For the past I-don’t-know-how-many years, I’ve been working on about a dozen unfinished books. Two of them are based on my experience in Nicaragua – Rancho Santana: Then and Now, a history of the resort in Nicaragua that I helped develop, and The Challenge of Charity, the story of my and Number Three Son’s 20-year experience developing Fun Limón, a non-profit community center across the road from Rancho Santana.

While both books were in their early stages, I often looked through the multitudinous entries I had made in my daily journals, hoping to find stories to include. The following is one that I’m especially fond of. It didn’t make it into the history of Rancho Santana, but I’m pretty sure it will be in The Challenge of Charity… if I ever finish it. 

Uninvited Pigs: 
Problems and Solutions 

To create the baseball and soccer fields for Fun Limón, we had to solve several serious problems.

Problem #1 

There was a thick layer of non-porous clay just below the surface of the ground on which we intended to build the fields, which made for such poor drainage that we knew we could not expect to grow healthy and sustainable grass there.

DA (a friend, Fun Limón board member, and civil engineer) told us that the only way to solve this problem and end up with the kind of grass that pro-teams and even Little League teams routinely played on in the US would be to dig out 12 to 18 inches of the non-porous clay and replace it with good soil.

We believed that having high quality baseball and soccer fields – equal to only the top one or two professional fields in the country – would be a big plus for our project. That, along with the bleachers and scoreboards and other amenities we planned to install, would make Fun Limón a model community center that could be emulated by others in the region.

So, we went ahead and cut out the clay, replaced it with good soil, and then planted a durable grass on top of it.

Once that was done, a question arose. How should we water the grass?

Problem #2 

The obvious choice was a sprinkler system. But since one of our objectives was to provide jobs for as many unemployed local people as possible, I had developed a prejudice against all mechanized systems. I believed they would almost certainly reduce the number of local people that we could hire.

Here were our choices:

The budget we had available was enough to pay three men (at the low wages that were appropriate in the area) to water the grass manually. Even if we could keep the grass watered with just three men (which looked unlikely), the cost of paying them (including taxes and government extras) would be about $12,000 a year. Meanwhile, the cost of a top-notch automated system would be about $36,000, and it could be run by one man working part-time.

We did the math and realized that, over the long haul, the manual option didn’t make sense.

After some discussion with our board members, we decided on a compromise: We would purchase an automated tractor with a watering attachment. That cut the laborers needed to 1.5 – less than the three we would be able to hire for the fully manual option, but three times better than the one part-timer needed for the fully automated option.

So, that’s what we did. And when the new system was installed, we felt doubly proud. Proud of our beautifully green and well-trimmed fields of grass, and also proud of having employed a few more local people.

Problem #3 

Alas, as I’ve learned a hundred times in my quest to turn Fun Limón into a responsible and viable charitable endeavor, our compromise gave birth to a new and unexpected problem. All that green grass was attractive not only for baseball and soccer players but for local pig owners as well. Rather than spend money on feed during the dry season, some of them figured it would be a good idea to allow their pigs to munch on our lawns.

Although we had a guard at night, that didn’t prevent stealthy pig owners from cutting the barbed wire fence that surrounded our fields and letting their pigs sneak in. One morning, we came in early to discover a half-dozen pigs dining on the soccer field.

It turns out that pigs are more aggressive grass-eaters than other grazing mammals, such as sheep and goats. Pigs eat down to the roots. Thus, a good third of the soccer field had been ruined.

Solving this new problem seemed simple. We knew all the local pig owners, so we contacted them and asked them to desist. They were gracious in acknowledging our concerns, but, in fact, that solution worked about as well as… well, it didn’t work at all.

We considered appealing to the local authorities, but were reminded, quite rightly, that even in cases of homicide the local constabulary was amazingly inefficient. “The only way to solve the problem,” said Carla, a local woman that worked as an accountant for Fun Limón, “is to shoot one of the pigs. When word gets out that we shoot the pigs, the fence cutting will stop.”

Problem #4 

“We can’t kill pigs,” I said to the board. “What kind of message will that send to the locals? There must be something we can do.”

We tried to educate the community about our problem, and even got the baseball and soccer players behind us. But three months later, the pigs were still destroying our fields.

The Final Solution 

And so, reluctantly, I agreed to execute an errant pig, rationalizing the decision bizarrely by telling myself that it was no worse than using missiles to fight terrorism.

And, yes, the problem went away.

Lesson Learned: Sometimes, you have to kill a pig.