Nicaragua!

SWWEEEEEEEET

2008-05-01T23:01:00.000-07:00

The End

2008-04-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Beacoup de lavaaa

2008-04-14T16:42:00.000-07:00

This. Was. The. BEST. Weekend. EVERRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Seriously.

This weekend would have to rank up there on the top five most awesome experiences of my life, I could go on and on. And I´m about to, so brace yourself. IIIIIII hiked a volcano this weekend, and it was awesome...did I say that yet?

Allright obnoxious enthusiasm aside...I went on a trip with the group Quetzaltrekkers (a group of volunteer hikers who organize hikes on volcanos around Nicaragua and donate their profits to the project I work for, Las Tias...I´ve mentioned them before because I was planning on working with them, but found my other job instead) to Volcan Telica, which is pretty close to Leon. We met up on Saturday early in the morning to pack bags and grab breakfast before taking the bus to the start of the hike. There were three of the Quetzaltrekkers volunteers (the way they do it is that each volunteer has to go on a hike twice before they lead it, so two of them were in different stages of training), a couple from Quebec who has been traveling around Central America for months, a guy from the Netherlands who has been doing pretty much the same, a guy from England who is basically an intern there and is in Leon for a few weeks volunteering with the cosmetic surgery branch of the hospital here, anddd me! We took the bus to a random place in the middle of nowhere, walked through a town and through a gate and right into this field of boiling mud pits! I´ve never seen mud boil before, it was pretty sweet...I felt like I should throw in some pasta or something. A kid from the town stuck his finger in the mud pit (braaave soul) and let us all take some. It was still super hot and I´m pretty sure he wanted us to smear it all over our bodies, saying it was great for the skin. Everyone politely declined, unaware that in a few seconds we would be coated with a layer of dusty mud from the trail anyway. So we started off on the hike, which was not (as I expected) a 7 hour hike up a volcano, but a 7 hour hike to the BASE of a volcano (which was actually pretty small and only took like 10 minutes to hike up). It was a beautiful hike though, first stop was under a lemon tree, second stop under a mango tree, third stop under a lunch tree (perhaps not the technical name, but at the end of the most burly vertical part of the hike, it was the most beautiful lunch tree I´ve ever seen), and last stop looking up at an active, steaming volcano. While intense, the hike wasn´t too bad, and it was AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME to be with a bunch of people that spoke English! Everyone was super friendly and open and it was really sweet to get to know everyone. We reached where we were going to sleep for the night, a really pretty clearing right at the base, set up camp and then hiked up to the crater of the volcano. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. It was pretty much a straight up hike of loose tumbling rocks, probably not my most graceful moment but once you belly crawled the last few feet right to the edge, it was AMAZING. You´re on your belly peering down into this huuuuge put from which smoke is pouring upwards (with a lovely stench of sulfur)...I was definitely in awe. We scrambled down and walked around the volcano to see the sunset and then went back to camp to make a fire and hang out some more. Ate some dinner, played some Mafia (suprisingly fun, I hadn´t played for years), and then around 11pm went back up the volcano! Ahhh if I thought climbing up a volcano during the evening was cool/kick ass/hard, walking up in the pitch black was an even more...thrilling, scary, WOWWW experience. A few of us were feeling sort of lazy when two people set off to hike up during the night, so we stayed back (you know, after spending a few hours relaxing by a fire at the base of a volcano you get a little jaded by the fact that you´re BY AN ACTIVE VOLCANO). But the guy from Quebec radiod down and all I heard was "beacoup de lavaaaa" and I was ready. So most of the rest of us scrambled up after them and DUDEEEE....real lava. It was really far down and you had to wait for the smoke to clear but there it was, redish orangish bubbling lava (last eruption of this volcano was 2004). That was probably the most breathtaking part of the trip for me. We climbed down and everyone craaaashed, long day. Woke up in the morning before sunrise, which was pretty astounding to see from near the volcano, and started the hike back down.

So here´s where everyone is probably thinking "So Alysse went on a trip, but had no problems??? This can´t be quite right"...and you would be correct. About ten minutes into the hike on Saturday up to the volcano I started feeling a little hint of blister on the back of both feet. About ten minutes later I started feeling a hint of the lack of a blister and the presence of raw skin on the back of both feet. Everytime we took a break I wrapped and rewrapped and rebandaged the backs of my feet, which would help for about five minutes until the mix of sweat and dusty mud would undo all efforts. By the time we got to the campsite my feet were screamiiiiiing "GET US OUT OF HERE", but at the same time my mind was screaming "DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE, THIS IS AWESOME", so I rebandaged and was fine. The next morning I did a superb job with about 10 layers of bandage, tape, mole skin, fancy British blister thingey, more tape...hoping that would do the trick. It did for a good hour, mostly because I couldn´t feel my ankles anymore...but soon enough I was literally throwing one foot in front of the other and moving at a snails pace. The back of my feet hadn´t been blistered for about 15 hours now, they were way past blistered and rapidly losing layers of skin...which was a stupendous sensation. After trudging along for a good amount of time, I made a spectacular decision...lost the shoes and put on my flip flops. AHHH relief!!! So the rest of the hike was pretty spectacular, I never thought I´d hike down from a volcano in flip flops but it actually wasn´t bad at all, and I moved about a million times faster. When we got to the bottom we had lunch at a comedor and headed back to Leon, sweaty, stinky, dirty, tired and happy. So skip through goodbyes, and see you laters, and fast forward to when I took the bandages off the back of my heels and tried to wash the dirt out of my wounds...only to realize that the dirt was actually now part of my body and wasn´t budging. I tried to tell my family that it was just that I was now "one with the earth", mostly because pouring water over my ankles KILLED and the thought of any more effort to remove the dirt made my stomach queasy, but they didn´t buy it. Soon I was equipped with an antibiotical creme, some other polmade thing, pills for pain and sterilized gauze...and was sitting with my foot proped up on my hermano Carlo´s lap (have I mentioned that he´s a doctor...okay well medical student, but he had a prescription pad to prescribe antibiotical creme and plastic gloves so we´ll go with doctor) while he told me to brace myself. Miriam and I started chatting while Carlos got ready to ravage my dirty, possibly soon to be infected ankle wounds and the conversation went something like this as he scrubbed and washed and scrubbed and SCRUBBED:
Me: YEOOOOOW!!!
Miriam: AIYYY...okay okay that looks terrible, let´s talk let´s talk look over here...how was the trip???
Me: Okay okay, it was good there were a lot of peopleacoupefromQuebecwhowerereallyniceAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH It was really fun I got to see the lavaatnightwhenitwasdarkAHHHHHHH CARLOS I HATE YOU I HATE YOU And there was a guy from Britain who´s a doctor andworkingwhereCarlosstudies AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH CARLOS I DON´T NEED MY FEET PLEASE NO MORE NO MORE...

and on and on until I limped away with cleaner, antibiotic-ized feet. SO while this weekend was still one of the best, most amazing weekend of my entire lifetime and the foot issues didn´t take away from the weekend at ALL...I´m having a lovely time limping around Leon now with sweet gauze bandages on the backs of my feet...warding off predictions that I´m going to have an infection etc etc. Luckily I´m still on a high from such a great time so I could care less. Let´s see...a little over a week left of work, some traveling and then home! I hope everyone is doing well...love you all and can´t wait to see you!

4 weeks!

2008-04-11T16:09:00.000-07:00

So that´s the official countdown, and now that I´m at the 4 weeks mark I´m not as anxious as I was to get home, weird how that is. This week was AWESOME. This story starts with a very very kind man about my Dad´s age who comes into the pub often when I bartend, not in the creepy way but in the kind person, pleasant to chat with sort of way. So he was there as I was counting down until the day I would come to Nicaragua, and there for the millions of times people scoffed and asked me why the hell I wanted to come here and do this, and there for the millions of times I said I was so excitedexcitedexcited. Anyway, my last day of work he came in and handed me a rolled up bundle of bills, a few hundred dollars, and told me that he wanted me to be able to help the kids I´m working with as much as I possibly can, and if the money can help one person, or all of them, then to use it at my discretion. He wouldn´t accept thanks, or an offer to send him a letter telling him what I used it for, he said he wanted to be anonomous, and just wanted me to be able to help as much as I was anxious to help. So...along with the gringos and official man that helped me out at the border, he receives an awesome person award. I was really moved by his actions and the fact that he was quite timid about being praised, and also that he trusted me not to run away with the money. With that being said, finally yesterday I got to put the money to good use. I wanted to wait for awhile to see what my kids really needed, and I went out with the director of the SOS yesterday shopping and WOW, it was AWESOME! Money goes really far here and we got dozens of cloth diapers and new bottles that were desperately needed, as well as a bunch of new toys...rattles and big plastic balls and huge pillows and little tambourines...for the kids to play with. It was so much fun seeing them all play today, the balls were definitely the favorite...they´re light so the fan moves them around and the kids were like a dog with a flashlight, chasing around in circles and circles endlessly. I´m pretty sure if they had tails, they would be wagging. We also got to buy stuff for the other classes, dozens more plates and bowls and little cups for the kids in the next level up that are just learning to eat. Plus I had a good amount of money left, which I´m going to use to buy a bunch of string to make bracelets for the kids at Las Tias. They are fascinaaaated with the bracelts, it´s really funny to see but nice, because when they´re all making bracelets they´re sitting in a circle, chatting and calm, instead of running around beating on each other or going nuts. So needless to say I´m really grateful that this man gave me such an awesome opportunity to buy these things for the kids. Let´s see...FINALLY this weekend I´m going to hike up a VOLCANOOOOOO! Unbelievable excited. Volcano Telica, active volcano...sweetness. If it erupts I´ll try to collect some lava as souvenirs! Chao!

Preciosaaa

2008-04-09T17:07:00.001-07:00

Good week

2008-04-04T16:26:00.000-07:00

Holaaa. It´s been a pretty great week actually, but compared to last weekend anything would be awesome. Seriously though everything has been grand. I´m still loving work, and realizing how sad I´m going to be to leave all the kids. At Las Tias, where I teach, I´ve ended up being really happy. I´m having a good time teaching the one on one classes (although a few more weeks is about all I could do, I´ve realized that there´s a lot more to teaching English than just speaking it, so the basics is about all I can handle) and I´m actually really enjoying the time when I don´t teach too. I have a bunch of different color thread and the kids (actually strangely mostly the boys) love to make the bracelets. So when I don´t have a class normally we´ll just sit around talking and/or making bracelets, which has been a nice experience. Teaching is fine but I mostly enjoy making bonds with the kids, and learning about their lives and thrilling them with talk about the States (you mean mangos are $2 there???? But they´re only 5cents!!!!!!!!). It´s also been interesting watching the other volunteers come and go. Most of them are only there for a few weeks or a month, which explains why the kids were so frustrating when I first came. I guess if you have a stream of new people, who all start teaching at the beginning ("What. Is. Your. Name???") there´s not a huge incentive to learn or progress. Up until this past week all have been girls, but this new kid, Sam, came and he seems to be having a little more luck. I always peek in with the kid that I´m teaching at the moment and since they´re not spending half the time blowing him kisses or asking him for sex, he has a lot better classroom control...so I´m happy for him and hoping that he´ll make some more headway with them.

