Happy Holidays!

I made it through my first Christmas away from my family alive and well, though a little nostalgic and jealous that they got 2 feet of snow in Maryland and now they´re all skiing!

For the 9 days before Christmas, there was mass at 6am, which I thought was unnecessarily early until I learned that it used to be at 4am. I only managed to get out of bed to go twice. My host mom brought noise makers and maracas and had no shame about making as much noise as possible, along with some neighborhood kids. Apparently these masses used to be more fun but since it got pushed back to 6am a lot of people chose not to attend in protest.

My two best friends here, Julie and Jocelyn, who were here with me during training, came back to visit for Christmas so we could all be together. We made hummus, ate a whole pack of oreos dunked in peanut butter and got pizza. We stayed up until midnight on Christmas eve because that´s what they do here. Christmas morning was a little anti-climactic, as Christmas always is. We didn´t go to 9am mass like we were going to because my host mom and sister slept in late. Everyone opened their presents and then we just sat around the house doing not much of anything all day. I got to talk to just about everyone in my family which was really nice. We went dancing at the local disco that night with my cousins - together we comprised about 45% of the people who were there.

In other news, I saw a scorpion on the sidewalk the other day, the big green bird my host mom just bought somehow disappeared, and I just got a haircut for 50 cents.
Tyler, my boyfriend (for those who don´t know), is coming tomorrow!

Operation Hummus = Success

I finally hunkered down and bought the absolute minimum ingredients to make hummus, Nica style. 2 cans of garbanzo beans, a lemon and almost a whole head of garlic. No sesame tahini or olive oil, and I used the blender. And it worked! Even better is that Nicaraguans have a weird aversion to garlic, so I don´t have to worry about anyone eating any of it.

So last Monday was the Purísima. Several families set up altars of the Virgin Mary in their homes. A ¨professional¨ altar-making guy actually came to our house to help out. He set up a big screen of mountain scenery behind the Virgin Mary statue and put a ton of flowers that were cut down from nearby trees around it. For the past week my family had been collecting food, candy, plastic cups and bowls, little towel, toys, trinkets, keychains, combs, earrings and whatever else they could think of to hand out to the masses of people that would come. At 7pm we officially opened the doors. Groups of 2-10 people came in one at a time, stood in front of the altar, and sang sections of songs dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Before anyone could sing, however, someone had to yell, ¨Quien causa tanta allegría?¨ (Who causes so much happiness) and everyone would respond ¨La concepción de Maria” (The Conception of Mary). After they sang what minimal segment of the song they deemed deserving of their ¨brindi¨ (treat), my host sister or mom would hand each person a little gift, which was picked appropriately and meticulously based on age and gender. For a good majority of the night there was a massive mob of people waiting outside for their turn to come in and sing. Unlike trick-or-treating, everyone partakes in the Purísima- parents, babies, small children, teens, old people, town drunks, non-Catholics who don´t know the songs. For a lot of people, the prospect of free food for their families is worth waiting in lines with their small children until midnight. I put up some pictures and a video on facebook if you want a better idea of the whole ordeal.

Tuesday was the actual Immaculate Conception. We went to a 2-hour mass in the morning and then packed up and went to the nearby river. The river is conveniently located behind a family´s house, and they take the liberty of charging an admission fee. They have essentially claimed ownership of the river, which I didn´t know was possible. It was really beautiful- situated in the middle of dense jungle. But then all the noisy kids came, and the drunks, ruining the peace.

My host mom bought a large green bird from a man walking through the streets carrying a shoebox of them. We already had 2 little green birds, but the anomoly of this one being able to talk (supposedly, it hasn´t said a word yet) was a selling point. The 2 birds got kicked out of their cage to accommodate the new one; they now roam around the kitchen floor trying not to get stepped on.

My host sister and I put up the fake Christmas tree the other day. Complete with lights and tons of decorations. Wasn´t quite the same as a real tree with Christmas music playing in the background, but it will suffice.

