improved the number of calves born. I think... I also thought for ages that there was alot of talk of apples and I wasn´t sure how this fitted - until it was explained that the word also means a measurement of land slightly bigger than an acre. How was I to know??!

Let me explain Co-operatives... There are individual farms. Then there are groups of individual farms called cooperatives. They work together to ensure health, education, good farming methods etc. Then there are Unions of these cooperatives - in Nicaragua, called UCAs. THEN - there are organisations that are the third tier, selling coffee abroad etc. One example is an org called CECOCAFEN. As yet I havent worked out where Fairtrade fits in, or the sessional workers that come from other areas of the country to pick coffee at seasonal times. But hey- it´s not been a week yet!