The aldea, where I work with the babies, is also going really well. I love love love the babies. It´s neat to see them developing, in the first few months they change so much in their abilities...so I´m able to see them learning to walk, or crawl, or sit up on their own, which is awesome. Im going to take some pictures next week, which I´m hoping will convince my parents to let me smuggle some home with me. Only 2 or 3, I´m trying to be reasonable.

Leon is Leon, I´m not much of a city person BUT at the same time it´s sort of cool to feel comfortable in a city....you know, having certain people you walk by every day and don´t know but say hi to each other. There´s a guy that runs a parking lot right next to our house and the first two months he used to whistle and yell out "chelllllita bonitttta!" as I walked by, so I ignored him most of the time. I decided to start saying hi to him one day, which prompted him to ask for my name and now he says "Hola Alysse! ¿Como estas?" instead, which is a lot more pleasant. We just entered into the HOTTTEST month now, and since Leon is the hottest city in Nicaragua, that´s pleasant. Strangely though I´ve gotten used to the heat I guess, because it doesn´t feel any hotter than when I came here. The only thing that´s changed is that I have to drink more water, which I haven´t been doing so have been a little loopy and sleepy the last two days. Let´s see...I´ve tried something today that I´ve walked by for months and never tasted...and will certainly be my downfall over the next five weeks. Imagine fresh plaintain chips in a bag topped with shredded cabbage soaked in vinegar. Ahhhhhhh amazing. Not really imagining the deliciousness? Maybe a little odd but that can´t be too suprising. That´s about all I´ve got for now, I´m trying to have a uneventful weekend so we´ll see what I come up with. Ciao!

Stuck in limbo

2008-03-31T16:40:00.000-07:00

AHHHHHHHHHHH. So the best part of this blog is that once I´ve written something down normally it seems a lot funnier than when it actually happened...which for a ridiculous day like Saturday, will be a blessing. ALLRIGHT, border trip to Costa Rica. Foreigners aren´t allowed to be in Nicaragua for more than three months, so as my three month date is almost here (time flies, sort of) last weekend was the last time I had to cross the border. While I had heard that you have to be in Costa Rica for 72 hours before entering Nicaragua again, I had also heard that it wasn´t really necessary (and have friends that have done the trip in one day, which I planned to do). So I took the bus early to la frontera, the border, which actually wasn´t as far as I thought it would be. Due to how easy it was to get to the border, I figured I was in for an easy breezy trip...also thinking I would be back by noonish which would be awesome. I definitely thought wrong. Once you get off the bus you´re swarmed by all these people who have the papers you need to fill out before crossing. It´s overwhelming but I stuck with one guy who had a badge, he seemed much more official than many of the other guys, seeing as he had clean clothes and shoes on. He helped me through this hole in the fence and helped me to get my exit stamp for Nicaragua. It´s about a kilometer between the Nicaragua immigration office and the Costa Rica office, so he walked with me as far as he could without a passport, which was very nice. This limbo land between the two borders was quite interesting, as it was basically a huge truck stop. I felt like I was at a highway truck stop in the States, there were a million trucks either driving through the border or parked and hanging out there. At this point I was vaguely amused with the whole experience, until my official guide man left me and I was on my own. About halfway between the two stops there´s more immigration guides, that only let you through if you have the appropriate stamps. After I went through this check point and walked in the truck parade another 1/2 K, I got to the Costa Rica side. Unfortunately this was where my LUCK CHANGEDD. I stepped into a line that was long enough that I figured it was for the immigration desk, when another guy stopped me and asked where I was going in Costa Rica and if I needed a taxi there. I told him no, I was just going to enter and exit Costa Rica so I could get my Nicaraguan visa. Here´s where Operation "Scam Alysse" begins. He told me I had to be in Costa Rica for three days, I said no that´s not true, he said yes it was and on and on until I walked away. Proud of myself for escaping a scam I went up to a guy at the immigration desk and asked him about the 72 hour rule. He told me that yes, indeed, I did need to stay in Costa Rica for 72 hours, and that the rules just got stricter. A little dicouraged, I left the desk and sat down trying to figure out how I was going to stay in Costa Rica for three days, when the first guy came up to me again, saying that for $60 he could call a friend he has at the desk and get him to give me a stamp to exit today instead of three days from now. I told him I only had $30 and he said fine, ushering me to the front of the line, and his friend, who gave me the stamp. Now maybe it´s not well known to anyone except Jake (who argued endlessly with me about this) but I really don´t like bargaining, so when I said I only had $30, I wasn´t trying to drop his price, I really had only $30 on me. However, I had my credit card on me so I figured I was good to go (as it costs $7 to get your stamp to enter Nicaragua). So I walked back to the Nicaragua side of the border, and oh man, my card doesn´t work, and some guards told me that the whole 72 hour thing isn´t true, so I´d been had. Significantly worried at this point, I walked back to the Costa Rica side of the limbo/border/truck stop from hell and tried that bank. And to my dismay, my card didn´t work there...and the bank manager informed me that there were no other banks inside the border zone. Nice. At this point I was pretty much a wreck...and was crying too. So I was a crying wreck, that ended up wandering between the two borders trying to figure out what to do. When the guys between the two borders tried to stop me for not having the right stamps to keep going back and forth, I literally just sobbed until they nodded me through. At this point I see the guy that took my $30, and when he asked me why I was crying I said "BECAUSE YOU TOOK ALL MY MONEY AND NOW I´LL NEVER GET BACK TO NICARAGUA"...perhaps a little dramatic but I think it got my point across. Now being the strangest scammer I´ve ever met, he gave me his number and the process to go through to call collect, and told me to call him in a little while if I still handn´t found a bank. So a while later I called him, we met up, and I figured I´d just sob until he agreed to give me back at least enough to cross the border and get home. Well he was in the process of trying to get money from two other Americans/gringos when I found him. By this point I had passed through distraught onto furious and I butted in and told them not to pay anything. They asked me what happened to me, and I told them I was waiting for this guy so I could argue with him to get enough money to get out of this place and go home. I turned around to go and they told me to wait, and put $10 in my hand. This is one of those situations where I wish I could write them a novel of thanks, or nominate them for a Good Samaritan award because I don´t think they have any idea how extremely kind they were...except that I started crying of happiness and gratitude so maybe that gave them an idea. So when I got back to the Nicaraguan immigration desk, I saw my nice official badge guy, and when I told him the story he was FURIOUS, and got a description of the guy at the immigration desk who took the money and lied to me and was telling all his other official badge friends. Another award to hand out here, because he filled out all my immigration papers for me, marched me through the hole in the fence before leaving Nicaragua (which is another $1 fee but he just marched me through telling them that I had no money and therefor wasn´t paying), plopped me on a bus back to Jinotepe and gave me a big hug. Awards all around to everyone that was so kind to me. I ended up meeting somone on the bus who was equally as angry as I was, because he had paid for a work permit to Costa Rica that ended up being false, so was denied at the border when he was trying to get back to work...so we ended up venting to each other for two hours until we were both calm and could talk about something other than how much we hated the border. Now I remember observing/complaining to Jake when he was here that for some reason a lot of people I meet tend to feel the need to take me under their wing and take care of me, which at times makes me feel like people think I don´t have a clue. But at this particular moment, I am very very very grateful that I instill this need in people. 6 more weeks here and I promise I´ll try to stay out of trouble.

Yumm Conchas

2008-03-28T17:34:00.001-07:00

3 Odd things that happened in my life this week:
1. A new girl started working at the Aldea this week, she´s 16 and has a 2 year old son (I´m not judging, it´s pretty standard here). In order to quiet one of the kids down she shoved her breast in his face, trying to get him to breast feed off her. Now, I´m not a mother so I don´t know if that´s standard or not, which is why I´m trying to be impartial and putting it under "odd" things instead of "ewww" things.
2. I couldn´t teach one of my english classes on Wednesday because the kids literally laughed at me for the whole thirty minutes when I said it´s okay for a man and a man, or woman and woman to like each other. I mean hysterical, tears rolling down your cheeks laughing, as if I told them it´s okay for a platapus and a 80 year old woman to be in love. They slapped each other saying "she says it´s normal HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH". This I´m putting under "odd/disturbing" because we´re not just talking about a difference of opinion, whether it´s right or wrong, we´re talking about me explaining something that for them, might as well happen on another planet.
3. An old, drunk, shoeless man called me a whore and tried to beat me up this afternoon. This is not under "scary" or "dangerous" because while his punches were quite accurate to do quite a bit of damage to my face, he was three meters away from me and ended up punching "me" so hard he fell down. Not ironically he was outside of a store that sells nothing other than Caballito, the Nicaraguan version of moonshine, that makes Dubra look like Grey Goose.

So maybe it wasn´t the most interesting week but I´ll live. Jake came last week and it was AMAZING to have him here! I feel the need to document a really pathetic hour of my life right here, just for kicks . I was nervous I wouldn´t get to the airport on time, so I ended up getting there a lot earlier than Jake´s flight. The airport in Managua isn´t very big, and all the chairs are right outside of the gate where people line up to go inside the terminal for their flights. So naturally I decided to sit there and people watch for a little while, but eventually I realized that everyone leaving Nicaragua at this hour of the day was, for some reason, American (or Canadian, or British, or non-Nicaraguan), tan or sunburnt and happy, but looking excited to get home. This led me from that simple curious feeling that one has while people watching, to a rather disturbing feeling of panic, in which I wanted to throw myself at them and say "TAKE ME WITH YOU!!!". This feeling really made no sense as my brother was due to arrive in an hour, but I´m fairly certain that I´ve never looked more like a lost puppy in my lifetime. It´s not that I´m unhappy here, things are up and down and I´m really happy here right now...it´s just being at the airport I started thinking about when I would leave (via that airport obviously) and what it would be like to come home and see everyone, and I got really anxious and excited for that. Anyway, that was definitely the most pathetic feeling moment I´ve had while here...and now you know.

Once Jake´s flight came in my lost puppy moment was over and I was so excited to have him there! We went to Leon, I wanted to spend at least a day there introducing him to my family and the places that I work. He came to Leon at a great time, because the first full day he was there, there was this HUGE Holy Week procession going on. Apparently it started at 6 in the morning at one church, and it went around the city for hours, in and out of other churches, until it ended at 11 that night. It was beautiful to see, we saw it in the afternoon and at night when everything was lit up. My favorite part of the day were these sawdust art pieces that people were making on this one road during the day. I have some pictures up of them but they were beautifulll, so vibrant and incredible. It was a big square of sawdust and the people used bright pigments to make different religious drawings...and at the very end of the night the Jesus float in the procession trampled all of them. Crazy. We went to the beach the next day (everyone had been telling me that EVERYONE goes to the beach during Holy Week, but forgot to mention that everyone goes during the last three days, not the first three...therefor it was pretty empty). We swam a little, and Jake had his first taste of THE Nicaraguan Rum, Flor de Caña. He also had his first taste of Conchas (raw oyster/shellfish type things), and therefor that night had his first taste of what I like to call the Nicaraguan Full Body Flush. Due to rather unfortunate timing of this Nicaraguan spa treatment, we ended up just coming to Jinotepe and hanging out for a few days, instead of the "Spring Break" debauchery we had planned. It ended up being a blessing, for me at least, because the last two days we went to a reserve and a ranch that we wouldn´t have ended up seeing. I had heard of the ranch before, because my friend Dean was in a conservation placement there, but had never been and it´s AMAZING. So amazing I´m going to take time at the end of my trip here and stay there for a week, just to soak in all the awesomeness. The guy who owns it, Umberto, is incredible...so warm and friendly. You would never guess that many years ago he came back from going to school in the States, bought a bunch of guns (including AK47´s), and fought for this farm that the Sandinistas had taken from him. Obviously he won the fight, and "kicked some ass" in his words. It´s an amazing story, and even more incredible how much passion him and his family have for the land. Jake and I walked and walked and probably didn´t see even a little piece of the land he has but it was so nice to be out of the city and in nature. So that was his trip...very tranquilo but I was just psyched to be with my brother (awww) and also speaking english was pretty nice.

