I HAVE A CELL PHONE!!

I almost forgot, I am now the proud owner of a brand new Nica cell phone.  Incoming calls are free for me, so please drop me a line if you feel like it.  You can get calling cards pretty cheap, or download skype and call through the internet.  Caller ID doesn’t work for international calls, so if I miss your call I can’t call you back.  Just try again a little later and I’ll probably pick up.  The number is: 011-505-655-7396.

30 Days in the Hole

I just hit the one month mark for training, and not a day too soon.  I’ve been hanging in there, but training has honestly been tough for me.  A lot of people have trouble with cultural adjustment, homesickness, the language barrier, etc; for me the real challenge has been a serious lack of independence and freedom.  Let me preface this by saying that if I could change anything about the training process I honestly wouldn’t.  I’ve been nothing but completely blown away by the training I’m receiving (especially the language instruction) as well as my host family and the Nicaraguan people in general.  That being said, I’m so ready for it to be over.  Between language and technical training, the peace corps basically controls a large portion of my time.  Aside from that, when I do have free time I can’t really go anywhere by myself, it’s not safe for us to be out after dark, and I always have to tell my host family where I am going.  For somewhere who is used to basically doing whatever I want whenever I want, this has been a seriously tough adjustment.  Just having to face the reality that I’m not able to take care of myself quite yet is a pretty bitter pill to swallow for me.  It’s especially frustrating because we’re not really doing anything project-wise yet.  We have charlas given by other volunteers twice a week about their projects and how to run effective projects once we begin our service.  I feel like I’m chomping at the bit to get started at my site, but instead I’m stuck sitting in class everyday.  Sometimes I feel more like I’m at summer camp than actually trying to live and work in another country.  I know that this is all temporary and it’s totally normal for trainees to totally hate training, but it doesn’t make it any easier while I’m in the middle of it.  I’m just trying to plow through it for another two months so I can start my service and reclaim ownership of my life.

                Now that I’ve seriously conned everyone into thinking that I’m sitting in the middle of nowhere totally hating my life, I’m going to stop being a Debbie Downer and tell ya’ll what I’ve been up to.  My life is honestly pretty normal here.  I’m in language class with the other three trainees in my town (whom I love!) from 8 until 3 every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday and from 8 until 12 every Wednesday.  At times I get super freaked out that my language it never going to progress to the level where I can easily communicate, but honestly in the last month I’ve learned more Spanish than I think I did in four years in high school.  Wednesday afternoon and Fridays we travel by microbus to a different city in the area to receive our technical instruction and charlas.  The microbuses consist of really ghetto vans that are usually crammed with people (the other day we got 24 people in one.  No joke.)that for the low low rate of 5 Cordobas (or about 25 cents) will drive you to the other cities in the area.  The charlas on Wednesday and Friday are with the whole group, so it’s also a really good time for all 20 of us to get together and catch up.  (If anyone’s paying really close attention you’ll notice that we’ve already had one early termination, or ET.  Tim, who was becoming one of my favorites, ET’d after the first week. Moment of silence for my fallen comrade.)  Fridays after class we’ll usually go out dinner and some delicious Flor de Caña, which is some of the best  rum I’ve ever tasted, and dirt cheap cause it’s made right here in beautiful Nicaragua. The rest of the afternoons I normally read a lot, chill with the fam, go for walks around the town, and of course catch the latest happenings in my telenovelas, which I am rapidly becoming addicted to. 

I also spend about two afternoons a week with my absolutely kickass grupo de jovenes (youth group).  Our main project here, which is more like a project with training wheels, is to form a groupo de jovenes with the other trainees in my training town and then do a project for the community with them.  We also play games and give charlas to the jovenes and just basically hang out.  We’ve got about nine girls in our groupo, ranging in age from 11 to 17.  They’ve decided to do a community newspaper for their project, which we are all totally stoked about.  Last week we went around to local business trying to sell ad space for the newspaper.  We took them to the local ciber (internet café) and helped them type up a professional letter explaining the project.  We even got the local mayor’s office to give their stamp of approval for it.  Literally.  The mayor read it over, didn’t say a word, signed his name, and then pulled out an ENORMOUS rubber stamp and stamped it.  Even the jovenes thought it was really strange and hilarious.  All we wanted from him was money.  I was really freaked out that we would have trouble raising the 100 Cords, give or take, that we need to print the finished project, but our jovenes came through big-time and raised 400 Cordobas in about two hours.  That’s officially more money than I make in an entire week.  We also have to give heath-related charlas to the groupo de jovenes, in addition to giving charlas in the school and Centro de Salud (health center).  Since we really wanted the jovenes to dictate the content of the charlas, we did an activity with them to help them pick out what topics they wanted the charlas to cover.  After much discussion, our jovenes voted by an overwhelming majority that they wanted the first charla to be about…….. abortion.  Sweet.  Now I get to figure out how to teach a bunch of 14-year-olds about abortion… in Spanish.  Awesome.  They also really wanted to write an article for the community newspaper about abortion, but we had to veto that idea. 

