6 months down, only 21 to go!

So in about a week I’ll have been in country for 6 months, which is totally crazy to think about. I usually can’t believe that I’ve been here for that long and how fast the time has gone. On the flip side, when I think about how long I’ve already been here, and the fact that I still have almost TWO YEARS LEFT, I about lose my mind. I know everyone says the years will go by in a flash, but it’s hard to imagine that I’m still only beginning.
The big news here (and by here I mean nobody around me is even slightly concerned, but everyone stateside is freaking out) is the presidential kidnapping and military coup in Honduras. As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m still alive and well. Nothing like a little bit of political unrest to keep things interesting. I know it seems like a really big deal in the media, but there’s actually not too much to worry about. Although this is the first military coup in the region since 1993, the president was replaced by a member of parliament, the Honduran people are almost overwhelming in support of the coup, and the military has made no attempt to become more involved politically. Of course this is totally illegal, the international community is livid and imposing some pretty severe sanctions until the president is reinstated, ect, Honduras is still relatively stable. And the unrest definitely hasn’t spilled over to Nicaragua, although many people are saying that Honduras just did what Nicaragua should have done with Daniel Ortega ages ago.
The other big news is that the mayor of Managua, the capital, was found dead the other week of a gunshot wound to the chest. The authorities ruled it suicide. Uh huh, sure. Sounds fishy to me, and a lot of other people, but that’s the way things go here.
Life in Ocotal is definitely good, I’m loving my community. It’s big enough so that there’s plenty to do (and by plenty I mean that there’s about three restaurants that I go to) but small enough to be totally manageable. I went down to Granada, one of the big tourist cities, so I wouldn’t be the only one getting drunk and talking about how great America is. Went to a barbeque complete with ribs, potato salad, cole slaw, and sweet tea. After almost 6 months of rice and beans, it was a feast for the ages. Granada is right on Lake Nicaragua, so one of the days we took boat tour of all the islands in the lake near the city. We got to go through a gorgeous nature preserve, gawk at rich people’s houses and, my personal favorite, see spider monkeys. Because we came bearing gifts in the form of avocados, they jumped right on the boat and made themselves right at home. Not a bad way to spend the 4th.
Work is … getting there. My second counterpart is now no longer working at the health center, and because of budget cuts they’re not going to be replacing her. So that’s awesome. I once again find myself without a counterpart. I know that neither of their departures have had anything to do with me, but still, it makes a girl nervous. The big news is a few weeks ago I had my big debut on the local tv station, which awesomely enough happened to coincide with the first time in my service that I completely bombed a charla. Everyone has those charlas that just don’t go as planned, (some completely true examples from people in my group : 1. She had literally everyone at the health center get up and walk out in the middle, even the man with no legs. 2. A woman got up in the middle of it, walked to the front of the room, told the volunteer that nobody could understand her anyway, and proceeded to give the rest of the charla herself. During the woman’s version of the charla she listed coconut milk as a form of birth control. 3. While teaching sex ed to a classroom of students, she asked all the boys and all the girls to draw/write about their perfect partner. Each girl got up and described a different boy in the class. The boys just drew a picture of a vagina. ) and my first disastrous one just happened to be on live television.
Now lemme give you a little background on how this happened. A guy in town who has a program on the local tv network about HIV/AIDS approached me about doing a show with him, which I agreed to. Because my Spanish is still a little iffy at times, and because I tend to freak out when on camera, I had us practice the whole thing from start to finish about a million times. So the big day comes for me to dazzle the audience, and even though I’m super nervous I feel really well prepared. So Carlos, the guy doing the show with me, shows up about 35 minutes late to the station. Which is 5 minutes after the show was supposed to start. Which actually doesn’t matter because we can’t start filming until the rain slows down. (Tin roof = really loud in the rain. Hopefully that’s at least a small indication of the professionalism of the local media.) So we’re about to start, and Carlos comes up to me and says “so this will work a whole lot better if we’re sitting down…” Uh oh, don’t like where this is going. “Yeah, I think it will be better if instead of doing the material we have planned, if we just sit at the table and I ask you questions and you answer them. “ So after trying to explain why I didn’t want to do that for a couple of minutes, I came to the scary realization that I was going to have to go along with it. “Soooo, what type of questions are you going to ask me?” He rattled off a couple questions that essentially were the meat of what we were going to do anyway. So I had him go over the questions with me a couple more times so I could be sure I had responses prepared. Ok, I think I can do this. Cue live tv. It starts off good enough, “what is HIV/AIDS?” “Ok, tell us how it’s transmitted.” Cool, I’m hanging in there. Carlos: “Could you talk more about how it’s transmitted through breast milk?” Dude, not one of the pre-approved questions.
