Site Visit!

The anticipation is over!  I finally found out what my site is and got a chance to go visit for a few days last week. 

My site is La Concordia, in the department of Jinotega.  It is located about 4 hours (by bus) north of the capital and is surrounded by mountains.  The location is beautiful.  The town’s smaller than my town in Honduras, but I think I’m going to like the size because I’ll be better able to meet people and get to know the community.  It’s located 45 minutes away from 2 different major cities, so I’ll have to travel there to go to the bank and if I need to shop for anything other than the basics. 

During the site visit, I stayed with the family who I’m going to be living with when I arrive at the end of November.  The family was really friendly and really concerned with keeping me constantly entertained.  The 15-year-old daughter brought me around to see the town on the first day I was there.  I got a chance to introduce myself to the teachers at the main school and the one teacher at the small, rural, multi-grade school where I’m going to be teaching. (1 teacher for first through sixth grade!)  My counterparts (the principal and vice principal of the school) also brought me to the alcaldia (town hall), health center, and the delegación (board of education) to introduce me to everyone.  It was a little overwhelming meeting so many people, but they all seem excited to meet me.  La Concordia has had volunteers in the past, but they have all been from the health sector.  I’m going to be the first environment volunteer, so I’ll be the first one to work in the schools.

Overall, it was a great experience.  My living situation is going to be pretty great.  My host mom is a good cook, I’m going to have my own separate space away from the rest of the family, and did I mention they have wireless internet?!  After getting back from the visit, I’m feeling ready to be done with training and get started.  All of the other trainees in my group seem very happy with their sites as well.  We’re just starting week 9 of training out of 11.  Countdown to swearing-in: 18 days!

Encounters with (not so) small animals

(I wrote this one a couple weeks ago, just haven´t  had a chance to post it)

Flashback to a little over a year ago…..I was living in Honduras, in training, with a family of all women—2 middle aged sisters, 2 teenage girls, and the abuelita.  One afternoon, we all were sitting watching telenovelas, as per usual.  All of a sudden, Yeisling, one of the girls, points towards my feet and screams.  I look down and there’s a small black snake, maybe a foot long, slithering right next to my feet.  Of course, everyone’s first reaction is to jump up on the furniture.  Abuelita jumps up and books it into the kitchen, away from the snake.  For maybe 10 seconds we’re all on top of the couches and chairs, looking at each other, wondering what’s going to happen next.  Then Sonya jumps into action, grabs the machete (because, of course, every Honduran family always has a machete handy) and hacks the snake to pieces.  We throw the pieces outside, clean up the blood with a mop and a little Asistin, and immediately started laughing together about how hilarious the situation was.

Flash forward to about 2 weeks ago… After showering and getting dressed, I walk into the dining room to sit down to my normal breakfast here in Nicaragua—fruit, bread, and coffee.  I hear something moving in the corner of the room and I see a teeny tiny mouse trying to get into a bag of garbage hanging next to the table.  I call Doña Manuelita over to tell her what I saw.  She immediately reacts, takes off her shoe, and tries to hit the mouse, which at this point has hidden underneath the tablecloth.  Unsuccessful in her attempt to squish the tiny mouse, she takes my food out of the room, closes the door to the dining room and runs across the street.  She comes back dragging a cat by a rope tied around its neck, which belongs to her sister, Doña Esperanza, who lives across the street.  She puts the cat in the dining room and closes the door behind it and says, “Ok, Sarah, the cat is going to kill it.  No problem.”

Flash forward a little bit more to this morning…My alarm is set for 7:00, but I wake up at 5, and there’s something moving in my room.  Now, I lived in a tiny cabin by a lake this summer at camp, and I am no stranger to hearing mice running around while I’m trying to sleep.  However, the animal I heard in my room this morning, running on top of the dresser, on top of my mosquito net, and rustling around in plastic bags was NOT small.  After laying in bed, super freaked out, for a couple of minutes, I decided that the animal was too big to ignore.  Without turning on the light (because obviously I don’t want to see what it looks like), I run to the door, barefoot, and walk over to the door of the bedroom where my host mom and sisters (the twins) sleep.  I knock a couple of times before I hear them wake up.  “Creo que hay un animal in mi cuarto,” I tell them. (“I think there’s an animal in my room.”)  Doña Manuelita runs out of her room with a sheet wrapped around her, walks over to my room, opens the door and turns on the light.  At this point, I don’t have my glasses on or my contacts in, because I ran out of the room as fast as I could and without turning on the lights.  But, even in my half-blind, 5 a.m. haze, I saw a large, brown moving object on top of my mosquitero (mosquito net).  “Alla está!” we scream.  (“There it is!”)  Thus begins the hour-long ordeal of trying to catch and kill the rat that is in my room. 

