Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

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 ...

First off - Lottie I deleted your comment and I am SO SOR RY. I couldn´t read the pop up box in Spanish, but I got your comment and I´m glad to know you´re checking it out. I’m a bit behind here with the updates, so this blog will be about last Thursday and all the exciting stuff that happened, and in a coup le of days, I’ll post about my site visit, w hich was very interesting and helpful. So, when I got here, I could talk for maybe about 30 seconds before I couldn’t talk anymore. Last Thursday, I gave a 45 minute charla IN SPANISH. The secret is to have the kids do as much as humanly possible. We talked a little bit about organic and inorganic garbage, and then we played a game with two teams where the kids had to come up to the front of the room and say whether the example I pulled out of the bag was organic or inorganic garbage. It was a lot of fun, and I feel like all of our charlas w ent really well. A bit of background. Each of us is currently assigned to a...