I´ve been walking a few days a week with my host mom. She´s showed me a bunch of new paths and windy roads that pass through neighboring villages. Yesterday we stopped at a sugar cane mill. We walked right up and poked around, watching the workers make candy/a block of pure sugar with it. My mom walked right up to a big vat of the processed sugar, stuck her finger in, dug out a big glob, handed it to me, and then repeated for herself. No one thought anything of it. We also passed by a house that sells milk and I carried back a Coca Cola liter of warm milk, fresh from the udder.

I went to a rosary praying session (they have become increasingly frequent since the Immaculate Conception) with my sister yesterday and they gave everyone a plastic cup of candy. Included in mine were two gold coin candies, which I assumed were chocolate. I got back and took out my secret stash of peanut butter to dunk the chocolate in. When I unwrapped it, to my surprise, it was pink! Gum. Talk about disappointing.

This morning when I was running I saw a guy wearing Boston College athletic shorts, almost identical to the ones I have. I was so excited. I stopped and said, ¨your shorts are from my university!!¨ He sort of laughed with me and looked at me like I had ten heads/was white, not to mention I was running at 6am on a Sunday. Anti-climactic.

Tomorrow I´m going to the beach with the teachers from the school for their end of the year party...even though I didn´t teach this past year, they invited me anyway.

Officially a PCV

As of a week ago Monday I am officially a PCV instead of a PCT. We finished training and swore-in on November 23rd. The next two days was the All Volunteer Conference, where all 170+ PCVs in Nicaragua got together to talk about the meeting´s theme, food security, and to share ideas about projects, good recipes, etc. I learned that making hummus in a blender instead of a cuisinart, and without any sesame tahini, is possible. Hopefully I´ll try it out soon. Despite chowing down on two containers of hummus I found in a Managua grocery store, I am still having withdrawal.
A couple weeks ago I met with two people from Wisconsin who have been working on a Sister City Project with some nearby communities. They have built schools and latrines and are currently focused on getting materials and snacks to the primary school kids and training the teachers. They want me to help with the teacher training. It should be really interesting. The communities are really poor and isolated. The teachers in the school live in my town and commute there for the week--travel between here and there is limited and complicated. The teachers arrive on Monday afternoon, teach on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and leave on Friday morning, leaving the kids with 3 of 5 days of class...if they´re lucky.

The U.S. ambassador in Nicaragua talked to us on one of our last days of training. He was surprisingly frank about U.S.-Nicaraguan relations (they´re not the greatest). It was fascinating to hear his side of the story and compare it to what I hear from the people I live with or see on the news. The upcoming presidential elections in 2011 will be interesting to say the least.

My last day at home before becoming a PCV my host mom decided to help me make one of my favorite concoctions-chicken, broccoli and pasta-though I was mostly just doing what she told me to do. I´m pretty sure she doesn´t think I can cook. It was entertaining. First, we used chao mein noodles. The chicken was boiled and then shredded (I left it in too big of chunks, my host mom shredded it again after I finished). She cooked the broccoli (with celery) until it was mushy. Then she proceeded to re-cook/fry the chicken with mustard, 1000 island dressing and (I think) chicken sausage. It didn´t taste too terrible, and everyone actually liked it, but it was a far cry from anything I´d had in mind. Nonetheless, they were convinced it was Italian food...but also kept calling it ¨chao mein.¨ The next night all of us PCTs were in Managua and went to a real Italian restaurant for dinner. I got pasta with broccoli and tomato sauce...and the USAID guy who was there with us paid for everything!

I saw an old woman wearing a shirt that said ¨Everyone loves a drunk girl¨ the other day. I´m not sure where they find shirts like that, but they´re everywhere. I like to assume that no one really knows what they mean.

Monday is the Purisima, or Immaculate Conception. From what I´ve gathered, it´s like Halloween, but you have to sing for your candy, it´s not just for kids, and it´s religious. We´ll see...

Almost done with training!

