Growing organic lives: Doña Deyenira Ruiz Alaniz
Posted on personal blog December 19, 2011
She tears paper out of a college-ruled notebook to stoke the fire. Pottery basins are nestled into the holes on the earthen oven where today’s tortillas are toasting, adjacent to the black beans that have been simmering since the night before. Deyenira (Day-in-era) dominates her kitchen. With one foot she kicks a chicken out the door, in her left arm she hauls a screaming toddler and with the remaining hand she beats out three tortillas to every one of mine.
Photo by Michael Beall
Her cheekbones are wide and rounded. Her silver-plated teeth are grey, yet ever ready to appear in a smile. The dark toffee creases in the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkle even deeper when she periodically bursts forth with a booming laugh and full-bosomed hug. It’s hard to guess ages. Women appear to weather quicker than the men.
Her four children and husband dart about the house, performing the hours of chores — Orlando, her husband, brings in hot milk from the family cow; María Jose and María Celeste, the twins, wash mountains of plates and clothing in the outside sink; Jamie, the oldest son heads somewhere with the horse; even three-year-old Orlandito sweeps the earthen floor, mostly pushing dust around to be cleaned up later.
Forth from her kitchen Deyenira brings steaming bowls of gallo pinto (I’ve heard two translations – painted rooster or weary traveler: kidney beans, chili and rice), fried plantains, fresh cheese and tortillas. She kindly claims mine are perfect, kind of artistic. Orlando said if journalism doesn’t work out I could open a tortillas stand. Not a bad idea, it would likely make a better income.
Such an experience is credited to Jane “Juanita” Boyd, an English expat, who is helping to build grassroot ecotourism projects in the Miraflor Natural Preserve. Travelers arrive at the doorstep of the Ruiz-Alaniz family, among others, in the community of La Labranza for home stays. The stays consist of the real Nicaragua-divine cooking, day hikes and exposure to the daily lives of the rural north of this country. It’s now a destination found in all the guidebooks. Boyd has helped these families alter their economic situation, which has been stagnant after generations of political wars fought in their backyard. Another project of Boyd’s that the Ruiz-Alaniz family has adopted is a small-organic veggie plot. They can grow enough for themselves plus some to sell.
“Before Juanita, we’d never eaten lettuce and squash. Now we’re like bunnies, eating it all the time,” Deyenira said, laughing loudly, bosom bouncing, at the idea of her family eating so many vegetables.
These rural families form cooperatives to implement the projects Boyd designs and helps finance. This insures there is continued infrastructure in the towns to sustain such projects. Much of the produce and coffee that these communities grow is sold to Café Luz and Hostel Luna that Boyd runs in Estelí.
“You can think up projects and figure out how to help people finance them,” Boyd said sitting in the rocking chairs on the inside patio of her hostel. “But they decide if they really want these things and if they are going to stay faithful to maintain them .”
Orlando, the father of the Ruiz-Alaniz family said he works with Boyd in these projects as just one of his the many jobs he holds to support his family. He hosts tourists, grows organic coffee, helps his wife with their garden and has his own corn and bean plot. He does construction work when there are jobs and is a leader in the community agriculture cooperative. Deyenira likewise bakes and sells bread and runs a small store when the tourism drops off. They hope to dig a fishpond so their family and others can have another source of protein, but that might be a long ways out. They use Boyd’s model of organic growing partly because they can sell produce for more and partly out because they want to protect what little they have.
“Much of this is out of conscious, there are no laws making us protect places like Miraflor,” Orlando said seated at the dinner table, lit by two small candles, there’s no electricity or running water in his home. “It’s harder to do things with out chemicals but if each of us can protect what little we have we can do a lot. This teaches our children that caring for the environment is important and maybe they can do better than we did.”
