The good, the bad, and the ugly.

THE UGLY
Might as well start with the ugly, just to get it out of the way. Do not, under any circumstances, eat yoghurt that has been expired for two weeks. It seems pretty obvious, I´m aware, but just in case you were thinking it could be delicious...well it WAS delicious, even though it was the consistency of soup, however the past few days have not been quite so delicious. End of story.

THE BAD
Okay in this case, ´bad´ is being used as in bad ass/sweet/awesome/GREAT. Jake is officially coming to Nicaragua, and I am sooo excited. Seriously. Shout out to my excellent brother right here, I´ve already started counting down the weeks - 4 weeks and 2 days in case you´re interested.

THE GOOD aka stupendous
I found a second volunteer job :-D I was pretty frustrated at the end of last week...I was only teaching two hours a day, three days a week, and even with spending an hour every day preparing the next days class, I was only busy 9 hours a week. Not that I don´t enjoy lounging around every once in a while, but I was feeling pretty useless and silly for coming all this way to work so little. Anyways, thank gooooodness for my momma miriam who sprang into action after I attempted to discuss my frustration with her. She talked to a woman she knows and found out about this social change organization that is absolutely amazing. It´s called Aldea SOS and is this big, beautiful center in a really poor barrio outside of Leon. They have a couple different components to their program, to help everyone in the family, not just the kids. During the day, parents can drop their kids off there while they go to work. It only costs 30 cordobas, the equivalent of less than 2 dollars a MONTH, and that includes breakfast, lunch and two snacks, a medical clinic if needed, as well as a safe classroom with plenty of adult supervision. It´s an awesome place and there are about 200 kids there, as well as other smaller centers in other barrios around Leon. The coordinators take all the family information when the kid first comes, as in parents jobs, who takes care of the kid normally, family health information and everything. Then they go and visit the house to try and figure out if the family could benefit from any of the programs they offer for adults, such as job training, personal development, and child development classes. I think that´s a huuuge part of the project, because just by glancing through a few of the kids files, I realized that a lot of the parents don´t have steady employment, have single parent households or huge households in really small living situations. The program also helps out women who are living in households with domestic violence, with programs and interventions. SO I went there early monday morning and after a few minutes of talking to them they asked if I´d like to start working right then. Ahh it´s awesome. I´ve been working with the infants, three months to 1 year old, this week and they´re so cute :-D I defenitely never thought I´d master the skill of changing cloth diapers, which let me tell you need to be changed every 15 minutes, while in Nicaragua...but I have. I´ve also mastered the skill of playing with one kid, rocking another to sleep and feeding another all at the same time, which I guess means I´m ready to have triplets. Jussst kidding. It´s cool though, the women there are really nice, which is a change from the other place I´m working where I´m pretty much ignored, and are really excited about the project and all they offer the kids. The downside is that I wake up at 6am to catch the bus to the place, but I´m hoping I get used to that eventually. So mondays, wednesdays and fridays I´ll go there in the morning, catch a camionetta -aka pick up truck with an elogated back, benches and a tarp cover-back to Las Tias to teach my two classes, and then go back to the project. Tuesday and Thursdays I´ll stay at the project all day because I don´t have classes. So I´m psyched about that, and feeling a little more usefull here in Nicaragua, which I´m hoping will help me to relax a little with the english classes. I was so frustrated last week because kids will just walk in and out of class, and a lot of them have no desire to learn. But my very wise mom pointed out that these kids have had a string of volunteers come and go, and it´ll probably take the kids awhile to trust me. Also, I guess I need to realize that a lot of them haven´t attended school, or aren´t currently attending school, and therefor classroom discipline isn´t really high on their skill list. I think I´m going to have to be content with teaching the kids that want to learn, and simply being a stable, realiable person for everyone else. I´m very slowly learning that I´m never going to be able to change the world but to make a difference in one kids life is pretty awesome too.