This coming week is our last week of training. We have a bunch of charlas and events in Managua to finalize the ¨bridge to service¨ and finish up the technical stuff. Swearing in is a week from this coming Monday.

Last week was my ¨site visit.¨ Everyone went to their future sites for 4 days to meet everyone and get a feel for everything. I stayed here, of course. It was nice to not have Spanish class or technical training sessions, but weird having so much free time. It rained pretty much nonstop the whole time thanks to Hurricane Ida. The Carribbean Coast of Nicaragua was hit really hard; luckily we just got rain here. I went walking every morning with my host mom. She showed me a few paths through the campo that I hadn´t seen before. One was particularly beautiful...very quiet and peaceful and it winds through fields of sugar cane, plantains, beans and corn. I co-taught once more with my counterpart, Ana. Class went well until we asked the kids to close their notebooks, at which point they immediately forgot everything we had been talking about for the past hour. Welcome to the world of teaching! I met my other counterpart, Scarleth, during my ¨visit,¨ too. She is very nice and low key and seems excited that I´ll be staying here.

I finally unpacked and rearranged my room since it will be my room for some time now. I found an etch-a-sketch and some glow-in-the-dark stars that I gave my sister. They were a hit.

This past Monday we went to the U.S. Embassy in Managua. It´s pretty removed from the busy city and was really quiet and calm. There were automatic flushing toilets and you could put the toilet paper in the toilet (instead of in the trashcan next to it) which were new concepts. Everything was also excessively air-conditioned...I had goosebumps for the first time in a few months. We learned about the extensive list of scholarship programs that the embassy offers. I hope to get some kids from my town to the United States to study or visit with one of them.

Yesterday we had the big presentation with everyone´s youth groups from our TEFL group and the group of environment volunteers. Almost all of the TEFL groups made videos of a Michael Jackson song for their final project. The environment groups made some interesting stuff with recycled materials--piñatas with food wrappers and newspapers and bracelets with coke bottle tops.

This afternoon I´m going to Managua with my host mom and sister for an uncle´s birthday party. It sounds like it´s going to be a lot of fun. We´re staying over at their house to avoid leaving Managua at night. On the way back I´m going to meet Julie and Jocelyn to go to the beach! Next time I write I will officially be a PCV!

Staying here!

I found out on Wednesday that I´ll be staying here in my training town in Carazo for my two years. It was one of my top 3 choices so I´m really happy. Everything here fits me well...it´s a small, safe little pueblo, my family is great and I love my counterpart (still have to meet the other one I´ll be working with). I was a little bummed to not get to see a new place in Nicaragua and start fresh somewhere else, but everything here is great so I think it´s best I stay anyway rather than risk going somewhere new that´s not as good. I think my family is happy to have me stay. It also saves me the hassle of moving all of my stuff to a new place by myself on an over-crowded Nicaraguan bus. I´m pretty close to Managua here which will also make visits easier! :)

A couple days ago a fumigation truck drove through town. I had no idea what was going on since I only understood ¨fuming truck¨ and ¨hide¨ when my abuelita was talking to me. Before I knew it she was running into the kitchen calling me to follow her and a truck passed by spraying chemicals all over the place. There were kids and animals in the street and a girl standing in front of my house waiting to buy something from my family´s convenience store...they were all blasted with the chemicals. The windows are always open so naturally it came inside the house, too...I think that´s actually the point so it will kill cockroaches, or whatever else it´s supposed to kill, though it seemed a bit questionable at the time. The fumes/chemicals hovered in the air for at least 15 minutes. And I saw a cockroach in my room last night...

There was a horse show here last weekend. Basically everyone dresses up as cowboys and there are hundreds of horses walking through the streets which you can mount at your own will. There are also ¨professionals,¨ or at least people who knew what they were doing, on the horses, making them dance! Even the horses in this country can dance. It was pretty amusing, and so were the cowboy outfits. Afterwards there was a big party and I went with my entire family. We danced for about 4 hours without stopping. I think I´m slowly learning, though it´s going to take a good majority of my two years here to get up to par with the Nica dancing standards.