So tomorrow I´m off to Costa Rica. My visa expires in about...oh 3 days, so I´m just going to jump across the border and jump back (I´ve heard I´m really "Nicaraguan" now because I don´t want to go to Costa Rica, I´ve mentioned this before but there are some hard feelings between the two countries, but mostly it´s just because Costa Rica is EXPENSIVE!). ¡Hasta luego!

PS Just for general knowledge, apparently when I "withdrew" from UCONN for this semester, I withdrew. So they disactivated my email account, so...if I don´t respond don´t take it personally

2008-03-14T16:42:00.001-07:00

JAKE COMES SUNDAYYYYY! I can´t even explain what a gift it will be to have him here. To share this experience with him. I´m sure anyone who´s studied abroad or been somewhere so different from your home can relate, but I feel like I am existing in two worlds that are so different that no one from one can possible grasp the other. It´s kind of an alienating feeling sometimes, which is why I´m excited to mix the worlds a little.

Here I spend so much time explaining "there" (aka the States) to people...which I´m happy to do, it just makes it feel like I´m that much further away. My brother just wrote an article about how globalization is making the world so much smaller, which in some cases is very true. I feel it when I see a 1989 UGA alumni t-shirt on an old Nicaraguan man selling watch parts on the side of the street, or see "Dunkaroos" in the supermarket. As an extremely fortunate person, the world IS my oyster, it IS small...because I have the freedom and resources to travel and experience. I could work for a year and then spend another year or two backpacking around the world, if I desired. I´ve lived with my family abroad for five years, which is probably a huge reason why I grew up thinking that if the impulse struck, I could find work and raise my own family in another country with no problem. HOWEVER, the world is not so small or accessible for everyone in the world. For Nicaraguans, the application for even ATTEMPTING to get a visa to come to America is $150, which a country with an unemployment rate of 25%, and thousand of people who support their families by selling water or fruit all day for merely cents, is not an easy thing to afford. And mind you I said "attempting", because the application does not even guarantee a good chance of getting the visa, it merely puts you in a lottery with thousands of other applicants, where you MAY get a visa. I know a ton of people who have spent the money to apply for such a visa, and very few of them actually know of someone who has received one. My abuela has a son living in Miami, and the last time she saw him was 16 years ago, and told me that she probably won´t be able to see them again. It´s such a hard thing to fathom, that another country is SO unaccessible to anyone, even a mother who wants to go visit her children/grandchildren.

Despite previous complaining about getting pooped on and screeched at by the babies I work with at the Aldea, the fact of the matter is they are all so precious. It´s easy to get so lost in playing with them for hours, feeding them and changing endless diapers, that I forget what life may be like for them growing up. I imagine them dressed up in cute outfits, or at their first birthday party with a cake, or swinging in a park...and then reality hits and I realize that this is not a life that is available to them. I was on the bus today with one of the teachers I work with, and she pointed out the house of a set of cuteeee twin boys that come every day, and pee and splash in the same spot in front of the door every day. It was a hut with three walls and a tin roof, and they were playing next to the stove outside, in the dirt and trash. Most of the kids come every morning dirty and in the same clothes we put them in the evening before. Most of their parents are unemployed or with low paying, domestic jobs. I wonder at what age will they be put to work, selling fruit or cleaning. And I´m not judging, it´s a fact of life here that kids have to work to help support the family. A girl that just started working with us JUST turned fifteen, and is working between 5 and 10 hours a day, and going to school and night. I walk to work every morning and pass a few houses made out of rusted metal sheets, and a few others made out of cardboard boxes nailed together, and I think for these people, "there" must really feel so far away.

Even with all of this, sometimes I wonder what I´m doing here. There is so much poverty, and people struggling everywhere, but at the same time, I live in the middle of a city, meaning I get to see both sides-the rich and the poor. My family is by no means poor; they have a woman that comes and washes their clothes, and another that comes to iron, and once every couple of weeks a woman comes to do their nails and hair. I find myself wincing sometimes at the way they treat these other women. There´s a woman that comes every night and drops off bread for the family to eat the next day, and my "madre" will order her around to a point that makes me uncomfortable. "Get me that bread", "go buy me some washing liquid"...etc etc. And yet I´m confused, because while they´re not poor, they´re definitely not rich. In a weak (possibly dumb) moment, I lent my madre $200 dollars, to buy things for the clothes store, because people weren´t buying. And yet in a month, she still hasn´t been able to pay me back more than $20 dollars, which I just received as of yesterday. They have relatives ("wealthy" due to the fact that they own a car), that help them out by bringing dry beans and rice every once in a while. So I find myself really confused. Because there are also wealthy people here, with cars and nice clothes and jewlry and beautiful homes. When I see these people I ask myself how much I´m really helping. I definitely believe in the good of volunteer services and programs, but I also believe that a country has to help itself in order to truly prosper. And when I see such a separation between people who have and people who don´t, and how much they´re helping or not helping each other, I wonder what right I have to step in and think I should make a difference.

Here´s where I go on about me me me. I get so frustrated when I see such a difference in economic status, also because of the fact that every day something is demanded of me. People are always demanding that I give them something, whether it´s my students that I teach ("give me, give me"-which may just be typical of teenagers) or random strangers on the bus. I once spent a whole twenty minutes in the camioneta telling the guy who collects money from the passengers "no". The conversation went something like this:
Dude: Why don´t you give me your watch?
Me: I´m sorry, I need it to tell time and wake up in the morning.
Dude: But it is such a really nice watch.
Me: Yeah, I´m really sorry. Do you want some of my peanuts?
Dude: Yeah, can I have the whole bag?
Me: I guess.
Dude: Why don´t you give me your necklace then?
Me: Well it was a gift from my grandmother, it means a lot to me.
Dude: Yeah but you´re American, I don´t have a watch so why don´t you give me something.
Me: I´m sorry.
Random old lady: Is this guy bothering you?
Me: No, no.
Random old lady: Well why don´t you give him your watch then or that pretty necklace?

These conversations happen all the time. And while I consider myself a pretty generous person, I get so angry when people treat me like I´m not a human being, but more an image of prosperity. I REALIZE that I am very fortunate to have been born into the family and opportunities that I was born into, but I ALSO have worked from the time I was able up until I left for this country. I´m not saying that puts me on equal status with someone that has to work to put food in their mouths, it´s just a difficult stereotype to break. And yet I never see the richer Nicaraguans being hassled or asked for money, which I don´t understand, and makes me feel even more out of place here. I realize this post is a little confusing, half about how poor the country is, and half about how frustrated I am because I have more money that a lot of people...I´m just trying to put to words some strange feelings I´ve had about this experience (as much as I love it and as happy as I am to be here). It´s an interesting experience as well because I am the only gringa that I know, if that makes sense. It´s a little different from a volunteer abroad experience, in that I´m not going through it with anyone else that really relates (therefor, Alysse complains in her blog). I have eight more weeks here, and I´m still going to work hard and I´m happy to have that time left here...but at the same time I´ll be happy to be back. I´ll be happy to have a job that pays (not for the money but more for the feeling that I´m working for something, earning something...volunteering is amazing, but it will be nice to get rid of the feeling that "oh I´m so rich you don´t even have to PAY me for this"). It´ll be nice to blend in a little more, there are many more blondes in America. I¨m also really excited to go back to school, as strange as that sounds. I´m psyched to be working towards something, a career, that will give me so many more skills to help than I have right now.

Okay enough serious, Jake will be here Sunday and I´m going to be a real tourist for a week and I´m STOKED. Hope everything is well way far away...Love everyone!

The Naked Man

2008-03-11T16:28:00.000-07:00

The first day I got to Leon, my friend Christine was showing me around, telling me all the places to go and avoid, etc etc. Well she told me a very interesting story about a man who always walks around the city with no clothes on "el hombre sin ropas". Apparently, wherever he was, I should avoid him...because he isn´t the biggest fan of foreigners. However days passed, and weeks, and then over a month, and I still had not seen the naked man, which made me think that perhaps he was just a myth, sort of like the Loch Ness Monster. HOWEVER, I am pleased? disturbed? amused? to inform you that yesterday at 6:20 in the morning, as I was walking to the bus stop to go to work...I saw The Naked Man. Finally! And just so that you don´t think "Oh it could have been any naked man", I assure you, he was the real deal. How do I know? Well the spread eagle manner in which he was sprawled out on his back, as well as my astounding observational skills, informed me that this man wasn´t just naked for a day, or a week, he had been naked for a very long time. An evenly colored dark brown from head to toe, this man was a nude-beachers dream. So as any smart person would do, I crossed to the other side of the street...just in case he awoke from his naked slumbers to give me a naked beat down. Interesting way to start the day off!

Also, a bum (not naked) came into Las Tias yesterday (where I teach english in the afternoon) and for twenty minutes I watched in awe as the Tias (aunties) fussed at him and beat him with a long stick. We were all rather amused, including the bum.

ALSO, two little girls stood and pointed at me for ten minutes today while I was waiting for the camioneta to leave work, whispering "Mira!!! Una gringa!!!!" (Look!!! A gringa/white person/american!!!). I decided if I ever see an alien, I will not point and stare and say "Look, an alien!"...because it´s not very nice.

I suppose that´s all the excitement for now. 6 DAYS UNTIL JAKE COMESSSS!! Adiossssss.

Clearly I had no idea what I was doing...

2008-03-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

WELL...So if you´ve read my previous post you know the PLAN for the weekend was to go on some excursion organized by a hostel to a nature reserve/island for some real touristy boat trip and ocean swimming and seafood eating. I was planning to go with another girl that teaches English where I teach, and was looking forward to a day trip where I was a real-deal tourist and didn´t have to worry about anything. I woke up Saturday morning, threw on my bathingsuit and packed some sunscreen...heading off to my first "touristy" excursion of the whole trip....

And they had left without me. Granted, I was three minutes late but still...I WAS THREE MINUTES LATE! The woman there said they had all left about twenty minutes before, which means...basically I got ditched. Sadness. So, with a whole weekend of nothing to do in this terrible Leonese heat, I went back home, grabbed my Nicaragua guidebook, opened to a random page and decided to go to Matagalpa. It probably would have been a good idea to read into the place that I was travelling to, however I saw several hiking trails and many hostels so I figured it was a perfect place to go. Trading my bathingsuit for my brown pants, that I seem to wear all the time because you can´t tell if they´re dirty...and my towel for my hiking shoes, I headed off to the bus terminal!

