I have not posted for a long time and I want to thank my friends who emailed and asked about my well being. I was so embarrassed to respond with my lame excuses and now I am finally blogging.
I have gotten a lot busier... my Spanish is a lot better so I am able to spend more time in the community just chatting. My work in the schools has taken a little different direction so now I am working with high school kids too. I know my way around Nicaragua a little better so now I am taking off on weekends to see some of the other parts of the country. And, to add to these lame excuses, we have power failures and internet signal fails on a frequent basis.
But, to be truthful, I also downloaded 4 seasons of Breaking Bad from Itunes and later 2 seasons of 6 Feet Under and watching those has not helped.
Enough already. Last night I went with my counterpart to a Nicaraguan wedding ( boda) out in the country. We took her family's camioneta ( pickup) and it was quite a ride. First we had to jump start the truck and then we went to buy diesel ( which you buy from the same house that sells milk/cheese products so you can imagine the variety of smells when you walk by their gate) which they have in a big steel drum and they dip into with your container ( quart, gallon whatever you are buying this time) and then they pour it into your vehicle. It was dirt roads all the way and it was about a one hour trip. Lots of dust in our wake and in our vehicle should we have the bad luck to come upon another vehicle. We only saw one other truck and several motorcycles, a couple head of cattle and a couple bicycles. It was pretty remote.
But, the boda was another story. Apparently everyone one in the comarca is expected to attend so there must have been 3 or 4 hundred people there. The groom's family provides food and drink for all of them and later the obligatory cake. It was not a "sit down" dinner but they did have some tables and chairs set up. They also had a bunch of plastic chairs set up around the dance floor. Everything was outside, of course, and this is the dry season so there is no chance of rain. They obviously had watered the whole place down very thoroughly as there was no dust from the hundreds of people dancing to the blasting music under the giant screen showing the music videos. There was the typical lighting and the bride in her white dress ( which I watched sweep across the open dirt for several hours) so I am sure it was filthy by the end. There were the usual older folks sitting around in little groups watching the activities. All in all, not too unlike what we do. The only different part is that they somehow can put this all together and have a wonderful time knowing that their homes have dirt floors, they cook over open fires fueled by wood, the kids will likely not get further than 6th grade in school, etc. This all seems so hard for me to understand.
Anyhow , we left around 10:30 and brought a couple from the wedding back with us to Malpaisillo. They rode in the back of the pickup the whole way and when we got home, they climbed out in their wedding clothes with their little overnight gym bag and walked a few blocks to the mercado where they were going to sleep for the night . No, there is no mo or ho tel, they would have just curled up together in a corner to wait for the first bus in the morining which is about 5:30 am. Ohhhh, to be young again.
Otherwise, last week I had a great meeting with 2 ladies from the community and one of the teachers from the Catholic school to plan a vivero ( nursery) project for the kids at the Catholic school. One of my goals with Peace Corps is education about the environment and to do that thru teaching the kids how to collect seeds, extract and dry them, and plant a tree nursery in the schools. I was sort of paralyzed about how to get started when I learned that the mother of one of the boys has a "commercial" vivero at her house. Anyhow it was crazy for me to be teaching about viveros when we had an expert in our midst. Then, later when chatting with the lady who sells me my newspaper, I discovered that she and her husband ( who has been dead many years) were part of the Sandinista agricultural movement back in the early 80s, starting and running agricultural cooperatives, and that they used to do viveros with the retired people in the communities to plant trees in their communities. ( she later explained to me that many of the trees they planted were wiped out by hurricane Mitch- that is so typical of the luck of this country....one step forward, two steps back) So, I got these women together with a teacher and we planned the whole thing, with me doing very little. I have decided that my primary goal with the Peace Corps in to teach the teachers how to use the resources they already have, rather than start new projects which likely will dissolve when I leave.
Incidentally, the woman who has the commercial vivero ( Sandra) just got back from 21 days in England. She went there as a representative of her local cooperative which grows sesame and she was hosted in England by the company they grow for. I don't know all the details, but it just another one of those contradictions..she lives in house with a dirt floor, they cook over wood, their sewage and gray water goes into a hole in the ground, etc. and they fly to England for 21 days of meetings. It just blows my mind.
Incidentally, as I write this , a horse just galloped by my front door.
