Are we there yet?

I just finished up my sixth week of training, which means I’ve only got five weeks left until swearing-in and the beginning of my service!  My volunteer visit last week was a much needed break from the grind of training.  Me and Hana, another girl in my training group, were both staying with Matt and Jess, so we made the trip up there together.  It was fairly uneventful save for one unusual situation on the bus.  A man sat down in the seat next to me and would not stop staring.  This is a really common occurrence for me and something that I normally tolerate really well, but this dude was way in my in my business.  (I generally can’t walk ten feet without having someone catcalling me.  They’ll yell at me from halfway around the block, make kissing noises, hiss at me, and yell every single English phrase they know, which is my personal favorite because they usually have no idea what they are saying.  Last night I got “hello, good morning, fine, super duper.” If that doesn’t make me want to drop everything and runaway with unidentified vago on the street I don’t know what will.)  At first he was just leaning halfway across the aisle staring, which I can pretty easily ignore.  Then he started telling me the three English phrases he knows, which I won’t repeat here.  Normally when someone does this I’ll answer them in English, and when they can’t understand switch to Spanish and make them feel like a jackass for not being able to speak English.  This is generally really effective, especially if the guy is in front of his friends cause they’ll start harassing him more than I was.  Yeah, that didn’t work here.  I asked him to stop, still didn’t work.  Finally, he made the fatal error and grabbed my arm.  Dude, not a smart move.  I was about to open up a can of whoopass on this asshole when I thought of a better plan.  I got the entire back half of the bus to stare so intently at this guy that he actually had to get up and stand in the front of the bus he felt so uncomfortable.  Oh sweet victory. 

After we arrived in Somoto we spent the afternoon hiking at a really cool canyon in the area.  The ‘we’ I refer to was actually the largest parade of gringos I think the town has ever seen.  There was me, Hana, Matt, and Jess, as well as Nico from my training group and Leigh-Anne, the volunteer he was visiting, another Peace Corps small business volunteer, two backpackers, and two other girls writing for a travel book.  It was nothing short of an entourage.  We hiked for about 20 minutes until we got to the river and then had to boulder our way into the rest of the canyon.  It was absolutely pristine and beautiful.  On our way out I noticed ropes being thrown down the side of the canyon wall next to a Nicaraguan flag stuck in the middle of the cliff.  Apparently, there’s a family that lives above the canyon, and they have to repel down to the river to bathe, wash clothes, and collect water.  Sure enough, a couple of guys started descending down the ropes into the river. I still maintain that you have to be criminally insane to live like that, but I guess I’ve heard of stranger family traditions.   

Monday and Tuesday we shadowed Matt and Jess at work.  Because I was with a married couple, I got to pick and choose what I wanted to do, so I got to see a lot of different working environments.  I got to see the Centro de Salud, or the health center that most communities have, and SILAIS, which is more like the health department and is only in the department capitals.  I also got to visit a Casa Materna with Jess and Leigh-Anne, the other health volunteer living in the area.  Casa Maternas are for pregnant women and are located all over Nicaragua, usually close to a Centro de Salud or hospital.  Because Nicaragua is so rural, it’s not uncommon for a pregnant woman to have to walk 5, 10, 15 hours for an institutionalized birth.  As a result, home births assisted by a partera (a midwife, usually with no training, formal or informal) are really common, which leads to the very high maternal and child morbidity rates in the country.  Casa Maternas give pregnant women a free place to stay for 2-4 weeks before giving birth, so they can avoid home births or walking large distances while in labor.  I also helped give a charla to a youth group in a rural community.  Tuesday afternoon I went out with a group from the University College of Dublin that does work every year in Nicaragua.  We checked out a small health center they had helped build the previous year and talked to some members of the community that the health center served.  I also got to see the finished product of a stove project that another PCV had done in the homes.  It was just a better engineered stove that heated things much faster, burned less wood, and had a chimney to keep the entire house from filling up with smoke.  The cool thing about it was that it was a fairly simple and inexpensive project, yet something that the families used every day and seemed very pleased with the results. We also went to another part of Somoto to begin the scoping process for their project this summer.