Very excited to be off on an adventure on my own ("who needs guides and other foreigners...I can do it all by myself!" I was muttering the whole way to the bus terminal), I ended up having to wait two hours to a bus to Esteli...which apparently would take me to Matagalpa. I didn´t really know how long it would take or where exactly to get off the bus, but I figured since I only paid for the trip to the change over, the bus driver would throw me off when it came time. Now while I am becoming more and more comfortable with speaking spanish, and can have conversations with the family I´m living with and my students with relavitely no problem, it seems I didn´t understand the bus driver when he said my ticket was "de pied" (aka "standing"...I think that was just a problem with "selective hearing"). But I understood soon enough, when I got thrown out of my seat by a big, burly Nicaraguan man. As I´m crammed in the aisle of a big yellow school bus (from Georgia, ironically) with my backpack lying somewhere in the aisle as well...I started to relax. "I´m off!" I thought. Here are some of my other thoughts on the bus ride..."why is everyone falling asleep?", "the ride can´t be much longer than an hour", "I can´t feel my legs", "where´s my backpack?", "I wonder if I lock my knees and end up fainting, someone will give me a seat?", "thiiiiirrrrrssssstttttyyyy", "I probably should have eaten lunch", "the ride can´t be much longer than two hours", etc etc. So it was a pretty fun bus ride, where I was oogled for being the only gringa on the bus. Somehow it seems that every mode of transportation I take (to work, from work, traveling to various parts of Nicaragua), I´m the only white person/foreigner on the bus/camioneta...and people tend to stare. And this is a strange thing, because there are PLENTY of foreign travelers coming through Leon...I have no idea how they´re getting around but I guarantee it´s a lot more comfortable and less dirty than where I´ve found myself. After two and a half hours of standing on a bus bouncing up, down, left and right due to...potholes, of course...I exited with a wave of other passengers to what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. I asked though, and was assured that this was how I got to Matagalpa, and another bus would be by sometime before nightfall (at this point it´s about 3pm). So we all waited at the intersection of two big roads with nothing in sight but mountains and more mountains...and we waited...and we waited. And an hour later the bus came! Finally we boarded the bus, and I got a seat. What luxury! So finally, we´re off to Matagalpa! I settled in my seat and started making a bracelet when a girl a little younger than me bounced in my seat, asking to learn how to make it. We got to talking, she´s studying "how to take blood" in university. I swear that´s not a misunderstanding, but I¨m pretty sure it´s a little more than just that. She showed me pictures of her daughter, and talked about her husband etc etc. She was shocked/confused/a little appalled that I was traveling alone, and it took us over ten minutes to establish that 1) I live in Leon 2) I don´t know anyone in Matagalpa 3)I´m traveling alone 4) I haven´t made reservations at a hotel yet, before I think she decided I was crazy. And by this time I was thinking I probably was...It would be after 5 by the time I got into town, and I would probably have to leave early so as not to miss the last bus into Leon, what was I doing there again??? So I took out my guidebook and tried to explain that there were lots of hostels that I could stay at, and I would find one when I got there. This was not acceptable. She whipped out her phone and called my first choice, verified that they had rooms, and when we got off the bus an hour later, escorted me by taxi to the hostel. While I´m sure I could have done it alone, I was sort of relieved after all that traveling not to have to try to find a hostel too. (By the way, this hostel was my first choice because of it´s excellent "security" rating...so there´s at least one point for me for safe, smart traveling) I almost freaked out after I realized I hadn´t brought a copy of my passport with me, but after some super dramatic "ohh nooo, what am i going to do, i totally forgot, where will i sleeeeeeeeep?", the guy just gave me a room. And not just any room, MY OWN room, with MY OWN bathroom, with MY OWN shower! Ahhh a dream. And cheap too! For this price in most places you´ll get a bed in a dorm with a shared bathroom, that you probably wouldn´t want to shower in. So this was AWESOME.

Finally sitting down to actually read about the town in my guidebook (after realizing hiking was probably/sadly out of the picture) I realized it´s REALLY known for its coffee. The guidebook described the town as caffeine crazed, which was pretty accurate. For a relatively small city, only two real main roads, everyne was bustling and there were about a million stores (every single one of them second hand clothes stores...). Also, it´s built on these CRAAAAZY hills...some of the hills beyond the city looked too vertical for cars to even drive on, I swear they were almost straight up and down.

By this time I´m starved so I ripped the four pages of the city out of my guidebook (smartest thing I´ve ever done, I don´t carry a purse anymore so as not to get robbed, so to have a mini guidebook in my pocket was awesome), and went on a search for food. First treasure I found was BUNUELOS! Ahhhhhh...delicious fried little nuggets of yucca and cheese, drizzled with a syrup that´s delicious. Absolutely horrible for you, but definitely my favorite food in Nicaragua, that I haven´t seen any of in Leon. I went and looked at a few restaurants in the guidebook but finally found this little italian place hiding in a small side street. It really was amazing. I got the most amazing salad, with more vegetables than I´ve seen in the last month....carrots, and olives and lettuce and tomatoes and canned green beans (???), and some great pasta. Delicious, delicious, delicious...best meal I´ve had in forever. It seems silly to go to a city in Nicaragua and eat Italian food but at the same time, I´ve been here for two months, I´ve eated my share of gallo pinto and tacos and tortillas and pollo...it was a nice change. Probably the highlight of the evening was when I went back to the room and realized that not only did the shower have water pressure (!!) but the water was HOT (!!!!!!!). I could rave for hours about how amazing a hot shower was, but that would probably be more boring than this post needs to be. However, it was INCREDIBLE! After washing myself with bowlfulls of water from a big garbage can, ahhhhhhhh HEAVEN.

So I left in the early afternoon, made it back by the same route (with a tempting offer from an old Nicaraguan cowboy to marry him and help him run a farm) but at least this time I snagged a seat on both buses. It´s probably the most uneventful weekend anyone could imagine...I mean I traveled for hours somewhere to eat dinner, shower and sleep...BUTTT it was nice to get out of Leon for awhile and I learned some things...such as to research where you´re going beforehand and bring identification (idiot). However, after sharing this thrilling story, I think this will be the end of my solo, unplanned trips across Nicaragua.

TGIF!

2008-03-07T15:53:00.000-08:00

AHHHHH I´ve never been so happy for a Friday to come! Thank goooooooodness. It´s been a crazy long week. And hot. Everyone warned me that come March everything gets MUCH hotter (I didn´t think it was possible to be honest), and they weren´t lying. I´m dripping sweat when I´m walking to work at 6:20 in the morning, that´s how hot it is. I also got a sunburn while sitting in the shade today. And to look forward to, April is the hottest month-which should be pleasant! Teaching went really well this week, I think the heat made the kids a little more distracted than usual but they´re still a THOUSAND times better with the one on one classes...and I´m still really pleased. I´m making friends with the other volunteer there...we´re going on a trip tomorrow to a nature reserve, with boats and swimming-so I´m stoked. She had the idea of making bracelets with the kids, as an incentive to go to class...and selling them through the organization that donates all their profits to the kids, so hopefully that gets off the ground. This also means that I no longer need to BUY presents for people, I can just MAKE them! They´re really fun to make though (it takes me back to my "friendship bracelet" making days), and now that I have read all of my books about 4 or 5 times each, it´s nice to have something else to do in the evening. I think the long week came from Tuesday and Thursday, when I work all day with the babies, at the Aldea. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I work a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the afternoon (before and after teaching), but Tuesday and Thursday it´s ten hours of diaper changing, bottle feeding fun. It is fun normally, but this week there were less teachers than normal, WAY more kids than normal...and all the kids with weird bonds to the teachers too. For example, there´s one girl that goes from ear pounding wailing to stunned silence when a certain one of the teachers finally picks her up. There´s three kids that are pretty content most of the time, as long as I´m only paying attention to them. As soon as I leave the room or stand up, OIY. Babies really can cry quite loud. I´m not sure I´m even doing the insanity justice so I´m just going to leave it at that.
So it was a hot/dirty/hard/long week but I seem to recall myself saying that that was exactly what I wanted out of this experience, therefore I´m happy. Jake comes in a week which also is going to be great. I´m ready to load him up with all that is Nicaragua. Adios!

More nicaragua

2008-03-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

I´m in a list-y mood so...

-Jake comes in two weeks from tomorrow!!! Whohoo! I´m super excited and have already started planning his every second/meal/thought. The overall mindset I have planned for him is "sweeeeet, this is awesome".
-Work is still going well. Teaching is GREAT. I´ll be thanking myself for the next two months for switching my teaching style. I used to hate planning classes, because I found myself thinking "Well this will probably only take them about four minutes to do until they get bored" and "I wonder how many kids will leave the class when I try to teach THIS". Now I love planning classes. Because I can do it for each kid, it´s awesome, I can make everything tailored exactly to what they know and are learning. I also really love getting to talk to the kids one on one, it´s nice to feel like I am actually developing relationships with them. The other job is going great as well. I´m just finding out that it´s a much bigger organization than I thought. I looked them up online, after finding out they´re entirely funded on donations, and they have these SOS places all over the world! It´s amazing. I´m going to put the site here for people to check it out if they want. I feel pretty lucky that I just stumbled upon such a great place. I´ve worked with preschool age kids before but kids this young. It´s crazy how in a span of a few months they develop SO much. It´s also funny how temperment is so apparent already in kids. Rudi is the kid who smiles ALL the time and likes to play in his puddles of pee. Genesis is only one of two that can walk in the bunch and she´s content to entertain herself. Recently she started calling me "momma" though which is sort of funny, and she just likes to sit in my lap and observe the other kids, and cries whenever I leave the room. Edgar cries and cries and cries and when he´s laughing he sounds like he´s crying and then he cries some more. He only stops crying if you´re rocking him while standing up, so we all sort of trade who takes care of him on what days to alleviate the rage. Franklin is a little devil and likes to bite and look down my shirt, but he´s a cutie too. Sarahy cries until she throws up, which is sort of disturbing. Anyway you get the point, the psychologist in me wants to study these kids as they grow up and figure out what they´re going to be like as teenagers/adults. I had mentioned before that they have a program where they offer classes for the families of the kids. The most recent one is being offered for mothers between 16 and 22 years old, which floored me when I read that. I keep hearing more and more about the teen pregnancy here and it´s really sad. It´s hard because it´s such a Catholic country that talk about sex is taboo, but something tells me that it´s still going on here...
-This past weekend I met some guys in Granada that were from Canada. They were heading to Leon so we ended up getting together here this past week. I´ve spent the past few weeks working and avoiding getting to know the foreigners that are travelling here, I guess I feel like I want to immerse myself as much as possible, in order to learn as much spanish as I can. But the two times I hung out with the guys I met SO many people, it was great. They´re staying at a hostel that pretty much only foreigners stay at and it was great to go there. People were from all over...south africa, australia, germany, ireland, israel, canada, the states...and everyone was so friendly and interested to talk. Last night was all talk about politics and how different they are in different countries. It was really interesting to hear and sort of made me feel like I´ve been missing out by being antisocial. That being said, I guess it´s all travelers so most people are only here for a few days, but it was nice nonetheless to have conversations in which I didn´t have to limit my side of the conversation by what verbs I remember.
-On a gross note, I went to the grocery store (yes the same one in which I bought the two week old yoghurt) to buy a pack of peanuts and raisins. In line to the grocery store I was a little dismayed to find that there were ants crawling on the outside of the packet. I´m not too picky though, I figured I´d just brush them off. HOWEVER, when I went to brush them off I realized...they´re inside of the packet. How the ants managed to find their way into a sealed package is still a little baffling to me, but I think I´ve officially decided that two strikes against a supermarket is about enough.