One other random incident....I got robbed again; its been about a month now so I have given up hope of getting my Iphone back. Anyhow, I am partly to blame for this one. I have a basket on the back of my bike, which I got originally to carry plastic bottles in when I was hot on the plastic bottle recycling kick. ( as a side light here....there is a man in town who collects them and recycles so now I take my bottles to him. He used to be a teacher but he is of the wrong political party so he lost his job teaching when the politics changed) I have a plastic bag hanging on my front gate and my neighbors are putting their bottles in there for me to take to him. Also, a kid showed up the other day at my door with a big bag of bottles so I gave him an apple. A few hours later 2 kids showed up with bags of bottles and I gave them each 1/2 an apple. As luck would have it, a couple hours later 4 kids showed up with bottles and I gave them a bag of peanuts to share. I was REALLY scared about what would come next but no one has been back since. Either they didn't like my peanuts or they got distracted by something else. But, maybe I made a little progress on bottle recycling here)
Back to the robbery: So, I was riding my bike home one night, just before dark, with my mochilla ( back pack) in my basket behind me and a kid came up beside me on his bike, deftly leaned over and snatched up my mochilla and took off into the semi darkness. At first , I thought it was a joke and that it was a kid I knew just teasing me. But, no, it was for real. I chased him for a while and I think he was really shocked when he turned back to look and saw grandma bearing down on him cause he really took off then. We got into some darker parts of the street so I turned back.
I went to our local police to report it ( with the help of my counterpart) and they loaded us into their pickup and took us for a hair raising ride around the area looking for the kid. Of course I did not see his face as he swept by me with my mochilla so I could not identified him even if we had found a suspect ( unless he was actually using my phone at the time.)
Anyhow, I did not get my phone back but another kid did find my mochilla tossed into a basuero ( open trash pit) and he returned it to the police and then his mother came to my house and told me about it so I gave him a reward. My wallet ( sans the 50 cordobas which must have been a deep disappointment to the thief since they all think we gringos carry wads of money around with us) was there along with my appointment book, journal, copy of my passport so I was pleased to get all that back. What has been so rewarding about this story is that people all over town, including those who I have never spoken too or even noticed, have commented to me about my robbery and expressed their sorrow for it. A random girl in one of my high school classes the other day even knew that it was an Iphone that had been stolen....so I guess that makes me a legend of some sort around here for a few days at least.
In closing, recently I have had the pleasure of meeting an adventuous Italilan couple who are "homesteading" on about 7 hectares outside of town ( they are currently living in tents while they build their house with stones ,etc from the property) and have agreed to take my 2 cats when I leave. I also spent some quality time with a delightful young lady from Austin, Texas who was down here for a month getting some "public health" experience for the master's in Nursing she is working on at U. of Texas. She commented to me that she was amazed and impressed by how hard the nurses down ehre work. She is also a flight attendant ( asafata in Spanish) with Frontier Airlines and lived in Denver a while. Next, she is going to Barcelona for a year on a Rotary International scholarship so no one can ever use lack of resources as an excuse for getting stuck in their town. She knows how to get out t here and LIVE !! She will be a great nurse or diplomat or whatever she decides to do. I tried to sell the Peace Corps to her and all the benefits she could later reap with Peace Corps on her resume.....so, who knows? She would be a great representative of the US, should she decide to join up.
That's it for now. I did get approval to come home in Sept. for our family reunion in Port Royal, PA so that was great news.
Love to all...count your blessings.
Pat
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| A cacao fruit containing the seeds we are going to plant to grow more trees. This what they look like before they are roasted and turn chocolate colored. These are the hands of the older woman who, with her deceased husband, were true fighters in the Sandinista rebellion. |
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| My attempt at artistic photo of rooftops out the window of a hostal in Leon. |
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| An intersection in Leon |
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| I met a family of 4 traveling thru the Americas roundtrip from Ontario on two bikes with two kids for a year. |
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| Another view of the bikes. The family was across the street having ice cream and letting the kids play on the playground equipment. |
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| Javier trying to find a cool sleeping position. |
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| This is a Hicaral tree...the fruit sprout out of the bark. |
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| A little dance class at the public primary school. |
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| This sad little bird calls out " Buenas" all day in his little nasal bird sounding voice to people who walk by. |
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| Lisa , a young PC vol who joined me for brunch at El Convento Hotel in Leon. I was meeting my Spanish teacher afterwards. She is from Maine and is here teaching English with PC. |
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| a typical little house |
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| another typical scene |
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| A group of kids off to school. |