Me:“Ummm, the virus is in the breast milk.”
Carlos: “And how is HIV/AIDS prevented?” Cool, now we’re back on track.
Me: “Through abstinence, fidelity, and condom use.”
Carlos: “And we all know you know about condom use (insert creepy laugh and him rubbing my leg under the table), so could you tell us more about abstinence and fidelity?”
Me: “ummm, don’t have sex, don’t cheat on your partner.”
Carlos: “Mumble mumble bunch of Spanish that I don’t understand.”
Me: Crap, I wonder what would happen if I just got up and walked out right now…“What a great question, I’d love to talk about the HIV test….”
Carlos: “Tell me more about your experience working with children living with HIV.”
Me: Ummmm, seeing as how i don’t have any. “Well, if a pregnant woman is HIV positive and takes antiretroviral drugs, has a cesarean birth, and doesn’t breast feed, she has very little chance of passing the virus to her child. So let me talk more about taking the HIV test…”
Carlos: “Mumble mumble, jovenes, mumble, realizar, mumble mumble.”
Me: “You’re going to have to repeat that question for me.”
Carlos: “Mumble mumble, jovenes, mumble, realizar, mumble mumble.”
Me: Honestly, who lets a mumbler have his own television show? “Once more, slower, and enunciate.”
Carlos: “ Why do you think that young people have such fear to take the HIV test, and what can you say to them?”
Me: Seriously, this is soooo not what we talked about. “Ummm, it’s easy. Just do it.”
Carlos: “Ok, that’s all we have time for tonight, now I’m going to play a video about addiction…”
Yep, all on live television. And in Spanish. Stellar. And the ‘addiction’ video turned out to be a documentary about the last days of Jeffery Dahmer. In English.
In completely unrelated news, I’m also working on putting in a vegetable garden in the Casa Materna, or the pregnant women’s house. The ministry of health doesn’t have to resources to provide anything other than rice and beans for the women there and you can imagine how bad it is to have pregnant women only eating rice and beans for a week to a month before they give birth. I’ve got everything ready to go except the dirt, which is especially frustrating when there’s dirt as far as the eye can see, just not the right type. I thought I was in luck on Thursday when Scarleth, the director of the Casa Materna, called me up and said someone had brought dirt there. “Jessie, this guy I asked about dirt just showed up with it. He’s gonna bring two full truckloads of it. You just need to come up here to pay him.” “Scarleth, you know that Peace Corps doesn’t have money for these things.” “I know, I just thought that since you care so much about the women you could just pay for it. It’s only C$500. I’m sure you have plenty of extra money.” ($500 is about $25. Of course I have tons of extra money lying around. It’s not like I make less than a teacher’s salary here or anything. I could pay for it, but it would just mean that I couldn’t eat for 10 days afterwards.)
It’s definitely a challenge being a gringo but living on a peace corps budget down here. People are so used to seeing rich Americans on tv and in movies, as well as seeing volunteer groups that come down and just essentially give things away, that lots of people can’t really accept that I don’t have piles of cash in my bedroom saved up just for them. Or that I can’t just call up some magic person in the states to give me more if I run out. I was explaining to my host family the other day that I eat soy meat because I can’t really afford real meat (they think the soy meat thing is the most strange/repulsive thing they’ve ever heard of. They make me wash the pans twice after I cook with it. I’ve also been told once that it will give me cancer.) and their uncle just gave me a blank stare and said, “well can’t you just ask for more money?” They still believe that my salary is in dollars, not cordobas, and am just lying about being broke.
So that’s about all this time around, I head off tomorrow morning for a week of language classes, thank god. It’ll be really nice to ask someone a question about Spanish and not get the response of, I don’t know, that’s just how it is. Not that I could explain English any better. Until next time…