Photo by: Erin Hough

Some students go skiing during the six-week winter break, some do volunteer work, but junior Erin Hough chose to do both – simultaneously.

During what Hough deemed as the perfect vacation, she successfully led an initiative to build a sustainable community garden in Nicaragua.

Hough, a biology major who coordinates DU sustainability projects, including the EcoCup and Trayless initiatives, began researching such a permaculture, or self-sustaining ecosystem, project in summer 2009.

The Permaculture Project was born after meeting with her faculty adviser, Matthew Taylor, associate professor of geography who owned community-developed land in Playa Gigante, Nicaragua.

“When designing the garden, I knew it had to be culturally relevant but also sustainable,” said Hough.

Hough oversaw the planting of a communal garden containing papaya, banana and plantain trees, each employed for different reasons.

The papaya trees grow tall and provide necessary shade; banana trees are self-replenishing (once fruit is produced, the tree dies and a new one grows in its place); and plantains.

As the potatoes of Nicaragua they are used in several different dishes, cooked in various ways and their dense trees serve as both a peripheral barrier and a wind barrier in the garden, Hough said.

The types of trees and layout of the garden were decided on prior to departure. Hough had to find housing and organize transportation on her own once there, she said.

“It was the anti-Murphy’s Law trip,” she said. “Everything that went right could and did.”

Hough and four others, sophomore, Sonia Wilk, and seniors Kyle Creager, Katia Gedrath-Smith and Ben Waldman – who designed the campus community garden between Centennial Halls and Centennial Towers – received grants from DU’s Partners in Scholarship (PinS) student scholarship travel fund to fly from Denver to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Managua, Nicaragua.

Once there, they took a taxi to Granada, Nicaragua, which is where their transportation plans had ended and their adventure begun.

The group hitchhiked south from Granada to Playa Gigante met the town’s mayor in a bar – and moved into his half-built, yet-to-be-named hotel.

They climbed a volcano and witnessed the tour guide decapitate a coral snake, played softball with the women of the community and procured the garden’s different trees, accidentally killed them, then uprooted new ones.

The group of DU students became so involved in the community, Hough even found herself turning down the mayor’s charms.

“Zacariás [the mayor] wanted me to live with him in Nicaragua for nine months and then he would come live with me and my parents in Colorado Springs for three,” she said, laughing.

Though they ran out of time and fiscal resources to finish the project, the half-way completed garden remains in Playa Gigante, awaiting further development.

“I just want and need to finish my goddamn garden,” Hough said, in a comical, emphatic tone. “All we need is the funding.”

Hough has even left her spring quarter schedule open to the possibility of returning to finish the Permaculture Project.

“Everybody there including the mayor would ask, ‘Are you coming back?’ and I would reply ‘With luck,'” Hough said, crossing her fingers.