Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

This is the Jesus purisima we had at my house in Mérida before I left for Christmas. Well, Christmas has come and gone, and here's a brief recap of my experiences. I went to Managua and actually managed to get a lot done at the office. Then went Masatepe for Christmas with my host family. In the middle there, I managed to go to the Laguna de Apoyo with some other volunteers, which was a relaxing opportunity to catch up and cook a lot. A-A and Cris came up with a menu and we all contributed money and had some absolutely DELICIOUS food, gringo style. Not to diss the Nica food, I love it as much as the next girl, but none of us have houses yet, and for at least a few of us, one of the things we look forward to the most is cooking again. We had Mexican style beans and mashed potatoes with a vegetable medley salad for dinner. For breakfast, there was french toast, eggs, orange juice, and banana milkshakes. For lunch pasta primavera. We also made coconut cajeta, which means yummy Nicarag...

As my last post described a Catholic ritual, let me make it clear that there are a number of other sects present here in my little metropolis as well. There is a very active Evangelical church on our main street, a very modern center for the Jehovah's Witnesses, a tiny Presbyterian church, and a church in progress for the local Mennonite families. While I haven't seen a church here, I have also heard that there are Baptists, and there was quite a large Baptist church back in Masatepe. Back to the Mennonites for a second. I have only seen a few of them, but they are definitely a presence here. Unlike in Belize, where I saw quite a few Mennonites, all the ones I have seen here are native Nicaraguans. In Belize, they were clearly Caucasian immigrants from other places. While the religion was obviously brought here by European immigrants, it is interesting that it has taken hold enough here to have native Nicaraguan converts. Right now I don't know much about the histor...

November 16th is my volunteer birthday, and as of yesterday I have been a volunteer for one month! Now down to business... One of the things I have totally managed to not mention so far is La Purisima, not because I don't feel like it's important, but because everyone else is writing about it, and well, there have been more pressing things going on. However, I feel it's time to shed a little light on how Mérida celebrates the Virgin. I was also reminded of my oversite on the 14th by the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe in our yard. Some background. La Purisima is 9 days of celebrating the Virgin Mary. Here it began each day at 4 AM with fireworks every morning, and these are the most amazing fireworks because they sound like bombs going off and you can feel the vibrations from them. Really, it was amazing. The first time it happened I thought someone was bombing Mérida. It reminded me of the night the tree fell in my front yard and made my whole house shake. I...

Let me begin with the most recent work related thing. As in, I have actually begun to work!! In reality I have been working. I am translating a charla I gave the other volunteers called The Teacher's Toolbox into Spanish for future use, I've been sort of editting our guía, and I've also been meeting everyone possible, listening, learning, and most futilely looking for a place to live. However, while I have been doing all that, I have also been noticing that my sister Tereza is really involved in things here in the community. The latest example is that there is a German NGO here that everyone just refers to as Project Aleman, and they are starting a comedor infantil project, which roughly translates to "kid eatery." In our town there is a child-development center that is run by the Ministry of Education (MINED) that is actually quite nice (see photo), called the CICO (pronounced see-co). The CICO is like a headstart center in the US, and as you can see, it...

I´m getting settled here, slowly but surely. And to cement my new involvement in the community, I attended the preK graduation this past week. First, all the graduates line up at one end of town with their opposite sex parents, and they walk in a grand procession through the whole town, ending at the school. Then they get to walk under these cool palm frond arches one at a time while their name is called. Then they´re are a bunch of speeches and each kid gets to walk up on stage and receive a certificate. There are also awards for best conduct, etc. Finally, there was some folkloric dancing, two to be exact. Here´s a photo of one of them. The kids are my niece and nephew with my current host family. She also won the best student in preK award. And a wild life update. This gigantic spider was in my letrine the other night and about scared the crap out of me since I didn´t see it on the door until after I had already entered and sat. After my...