(A side note on the abortion issue:  Nicaragua has received a lot of flack lately because of recent legislation passed banning all forms of abortion, even in cases of incest and rape or when the mother’s life is in danger.  Most of the countries in the area have very strict abortion policies, and the majority of the populations generally support it.  Regardless of my own personal beliefs about the issue, this is perhaps why the groupo de jovenes is so interested and curious about it.  It’s generally not discussed, especially not in a responsible and educational environment, which leads to a lot of myths and confusion.  The problem of illegal abortion is also a huge issue.  Nicaraguan attitudes about sex in general are very different than in the states, which is why sexual and reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, unplanned pregnancy, and STD prevention will compromise a large portion of my work as a health volunteer.  Nicaragua has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the entire western hemisphere, with 40% of the nation’s babies being born to women under the age of 20.)

 Even though I have a daily routine that seems totally normal, every once in a while I’ll get smacked in the face with something so totally ridiculous that I’ll be instantly reminded of how what seems normal now would have been completely strange a month ago.  Perhaps my favorite example was when I was woken up at 4:30am by a brass band having a full-on parade through the street outside of my window.  I was pissed.  After I woke up a little bit more I collapsed into laughter at the sheer incredulity of the fact that that seemed almost as normal as my normal alarm clock (which here consists of a family of roosters that live next door).  The fact that it seems totally normal to wake up by rooster every day is kind of a strange thing in itself.  Another one of my favorites are the inappropriate t-shirts that are worn everywhere.  Some notable favorites include: I heart Eskimos, #1 daughter (worn by my friend’s little brother), Women’s Empowerment Retreat 2006: Helping You Find the Light Within (worn by an old man), Proud to be an American (worn in true American style by a man about 70 pounds overweight), and my personal favorite, Everyone Loves a Drunk Girl (spotted on a 14-year-old girl on the microbus).  Sometimes I’m tempted to clue people in to what their shirts say, but so far I’ve been content just to admire from afar. 

Another thing that seems totally normal that probably shouldn’t: I have parasites.  After having diarrhea about ten times a day for almost a week straight I kinda figured something was up.  Rest assured, I’ve seen a doctor and the parasite problem is getting taken care of.  In 5-7 days I should be completely cured of the critters.  And here I was thinking it was just the gallopinto I’ve been eating every single day.  Gallopinto is the national food that’s normally eaten with breakfast and dinner and consists of rice with beans, not to be confused with arroz y frijoles, which is rice and beans and normally eaten with lunch.  Don’t ever try to claim that gallopinto and arroz y frijoles are at all similar, because you will be instantly reminded that they are two very different foods.  I personally am a member of team gallopinto.  Based on the fact that I normally eat rice and beans at least twice a day, you’ve probably realized that the food is nothing to write home about.  So I won’t.

That’s really all that’s been going on with me right now.  The big excitement happens tomorrow, when I leave for my volunteer visit.  We’ve all been paired up with a different health volunteer, and we get to travel to their site and spend four days living with them and shadowing them at work to get a better idea of what our service will be like.  Thank god.  Hopefully the break from training will help me begin to regain the sanity that has slowly eroded away during training.  I’ll be going up to the north of the country in the mountains to one of the department capitals.  (There are 17 departments in the country and the department capital is usually a pretty big city.)  I’m staying with a married couple whom I’ve already met and love, so I’m really looking forward to this visit.  Because they’re a couple, another trainee from my group is coming with me, which means I get a travel buddy.  It should be pretty easy to get to their house because they’re in a department capital, as opposed to some trainees who have to take boats, rickshaws, and/or mules to reach their volunteers.  Finding anything in Nicaragua is a little bit of a challenge as real addresses don’t exist.  Instead, they base the addresses on proximity to a local landmark.  For instance: from the catholic church, three blocks south next to the pink house.  Sometimes these are actual landmarks, but often times addresses can sound a little more like this: two blocks towards the lake from where that really big accident with the bus happened in the 1990’s.  This is not a joke.  My volunteers’ sounds something like this: one and a half blocks north of the house of Pablo, who is dead.  The house with the two gringos with a big black dog.  And I have no idea how this system works, but it does.

Sorry this post is so long, I’ve been trying to limit my trips to the ciber, so I had a lot of info to pack into this.  Hope everyone is surviving the recession, I can say with confidence that I definitely picked the right time to flee the country.  Wish me luck on my travels this week!