Hope everyone back home is doing well and staying warm!

Muyyyy alegre!

2008-02-25T01:07:00.000-08:00

Came back to Jinotepe this weekend to meet up with my friend Christine (who is leaving Tuesday which is a huge bummer) and a big group of volunteers that came from Queens University during this past week, their reading week, to volunteer. It was really interesting to go around with a big group of volunteers and see how much they´ve done in such a short time. We visited an orphanage they´ve been working at, painting the playground equipment, and WOW they should be proud because they did great and the kids were over the moon. All of us went to Granada Friday night...which was spectacular! Leon and Granada are both colonial towns/citys and I love Leon but Granada is awesomeee (which apparently I´m not supposed to say because apparently they were bitter "rivals"). Saturday we all took a bus to San Juan for the night which was even better the second time around, despite the insane amount of sand I have in my hair/ears as proof of a weekend at the beach. Luckily this time I remembered that strange invention called sunscreen and am not bright pink. Also I tried quesillos FINALLY. There are these women that roam the streets with trays on their head and they all have this specific sing song way of saying "quesillo quesillo QUESILLLLLLLO", in a voice that travels milllles, seriously it´s a skill. Basically what they do is take a tortilla, put a little thin patty of some cheese on it, put in a bunch of pickled/cooked/not sure what onions, put that in a plastic bag, and squirt in sour cream and salt. Sounds pretty standard but then you mush the tortilla and everything down into the corner of the plastic bag, tie the top, bite off a corner and suck the now tortilla and cheese and onion mush out of the corner. It was delicioussss, and even if it wasn´t, it was so much fun to eat. Awesome weekend, and it was nice to be back in Jinotepe for the night where I know everyone. I wasn´t particularly excited for the 4am bus I was taking back to Leon but it was worth it to be around for the whole weekend.

SO speaking of work, I´m really proud of myself so I´m just going to brag for a sentence, or twenty. I´m still loving the SOS Aldea I´m working at (I got pooped on last week which everyone thought was hilarious, I never knew poop could fly, but I´ll spare you the disgusting slimy details) and I found out it also houses kids who either don´t have parents or who have unsafe households (drugs, prostitution, etc)...which I think is pretty spectacular. Working at Las Tias, however, has been driving me crazy. Most of the kids are great bundles of teenage energy and they´re all great. The problem has been this...I teach two classes a day. In each class there are a scattering of a) kids that really want to learn english, and have a good background or have been trying to teach themselves, therefor know a varying amount, b) kids that want to learn but don´t know any english, and c) kids that don´t really have any desire to learn english, don´t really want anyone else to learn, and just want to be in class in case I have candy as a prize for a game. I´ve been having a ridiculous time making lesson plans that would engage all of the kids and make them want to be in class, and most of the time I´ve just been playing games with them that don´t really require learning any english...because that´s the only thing that will hold all of their attention. Kids are still walking in and out of class as they please, whether to hit someone in the class or blow me a kiss or whatever. So I´ve been feeling somewhat like a horrible babysitter for the past few weeks, because that´s basically what I´ve been doing (and poorly). Plus the women that work there don´t have any problems ignoring me, which makes me feel like I´m doing an even better job. SO Friday I went up to one of the ladies and told her "we need to talk"...which is where I begin to be proud of myself because confrontations with people that act like I don´t exist is not exactly a skill I posess. I told her what´s been going on with my classes, and that if I´m here as an english teacher, I don´t want to be put in a position where they just throw kids in my class that don´t want to be there and don´t care about learning. I said if it keeps on going this way I´m going to be leaving in May and I´m afraid no one will have learned anything, so I´m changing everything. I decided to give one on one lessons to the kids that want them, instead of teaching classes. I had been teaching from 10-11 and 1-2, and not really doing anything in the middle...which if I teach each kid for half an hour, gives me eight mini classes a day. I thought it was a really great idea, and told the woman that that´s what I was going to do from now on (which was the end of me feeling like I´m being awesome and strong and expressing myself in english because she shrugged and basically said "sure whatever"). Anyway I was a little nervous that my classes would feel like I was abandoning them or something, because the bummer thing is that not all kids really want to learn english, therefor not all kids will be having the classes. There´s tons of other stuff for them to do around there, a wood workshop and crafts and other stuff, but I felt a little guilty. Howeverrr, most all of the kids were super psyched! They were all singing up right away for their time slots, I told them they could do it one day a week or all of the days, depending on what they wanted. They were telling me things they specifically wanted to learn and how they were hoping to learn a lot faster with the one on one etc etc SOOOOOO I´m excited and relieved and hopeful that this will be a lot better than the big crazy classes.

To update...I had the first classes today and they went WONDERFULLY! I haven´t been this happy since I´ve gotten here. There´s a new volunteer here now who wants to teach beginner english classes, so what we finally worked out is that she was going to teach any beginners that wanted classes (as a big class, which she wanted) and I was going to teach the rest in one on one classes. So it works out that noone gets left behind or left out or anything. So AHH today was just amazing. I was pretty aware where each kid was in their english, whether it was learning new verbs that they needed, present, future or past tense, or just needed help understanding homework. During each kids class we made a sheet of the verbs or tenses or ideas they had learned and FOR once instead of throwing their worksheets/papers on the ground, every single kid wanted to take it home. It was awesome working at each kids level, because they really opened up which was great. Even the two kids that are unmanageable together, when seperated, turned out to be very very smart and focused. I´m really psyched to teach again because WOW I´m pretty sure they all absorbed more in that thirty minutes to themselves than they have the whole three weeks I´ve been here. Slowly everything is falling into place and I´m pretty thrilled with everything right now. Adiosss!

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

2008-02-15T13:57:00.000-08:00

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.

Touuuuchmeeee

2008-02-07T13:23:00.000-08:00

Well first of all, I officially have an "address" if you can call it that:
"Del Supermercado Salman 1/2 cuadra al norte,
o frente al colegio Jose Madrid (casa roja con blanco),
Barrio Zaragoza, Leon, Nicaragua"
...which translates to something like "half a block north of the supermarket Salman OR in front of the Jose Madrid school". Pretty sure postmen in Nicaragua have the worst job ever.

I´m getting settled in Lyon, it´s not a very overwhelming city and I´m pretty sure I´ve covered it all by foot in the past few days (either intentionally or by "accident" aka getting lost). The place that I teach is about 12 blocks away and I´m pretty sure I´ve walked a different way every time. Pretty much I just walk until I find a really ugly church (there are about 8 churches in Lyon but this one takes the ugly prize) and then I´m pretty close. Okay so the school....OIY. Basically I´m working in a zoo. A zoo of awesome kids but still...a madhouse. I teach one class in the morning before lunch, and one after lunch. The classes are COMPLETELY different.

My first class I have about 20 students, 18 of which are boys. My keen observation skills have noted that large groups of 13 year old boys who are hot and haven´t eaten all day are not as receptive to learning as one might think. The only english that the kids in this class know is "touch me", not joking. I´m pretty sure I hear that one about 40 times a day. "What´s your name?" "Touch me". It´s delightful. Most of the kids are really great though, despite their limited knowledge of the english language. There are a few that actually want to learn (3 or 4), a few that whisper the right answers but decide their time is better spent slouching and looking cool, and a few that like to sing and dance around the class but really just want attention. Of course there are 4 or 5 that sit as close to the back wall as their chair will allow and scowl at me the whole time. Lecturing is pointless, as is homework and in class writing excercises (no notebooks or writing utensils, and I´ve been warned that if I provide them, they´ll never make it to class anyways), but letting them fill stuff in on the whiteboard is awesome as are games involving candy prizes. I´m trying not to be a pushover, but I haven´t quite perfected my "stern" stare...generally it´s met with laughter or a kissy face. The last 10 minutes of this class are spent with me turning down multiple marriage and date offers, as well as avoiding questions concerning why I don´t have a boyfriend, why I don´t want to date a 13 year old, and why I don´t want a ride home on anyones bike handlebars. We´ve done the alphabet and greetings so far, and my lesson plans for this class include about a million activities because their attention spans only last about 45 seconds per activity.

My second class is after lunch, and I don´t know if that´s what makes the difference, or the fact that it´s only 8 kids, or the fact that it´s half girls. Whatever the reason, this class is a lot easier to manage. Granted they did get me to inadvertently teach them how to say "give me a kiss" in english, but once I realized my mistake I added "please" to the phrase...so at least they´re polite. Most of the kids in this class have a pretty good grasp of basic english, not saying full paragraphs or anything but easy verbs and general vocabulary. I´m having fun planning games for them because they can be a little more challenging and in depth/longer. I think I can teach these kids a lot...I hope.

So basically I emerge from my first class sweating and exasperated, and emerge from my second class a little more uplifted. I don´t really blame the kids for their...inappropriate behavior though. I mean walking home from the school men from the age of 15-65 hiss and whistle and call out "chelllllllla!"...and they´re probably very similar to most of these kids brothers, fathers and even grandfathers--so this is what they´ve been taught. The other women that work there don´t really pay much attention to me (well they pretty much ignore me), but I guess that´s better than someone breathing down my neck.

I started working with Quetzaltrekkers as well. I just spent a few hours repairing some tents with another volunteer that works there, but it was cool to be around people my own age. All the volunteers there seem very unique...one from alaska, one from nova scotia, on from sweden etc etc and have been there for various amounts of time. I think it may be a nice outlet to work there as well.

Sooo that´s about it. On a different note, I´m really getting to know all the different ways carbohydrates can be served in a single meal. Doctors all over America would stare in awe at Momma Miriam´s skills of high carb serving. For example, today for lunch I was served a heaping plate of white rice, with a huge side of pasta, as well as a tortilla and fried plantains. It was astounding, not to mention that I ate rice and beans for breakfast and probably will eat it again for dinner. Just thought I´d mention that for people that thought I´d be eating weird stuff like insects...nope, just rice.

Entonces...