These are pictures from my Thanksgiving dinner, where I received delicious US style food. Including real pecan pie, since our host was from Georgia!! PC here has a really cool program where people can go to PC staff´s houses for Thanksgiving or we can go to an embassy family. And I was very fortunate to be invited to have dinner with a public relations person from the embassy. I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on, since my last post I have been to the All Volunteer Conference in Managua, and moved to my site permanently. In the work department, I have attended one parent meeting so far, and have a list of the 17 potential teachers I will work with, and my job for the next few months is to meet all of these people in their various villages. A number of them live on the side of the island that is extremely difficult to get to, and therefore, I will be learning the transportation system of the island rather intimately. On top of that, I am trying to find a house to move into at the...

Some flower pictures I received in the mail from two very special ladies: The card I got while I was in the hospital: And the youth group program with our cool project mentioned in it:

Today I met the US ambassador to Nicaragua, Paul A. Trivelli . I´m sorry, but that was just cool. Maybe my gushing enthusiasm doesn´t suit a woman of my mature 26 years, but I don´t care. That is the second ambassador I´ve had occasion to meet since my Peace Corps experience began, and it was just as amazing the second time as it was the first. In Washington, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the US came to speak to us, and today the US ambassador came and spoke to us about what he sees as the Peace Corp´s role in the US mission here. I asked him a question. It was spectacular. A large number of volunteers will also be having Thanksgiving dinner at his house. I won´t be one of them because it´s usually second year volunteers, but it´s still just cool that that´s an option. I have realized that it´s the unanticipated amazing experiences that are sometimes the best. I also told someone today that the good thing about coming from a small town is that there are so many amazing experie...

I would have given it 5, except for that pesky abdominal pain. I have just been released from my first Nicaraguan hospital stay, and I have to say, while I could have done without being in the hospital entirely, that was by far the nicest hospital stay I could have hoped for. On Thursday night, my agonizing, gut-stabbing, double-over abdominal pain returned, and after keeping me awake all night, reached a shivering, sweating peak Friday morning. Normally, I dislike hospitals (who likes hospitals?), but by this time, my inner monologue was begging for an IV drip. My outer monologue was busy remembering to breathe. I thought I would get a quick dose of drugs, and be returned to home sweet home in Masatepe, but I was mistaken. Three days and three nights later, I finally got out. Turns out I had some sort of horrific bacterial infection, probably salmonella, that had my intestines all inflamed and icky. Yes, that's a technical term. I am much better now, thanks to feats of modern medi...

Today we had the ceremony to wrap up our youth group activities. Each pueblo had to explain their activities with their youth groups, and then the kids needed to say a few words about what they learned, and what they got out of the youth group experience. Then there was cake and soda. We told our kids to come intheir uniforms, and they showed up all cute and pressed. They had their hair done very nicely, and they all looked so good. Each jóven also got a certificate with their name on it saying thanks for working with Peace Corps. Finally, the best part of the day, the restaurante where we always go for these things has a playground, two to be exact. Obviously, the playground provided much diversion both before and after the ceremony. Here´s a picture of our youth group members with their maceteras. All except Jose, who wasn´t there that night. Finally, during our swearing in ceremony, there are two parts, one with just the aspirantes and the families, and one with the ambassado...

Wow, the past week has been um, pretty busy. We finished up our youth group project last Thursday, so hopefully after our week of absence there are still planters hanging in the school. I went to Mérida for the first time, my new site and therefore home. It was quite an adventure, and very different from the life I am living now. It is at least a 2 hour bus ride from Managua to San Jorge, the port city, and that bus ride has proven uneventful both times. Then, you can either take a launch or a ferry to and from the island. I took the ferry the first time, and a launch the second time. Here´s a picture of the launch I took on my way back to Managua. Then, there´s at least 2 hours by bus from Moyogalpa to Altagracia, and then back down to Mérida. I like my site a lot, but it´s pretty out there. I have 4 schools, and I visited 3 of them, one 10K away on a bike, and on that day I discovered I would not be making that trek on a regular basis on a bike, as it is up and down, up and d...

