 The entire country of Nicaragua is in the fifth day of a complete transportation shutdown. All of the boats, taxis, buses, trucks and ships have gone on strike in protest of the high fuel prices. The only thing operating is airplanes and private vehicles.
Gas is currently at $4.75 US per gallon. The complaint here is that the fuel is purchased directly from Venezuela at non-market prices, and it is the government that is keeping the price high and making the money.
 The only impact on us is that it is getting harder to get food items that come from Managua, but the basic food staples are still in plentiful supply. There has been some violence in the Managua and Leon areas on the Pacific side, but nothing here. The police here are pretty quick to clamp down on anything like that.
Tim and Pastor Harlan had a good meeting with Accion Medica, a group from Norway that has been focusing in the past 4-5 years in encouraging and helping family farmers to plant crops. They are currently supporting farmers in about 35 communities.
Accion Medica's primary work is in womens and childrens health issues, and they  recognize food supply as a critical part of their overall emphasis.
Here is the lowdown: If you take 100 lbs of seed rice (cost $40 USD) and plant it on a manzana of land (about 2 acres), you produce 3000 - 4000 lbs of rice for comsumption or sale.
If you need to pay for all the labor throughout the process, the total cost is about $500 per manzana. This produces about $1200 worth of rice for sale or consumption and creates work for the locals.
We are going to continue to pursue this  as a part of our ministry goals. The nice thing is that Accion Medica has the people and structure in place to support this type of work. Their agronomists will go out and train people and typically, they are able to increase the yield of a typical family farmer by 2x or 3x.
We are beginning to have a good influence on the workers. We have had them over for pizza and dominoes several times and Tim has had the opportunity to share the Word with them during break times in a very low-key way.
 They have begun asking Javier "what church does he go to?". We will probably begin translating our Bible study notes into Spanish so we can lead a Bible study with them.
The house is coming along well, albeit slowly. We took about 3-4 weeks off to build the fence, but that is just about complete and the guys are working on forming up the second floor. We are trying to beat the rainy season. If not, we have an alternative plan to cover the entire structure with plastic to allow us to continue during the rainy season.
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