The End

I should apologize in advance for what is bound to be an epic novel...I´m trying to make up for my laziness.

SO I left Leon for good on Tuesday, finished both jobs and now am in Jinotepe for the two weeks before I leave (to travel etc etc). Yikes, I can´t believe I´ll be home in two weeks! At some points, I felt like time was trudging by, but at the same time, I remember the day I got here like it was yesterday. I remember everything seeming so strange and a little scary, things that now are just a part of every day life. For example, even walking around the block of the hostel I stay at in Jinotepe seemed like a big ordeal my first couple of days here. Going to the market was like the "event" of the day for me. Taking buses anywhere terrified me, which I laughed to remember as I flagged down a bus Wednesday afternoon and proceeded to spend an hour crammed with 20 other people with my ear crushed to the ceiling and my butt sticking out of an open window. I guess that´s what learning a new culture is all about though.

Let´s see...Leaving the aldea was pretty much a heart crusher. I have a ton of pictures of all the babies but just thinking that I probably won´t see them again, and when I do they will be all grown up...I had such a hard time giving them up to their parents that evening. I´ve never worked with kids of that age before, but even at 7, 8, and 9 months you can see personalities and temperment developing. How they´ll turn and grin at you after knocking over a cup of baby food, or crawl over to you just to sit in your lap for a little while...ahh I think I´m in love. I still have a really hard time grasping what their lives will be like as they grow up...I´ve seen most of their houses, with rusted sheets of metal as roofs and small cement or cardboard structures as the building and trash all over the ground...but I really respect the center that I was working with so it´s great to know that their parents have this great resource for their kids. The women had this big suprise lunch for me to say goodbye, complete with a life size blonde cardboard doll that someone had made...which was a lot of fun. I´m trying to convince the volunteer organization I came here with to start sending volunteers there too, which the women were really psyched about. As I was saying bye to my favorite little boy, Edwin, his mom was really suprised that it was my last day. She came back about 10 minutes later and gave me this huge picture they had of him, saying his dad and her wanted me to have it (he´s the one everyone calls my son), which almost got me sobbing.

The last day at Las Tias was sad in a different way, but hard. I guess it´s different saying bye to people that can actually talk. All day my students were writing sentences for little assignments I would give them like "I will not love you forever if you go", "Porque are you going?", "I do not want to learn speak english si te vas (if you go)"...I guess I´ve never explained that a few of my students just think that the idea of Spanglish (which I had to explain) is hilarious. Sometimes I´ll say, okay ten minutes of Spanglish, and we write sentences and talk in this mixed jarble of all the words they know in english plus spanish. It´s fun and makes them psyched to speak and learn new words they can add so I´m all for it. So leaving there was a bummer, but there´s another volunteer there, Sam, who is a really great, enthusiastic teacher so I know they´ll all be fiiiiine.

I went out to the discotheque one of my last nights with my madre, Miriam, her son, Carlos and his girlfriend. I never went out in Leon so it was sort of fun to get out and even more fun to do it with my familia. Miriam loooooves to dance so we danced and danced, it was a blast. After a while a few guys started to ask me to dance and it always went something like this: dance, dance, "I like your eyes", dance, "Can I have your email address?", dance, "I love you", then proceeded some strange neck licking thing. Always. Followed by me shoving them away and going to sit down. After about three of these I wisened up and just stayed glued to my chair, until all three of the creepsters surrounded me with proposals to take me to Managua or the beach or a variety of other places. Carlos and his girlfriend were sort of laughing at how bewildered I was but Miriam (big lady with short curly flaming red hair that sort of sticks out like an afro, bright red lipstick, tons of bright eye make up...you get the picture) took the bucket of ice on the table, smashed it down and shouted "SHE´S TALKING TO HER MADRE, GET AWAY FROM HER". And they raaaan. It was hilarious and she told the story to everyone who crossed her path for days. As entertaining as it was for everyone, I´ll be happy to get back to the states where I feel like a normal person, and not like some strange, rare breed of unicorn. Leaving the family was a lot sadder than I expected, I was crying, Miriam and my abuela were sobbing. But at the same time I am SO happy to be back in Jinotepe. I really can´t explain it, but aside from my house with my family in Brookfield, this place in Jinotepe feels exactly like home. I know everyone that works in the house really well, and it´s awesome to see them all every time I come back...I have people I know in certain stores and restaurants I go into a lot, which is why I love that it´s a smaller town. I´m excited to be here and psyched that I have two weeks to travel and see some stuff that I haven´t gotten to yet.

