Home for the holidays!

The last month of school was pretty uneventful, as expected. Classes ended about two weeks earlier than they were supposed to. The teachers turned their grades in on a Friday and the kids were still supposed to show up to school the following Monday. With nothing to do but clean the classrooms and the grounds and fool around things were pretty chaotic so the last week of school ended up being just a day. The teachers got sick of the kids showing up with nothing to do so they gave up pretending there was still school and told everyone to just go home.

A bunch of my Peace Corps friends and I got together for Thanksgiving dinner. It was a gigantic feast with all the usual Thanksgiving food (mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, etc.) except we had chicken instead of turkey. The next day I went to my favorite Laguna de Apoyo with my friends Julie and Jocelyn and later that afternoon we went to a bodybuilding competition near my town where some friends from my gym were competing.

The first week of December I worked at an Intensive English Summer Camp for 80 high school students hosted by the U.S. Embassy with some Nicaraguan teachers and 4 other PCVs. We went to the Embassy to plan everything out the day before. It was really unorganized and overwhelming and we were all really stressed out about it. For the first couple days we were doing a lot of improvising and making lots of changes as we went but we got things down pretty quickly and it all started running much smoother. The mornings were English classes with the Nicaraguan teachers teaching and the PCVs helping out. The afternoons were culture classes with the PCVs. We each picked a holiday to teach them about and the another miscellaneous culture topic. I taught the kids about Thanksgiving and we made Pilgrim and Indian hats with construction paper which they continued to wear for the rest of the week. Jocelyn talked about Christmas and had them make paper snowflakes and wreaths. Julie talked about the 4th of July and taught them the national anthem. Jess and Liz taught them about Martin Luther King day and had them make their own "I have a dream" mini-speeches. The week was full of typical camp games and movies and the last night we had a talent show. We also went on a field trip to a national TV station and newspaper company. The kids were great and so much fun to work with. It really showed us PCVs that there actually are Nicaraguan students who care and are interested and motivated, which was really refreshing because the majority of our high school students are nothing like that.

I came home on the 20th. I got in at around 1am and left the next morning at 7am to visit my grandparents. They're doing really well and it was really nice to see them. I got back home on Christmas Eve and spent a white Christmas (it snowed!) with my family. The day after Christmas we had to put my dog, Goober, to sleep. He was 12 1/2 years old and was pretty sick. It was horrible but was probably best for him. Now we're in Colorado skiing for a week. I'll be home for a few days before I go back to Nicaragua on the 7th.