The twins are now awake, and Doña Manuelita screams for her teenage grandson to come help us.  “Concho!  Hay un ratón en el cuarto de Sarita!”  (“There’s a mouse in Sarah’s room!”)  Somehow what he hears, having just been suddenly woken up is, “Hay un viejo con carretón en el cuarto de Sarita!” (“There’s an old man with a cart in Sarah’s room!”)  That gave us a good laugh, because he was super confused.  Being a too-cool-for-school teenage boy, he came over and had a look inside the room before he went right back to bed.  The twins are in the room with Doña Manuelita trying to catch the “ratón,” but it definitely was a rat, not a mouse.  At one point, I go inside the room because they can’t find where it went, and I see it climbing on the wall next to the bed that has all my clothes stacked on it.  We start taking furniture and my belongings out of the room to make it easier to find the rat.  Eventually, after some screaming and chasing we got it stuck behind the dresser.  Did I mention the lights kept going out?  That made the whole thing more interesting because the lights were going on and off and we had to use flashlights to try to locate the rat.  So, now that the rat is stuck behind the dresser, they aren’t sure what to do with it.  The shoe-hitting method isn’t going to work because they can’t fit their hand behind the dresser.  The broom doesn’t fit behind there either.  Doña Manuelita suggests the machete, and then runs to find it, but doesn’t know where it is.  They decide to call Pablo, who is a friend of the family who helps Doña Manuelita out by doing things around the house and running errands for her.  They use my phone to call him, and Doña Manuelita tells him to hurry quick and come over, without saying why.  He shows up 5 minutes later, on his motorcycle.  At this point, Doña Manuelita has found the machete, and her, Pablo, and one of the twins are in the room trying to get the rat.  It comes out from behind the dresser, and after about 10 more minutes of chasing, yelling, and looking under beds with a flashlight, an almost-dead rat runs out of the room and into the living room, where María Gabriela and I are waiting.  Pablo hacks at it a couple times with the machete for good luck and kicks it out towards the back patio.  We mop up the blood and clean up my room, putting all of my stuff back in it.  By now, it’s 6 a.m. and it’s been an hour of craziness.  The explanation that I was given, by multiple family members and friends, is that our neighbor has a big storage area where they keep corn and beans and things from their finca.  The rat must have entered from a hole near in the roof and fallen down into the room.  They also said the rat was “dundo” (dumb) because they family next door uses rat poison.   What a morning!

       

Halfway There!

We’ve reached the halfway point of our 11 weeks of training.  I realized I haven’t posted in awhile, sorry! 

After the third week of training ended, my group stopped having Spanish classes.  Since we are the advanced group, they only give us three weeks of class.  After that, we have to fill up our schedules with other activities and study on our own.  This frees up a Spanish teacher to work with some of the lower groups who need more help improving their Spanish level.  So, what do I do now?  It’s been weird not having class, but we’ve been doing a good job staying busy.

 We’re required to teach one class per week in the elementary school.  Since I like to teach and have tons of time now that there’s no Spanish class, I’ve been teaching two days per week, on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.  It’s a sixth grade class of about 25 students, and the teacher is younger and really receptive to the kinds of activities that I’m doing.  Once we get to our sites, we’ll be co-planning and co-teaching, but right now I’m just teaching science on my own.  The teacher stays in the room with me and helps me out with explaining difficult concepts and classroom management.  The kids are always excited to do “dinámicas,” which are games and activities that get them up and moving.  I try to include at least one in each class so that they have a little motivation and can get up and move around.  I’ve taught 5 classes.  So far I’ve taught about renewable and non-renewable energy, potential/kinetic/mechanical energy, ways to save electricity/avoid accidents with electricity, and the nitrogen and water cycles.  I’ve had to do a lot of work brushing up on my science knowledge and reviewing the vocabulary, but everything’s going pretty well.  By the end of training I’ll have spent a lot of time in the classroom and should be more than ready to start working in schools once I get to my site. 

We’ve also been working with the “Club de Lectores” (Reader’s Club) at the library, which is a group of about 15 elementary school-aged kids.  There is a story and drawing contest that is going on now, and the theme is “Salvando el Medio Ambiente” (Saving the Environment).  We’ve been reading environment-themed books to the kids and helping them work on their stories.  Before I left the states, I bought “El Lórax” to bring with me here.  It was a struggle to read it with all of the crazy words and rhyming (it’s hard to read in English, and 10 times harder in Spanish!), but the kids loved it.  This week we read a book that was about things that kids can do to help the environment and then we went out to the park and collected garbage.  In a matter of 6 or 7 minutes, we collected 2 huge sacks full of garbage.  We saved the plastic bottles and we are going to use them to make crafts.  So far, the kids made maracas and we used some of them for bowling pins (with a coconut as a bowling ball!).  We plan on cutting the tops off the bottles and planting seeds with the kids to use up the rest of the bottles.