The site visit was good because I got to see a good majority of the types of projects that volunteers usually work with.  It was also nice just to have a reminder that training is only a short portion of my service and in a few short weeks I’ll be living independently and actually doing the type of work that I came here to do.  As sad as it is, probably the best part of the site visit was getting to eat semi-american food.  After six weeks of eating whatever my host family serves me that day (my favorite hysterical meal so far is the lunch I get every once and a while consisting of rice, pasta, bread, and plantains.  No joke.) I cannot describe how absolutely glorious that tuna salad sandwich on WHEAT BREAD was.  I almost cried it was so good.

I returned to training with mixed emotions.  I definitely had missed my host family and it was nice to get back to them.  Part of me was super fired up to bust my ass working through the last half of training, but the other part of me felt absolutely tortured to be sitting back in classes after I had seen how good it is on the other side.  I know that training is really important and I honestly wouldn’t change anything about it even if I could, but that doesn’t make it any easier while I’m in the middle of it. At least I’ve been told that the second half of training flies by. 

After returning from our volunteer site visits we got the packet of all the available sites that we will be placed in, and Saturday we got to put down our site preferences.  We find out our sites on March 16^th, and I cannot wait.  They tell you not to get too attached to any site or sites because there’s absolutely no guarantee that you’ll get any of your choices, but I did the typical thing and completely threw that good advice straight out the window.   I have my heart absolutely set on one site.  I was already leaning towards this site before I saw the project descriptions because it’s a larger site in the mountains, but once I saw the projects I would be working on I was hooked.  Seriously, it screams industrial engineer.  I honestly feel fairly confident that I’ll get the site, especially because I can make a better case for it than anyone else, but I’m still terrified that I won’t get it and will have to cry and make a huge scene in front of everyone.  I know that I’ll be fine just about anywhere, but I’m totally keeping my fingers crossed that I get what I want.

On Wednesday I gave my first solo charla in the school.  Imagine having to give an hour-long lesson to a classroom of 50 students ranging in age from 9 to 12.  Ok, now picture doing it in Spanish.  Ummm, yeah, it was definitely a back-up pair of underwear type of day for me.  Thankfully, the stars were aligned that day and I killed it.  I lucked out and got what was probably the best behaved classroom in all of Nicaragua, but I had also put a lot of work into my charla and walked in very well prepared.  The kids enjoyed the lesson and activities, and I definitely felt fairly confident and at ease with my Spanish.  It was nice to have my hard work pay off, but it was even nicer to feel like I was actually doing something.  I don’t believe for a hot second that my water charla is actually going to make any sort of a difference in anyone’s life, but just getting to do something that didn’t involve me sitting in Spanish class or in my technical trainings was a very refreshing change of pace. 

I’m definitely in the home stretch for training, thank god.  Next week is HIV/AIDS week, so we get to stay in Managua and Chinandega for the week.  The following week we find out our site assignments, and then the next week we get to visit our future sites.  Then we’ve got another week of class, and then the last week I get to spend with my host family at the island. (There’s a family farm on the island in the middle of the largest freshwater lake in the Americas.  The island has two volcanoes on it.  If that’s not enough, there’s also apparently another lake inside one of the volcanoes.  Sweet.)  After that we get sworn in as volunteers and then the real adventure begins.  Until next time…

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!

Santa Teresa - Sunday

I’m finishing up my second day in my training site of Santa Teresa.  It’s a small town of about 5,000 people about 40km southwest of Managua and I love it.  The town is awesome and my host family is so amazingly warm and welcoming it kinda almost makes me feel guilty.  My host mom is Thelma, the sweetest and most maternal woman I think I’ve ever met.  She has two sons in their early 30’s, one of whom, Luis, lives in the house with his wife Lizette and their 11 month old daughter Millet.  Thelma also has two daughters, Milagros and Thelma Leonela, 21 and 18, respectively.  It’s a really cool dynamic, because in some ways I feel like a big sister, but in many many more ways I feel as though I’m the tag-along little sister whom they have to explain everything to. 