I didn´t get to teach when I was supposed to again. There was a teacher workshop going on during my class, surprise! There seems to always be something going on from 4:20-5pm on Monday afternoons.

It´s been raining every day here for a while so I accumulated a mountain of dirty clothes. Today, finally, there was some sun so I took a risk and washed most of it. I´m not sure what happens if it keeps raining and you can never wash your clothes. Today is the first day of summer here, though, so we shouldn´t be seeing much more rain until May.

Tomorrow is Day of the Dead. My aunt, uncle and cousins from Managua came here last night with a basket full of beautiful, gigantic hydrangeas to put on the graves of family members in the cemetary here.

Countdown to Site Assignment

Sorry it´s been a while since I´ve written. Everything has been going well and I am quickly approaching the end of my 11 weeks of training. This Wednesday we find out our site assignments!

The volcano two weekends ago was awesome. We had an incredibly boring charla about diversity and then Peace Corps drove us to the top, but other than that it was great. There was a lot of hiking around and exploring to do at the top. Pictures are on facebook, on the link I posted before this post.

Two Mondays ago when I was walking to the school to co-teach I saw a mass exodus of students walking away from the school. When I arrived, my counterpart told me that they had all left to go to mass...during my class. Go figure. Luckily, I was able to teach this past Monday and it went really well. Hopefully I´ll teach again this coming Monday also...but you never know what could happen! I discovered an air-conditioned, Internet-equipped computer lab at my school which was a bit of a shock. I felt like I was on another planet with all the air conditioning and technology around.

Last Wednesday and Thursday, and basically the entire weekend, were the ¨fiestas patronales¨ in my town. It´s basically a huge celebration of the patron saint for whom the town is named. The people were constantly setting off ¨bombas¨ which are basically bombs, minus the destruction. They´re so loud, and they start going off at 4am. I also paraded through the streets for hours (it took 2 hours to walk 6 blocks) with the procession. The people were carrying the really heavy wooden table holding the patron saint idol adorned with flowers through town for 9 hours, singing and dancing and playing music the whole time. There were also fair-like rides parked in front of the park (actually, they´re still there). Think zipper, but in a third world country. And I went on it! There was a bit too much wiggle room so my head kept hitting the ceiling when we´d flip, but it was pretty fun nevertheless.
I´ve gone to a couple of parties with my sister and cousins on the weekends. One of my cousins is trying to teach me how to dance. Every Nicaraguan can dance REALLY well. It´s actually embarrassing to dance with them because I´m so horrible. Trying to learn, but it´s going to take a while.

This past Saturday I went back to Catarina, but this time down to the water, with my friends Julie and Jocelyn, and our Nica friend Carelia. It was beautiful (pictures on facebook)! It´s a giant crater filled with the bluest, cleanest, clearest water I´ve ever seen. We swam from 9am until 4pm with about an hour break to eat lunch.
I ironed my jeans for the first (and probably not the last) time in my life. I swore I´d never do it, but there´s really no other way to soften up your clothes once you take them off the clothes line. I suppose I should buy some fabric softener.
In other news, Daniel Ortega is well on his way to changing the constitution so he can run for re-election in 2011. Think Honduras and/or Venezuela. Nothing crazy has happened yet, luckily. We´ll see. But don´t worry, if anything were to ever happen, Peace Corps definitely has everything under control!

I think there is a tarantula lurking in my bedroom. I only got a quick glimpse of it the other day and haven´t seen it since. My mosquito net is my best friend.

Pictures

It´s much easier to post pictures on facebook, so here they are!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2225381&id=1613510&l=41f82fe19e

Back from Volunteer Visit

I co-taught my first class a week ago this past Monday. It was pouring rain so we practically had to yell to hear anything. Then it got really dark so we had to wait around while a student ran around trying to find a light bulb to plug in so they could see the board. It was interesting to say the least.

