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.