The house is enormous and pretty with nice tile floors, a killer garden and patio, running water (sometimes), and electricity (sometimes). Holy amenities batman!  My room is about quadruple the size of my one at home, has six beds in it just for me (no joke, six of them), and I share a jack and jill bathroom with Leonela and Milagros.  I swear to god the girls in my house and about half the girls in Santa Teresa dress better than I do.  The standard of living is much lower than that in the states, and there are definitely a lot of families living in undeniable poverty, but the people are rich and generous in spirit.  The best thing about my training site is that I’m in the second lowest language group, not the lowest!!  Where would we all be without the simple victories?

My arrival coincided with the town’s semi-annual commemoration and celebration of their patron saint, you guessed it, Santa Teresa.  Because there’s still a considerable language barrier (nobody in the house speaks more than a few words of English, and my Spanish is downright embarrassing at times), I can’t get a full bio on Santa Teresa, but she was a writer and worked with the poor and seems like a thoroughly cool woman.  The first night Milagros was going to one of the parties that they hold this time of year, and terrified as I was I couldn’t pass up the invitation to join her.  They had a carnival for the little kids and families and a band and dancing for the young people.  And by band I mean a guy singing with a bunch of scantily clad women next to him shaking their asses.  By dancing I mean full on bumping and grinding.  All the while they had a projector playing his music videos, which consisted of him singing, the ladies shaking their asses, and him getting random people around Nicaragua to shake their asses with him.  And here I stand in the middle of it taller than almost everyone else with my blonde hair, blue eyes, chacos, and a polo shirt.  I should have just had gringa tattooed on my forehead.  Just when I thought it was not possible for another human being to look more out of place, in rolls a redheaded white dude in a wheelchair.  I almost fell on the floor laughing.  Nobody else got the joke.   

Thankfully I wasn’t forced to dance on my first night and instead forced conversation on a couple of the town’s youth (whom I’ll be attempting to work with during the three months I’m here), all of whom turned out to be studying industrial engineering.  I swear I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.  Besides providing a much needed opportunity to practice my Spanish, the whole night just made me realize how similar this is to back home.  The places and faces might have changed, but the way people interact with each other is truly universal. 

Sunday was the big fiesta for Santa Teresa.  I started the day out by going to mass with my host mom at the church a stone’s throw away from the house. ( As a little sidebar, this entire experience has felt completely surreal since the initial plane ride to Miami.  I’ve been saying since the beginning that everything is going to hit me all at once and come out in a big crying mess at the most socially inappropriate moment ever.   Gushing tears in the middle of mass.  Check and mate, mission accomplished.  The best part was because my Spanish is so bad I couldn’t really explain to Doña Thelma exactly what was going on, so I’m pretty sure she just thinks I’m either totally weird or really into Jesus. )  All I could figure out in advance about today was that it was going to involve a lot of people riding horses.  Thank god they explained the hand gesture for horse in my pre-training workshops; otherwise I’m pretty sure I would have expected today to bring a bunch of people having sex all over the streets of Santa Teresa.

Once church was over, the rest of the extended came over for lunch and to watch the horses.  And by extended family I mean about nine-hundred relatives.  Once again, there I was standing around awkwardly trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to carry on a conversation with complete strangers.  Unsurprisingly everyone was super nice and friendly and made me feel as at home as humanly possible.  My favorite part of the day was lunch which consisted of the customary rice, beans, chicken, plantains, and… I shit you not, chow mein.  If I knew Chinese Buddha delivered to Nicaragua I would have come here years ago. 

After much anticipation it was finally time for the horses I had heard so much about.  My interpretation of the whole thing, and I’m sure it’s totally skewed, was that every single man woman and child between the ages of 5 and 90 within a 20km radius got dressed up, got drunk, got their horses drunk, danced on the ground and on their horses backs, and had a parade through the streets of Santa Teresa.  And what parade wouldn’t be complete with tons of drunken musicians in the backs of trucks and more women shaking their asses on top of the parade’s one and only float, sponsored by the local beer Toña, all in the glory of Santa Teresa.  That Teresa must have really known how to throw down.  I can’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon.  Tomorrow marks the end of free time and the beginning of six-hour-long language classes.  Not exactly fun, but crucial for my survival in Nica.

Managua!