Wednesday was an awesome day. The father of two girls I coached on the Park and Rec summer swim team, Mr Davidson, is in Nicaragua for a week with some kids from the high school he teaches at in New York. They ended up working about an hour away from Jinotepe, so I went to go see them and visit with him for awhile. I was pretty homesick when my Mom emailed me that he was going to be in Nicaragua and we should try to meet up, so it was something I had been looking forward to. So he had given me the name of the place they would be working at before he left, saying he would be out of email range once he got here but it wasn´t too hard to find. I hoped on a bus which plopped me on this big road in the middle of nowhere, the driver pointing to this dirt path/dry river bed that he said led to where they were staying. And it did, only they weren´t there. The guy guarding the gate told me that they were working far away and wouldn´t be back until lunchtime. So I chatted with the guard for a few hours, napped, walked around the town and stared into space for a few hours until the group pulled up. Super excited I rush to the gate and start saying hey to everyone, expecting them to know who I was, which it appeared they didn´t. As the last person came in the gate I realized Mr. Davidson was definitely not one of them. It turns outtttt...there had been a switch, and his group was staying somewhere else "farrr" away. So I set off down the dried up river with the name of the place they were staying and a big 10lb incentive to find them. You see, I had bought about 60 bunuelos from this woman up the street the day before. Bunuelos can only be described as the most delicious treat ever invented...cheese and yucca fried into little nugget balls and covered in this honey/sugar/cinnamon juice. So I´m hauling a ton of these around in my backpack thinking that if I don´t find them, there will be no stopping me from sitting down and eating all sixty of those delicious nuggets of yum. Therefor, my 10lb incentive. So I set off, asking random people selling stuff on the side of the road where this "La Francia" place is that they´re staying (that´s generally my way of getting around here, and it´s worked remarkably well so far). After awhile a woman flags down a bus and chucks me on it, which dumps me on the side of the road about 20 minutes away. I ask some people sitting outside of their house and they point across to this house that´s sitting on top of a hill...not too, too far from where we were, except for the fact that there was a very steep gorge seperating us. "No problema" the guy says, and sets off with me, both of us in our handy sandals, down the steepest, awesome trail I´ve ever been on. It was like...I don´t know but I half expected a dinosaur or some other strange, huge animal to pop up. There were these huuuuge, shaggy, palm tree-like things, and pineapple bushes everywhere (did you know pineapples grew on bushes? I had no clue, they´re these spikey red and green bush things), dozens of other trees and bushes I´ve never seen before and forgot the name of as soon as the man told me. So we get down the side in about 10 minutes, and then proceed to go back up. The going up was just as stunning and beautiful, but not quite as much fun...due to the fact that you pretty much had to run to get up the soft, slippery dirt. So we get to the top, where there´s a little cabin. He passes me off to his grandmother to walk me the rest of the way, which she does, and finally I come across a big cement building with a bunch of dirty, tired gringos inside...including Mr. Davidson. Lucky for me, he was extremely impressed with my adventures to get to his group. It was great to see the kids, they were all really nice, and awesome to talk with someone from home. It felt sort of strange, that I´m standing in this beautiful place in Nicaragua with the father of girls I had coached in swimming...small world. So we just chatted for a while, they were on their break after lunch, and then I went with them to the site they had been working on. Talk about incredible. They were building a house for a woman, whose original house was sitting right beside it. Her old house was TINY, I mean the size of a bathroom, and made of out rusty metal sheets and I don´t know what else. Her new house was about 6 times the size and made out of metal rods and concrete blocks...about a million times sturdier. It was really great to see the kids and how proud they were of the house, they had started with only the foundation only days earlier. All in all, it was an awesome day. I love my little travel adventures/problems because they always work out and I always figure out how to get where I need to be, which makes me feel very...able, I guess is the word. It was also sort of neat to break down my experience here with someone that at least semi-knew me after it was all over. It sounds silly to say, but it was nice to discuss it with an adult too...just different insight than someone my age is able to give.

Today I went to a festival in the next town over with Alejandro, who works in the house, a volunteer, Gabby, who´s staying in the house and an older man who´s looking to start "adventure travel" in Nicaragua for very wealthy people (it´s been cool watching him plan that). It was fun, but like any other Nicaraguan festival/parade, it was about 4 hours of waiting with bands playing to amuse everyone, and then about 10 minutes of actual parade. It was entertaining though. A part of the parade, I still have no idea why, is tons of guys dressed up as women, with masks and wigs and stockings and fake books and purses...noone really could explain why but there were about a hundred of them...some walking, some dancing, some stumbling from too much beer. Verrrrry interesting...and classic Nicaraguan.