2008-02-04T14:30:00.000-08:00

I spent all day yesterday walking around with Christine. She knows the city really well and I´m SO happy that she was able to spend the weekend with me here. I had breakfast with the family (gallo pinto-which is the typical beans and rice but it was delicious, along with this really soft cheese that tastes sort of like mozzarella-yum!) so that was nice. Then we walked around a little and got lunch at the market. The market is crazy, especially around lunch time...there are people everywhere. I got this delicious arroz con pollo, which was just rice with hunks of chicken and huge raisins and carrots etc etc. So I´m psyched that the market here is clean and delicious, I hadn´t eaten at the market in Jinotepe because I was a little nervous. It´s cool because if you get your lunch to go, they wrap it in a banana leaf and put it in a little baggie--so the trash cans around the market are filled with banana leaves. We ended up bumping into two of her friends, artisians as well, so ate with them. After lunch they walked us to this museum that is BEAUTIFUL. They have everything, modern art, classical stuff...it´s really neat. It was free and very tranquil with fountains everywhere and we just wandered around for an hour or more.
Christine´s friends set up their stuff right outside of the central cathedral every day (everyone is getting jewlrey back home as souvenirs...all three of her friends make beautiful bracelets and necklaces), so we ended up hanging out there for a while. There´s this little boy who hangs around the cathedral, he has one of those signs "I´m very poor, my name is Charlie etc etc" but I think mostly he just likes hanging out with the boys because he got really embarassed when we tried to read the sign. He´s super sweet though and we thumb wrestled for about half an hour while he tried to figure out who my "novio" (boyfriend) was, I told him "Ervin?" "Noooo" "San Jose?" "Noooo" "El hombre con moto?" "Nooo" "Mi?" "Si! Por supuesto!" (You of course!) to which he turned into the 10 year old boy he is and giggled for about 20 minutes. Anyways so it´s really interesting hanging out with these guys, all these tourists come up to them and buy stuff, it´s funny to be on the other side.
I went to go find Quetzaltrekkers after that, and they told me I was in luck...they have meetings every Sunday to figure out who´s hiking what, who´s promoting where and who´s working in the office during the days. I ended up going to the meeting and everyone seems really nice! There was supposed to be a hike for the new volunteers (there are two others...I think they´re doing "internships" but I don´t really know what the difference is) tomorrow at the volcano Talica, but I just went to check it out and it was cancelled (which is good because I still haven´t figured out my schedule for las tias, also I´m not exactly "in shape" to climb a volcano by tomorrow...at least I don´t think. Honestly I was checking out everyone´s legs at the meeting, to see if they were super ripped, but they all had pretty normal legs so I was a little comforted). ANYWAY, everyone seemed great...I already signed up for an office shift Saturday. I still haven´t figured out exactly how much time I´ll have to devote to them...I want Las Tias to be my number one priority and I also want to have a little flexibility on the weekends to travel if I want to. We´ll see, I really want to do the Quetzaltrekkers but I´m not going to let it get stressful. We had a long dinner at this hostel and had huuuuge chicken quesadillas with cilantro sour cream...YUM! Then we met her friends at another hostel that has a bar, and listened to mariachi music and talked. I was EXHAUSTED though!
This morning we walked to Las Tias...it was their first day so the kids were having an "orientation" thing where they learned the rules. It´s interesting because there are two places for Las Tias, one is where all the younger kids go (and it´s really nice, I guess everyone wants to donate to the younger ones) and the other one, where I´m working, is a little more run down, it´s sort of a shame. So Christine and I just grabbed a packet of papers she had left for me, games and worksheets she had done, and went over them back at the house. She left after lunch, which was a bummer...she´s been a GREAT friend this weekend...but it´s good for me to be on my own. No more hablando ingles. My family LOVES her (she was there for two months so obviously they´re close) so as selfish as it is to say, I guess it´s good that she´s gone so I can start to make relationships with them. (I forgot to put before that we also live with their grandmother and grandfather, the grandmother is REALLY sweet, the grandfather is sick and is sort of going off the deep end, Christine told me to watch out for wet spots because he pees wherever).
So like I said before, I live in a clothing store, well in the back of the clothing store. I already bought a shirt haha, it´s so light and breezy and perfect for Lyon because it´s so HOT. It is UNREAL here...sooooooo hot. I feel like I´m walking around in slow motion I´m so lethargic. The good thing is that there are people everywhere selling these bags of water (all liquids are sold in bags, I think so the vendors can take the bottles and give them in for some money) for 1 cordoba, which is about 5 cents. So I buy those every hour or so haha. Tomorrow is my real first day at Las Tias, I think I´m sort of just going to "wing it" because I have no idea what level everyone is at. We´ll see though.

Okay so I´m off to Quetzaltrekkers to help fix tent poles or something like that. Chao!

PS It´s the beginning of mango season now, the ones that are in season are these little green ones but on the street they sell big bags of them. They´re really good, but don´t taste anything like mangos. I bought some today and asked him to put this liquid on it (I thought it was vinegar, which they put on a lot of fruits I´ve had from the street...strangely it´s really good) but it was actually this spicy sauce. Therefor I think the strangest thing I´ve eaten here is officially mangos with hot sauce.

I´M IN LYONNNN!

2008-02-03T09:11:00.000-08:00

I feel like writing this whole post in HUGE LETTERS BECAUSE I´M SO EXCITED TO BE HERE! But I won´t because that´s a little annoying to read. Let me break it down for you...

Lyon: I live in a city!! No huge sky scrapers or anything like that but there´s a huge cathedral (beautiful at night) and lots of stuff and things and restaurants and city stuff. Okay I don´t really know that much about it, todays my walk-around-and-get-to-know-the-city day. But it´s sweet.

Family: My family is SO nice! The front of the house is a second hand clothing store, and then you keep walking back and there´s the rest of the house (Megan and Kalli...be jealous). They´re very religious so there are crosses and pictures of Jesus everywhere, including a picture over my bed that looks like Jesus from one angle and Mary from another angle. Living in my house is Miriam (mi madre...very energetic), Rodolfo (mi padre...but actually Miriam´s brother, he lives in the house with his daughters...very nice but speaks really softly and I´m always afraid he´s asking me questions and I´m just responding "ahh si si"), Carlos (mi hermano, about my age and very nice), Krystal (mi hermana...13 and such a sweetie...big on hugs). I have another sister but she´s staying with her mom right now so I haven´t met her, as well as a million cousins and aunts and uncles that I haven´t met yet. Everyone is SO kind..."we´re your family and this is your house" etc etc and I´m definitely putting my spanish skills to use.

Okay back to the house...work starts Monday. Sweeeeet!

PS I took a shower by pouring buckets of water over my head this morning and it was cold and refreshing and I guess that way noone really wants to hog the shower. Sorry, just had to document this first-experience.

BAAAAAACK in action.

2008-01-31T14:55:00.000-08:00

Welllll after being sick for a few days with a rather unpleasant (aka miserable) kidney infection FINALLY i´m back, and by back I mean walking around because that feels pretty awesome compared to the last week. I´m not really looking for any sympathy notes here because I didn´t really decide it was necessary to ask for a doctor until five days of feeling "not so well" and two days of feeling "terrible" (as well as alternating between sleeping, having body shaking, teeth chattering chills, and sweating through my clothes...pleasant). I think I was in a fetal position for about 9/10ths of saturday and sunday...and monday and tuesday now that I think about it. But the doctor came to the house ($10), sent me to a lab for tests ($10 and a lot of pride lost when I couldn´t pee for about 1 1/2 hours-shyyy) and some antibiotics ($25) and now I feel great ($PRICELESS$).

So what did I learn from the past week?
-Do not get a kidney infection...they are pretty lame
-Being in bed for hours upon hours upon hours will hurt your neck
-Drinking liquids is good when your sick. Go figure.

SO now that I´ve wasted a week being sick, IT´S FINALLY HERE...I´m leaving for Lyon TOMORROW! I suppose you can gather I´m excited from all the capital letters but I CAN´T WAIT! First of all, because I´m going down with my friend Christine and her friend Ervin. Christine is the girl that I´ll be replacing at Las Tias...she had an unfortunate accident with her passport and has stayed here waiting for it to be renewed. Ervin is her friend from Lyon, he makes amazing jewlry and is super nice (first friend in Lyon-check!) and taught me how to make an ashtray out of a beer can-which is a sweet party trick but probably would be better if I smoked. Second reason for excitement, because I´m starting work on Monday. Can. Not. Wait. Okay I´m wildly nervous but I´ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Third reason of excitement...AHHH. So there´s this group in Lyon called Quetzaltrekkers (I have to give credit to my Mom for finding them on the Internet). They´re a group of volunteers and they organize day, overnight, and weekend hikes up the volcanoes around Lyon. All their money goes to...guess. Yes! Las Tias! Which is awesome. I e-mailed them a little while ago asking if they needed volunteers a few days a week (because apparently at Las Tias I´ll only be teaching 3 mayyybe 4 days a week) and they wrote back and said yeah! I can train to lead hikes up volcanoes or do promotion work for the club and oh mann I´m psyched. I´m calling it operation volunteer double whammie (you know, because they donate to the organization I´m working for, yeah I know...corny, forget it). So that´s about it for now. I¨m pretty psyched to be healthy and heading to Lyon. Hasta luego!

In Which Alysse Actually Does Something Useful

2008-01-24T18:58:00.000-08:00

First of all, I´d like to apologize for inadvertently using the word "anywayS" over and over again in the previous posts instead of "anyway"...I´m sure many other people were equally as outraged as my Mom (love you!) and I´m sorry for any offense I caused.

Anyways, so I started teaching this week. Well "teaching" is a stretch, it´s more like "assisting" right now. I leave for Leon next Saturday, and until then I´m helping Lise teach her classes. She teaches university students three days a week (a beginner class and an intermediate class) and university teachers two days a week. She´s a great teacher, lots of fun and very energetic. She acts stuff out a lot and uses a "talking stick" to make everyone participate...except in this case it´s a "talking stuffed animal cat", which of course is way more fun. Mostly I write stuff on the board, lend my stellar acting skills to mime words, and translate for people who don´t understand something in English. Translate? Well I try.

I´ll admit I was a little bummed when I found out that I would be teaching english in Leon. I´ve always had this strange notion that the idea of teaching english to people in developing countries is just a plot for America to slowly take over the world.(I´m just kidding, for any US government officials who are reading this...sort of). But all the kids and teachers had to fill out a form before entering class, standard questions about where their speaking and reading levels were at, and why they wanted to take the class and what they hoped to get out of it. I have to say 100% of the answers were NOT related whatsoever to the US. Most of the kids talked about wanting a better job, a better life. Wanting to be able to take part or work in international business, or tourism (to be able to display the pride they have for their country). English is such an expensive language to learn here. Most people who study it, have to forgo having a job in order to study (because most of the jobs around here require extreme full time)...which a lot of people don´t have the opportunity to do. So everyone is SO appreciative of the time Lise is giving to them. I think if I ever profusely thanked any of my teachers at the start of every class for the gift of her time and energy and love, they would keel over from shock. It´s really great to hear how excited they are to learn, and how hopeful they are what doors English can open for them in future careers or life in general.

Also, I never thought about how hard it is to learn english. I´m/He´s /She´s/Wouldn´t/´Cause. A teacher in one of the classes told me she said "focus" wrong one time (use your imagination) and since then she stopped speaking english because she was afraid of saying something else wrong. She said she never talks about the "beach" (add a T in there somewhere and you´ll get it), instead she´ll talk about the sea or the ocean.

For better or for worse.