I can honestly tell you I never thought this day would arrive.  After waiting for approximately 147 years, I finally arrived in Nicaragua Thursday afternoon.  Ladies and gentlemen, round of applause.  The first day was basically a big blur.  Today was a lot better.   We got to meet a bunch of the support staff, all of whom were really awesome.  Nicaragua is considered a high performing post, and after meeting some of the people running the show I can totally understand why.  There are 21 people in my training group, all of whom are health volunteers, six males and 15 females.  Quite a change from my usual 72% male at Georgia Tech. 

 We took our language assessment exam, which will determine what language training group we are in.  We will be split up into five training groups, all in different cities, but all are within close proximity of each other.  Can’t say my language exam went well as I basically couldn’t remember how to conjugate verbs in anything besides present and past tenses.  So glad I pushed back graduation to take those additional Spanish classes.  Oh well. 

We also got to take a tour of Managua, the capital where we’ve been staying, which was awesome.  It ‘s definitely not what most people would describe as devastatingly beautiful, but the natural landscape is absolutely stunning with lakes and mountains.  It was also just really cool to see in person all of these places that hold such a historical significance that I had previously only learned about in a book.  We also got mosquito nets today, so now I can totally pimp out my crib.  I had the lovely experience of my first chloroquine pills for malaria prevention.  I had heard so much about how awful they tasted, but they really weren’t that bad.  We’ll see how I feel after weekly doses for two years.

Tomorrow is a really big day.  We find out what training city we will be placed in, as well as the other trainees who will be living there with us.  I also move in with my host family tomorrow, and I am really hoping I like them.  I’ll live with my host family for three months, and they have the potential to make or break training, so everyone say a prayer for me tonight.  Tomorrow also marks the end of free wireless.  So sad, but I gotta cut the cord sometime.  That’s all for now, wish me luck in my training site. 

And so it begins…

I hope 2009 finds everyone healthy, wealthy, and wise in mind, body, and spirit.  As America just took a huge step into the future with the swearing in of our 44^th president, I am preparing to also take a giant step into my own future.   I just arrived in beautiful Miami for the start of 27 months serving as a Community Health Promoter in Nicaragua with the Peace Corps.  Whew, it’s a mouthful just to say, let alone actually do.  I know, everyone is really proud of me, I’m going to make a difference in a lot of people’s lives, this is going to change my life, etc. etc. etc.  You probably have a million questions also, like where the hell is Nicaragua and why would anyone actually want to go there? Have patience, all of those questions will be answered eventually.  I want to first tell a little story about how I’ve managed to even get to this point.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be amazed by feats of patience, determination, and karmic retribution.   I tend to ramble on occasion and this will definitely be the longest post you’ll have to put up with, but try and stay with me here, you won’t regret it.

I began the application process for the Peace Corps in July of 2007, so to say this is a long time coming is an understatement to say the least.  The application process is notoriously frustrating, so I should have been prepared for the difficulties I faced, but of course being the eternal optimist I assumed everything would be a snap.  Oh man was I wrong.  I received my first nomination as a healthcare volunteer in Latin America leaving in June of 2008.  I found out two weeks before graduation in May of 2008 that I had been medically deferred until March 2009 because of a paperwork error following a Lasik procedure.  First sign that maybe I had some really really bad karma coming my way.  I would have to go through a lengthy and stressful appeals process that made my initial departure date infeasible.  So I suddenly found myself accepting my diploma from Georgia Tech (an engineer graduating with honors no less, still can’t believe that happened!) with no job, no real money, nowhere to live, and not a clue what to do with the rest of my life.  Not a very good feeling considering how hard I worked to get to that point.

Fortunately, my stubborn streak reared its ugly head and I decided that there was no way I was giving up this dream so easily.   It was following this initial disappointment that I began to realize how lucky I was to have so many strong and supportive people in my life.  I had no shortage of people offering up everything from a shoulder to cry on to a couch to sleep on.  I promptly packed up what little belongings I had left and moved in with my kickass friend Rick (who I’m still eternally grateful to) in Pensacola to do what every good engineer does: wait tables and work on my tan.  Not exactly a great career move, but the break was much appreciated. 