Last week, I went on my volunteer visit.  The point of the volunteer visit is to send us out on our own to navigate the public transportation and visit a new place in Nicaragua to live with a volunteer for a few days.  By living with a volunteer, we get a chance to ask a million questions about their lives and their work and get to participate in their activities and programs at their site.  Susana and I went to the department of Matagalpa for our visit.  We hung out with the environment volunteer that lives there and went to the rural school where he works, checked out the gardens that he’s made, helped build a stove for a family, and worked in his neighbor’s garden.  It was definitely a hands-on experience, and we got a chance to participate in his activities.  Some of the highlights for me were going to the rural school where he works and building the stove.  The school only had 2 classrooms, both with multi-grade classes.  The one that the volunteer works with is grades 3-6, which are the grades that environment volunteers work with (the younger kids don’t have science in their curriculum).  There were probably about 6 kids in each grade, and it was cool to see the volunteer and teacher work together to teach kids of all different levels at the same time.  The other cool thing we did was work on the stove project.  It’s a country-wide project to build improved wood stoves that families use to cook their food.  Volunteers write grants and receive money to build the stoves.  It is an improved model that uses less wood and has a chimney to prevent the family from inhaling lots of smoke while they’re cooking.  The stoves are made out of brick and a mixture of mud, horse poo, small pieces of dry grass, and water combined with crushed up aloe plants.  All of the stuff gets mixed up and used like cement.  It was a really cool project, and Susana and I learned a lot.  I’m not sure if it’s something I’ll do in my site when I’m a volunteer, but who knows!

I guess that’s a pretty good update for now.  Some other highlights:

• I’ve been going to the gym with my host sisters…quite the experience (I’ll try to write a post about it soon)
•   I went to Jinotepe (the city where my host sisters go to college) to go out for pizza for their birthday.
•   We went out to the club in Masaya with Susana’s host brother, Fran.
• I went on a hike with my friend Luis down to the Laguna de Apoyo.  It was a super difficult hike, especially on the way back up, but we rocked it.  We went swimming in the laguna when we got down there, and it was absolutely beautiful.
• Our garden is growing!  Well, some of it.  A couple of squashes, all of our radishes, and the tomatoes in our seed bed are doing well.  We only ended up with one cucumber plant, so thats kind of sad.

Also- we’ll be finding out our sites on Thursday, the 25^th.  They’re really keeping us in the dark and not even giving us a list of the sites where they’re sending us.  I’ll make sure to post when I find out where I’ll be living for the next 2 years!

Sorry for the lack of communication, but I promise I’m doing fine!

Hasta luego!

Highlights of the first 2 weeks of training

Hola everyone!  I know it’s been awhile since my last blog post.  Here are some highlights of the first 2 weeks of training.

