the beautiful sights of Masatepe

9-26-07

Today’s very exciting topic is the plants of Nicaragua. In the US, I had a Guide to the Flora of South Carolina, and I wish I had a similar book about Nicaragua. Especially now because it’s the rainy season, and everything is in full bloom. Right now, it rains here every day. Some days it is a constant downpour, other days it’s sunny for a long time and then the whole sky falls down in about fifteen minutes. Either way, we are guaranteed rain, and my clothes are guaranteed to take forever to dry. Yesterday, I washed a lot of my laundry and got very lucky with some serious sun during the earlier part of the day, so my clothes dried in record time. While this may seem like a minor inconvenience, clothes that take 4-plus days to dry (no exaggeration) come out smelling much worse than they did before they were washed. Here are my clothes hanging in our garden today. We hang clothes there when it’s sunny.

This is our lavandero, which is where the laundry is done. My family has a washing machine, which is very rare here. The sinks to the left of the washing machine are for washing clothes by hand. The two side sinks have bottoms that are concrete washboards. Yesterday when I did my laundry, I did it here, with my bare hands. It was sort of amazing, but I’m pretty sure that’s only because it was the first time. The central sink is full of water because there’s no water between 7:15 and 2:30. Therefore we fill all available containers before 7:15 and use the water for flushing the toilet or washing dishes or laundry.

Now, I said this post was about flowers, and it will be. Right now. Because it is the rainy season, stuff’s in bloom. Here are a couple of my favorites, with more available at Picasa. All of these are in my house somewhere, on my street, or on the next street over. And yes, I looked like an idiot taking pictures of the flowers. One of my neighbors came home for lunch and had a good laugh at my expense. I take it in stride.

Finally, Friday we find out where we are going for our volunteer visit. The volunteer visit is our chance to see what volunteers lives are actually like. For 4 days, we travel somewhere in Nicaragua to a volunteer’s site and shadow them. We get to ask them a million questions, and evaluate the environment to try to think about what we might prefer in a site for ourselves. Then, two weeks from now, we have the site fair, when we learn about the sites that are available. Below is a map of Nicaragua.

All we know right now is that we can be placed in Chinandega, Leon, Matagalpa, Boaco, or Chontales. Chinandega is HOT but is on the beach. Leon is not quite as HOT, but is a little farther from the beach. Matagalpa is mountains, and Chontales is cowboy country. I think Boaco is something in the middle, but is generally more campo from what I understand. There is also one site in the department of Rivas, which I think would also be pretty amazing. Today we met a volunteer who actually lives on the Isla de Ometepe. During the site fair, we also find out the sizes of the towns, and more about what the work there would actually entail.

P.S. Andrew, I thought long and hard before publishing that comment, mister. Also, Briana, it´s just that we need more trees. Also, I live in a town that makes furniture, so they´ve cut down any trees that have furniture value. As of right now, it´s raining so much that our greatest concern is that the seeds will drown before they have a chance to germinate We even have them covered with big banana leaves, and they are still getting soaked.