the island of Ometepe!!! I'm not kidding, and I can't believe how lucky I am. I am going to the town of Merida, which has about 1500 people. I am going to be working in 4 schools. I have two counterparts, who I met today. One from the Ministry of Education, and one who works with MARENA, which is the environmental ministry. Tomorrow I am visiting my site for a week, so when I get back I will be spending a lot of money to upload A LOT of cool pictures. It's 2 hours by bus from Managua, 1 hour on a ferry, and then 2 more hours on a bus. It's remote, but lovely. There's also a biological field/research/education station there. Here's the webpage , and there's a Hacienda associated with them in Merida, and on their webpage there's a sort of map with a big arrow pointing at my house. There's also a tiny islet off the coast at Merida that I can kayak to apparently, and I might get to ride a horse to one of my schools, and the island has petroglyphs, honey...

Hello world! My laptop is no longer just a doorstop, it is also an ipod charger. I´m working on that situation, which also means working on how to shrink my picture quality to make them suitable for upload. However, in the meantime, you´ll just have to make due with my rapier wit. This has been one of those weeks that is both a challenge and a triumph. Kind of like climbing a mountain I guess. This week I have completed the following activities: 1. Had interview with my boss about potential site placement. We discussed what my preferences are, what skills I have to offer, etc. I am very excited about the possibilities, but won´t find out my site until next Wednesday. I will post this information as soon as I have it because it´s like finding out if I got into college or something. 2. Went to Managua for medical stuff. Along with the tropical flowers, my allergies have blossomed here. It could also be that it is one of the two wettest months of the year, and we are having a do...

A power surge fried my laptop two days ago, so there will probably be a short hiatus while I figure out how to solve this little problem. This would have been difficult in South Carolina. Here it´s a bit more of a challenge. It also doesn´t help that I´m mostly broke. I´ll keep you posted. Wish me luck!

I am more than halfway through my homestay portion of training, and that’s a little terrifying because I feel like I still have so much to learn, about my service and about Spanish, heaven help me. However, it’s also kind of exciting because I’m getting excited about finding out my site, and getting started with meeting the people in my new community. If one of the purposes of training is to increase confidence, sometimes I feel like I’m moving forward, and sometimes I’m going backwards. To demonstrate this, I have two examples. Last Thursday we had our youth group meeting in which we needed to select a project and set up a tentative timeline. We succeeded, but it was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had here so far. We were all tired from our volunteer visits, and the kids all had great ideas and wanted to express them (simultaneously), and it felt like the situation was just totally out of hand. It’s especially frustrating because in English it would hav...

Yesterday I saw my first volcano. Near to my training town is Volcán Masaya, and there’s a museum with information about tectonic plates and the geology and biology of the volcano. Then, you drive up to the volcano, literally the edge of the crater. It’s not active in the sense that there’s no lava spurting out of it, but there are many warnings about rock expulsions (you should hide under your car), and they ask that you back into your parking spot to aid evacuation in case of emergency. Flying rocks are less of a risk I think than the sulfurous gas that spews out of it constantly. This g as does not smell good, and actually burns when you breathe it in. Did this stop us? Not at all because we are fearless Peace Corps volunteers, or something. At the edge of the volcano, there’s a stair path thingie that leads up to a giant cross and some good views. We climbed up there, took two pictures, and then climbed back down because the smoke makes you cough and such. ...

First of all, the purpose of the site visit is to see what a volunteer’s actual day-to-day life is like, and get a feel for what we might want in a site. I visited El Sauce from Sunday to Wednesday. El Sauce (pronounced sow-seh) is in the department of León. All the volunteers from León got us together on Sunday and we all went to the beach, which was a lot of fun. It was the first time I’d been here in Nicaragua , and we headed to the Pacific coast. The surf here is a lot bigger than what I’m used to on the East Coast of the US, but it was a calm day so swimming was entirely possible. I still got slammed a number of times, which was kind of fun in its own way. There is also a very nice outcropping of rock there for some reason, surrounded by big sandy beach, and I walked out there and checked out the scenery. Below is a picture of Las Penitas, and there are more at Picasa. After that we went back to El Sauce. El Sauce has more people than Masatepe, but Masatepe ...