Our youth group is still going strong. They decided to change the song for our project to ¨Billie Jean¨ after looking at the words to ¨Thriller.¨ Last week we gave a charla on self-esteem which went over really well. I think the kids really enjoyed it- they don´t get to talk about stuff like that very often, or ever. Tomorrow at our meeting we´re going to make a small fire outside the library (which is completely normal and acceptable here) to roast marshmallows and make s´mores. Should be fun.

There was a cockroach INSIDE my mosquito net the other night. I hadn´t been tucking it under my mattress because of the way it was configured around my bed, but it´s definitely tucked in now. Luckily my family fumigates the room with cockroach killer so it fell out of my bed and onto the floor, providing the perfect opportunity to kill it, while I was pacing around the room trying to figure out what to do. Aside from it brushing against my arm, everything was ok!

Saturday I went on a mini-pilgrimage with my host mom and several other town members touting the Virgin Mary and accompanied by a band, a car with loud speakers and faux fireworks. We walked for at least an hour down a never-ending dirt road, eventually arriving at the Virgin Mary´s resting spot. Apparently a lot of people were staying there overnight for a mass the next morning, but my host mom and I walked (and later hitchhiked) back to town.

These past few days I was on my Volunteer Visit in Rivas. The point is to stay with a volunteer to get a feel for their lives and sites. We went to the beach when I got there on Sunday. It was beautiful and very relaxing. We were busy the past few days with her community English classes and her classes at the school. We had to haul water from a well one day because there wasn´t any to shower with and we´d just come back from the gym (yes, there was a gym!). There also wasn´t any gas to cook with so our meals were interesting. Fun trip though! Learned a lot and had fun. Back in my training town now. We´re all climbing the Masaya Volcano on Saturday!

It´s Already Almost October

So I finally have time to sit down and update my blog. I´d been planning to go to the Cyber (Internet Cafe) for a while to do this but our medical and technical sessions kept running late and it would be 6pm and time to get home for dinner before I knew it. A lot has happened since last time I wrote (I have my journal in front of me so I´ll remember it all). First, I ate pizza. It had ham on it which was not ideal, but it was pizza. It was also with the priest of the Catholic Church, which apparently is normal. My mom and two of her friends were there, too. My family took me to a beautiful place called Mirador de Catarina. It is a tourist trap of the Masaya area overlooking a perfectly blue lake which is overshadowed by the Masaya Volcano. You have to take a horse down a steep and windy path through the jungle to get to the water...one day I hope to do it. And hike up the (active) volcano! I have pictures but this computer isn´t recognizing my camera so I´ll have to try again on a different one another time. I ate a lot of what is considered ¨street food¨ that day (fruit drinks/frescos in a blastic bag made with unpurified water and food in a plastic bag). If I were going to get sick here, it would have been after that food, but I was fine!

I have also started co-planning with my Nicaraguan counterpart. She is great--very interested in working together and learning from each other which will make the process run smoothly. We were supposed to teach together for the first time last Monday but she forgot until that day that she had a doctor´s appointment in Managua that afternoon...typical. We´ll teach together for the first time next Monday.
I´ve only had 2 cockroach experiences so far. I consider myself lucky considering my friend, Julie, has had 6 in the past 3 days! My host mom killed the first one and the other one disappeared before I could get to it. It´s very comforting sleeping under a mosquito net!

I´m slowly becomming a professional clothes washer. It´s true, we wash clothes here against a rigged stone slab. The clothes lines in our patio (backyard) connect all of my family´s fruit trees and provide the ants with a perfect means of transportation. There are usually ants all over my dry, clean clothes when I take them off the line. Things could be worse!

My training group and I started our youth group at the school. We had a big turnout of 17 people at the first meeting, which dwindled down to 12 at the second meeting. They decided that they want our big project to be singing ¨Thriller¨ by Michael Jackson in English and learning the dance. Should be fun. We´re going to try to film it at the end of our 8 weeks with the group and put it up on YouTube. There´s a huge Michael Jackson following down here.

