A journey into the region where Sustainable Harvest Nicaragua works has a heart of darkness aspect. The goal, however, is to bring forth a certain sort of light in the form of teaching about sustainable agriculture and promoting reforestation in an area hard hit by rampant slash-and-burn practices. Just to reach the work area takes the better part of a day, first by boat leaving from the Atlantic Coast city of Bluefields onto open ocean before a right turn into the mouth of the Kukra River. At that point, the jungle overgrowth becomes a long hallway that the boat navigates inland, the sun occasionally blotted out when a canopy of leaves closes out the sky.

The first day's biggest adventure came halfway through the journey when a submerged log knocked off the boat motor. We were four hour's paddle from any settlements, and initially the motor seemed hopelessly lost on the bottom of the river. Luckily, after several dives one of the SHI staff found the motor half-buried in mud on the river bottom. We hauled it up, spent an hour drying it out and headed on. This was clearly not going to be the usual kind of work commute.

After the six-hour boat trip, we arrived at the community of San Francisco where about 100 families live. SHI Nicaragua has an office and dormitory shared with a local non-profit organization here, although office means something slightly different in this context – only half the community has electricity, and even that is for only two or three hours a night when there is fuel for the generator. There is no running water and the shower is a few tacked up plastic sheets next to a well. The toilet facilities are an elevated outhouse. The dorm comes without screens or mosquito netting, but since it was the dry season Mercedes and I did not get eaten up too badly during the nights. The SHI office does not have much in the way of computers or file cabinets, but the walls are covered with poster paper outlining and recording the work being done by SHI with local families in the even more rural area outside of San Francisco. This area is part of a nature reserve in Nicaragua named Cerro Silva, but this designation does not protect it entirely from development.

The next few days we visited the SHI families in the countryside. Most trips out were by mule, and after the first few days my backside was sore enough that I asked to borrow a sanitary pad from my wife for a little extra cushioning. The land we traveled through was both beautiful and damaged – deep green jungle alternating with smoking ruins of trees as we traveled up rutted trails that, in the rainy season, are impassable. One of our guides and an SHI beneficiary was a tall, white-haired man named Don Mariano. He told us that the largest landowner of the region had been burning off forest to have more grazing land for cattle and he would let burns get out of control to ruin the crops of neighboring farmers who didn't want to sell their land to him. “One thing SHI has helped us with is to organize against that sort of thing.” Don Mariano told us, “We've learned a lot about new crops, and received a lot of seed and other help from you all. But the most important thing you've done is getting us together to talk about what we do with what we've grown and how we keep people like that from taking our land from us.”

Don Mariano had one of the most successful small farms in the area, and with SHI's help had planted plantain and cacao trees in areas where he used to slash and burn himself. SHI had also helped him to multi-crop on his land, sowing plants that provided nutrients to the soil alongside his regular crops. With the improvements in his income and harvest, he decided to donate a part of his land to build a school for the children of the region, most of whom lived too far away from San Francisco to get to classes every day. Don Mariano embodied many of the best qualities of rural Nicaraguans, including a stoicism that I certainly can't imagine for myself; less than a week before we met him, he had lost the top half inch of one of his thumbs in a horse training accident. Don Mariano never went to see a doctor, and never complained to us although his wrapped-up thumb must have given him a great deal of pain throughout the two days he acted as our guide.

We also visited some of the women's organizations that SHI Nicaragua has helped to develop in the area. Doņa Estebana Romero was a leader of one such organization, and she showed us the grain dryer she had built with SHI's assistance. She also talked about how forming a cooperative for grain and animal production with six other local women had not only given them all more income but also a sense of independence. She and my wife Mercedes ended up in a long conversation about how her role in her family has changed. Doņa Estebana told us, “My husband has always been a good man, not one of the violent ones, crazy with jealousy all the time. But since he has seen me doing my own work with the co-op, he shows me even more respect and now we talk about how we spend our money together, instead of before when he was the only one who made money and the only one to decide what to do with it.”

The same day that we visited Doņa Estebana, we also visited a new biodigester project assisted by SHI Nicaragua. The biodigester is being installed outside the home of a family on a hillside with a spectacular view of the entire Cerro Silva forest reserve, both its lush jungle and high mountains. “This one biodigester will only save a small amount of wood, of course,” SHI Nicaragua director Marvin Gonzales explained. “But it shows that there are alternatives to wood-burning stoves, and people from outside who care about offering those alternatives to the people here, when otherwise it can feel like you're pretty isolated out here. It's another door that SHI opens, and then we can walk in to do other work as well. Everyone around here wants to see a biodigester, then they want to hear about our agricultural work, and then they want to work with us. That's how it goes.&148

Our final few days included an eight-hour trip by mule to visit several other SHI communities. The communities we went through were ones that had just begun working with SHI, and it was obvious why they had been chosen. The poverty was deep and the signs of malnutrition were everywhere, especially in the distended bellies of the children. “We're looking at what the crops are that will stick here,” SHI agricultural worker Marlon Moody told us. “This area is dryer than back in San Francisco, but we have a lot of ideas about planting crops that don't need as much water and maybe chicken coops and hog farming. Our goal has to be not just crops, but helping these communities gain more income. You can see how much need there is for that.”

We arrived by mule to one last community where SHI works, this one with road access back to Bluefields, and after several farm visits the next day, we managed to hitch a ride back into town on a coal truck. We had gone out by boat, and back by mule. Mercedes and I had the chance to see a world entirely different from that of the U.S. or her urban part of Nicaragua. We had traveled in a region where the luxuries of running water, electricity and houses of plaster and plastic are unknown. The people we met were both deeply poor and deeply proud, and both aspects go a long way toward explaining why SHI Nicaragua's presence has been so successful in this region. These Nicaraguans were not asking for or expecting handouts, but wanted the kind of technical help that SHI can offer to improve their standard of living and their quality of life. That includes protection of the forests and lands people live on and within in Nicaragua. It is a protection based on working with people and offering them sustainable alternatives. At its best, that is the kind of work that SHI does, and what it represents for the rural communities of Nicaragua.

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