Sorry I haven’t updated in forever, I’ve been crazy busy trying to finish up with training. So much has happened that I don’t really have the time or energy to go over all of it here, but I’ll do my best to give you the highlights.
HIV/AIDS Week in Chinandega
Basically only two notable things happened here.
1. I gave my first charla to a group of men. This can be especially difficult for women because of the really strong machismo culture here, and it definitely didn’t help that it was an HIV/AIDS charla, complete with condom demonstration. Fortunately, the group of firefighters I had was extremely professional and respectful, so the charla went off really well. I definitely felt like they paid attention and were relaxed and comfortable enough to have a pretty open and honest discussion without ever really crossing the line of appropriateness. If only every group of men would be like this…
2. We went to the beach. Awesome.
Site Assignment – AKA the biggest deal ever
So we were all given a big packet with descriptions of all 20 sites that we will be placed in to look over and rank which ones we wanted. Then Peace Corps did something downright inhumane: made us wait over three weeks to find out who was going where. Pure evil. This was especially torturous for me because I did the one thing they told us not to do: get our hearts set on one site. So of course I spent the next three weeks obsessing over Ocotal, the site I wanted. By the time site assignment day got here, I was sweating bullets. I mean, I would have been fine in just about any site, but I was really nervous I wouldn’t get Ocotal and would be really upset and cry in front of everybody and just embarrass myself. I had even written an essay for Pilar, our project director, in Spanish and English entitled 8 reasons why Ocotal needs me. Obnoxious, check. Effective, check. I got Ocotal, thank you sweet baby Jesus!
Site Visit
So the week after site assignments we got to go on our site visits. I was actually really nervous because I had made such a huge deal about Ocotal, that if I finally got there and didn’t really like it I would feel like a total asshole. Thankfully, it was everything I wanted and more. It’s a fairly large site in the northern highlands with just under 40,000 people. It’s the capital of the department Nueva Segovia, which is famous for gorgeous mountains, coffee growers, and being the site of much of the Sandinista/Contra war battles. The city is located in a valley about 15 km from the Honduran border. Like most of Nicaragua, its main economy is agriculture, but because of the close proximity to Honduras and its location right off the Pan-American Highway, it does get more trade coming through than most places in the north. It is also one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest countries in the Americas, so I can rest assured that there will be no shortage of work for me to do. Because of its size, Ocotal has lots of ‘luxuries’ that other places don’t, including: two grocery stores, three ice cream shops, a hospital (that I hopefully will never have to do to), two discos (one of which has karaoke, dangerous), swimming pools, one of the prettiest parks in Nicaragua, and a sitemate. My sitemate is a small business volunteer who I think I’m going to get along with really well. She may turn out to be largely responsible for the partial preservation of what little of my sanity still remains.
Brian, the volunteer that I’m replacing in Ocotal, was still in the city for a few days, along with Nikki and two other small business volunteers from her group, so I got a really good introduction to Ocotal. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the visit was a little more play than work. I did get to meet my counterpart, Marbely, who is fantastic. She’s an educator for the health center and one of the people I’ll be working most closely with. I got good introductions to the health center, SILAIS, which is like the health department and only located in departmental capitals, the hospital, and a couple of the smaller health posts in the outlying communities. I also went to a training session organized by one of the local NGOs that had in attendance two teenage mothers, one with her newborn baby, the other about to pop, and one transvestite. Jackpot. I felt right at home. Also, because the volunteer I’m replacing and Nikki my sitemate both had really really low language levels when they first came in, I got about a million complements about how good my Spanish was. This is not something that happens very often for me. I also discovered that the hot dog/ramen noodle stand in the park stays open until after the bars/discos close. I’ll throw out my second thank you sweet baby jesus for that one.
Right now I’m totally pumped because while the rest of my group has another week of language classes and charlas left before swearing-in (which we are all totally over by this point in training), I get to take off tomorrow morning for a full week on Ometepe with my host family. I’m thrilled to be missing classes, but even more thrilled to get to spend so much time such a beautiful place with my host family. They’ve been absolutely wonderful to me over the past three months and I’m going to be so sad to have to leave them behind. I really couldn’t have asked for a better family and I’m eternally grateful for all that they’ve done for me.
Now that training is essentially over for me, I’m kinda just a bundle of emotion. I’m completely thrilled to be done with training and getting back a little bit of freedom and independence in my life. I’m also really ready to begin work, but totally overwhelmed and nervous at the same time. The volunteer I’m replacing didn’t really have any ongoing projects for me to start on, so I just basically have to create my own. It’s a little stressful because it is a bigger site that a lot of other volunteers wanted, so the pressure’s really on for me to do enough to help the people in my community. Leaving my family and the other volunteers is going to be really difficult because we’ve all gotten so close during the last couple months. I guess mixed emotions is a good thing in this circumstance, so I’m just going to try to enjoy the last week of training as much as I can.
By the way, we have a new frontrunner for the ironic t-shirt contest: a really old woman spotted at the market wearing a “Spring Break 2009 Girls Gone Wild” shirt. Priceless.
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