So I´ve been busy and it feels like time is flying by. I can´t believe October is next week already. I have Spanish class from 8-12 and 1-3 most every day. Co-teaching will start to be every Monday afternoon. Youth group meetings will be an hour on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Co-planning is once a week for at least an hour. And then we have tons of medical and technical info sessions (charlas)...usually Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. I´ve been managing to run about 5 days a week which has been great. The food is still really good. I´ve been eating lots of rice, beans, tortillas, eggs (I´ve retrained myself to like them), cheese and plantains. The only downside is that they use a ton of salt and a lot of things are fried. I usually watch a telenovela with my family from 7-8 every night and am in bed by 9. I generally wake up a couple times to roosters during the night (they do NOT just crow at dawn) before getting up at 6am to run. I still feel really safe here and am having a great time!

Still Alive

Today is the first day in almost a week I´ve actually had time to get to the Internet Cafe...we´ve been really busy. Monday and Tuesday the other volunteers and I, and our language teacher/facilitator, went to the local school to meet the director, the English teacher and observe some English classes. We ended up actually teaching in the classes which was a bit of a surprise, but really fun. It´s amazing how little English the teachers know and how much help is needed. We´ve had about 6 hours of Spanish class per day, intermixed with trips to nearby towns and Managua for PC business (vaccines, medical info sessions, etc.). The other volunteers in my town and I have been meeting at 6:15am to go for a run in the mornings...definitely makes the cold shower more enjoyable.

On Thursday and Friday we went to NicaTESOL which is an annual conference for English teachers in Nicaragua. We went to a bunch of sessions on topics, one of which was about activities that require little to no materials. Yesterday when we arrived back to our training town from Managua it was raining like I´ve never seen rain before. I ran about 5 blocks from the bus stop to my house in about 6 inches of dirty water. My host mom then told me that there´s an earlier bus stop that is much closer to the house. Next time!

I´m still eating lots of rice and beans and fresh fruit, and an increasing amount of eggs and chicken. I love being forced to speak and practice my Spanish and am looking forward to 10 more weeks of improvement in my language skills. Hopefully I´ll be able to upload some pictures soon!

In My Training Town

Arrived safely to my training town, about 30km south of Managua. My host family is very nice and patient with me. I'm their 8th volunteer, so they definitely know what they're doing. I have a mom, grandma and sister who is 17 years old. My town is small, but the infrastructure is better than I was expecting. There is running water most all the time except for after 6pm. We have electricity, a tv, radio, house phone and car (though some of those are luxuries specific to my host family). I also have my own bedroom and bathroom. Peace Corps is definitely taking care of us. Everything is very well planned our and organized. There are three other volunteers in my town who are all great and really fun. I have to get back home for lunch. Lots of rice and beans and fresh fruit, I love it!

Arrived Safely

I'm safely in Nicaragua and borrowing a friend's computer so I don't have long. We left the hotel in D.C. this morning at 2am, arrived at the airport at 2:30am and sat around until 4am when it opened and they would check us in. Flight to Miami was uneventful, but the flight from Miami to Managua was delayed by about 4 hours because of rain in Miami. Finally got here around 4pm local time...all of our bags are in Haiti. Should be here tomorrow. Luckily I packed everything I need for a few days in my carry-on. Everyone is really, really nice and fun and I'm having a good time so far...though I do miss everyone at home. Talk soon...

Last day in the US

I finally finished my 40 hours of Rosetta Stone! And to celebrate, I'm going to start packing.

Leaving for staging in D.C. tomorrow. Then off to Nicaragua on Wednesday morning! More to come next time I find a computer...

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog.

I will do my best over the next 2+ years to keep everyone updated on my adventures with the Peace Corps in Nicaragua. If nothing else, I hope it will help me keep in touch with everyone while I'm away.

More to come as my departure date nears. 33 days...