• ·      Independence Day and the Anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto:  Both the 14^th and 15^th of September are holidays here in Nicaragua.  Normally, there are parades on the 14^th and then the schools hold events on the 15^th.  However, recently there have been quite a few small earthquakes and some activity at the volcanoes, so the president made the decision to wait and have the parades on the 15^th.  I’m not sure how waiting one day made much of a difference, but whatever.  On the 14^th the four of us went with Doña Elsa, Susana’s host mom to a restaurant to have some beers and dance.  There was a live band, and we danced all night, getting home at 1:30 in the morning.  The next morning we woke up early to go to the parade.  All of the schools in town participated.  Every student marched with their school.  Some students wore sashes to show that they have academic excellence, and others played in the band or danced with batons.  After the parade, they presented awards to some of the students.  Then, each school did a performance in front of the park.  I stayed for the whole thing, even though it was really hard to see due to the HUGE crowd.
• ·      Spanish class:  Not too much to report here.  We’ve been having class the past 2 weeks and we only have one week left with our teacher.  This week we’re switching over to the schedule we’ll be having after she leaves so we can get used to doing our new activities.  I’m going to be teaching science in a 6^th grade classroom in town 2 days per week and then doing some programming at the library as well.  We also have to set up our school garden next weekend and work to maintain that over the rest of our time here.  Tuesday is my first day of teaching.  I’m teaching a 90-minute block on renewable and non-renewable energy sources.
• ·      Block Party!:  Friday night, one of the political candidates (town elections are in November) threw a concert at the end of my street.  The band was really good, and I spent a couple of hours listening to the music and dancing with the twins and a younger cousin who’s 8 or 9.  It’s hilarious how young kids here learn how to dance so early!
• ·      Huertos:  On Saturday, we had an all-day training on how to make gardens.  We went to an agricultural training center and had a training session about how to make a garden, what pests we should look out for, and how to make organic pesticides.  Then we spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon trying it out.  We were in small groups with a facilitator to help show us what to do.  We started with a patch of tall grass and had to use a machete to clear it out, then pickaxes and rakes to prepare the soil.  We made a fence by sewing empty sacks together and propping them up on sticks stuck in the ground.  We planted a row of radishes, a row of cucumbers, and some squash.  We also created a seedbed to plant tomatoes and bell peppers.  In order to have good soil, we had to mix compost, lime, and ash into the dirt.  We also had to sift all of the dirt so that the seeds were in very fine soil.  Robi, Tim, Chelsea, and I worked with our APCD María Antonia.  It was a really long day, but now I feel somewhat confident in starting our school garden.
• ·      La Hípica:  Sunday was the hípica in Masaya, the nearest big city to my site.  Susana, Chabela, Susana’s host brother Fran, Chabela’s host sister Lisbeth, and I went into Masaya in the morning.  We walked through the market, hung out in the park, and had lunch.  After lunch, we lined up on the side of the road to watch the parade.  It was a parade of tons of people on horseback.  There were men, women, and kids on all different types and sizes of horses.  It was crazy because there were lots of people and lots of drinking going on, even the people on horseback were drinking beers during the parade.  It was also raining pretty heavily the whole time, but we were only slightly annoyed by it.  After watching an hour of horses go by, the highlights would have to be all of the people drinking beer while riding their horses, the random guy riding a bull instead of a horse, picking out all of the attractive guys that rode by, and seeing all the cute little kids.  We left before the parade ended, mostly because after awhile all of the horses started to look the same.

Sorry for the lack of pictures on here and on Facebook!  My new camera causes my computer to freak out every time I try to upload photos.  The camera came with software that I’m supposed to download, so I think that may be the problem.  However, I need to have my computer connected to the internet in order to do that, so I’m not sure when that will happen.  However, I promise you I have been taking pictures and eventually I will find a way to get them up here!

Also- I said this when I was in Honduras, but I’m going to apologize up front for my writing.  Because I’ve been focusing so much on my Spanish and using it all the time, my writing and speaking in English is not what it used to be.  I am normally a pretty good writer, I swear J

And training begins...

I’m not sure when I’ll get to post this because I don’t think I’ll be having much internet access over the next 10 weeks, if any at all.  When I was in Honduras, I tried to keep a journal, but I wasn’t really able to make a habit of writing things down everyday, so it was short-lived.  It’s definitely easier for me to type things, so I figure I’ll just write a bunch of blog posts as I go and then post them as soon as I have internet access.  I apologize in advance for these posts being so long.  I hope someone will take the time to read them, but if not at least I will have these notes and thoughts for myself to document my time here.

September 9, 2012

Today is my first full day with my host family.  Yesterday, after a long charla (training session) on living with host families in the morning (which was kind of boring for me, since I’ve already lived with two), we split up into different buses/trucks and headed out to our training towns. 

I’ve noticed many differences between the way Peace Corps training is done in Honduras and here.  In Honduras, our whole group of 15 trainees was living in the same town, Las Cañadas.  We had Spanish class in small groups most mornings and had technical training sessions together in the afternoons.  Almost all of our training took place in Las Cañadas, with a few trips into the office in Tegucigalpa on Fridays.  Here in Nicaragua, both projects are living in different departments (states).  All of the environment volunteers are living in the department of Masaya, in 4 different towns: Pio XII, Masatepe, San Juan del Oriente, and Niquinohomo.  I am living in Niquinohomo, which is pronounced Knee-key-no-mo.  After dropping off the volunteers who were living in Pio XII, we arrived in Niquinohomo to drop off Riana, Chabe, Susana, and me.  My host family has hosted like 30 volunteers in the past, so they are very experienced as a Peace Corps training host family. 

The family’s house is very pretty.  The property is completely fenced in.  It has a beautiful front yard with tropical plants and flowers, and a front patio with tables, chairs, and rocking chairs.  In the front of the house there is a big, open sitting area, and the whole house has really high ceilings.  My bedroom is right in front of the house, off of the large sitting area.  There are 2 beds, one full size and one twin bed.  I have plenty of space to unpack my stuff, and I have most of my stuff laid out on the twin bed.  The rest of the house has a bunch of rooms off of a main hallway that goes towards the back yard, including a few bedrooms and the kitchen/dining room.  The house is very open, and is closed up in the back by a large gate rather than by a door.  This allows for better air circulation because it is HOT.  The back yard has a cooking area, the bathroom and shower, and an area for washing clothes. 