All was going well until I got my second karmic kick in the ass.  I showed up to work on a delightful Sunday morning only to find the still smoldering remains of my former place of employment.  Shitting my pants doesn’t even begin to cover it.  The place had been struck by lightning the previous night and burned to the ground.  I’ll repeat, shitting my pants doesn’t even begin to cover it.  I quickly assessed the situation, which was forty servers suddenly out of work in a fairly small town, and decided the chances of finding a new job in Pensacola were slim to none.  I decided to lick my wounds, pack up my things, and head home to Atlanta with my tail between my legs.   Lets just say I know how to pick my battles.

So there I am, sharing my friend (who I am also eternally grateful to) Meghan’s couch with five stray kittens she had adopted (true story), working an even worse serving job, and seriously thinking that I had made a terrible mistake by still chasing this dream.  Thankfully I had my first glimmer of hope.  After several months of waiting, the Peace Corps appeals board finally looked over my file and overturned my medical deferment.  Whoo hoo!  Now I just had to play the waiting game while headquarters looked over my file and gave me a new assignment.

I then really took a step up in life and did what every girl dreams of: moved into my brother’s basement.  Once again, not glamorous but I was eternally grateful to still have a roof over my head.  I received my new assignment, still healthcare and Latin America but I wasn’t getting to leave until January of 2009.  I was definitely not stoked about having to wait until January, but at least things were starting to look up.  For about a week.  I then lost my second job in as many months when the restaurant I was working at closed down.  Seriously, if you own a restaurant please don’t let me within 20 feet of it.  I beg of you. 

I found yet another serving job, this one even shittier than the previous two.   Freakin economy, at this point I was just lucky to have a job.  I managed to secure not only a permanent residence, but a killer house with great roommates in a perfect neighborhood that I could actually afford.  Triumph of the century.  My good luck continued when I finally received the package that every future volunteer dreams of: the invitation kit.  (As a sidebar, if you get a chance please ask me about finding my invitation kit, there really isn’t enough time to do the story justice here, but I promise you won’t be disappointed.)  Not only did it have my departure date and more a more specific job description, but this was when I learned of my country of service, Nicaragua. It was official!  Through this entire process there were only two countries that was really hoping and praying for, and Nicaragua was one of the two. Thrilled doesn’t even begin to cover it.  Luck was finally back on my side.  For the first time I began to think that this was actually going to happen for me.  For the next couple months all I had left to do was play the waiting game again until my departure, which I’d become a master at in the past year and a half. 

There’s really two things that I’ve taken from this consistently excruciating process, the first being the importance of patience and persistence, two virtues that will serve me will in the upcoming years.  The second is how truly blessed I am to be surrounded by such a wealth of supportive, loving, and trusted family and friends.  Without all of ya’ll I NEVER would have made it to this point. I love and am thankful for every single one of you.  Remember, I’m just a plane ride away. (hint hint)

Whew, everyone take a breath.  Ok, take one more.  Awesome.  Now that everyone’s caught up to speed, I’ll give you the cliff notes version of what’s in store for me over the next 27 months.  My official job description is a Community Health Promoter, which is essentially health education.   I fly to Nicaragua tomorrow, where I’ll spend three months living with a host family and participating in intense language, cultural, and vocational training.  From there I get assigned to a post where I’ll be for two years until the end of my service.  No, I don’t know where I’ll be during the two years.  I don’t even really know where I’ll be during training (they like to surprise you like that) but it will most likely be within a couple hours of the capital Managua.  I could go into more detail, but I figure I’ll hook more readers by spicing things up with a little suspense.  I’m tricky like that. 

I could easily spend the next three days talking about the awesomeness that is Nicaragua, but for the sake of everyone’s sanity I’ll abstain until a later date.  Seriously, just Wikipedia it.  I’ve said enough for one day.  Or, just wait until I arrive there and receive detailed firsthand accounts of its greatness. 

I could also easily spend the next three days talking about the seemingly infinite number of thoughts racing through my head right about now, but I woke up at 5am and would rather sum it up in two words: oh shit.  Maybe once I take a nap I’ll be more in the mood for articulating my emotions.  Until next time…