2008-01-21T14:36:00.000-08:00

Oiyyyy. Thank god I´m back. I had a blast, and still have sand in my ears and a sunburn to prove it...but I´m happy to be back. I feel like Jinotepe is home right now. Not home home, but still a comfortable place where I know the people and how to get around and I can walk around the house barefoot and read all day if I want. That pretty much sums up my definition of home. Oh yeah and there´s actually food around. I guess in San Juan beer is an acceptable meal substitute, therefor being somewhere where I don´t have to sit around hungry when everyone else is pounding down the beers at 9am is quite refreshing! That being said...SAN JUAN IS AWESOME! I already have plans to go back next weekend with two other volunteers from the house. This time I went with one other volunteer, our friend from Jinotepe, my friend Tomas and his sister.

Okay so starting off, the trip there was really easy. An hour long ride on the microbus (which was filled to normal capacity due to a police stop down the road, ahh a full seat to myself...luxury) to Rivas and then a taxi ride to San Juan. I wish I could have taken a picture of the road from Rivas to San Juan...it looked like a scene from that movie/book Holes. There were foot wide, foot deep holes ALL OVER the road. I felt like I was on that wooden roller coaster at Six Flags, where you´re being jerked around so hard you start to go a little numb. Taxi drivers in that part of Nicaragua must need special training...The art of dodging potholes goes something like this: right side of the road, sharp veer to the left side of the road, veer to the right, offroading on the right side, big swerve to offroad on the left side, and on and on. It got to where it was smoother driving completely OFF the road than being on the road. Also, I think the taxi drivers would rather risk driving into an oncoming truck than hitting a pothole, because I felt near death so many times I´ve practically accepted it by now. So anyways, after a 30 minute ride on the paved potholed roller coaster of death we were finally in San Juan. We pull up in front of a surf shop (Arena Caliente Surf) and to my delight, we walked inside and it was a hostel for surf bums as well. I felt my cool rating rising the more surf boards I saw. It was awesome. Long haired, surfer dudes and dudettes lounging around, amazing murals and photos of surfers covered the walls, broken surf boards lined the walls. Bathing suits and wet suits hanging to dry on the line outside. Of course I was a total imposter, because I just wanted to take pictures of everything to show everyone back home this COOL place I was in, while this was just where they were crashing for the week or month. So alas, for the sake of "fitting in" I didn´t take any pictures and therefor I have no proof that I was in such a sweet place, so my cool rating is back down to zero. Anyways we hung around the house with everyone (the people we came with are related to/know a lot of the people there...which is why all of us non-surfers were staying there in the first place). A lot of the people were just around for a few days or a week, then heading on to costa rica or panama...there were a lot of people from the area, some Americans, a guy from Britain, etc etc...it was a mixed group but everyone was really nice and relaxed. Tranquilo is the equivalent to "chillin" in spanish and I think I heard it about a million times while I was there. I ended teaching some of them how to play beer pong, and I really hope that´s not my only contribution to Nicaraguan society while I´m here. That would be a little pathetic. We went out to a few of the clubs around town, some were really relaxed and tranquilo with surf videos playing on screens on the walls...and a few others were more american with 50 cent and ludacris playing and about a million white people hanging around. The thing about San Juan is it is REALLY westernized...a lot of bar and restaurant names are in english...most things offer both languages...there is an equal mix of locals and tourists. So being a blonde definitely didn´t make me unique in San Juan like it does in Jinotepe. We also went to a discoteque that played a good mix of salsa and modern music. I danced until I could barely stand up and then went to bed. Apparently 1:30 AM is a totally uncool time to go to bed. Most other people were just going out to the bars at that time, and I was woken up at 4:30 to Pink Floyd being blasted at a bar just down the street with 50 drunk people singing along. It was that song where the little children sing...something like "we don´t need no education...etc etc" and let me tell you, that´s sort of a creepy song to be woken up to.

We set off for Maderas beach that morning with a bunch of the people from the hostel (another death defying drive on a road that was more like an obstacle course). I decided not to surf that day because it was a little expensive and I was already planning on coming back the next weekend. It was an amazing beach though!! The waves were awesome, everyone was either surfing or body boarding and the beach seemed to go on forever. I got burned in the hour that I was in the water and therefor earned the nickname "little lobster". Awesome. Of course I forgot my camera again, therefor have no pictures...but like I said (stolen from Arnold), I´ll be back.

That night came the most bizarre part of the trip. Afer showering I was informed that I would be attending a wedding. I think one or two of the guys at the hostel were invited, and somehow felt that they needed a entourage of 8 to accompany them. So we drive up to the MOST INCREDIBLE hotel I have ever seen. Picture a hundred white sandstone cottages with red clay roofs scattered along the side of a hill/mountain with beautiful winding staircases connecting it all. It was truly magnificent. We walk up to where the wedding was and it´s half way over, we sort of stand to the side as they finish up the "you may now kiss the bride" part. The wedding was outside on a patio, there was one of those pools that looks like it goes on forever, it didn´t have walls, and it had the most breathtaking view of San Juan at sunset. There were a million twinkling lights all around and WOW it was just spectacular. Then we all clapped and drank passion fruit cocktails and ate chicken concoctions and chatted. I felt like I was on that movie wedding crashers...it was so strange to be at this amazing wedding and ohhh yeah I don´t know anyone here. But that being said it was beautiful. So I figured we were just there for hor dóeurves and would be leaving soon but then they ushured us all to the huge dining room (outside again with another pool) for dinner. WHAT? Okay I´ve only been to one wedding in my life so maybe I sort of think they´re a big deal...but they´re sort of a big deal. I don´t even remotely know who these people are and yet I´m toasting to them at their reception dinner. Strange. But I hadn´t eaten all day (no I don´t take part in the "beer instead of turkey sandwich"...I´m not that Nicaraguan yet I guess) so I was up for a little dinner. I got a little sick of the joke "lobster for the lobster", but I was eating lobster so I got over it. Dinner was delicious, we were deemed the most fun party at the wedding by one of the wedees fathers (wedee? person who is being wed?) and I think when I offered to take a picture of him with the group, we made his night (or maybe it was the 10 coctkails he had).

It was a lot of fun mixed with a little drama. Not to get too much into gory details but let´s just say that in Nicaragua, one is not flippant with the feelings of others--by penalty of severe scoldings by family members. I have learned that "casual dating" does not exist in Nicaragua, therefor will no longer be taking part in any flirting with, talking to, looking at, or dating while I´m here. I was "spoken to" for about an hour in spanish by the sister of a friend we had come with with no speaking skills to defend myself besides "No quiero luchar" (I don´t want to wrestle)...it´s about as close as I could come to "I don´t want to argue" which I hadn´t anticipated needing to know while here. Anyways here´s where my whole family is smiling and shaking their heads and saying "Ohh Alysse". End of gory story.

I had a great time at the wedding but strangely it made me really homesick. The couple was from the states, so most of the people there were American and it just made me think of my family. I´m missing my cousins wedding while I´m in Nicaragua and I was imagining my whole family at her wedding having fun and dancing and toasting her and it bummed me out a little. Because I´m not working yet (I start tomorrow, thank god) I feel like I´ve been on vacation for two weeks...and two weeks is about the length of time I like to be on vacation for. It´ll be good for me to start working and put my energy into something. Í´m not leaving for Leon for another two weeks, but the other woman I´ve been taking lessons with is volunteering here in town for her stay. She´ll be teaching english to advanced english students at the university nearby, as well as the teachers who teach them, and I´m going to be her assistant. I think she wants me to be a bridge between her and the students, because I have a little better grasp of spanish. If they don´t understand something in english hopefully I can help out there, and just help out in other little ways. She´s taken a course in teaching english as a second language, and reading over her lesson plans and hearing her ideas has given me a few ideas for my school as well. Granted I´ll be teaching in a different environment but I think the next two weeks will be sort of like training wheels for me, where I´ll be able to observe her in a classroom before being thrown into one myself.

Anyways, that´s about it...I miss everyone!

Still alive.

2008-01-17T17:03:00.000-08:00

I think my brain is fried from writing too many e-mails...that and I´ve hogged this computer for an eternity so this will be short. San Juan del Sur this weekend, surf city...it´s time to test my natural abilities to "ride a wave", which probably will result in about a gallon of water up my nose. Chaooo.

How to Not Get Run Over By a Horse

2008-01-14T15:33:00.000-08:00

Okay so looking back over the cheesy-ness of my last post, I realize why everyone thought I was going to come home having smuggled an orphanage in my suitcase...Anyways..

Top 10 Things I´ve Learned So Far in Nicaragua
1. Washing your own clothes is HARD. In the past hour I embarked on the adventure of "washing by hand" with a bar of Dove body soap and a stone ridged surface, and let me tell you, I have a whole new respect for washing machines. I realized I have absolutely no idea how to wash clothes, and I´m sure my clothes would tell you right now that they are not, in fact, clean. If nothing else, the amount of soap still caked on them while they´re drying on the clothesline will give everyone else the dove scented illusion that I´m not a slob...I´m just glad I escaped the rainy season-that could be a sudsy disaster.
2. People can still get colds in Nicaragua. Two people in the house had colds this week-luckily I escaped. Somehow that amazes me, I thought colds were reserved for miserable times where the ground is grey and slushy and snow got into your clogs so your socks are soaked.
3. People can still get COLD in Nicaragua. Brrrr. Okay I´m sitting here in shorts and a t-shirt but I swear, it can get chilly to mildly brisk out here. Especially at night. Althought I keep being warned that when I move to Leon I´m going to shrivel up and burnnnn.
4. There are so many festivals here that they have to reserve dates for them, so that two don´t occur on the same date and everyone can attend all of them. And everyone does.
5. I´m mildly addicted to quesidallas con pollo. Knowing my eating habits I´ll probably eat them every meal for two weeks and then never eat a quesiadilla again.
6. I love countries where people kiss on the cheek every time they meet/see one another. It´s awesome, I just want to walk around calling everyone "Mi amor" and make them all friendship bracelets.
7. People aren´t always staying at you because you´re the only blonde within a 10 mile radius of the town, sometimes it´s just because your fly is unzipped. Oh how embarassing.
8. To insult a Nicaraguan, call them "Tica" (it´s what Costa Ricans call themselves), to insult a Costa Rican, call them "Nica" (what Nicaraguans call themselves). Hopefully someone is as amused as I am that these rivaling countries have rhyming nicknames.
9. Who needs paper advertisements or festival invitations or obituaries when you have a car with a huge megaphone on top that will drive through town and shout all of the above about 10 times a day.
10. Roosters don´t crow only at dawn. Apparently that´s a myth. Roosters crow from about 1am on...and on and on and on and on.