When I arrived at my house, I put my stuff down in my room and got a little tour of where everything was, including my special gallons of bottled water kept in the refrigerator.  Then I sat down out on the front patio with my host sister and chatted a little bit before having lunch.  Host families, in general, always give you way too much food.  I had a full plate of rice, fried yucca, chicken, French fries, and salad.  I ate as much as I could, but there was no way I was going to be able to finish it all.  After lunch, I spent some time in my room unpacking before heading to Spanish class at 1:00.

I’m still working out all of the names of the people who I live with, but so far I’ve met my host mom, Doña Manuelita, her older daughter Patricia, another daughter who has an adorable 2-year-old son named Diego, and the twins who are in their early 20’s.  I’m still working on the names.  I was definitely told them initially, but it’s hard to remember everything when you’re meeting so many people all at once.

At 1, the twins, Diego, and I took a mototaxi to Spanish class, which is held at the house where Chabe lives.  It is so different being in an advanced level Spanish class.  It is mostly just conversation-based.  We spent our first class together learning some words and phrases that are unique to Nicaragua, going on a walk to the local pulperia (convenience store), and visiting Riana’s host mom for a chat about the town, her family, and the past volunteers who have lived with her.  I should mention that we did sneak a peek at the list that our bus driver had to see our exact Spanish levels, and I somehow managed to get Advanced-Mid, which is the same level I had when I left Honduras.  This really surprised me, but I’m glad I was able to pick up the language again so quickly once I arrived here, because I haven’t really spoken much Spanish since January.

After class, I hung out in the house.  Living with a host family is a little awkward sometimes because there is only so much you can talk about, so there is a lot of awkward silence.  I hung out and chatted with people, and ran out to the store with one of the twins to buy some stuff.  I found out that my host mom and sisters run a kind of small-town fast food business out in front of our house.  I’m not sure if it’s something they only do on the weekends, or if they do it every night.  They had a table set up out front with food, and people came to buy plates to go.  I had dinner, hung out around the house, and had a nice conversation with a friend of the family who came over to visit.  It’s definitely an advantage to have the ability to have a real conversation with someone.  The whole family keeps complimenting me on my Spanish.  I remember how difficult it was when I moved in with my host family in Honduras, and it has definitely been easier to make an initial connection with this family.  I ended up heading into my room around 8:30 or so.  I started reading a book on the history of Nicaragua, so I read a little.  Despite the radio playing, Diego crying, and all of the other noise of a Saturday night, I couldn’t keep my eyes open and fell asleep early.

This morning I got out of bed around 8:30, which was fabulous.  In all of our days at the hotel during orientation we always had to be up around 6 to be ready to leave at 7, so sleeping late was such a treat.  I took a cool bucket bath, which was refreshing because of the heat, and had a great breakfast of bread, instant coffee (ok, that part wasn’t that great), and a big bowl of fruit salad with pineapple, watermelon, and banana.  I spent the morning playing and coloring with Diego and playing Uno with the twins out on the front patio.  This afternoon I’m hoping to get to walk around town a little and see everything. 

I just realized that I forgot to mention the rain, which started yesterday evening and didn’t end until probably about 9 or 10 this morning.  It’s the beginning of the rainy season here, so I’m sure this is only a taste of what is still to come weather-wise.  I hear October is the rainiest month of the year. 

So, that’s all for now.  I’ll be spending the rest of the day today with my host family and then I have Spanish class Monday through Wednesday and other training on Thursday with the entire group.  We have Friday and Saturday off this week because of Dia de Independencia (Independence Day), so we will get to celebrate with our host families and see how the holiday is celebrated here.  Spanish classes are going to be from 8 to 12 and then in the afternoons from 1 to 3 or 4.  As an advanced class, we are only going to be receiving 3 weeks of class, and after that we’re going to be doing projects in the community.  I’ve been trying to hold my own in a class that includes native speakers, and it’s definitely going to push me to learn a lot.  The fact that I’m doing all of this for the second time definitely has made me feel more comfortable and excited about everything as opposed to nervous and anxious.  Of course, I do have some anxieties, including being successful in an advanced Spanish class and acquiring the skills and knowledge about the environment that some of my peers already have because many of them majored in environmental studies or environmental science in college.  More updates to come!

---One of the other girls in my training site has internet at her house, so looks like I could have semi-regular access.  I'll have a cell phone in a few weeks so that I can coordinate times to skype with people via text message!