And now, the eagerly anticipated answering of How to Not Get Run Over By a Horse:

This Sunday there was a horse parade in the town over, Diriamba. Another festival?? Shocking, I know. We got there about an hour after the parade was supposed to start, and of course it would not start for another hour and a half ("Nica time" they call it, and I like it because I´ll probably never be late for anything while I´m here). At first I didn´t see why it was a horse parade, because there were no horses, only people in cowboy hats walking around drinking beer. Once the parade started, whoah. The only float they had was sponsored by one of the two beer companies, Tona, and had a bunch of girls dancing in cowboy outfits. Other than that it was horses...tons and tons of horses. Rowdy horses. Crazy horses. Bumper horses. These horses would prance and dance and swing around and trot into the crowd and bump into each other and walk backwards and walk sideways and anything you could imagine. I don´t know how many times I would turn from talking to someone and BAM nose to nose with a horse, actually most of the time it was nose to ribcage or nose to butt. It. was. insane. Added to the fun of playing mosh pit with horses, to walk anywhere you had to walk withhh the horse parade. Not on the side, but dodging in and out of all the prancing dancing looney horses. Cabaillos en espanol. So how do you avoid getting run over by a horse? It´s not easy and I´m sure many broken foots will testify to that. You can literally push it out of the way, or throw someone else in the way of it, or if you´re agile enough you can zip between them. It was a pretty exciting adventure...until How Not to Get Run Over By a Horse was replaced by How Not to Get Pick-Pocketed. The total losses of the group I was with was one wallet, one camera, and one phone. At one point we were just standing by the side of the road watching the parade when a tornado of fists and bodies struck. Everyone was pushing and falling and after 30 seconds when it calmed down, cameras and phones were gone and everyone blamed everyone else when the guy who took it probably slipped away. Bummer. I´m glad my purse was wedged into my armpit. Safe.

2008-01-12T09:53:00.000-08:00

So I am officially oriented to Nicaragua. My "test" yesterday was:
1. Go to the market and buy a chayote ("What the heck is a chayote?" you ask...it´s green and lumpy and delicious...sort of like a squash)
2. Buy a postcard at the libreria santiago
3. Go to the post office and send the post card to Canada.
4. Take a motobus to Catalina, go to El Mirador and see the site (volcano on one side, sweet lagoon on the other...it was beautiful)
5. Take a cucaracha to San Juan de Oriente (cucarachas are these little three wheeled contraptions that have a top and no sides)
6. Get yourself back home.
Sounds goofy to have a test but I guess the point is that if your group gets miserably lost, or comes back with a papaya or sends their post card to China...maybe you shouldn´t be on your own. But I PASSED, don´t worry.

This week was pretty eye opening. A girl that is staying at the house, Andrea, took us to meet a family she´s really close to. She´s actually getting an apartment around Jinotepe and looking to start a girls soccer league around here, which is great. She stayed with this family a while back, and taught english lessons out of their house. I was really overwhelmed by how kind and extraordinary this family was. They live in one of the poorer barrios, where they have to bring water from the road to their house. I guess they were some of the first people to live there, and first lived in a small wooden hut. The father is a carpenter and works with glass as well and he actually built the house they have now around the wooden hut, and then took out the hut when he was finished. It´s still small, a kitchen and two bed rooms, but it´s one of the nicer safer ones in the barrio. They were so welcoming and kind, words really can´t do them justice. Their daughter is fourteen and is a luchadora...wrestler, as are their sons and nephew. They go to all her matches and said that it´s good because it keeps her away from trouble and might get her away from the barrio, wrestlers sometimes travel around when they´re good enough. They invited us to one of her matches at the end of the month...so I think we´ll go be her cheering squad. The mother is truuuuly amazing. She went door to door in the barrio and taught the adults to read and write. She lets the kids in the barrio come to her house and have little dances, so that they´re somewhere safe. She worked in one of the sweatshops around here, testing chemicals for two years, until they found out that one of the chemicals she was testing causes cancer and asthma and other things. She has asthma and was sick for awhile and now works in a textile factory. It´s amazing...everyone here has a story. And most of them include working extremely hard for little money, sickness, sadness, hunger...and yet everyone is still so kind and proud. When we left they told us that they were our friends, and their house and family was open to us at anytime...and they were so genuine. I´m getting a little sappy here, but it´s just inspiring to meet so many people who have spirits strong enough to surpass obstacles that would break most others.

Eyyyyy Mammaaaaa!

2008-01-08T13:35:00.000-08:00

Hola! I´m trying not to start this post off with something as lame as ¨Well it´s been a crazy few days¨, but I guess that´s about all I have. Maybe after a few more spanish classes I´ll be able to say that in spanish, which would sound much cooler I´m sure. My orientation class this afternoon was pretty short so I have the rest of the day to explore. Today was essentially a geography class, all about Nicaragua. Unfortunately my brain turns off upon hearing the word geography (which I´m sure is not a suprise to anyone whose ever heard me try to list all the states on the east coast), but I´m sure I sucked in some information anyways. The other woman in the ¨class¨ has studied up on her Nicaragua geography already so I´ll just tap her fountain of knowledge when I need to. I guess for the rest of this week it´s 4 hours...FOUR HOURS...of spanish in the morning, and then these mini classes in the afternoon. Yesterday we took a bus to Masaya, where there are huge markets of any souvenir or any trinket you could ever desire. Change purse made of of frog skin, head included? They´ve got it. Painting of Nicaraguan man peeing? They´ve got it. I didn´t get anything but I´m sure I´ll be back. The real experience was taking the bus. We walked to where all the buses park in Jinotepe. They have big school buses, which are apparently very slow, and smaller ¨microbuses¨. We took one of the microbuses, which I guess is what most people take to go anywhere around Nicaragua. They have a guy that sits near the door of the bus who shouts out of the window where the bus is headed, and sometimes the bus will stop to let someone off and the guy will jump out and walk up and down the street trying to find someone who wants to take it. I think they crammed about 20 people onto the bus, to the point where the guy had to hang on on the outside of the bus. Pretty cool. I don´t know how I´m ever going to take one myself but apparently that´s the ¨test¨for passing orientation at the end of the week...getting yourself to a certain town in Nicaragua. Should be interesting. When Jake comes to visit I´m going to have to travel a far way to Managua to pick him up at the airport, involving taxis and multiple crazy buses SO my main motivation for learning all of this is to actually be able to make it to the airport and impress him with my amazing transportation and navigations skills-which is one thing I certainly have never posessed.

I feel I should talk about the food at some point. I´m sure my family is interested whether I´ll come back having (a) gained 10 lbs or (b) lost 10 lbs. The answer is (c) gained 30 lbs. The food is fantastic! Lots of beans and rice, like I expected. But so much other stuff too. It´s nearing on the fruit season now, so all the fruit is so fresh and fantastic. Pineapple, papaya, plantains, bananas. I guess in a few weeks I´ll be able to buy about 20 mangos for less than a dollar. Something crazy and awesome like that. I went over to Raquels house the other night for a good bye party for a friend of hers, and her mom had made this dessert that was out of this world. I forget the name but it had yucca and cheese and was topped with this sugary cinamoney thing. I wish I knew the names of things so I could describe them better, but for now my favorite dishes are delicious meat and vegetable thing, yummy squash and white sauce thing, bean mushy awesome thing, and rice. Good stuff. Street vendors are everywhere here too, selling little cookie type things and meat and plantain concoctions and sweet potatoe looking things. I haven´t gotten any of those yet but they look delicious and not particularly nutritious.

I really like it in this town, Jinotepe, but I still feel a little weird that I´ll be here for the next month, and not in the town where my volunteer placement is. It´ll be better in the end, because I´ll have 4 hours...4 HOURS...of spanish every day...EVERY DAY...but hopefully I´ll find something to occupy my time. One of the volunteer cordinators here said that he thinks they´re going to find places around this town that I can check out and volunteer at. There´s a girl staying here who´s looking for an apartment, I don´t know if i said this before but the place i¨m staying is a hostel too, and she knows the town really well so I´ll probably ask her this week if she knows of a place to volunteer at short term.

The only thing I´m having a hard time getting used to is being a blonde chica in a small Nicaraguan town. For all the attention I´m getting I feel like I forgot to put my clothes on before going out. Any stereotypical thing for a man to say to a woman is fair game ¨"Eyyy mamaaaaa, ess papppiiiii" is my personal favorite. I don´t feel unsafe here, everyone is so nice and friendly. But there´s friendly and then there´s friendlyyyyyy, and I don´t know who I should smile at and be friendly to back, and who to just ignore. It´s not as much as an ego booster as one might think haha...I feel super concious of the fact that I´m different...but I´m sure I´ll get over that...or maybe I´ll get so tan I´ll blend in, but probably not.
Allright well I guess that´s about it...I´m already planning a million weekend trips I want to take in the next month. Top of the list is San Juan del Sur, which apparently is a great place to surf, which I would love to learn. That would be badass.
Chaooo.

HERE!

2008-01-06T13:05:00.000-08:00

I can´t believe I´m actually here. I don´t even know where to start. My flight and getting through the Nicaragua airport was a breeze. I was picked up by the country coordinator of my program as well as a girl Christine. Christine is the one who I´ll be replacing in Leon, with the family she stayed with and the program Las Tias that I´ll be working with. I feel so much more prepared already, but I´m thinking that the placement will be NOTHING like what I was expecting. Apparently I´ll be teaching english, and because almost all of the kids that come to the center are from the streets, attendance and attention levels are pretty horrible. Aside from that though, she said they´re a great group of kids…I´m hoping that I´ll find some way to keep them entertained enough to come more than twice a week. This girl ended up working with a Habitat for Humanity type group down there so there´s definitely tons of other stuff to get involved with. But I won´t actually be in Leon for another MONTH! I have a week of ¨orientation¨ training here in Jinotepe and then I stay for another three weeks for pure language training. I´ll be anxious to start working, I know, but I already love it here so I´m sure I´ll be fine. The town is great, so busy and colorful. The place that I´m staying is SWEET. It´s a big building, two floors. The second floor is all dorm type living, where we all sleep. The first floor has the kitchen, a few other rooms, the office etc. But there´s this big square garden in the middle…and everything is so open here that there´s no walls separating the garden from the rest of the first floor. The breeze is so nice, plus it just feels cool being able to be outside and inside at the same time.
There´s only one other person doing the orientation with me. She´s an older woman from Canada, but she´s a trip. Everyone else is younger, around my age or a little older, but she fits right in. Theres another guy staying at the center, he´s been here for four months and is working at the hospital around here. Apparently in Nicaragua you don´t need any schooling to put in IV´s or stitch people up, because that´s what he does most days. Apparently IV´s are easy, you just “stick the needle in”. I really hope I never get sick here. This house is also a hostel, so theres a group of engineers without borders people staying here, plus a few other people.
They had a welcome dinner for me and the other woman last night at this little Mexican restaurant down the road, and I think I got my first tast of how everything really works around here. We were all sitting around eating (delicious) and drinking (there are only two beers here in Nicaragua, and I´m pretty sure they fill the bottles from a keg in the back) when cops started walking in the place. There were a few outside and one starts arguing with the owner. We found out later that the cop was seeing if the owner has a permit to serve beer, and wanted a bribe to look the other way. After walking around town today and seeing cops lounging on the stairs of buildings and chewing on banana leaves, I´m starting to understand that perhaps law enforcement is not taken quite as seriously as back home.
I went over to Raquel, the in country coordinators house after dinner to hang out with Christine and Raquels sons. Her sons were all punked out and Taking Back Sunday was playing in the background while they took shots of cheap rum. I have to say, I felt like I was back in high school again.
Tomorrow starts language training, hopefully I´ll start feeling less like a useless tourist. I think maybe I was a little foolish in thinking that buying a Spanish workbook at the beginning of last semester and letting it contribute to the pyramid of unread books on my desk was going to help me out over here. I did manage to navigate through the town and make it to this internet cafe, only getting lost once, which I think is pretty fantastic. My next great adventure will be making it home.