a typical training day

peace corps training days are pretty packed. to give you an idea, here is what my days usually look like Mon-Sat:

5:30- get up to run (not every day)
6:30- shower/eat breakfast/do the homework i should have done the night before
8:00- start spanish class
12:00- lunch break/squeeze in a quick nap if possible
1:00- "applied spanish" where we do more hands on activities in the community.  this is mainly where we do our work with the youth group and our counterpart teacher.  we've also gone to meet several community leaders like the police, the local ministry of education office, etc.
4-5:00- finally done after 8 hours.  i sometimes talk our teacher into buying us ice cream from the local Eskimo ice cream shop. i try to stop by some of the other volunteers' houses to visit and see how their training is going too.
6:00- dinner with the favorite telenovela on in the background
7:00- work on the several reading assignments we have each week
9:00- bed time!

and then i do it again the next day...

there are days where we have technical training about different topics.  for example, today we had a three hour session on lesson planning with our local counterparts in the afternoon. other days we have an entire day of tech sessions starting at 8am.

overall, training has been pretty good. there is a reason they do it this way so we can get used to a lot of different things going on and changing schedules. there is also tons of information they are trying to teach us in a relatively short period of time. i'm enjoying training and the time we get to spend with the other volunteers since we'll be spread out across the country once we finish, but i'm also eager to start doing more hands on activities in the communities.

poco a poco...

guacamole and community mapping

i've realized that i talk about food a lot on this blog. food is a big part of my life. i'll try to expand to other things soon.

my tia marlén. she indulged me with a smirk for the picture.

we made guacamole last night. i was thinking of the guac i always made at home. i was super psyched to have some good aguacate. i volunteered to help and was ready to start mashing up the avocados and then found out that nica guac doesn't have mashed avocados.  it's more of a salad.  similar incredients though: onion, lime juice, cilantro, and a little chili if you want it spicy. the key difference is that they add a hard boiled egg. we had a discussion about how i thought this was absolutely crazy, and they just laughed at me.

guac nica style

i split a little of the avocado off and made guac mexican style to show them. it was delicious. we ate it with fried tortillas and gallo pinto.  it was a cultural exchange of sorts. my aunt said she liked it a lot, and i made everyone else try it too. they all said they liked it, but they may just have been polite.

my guac

since i keep talking about food all the time, my family has decided that i have to make food sometime. tonight we discussed tortilla española and pizza.  two things that i will have to make in the near future i guess. it's a good thing i love cooking and have been making french bread pizza since i was about 8 years old, so it should be fun.  what brings people together more than food?

the boys' map

on monday we did a community mapping exercise with our youth group.  i was a bit unsure about the activity and what it's purpose was related to starting a small business, but it turned out to be a pretty fun thing to do with the kids.  the idea is to figure out what is important to them and identify resources in the community.

the girls' map

we split them into boys and girls and had them map the places they thought were most important, places they visited the most, places they visited the least/dangerous places, and what types of businesses there are in the community.  as you can see from the pictures, the boys and girls had different styles on mapping.  my example of an important place to me was Eskimo, an ice cream shop.  they all got a laugh about that, and then eskimo ended up on both of their maps. my question: who doesn't like ice cream?  it was a good way to bond with the kids a bit and make them a little more animated.

next post will probably be about the upcoming festival in masatepe. complete with dancing horses! 

food, life, and fun... so far anyways

gallo pinto (top) accompanied by some other things

food: in short- rice and beans. a lot. of. rice. and. beans. it's a good thing i don't mind rice and beans. the most common type is gallo pinto. it usually consists of black beans and rice and then refried with some extra salt. the nicas love their salt and queso fresco (a very salty cheese). usually the gallo pinto is accompanied by something else, for dinner tonight, it was with fried chicken, plantains, and some scrambled eggs.. for some reason tonight it also had pasta in it...

nacatamal

this morning i ate nacatamal. it has a doughy like outside, a little bit of rice (of course), chilis, and meat. the one i had was beef. it was delicious. i was warned that i needed to be careful since it was going to be spicy, but they don't know how spicy i like my food. i probably would have made it more spicy if possible. haha.

inside the nacatamal

last night we ate chalupas. delicious as well. toasted tortillas, beans, chicken with some other veggies, and “salad” which is primarily cabbage. they tried to put some queso fresco on it, i was not a fan and requested mine “sin queso.”

daily life: lately i've been getting up by 630am and getting ready for the day. breakfast has been anything from last night's left overs, cakey like “bread”, eggs with gallo pinto, fried tortilla with beans, etc. basically it varies day by day.

we have class from 8-12, a break for lunch, and then more “applied” class. this is where we tend to go out into the community and introduce ourselves and also go to the high school where we are forming our youth group as well as working with one of the teachers.

one of the places we went was the police station this past week. we talked to the subcomandante de la policia and introduced ourselves. he seemed surprised that gringos were in the community and had no idea we were here with cuerpo de paz. i think he was pulling our leg and bromeando. he gave us his 8 cell phone numbers but said them all so fast that none of us really were able to write them down.

these guys are my best
friends because they eat many
of the bugs in the house

friday we had technical training in managua. this past week we learned about establishing a community bank, which is a really cool concept. a community bank is a bank in its simplest form. members of the community pool their money together and then loan the money out as members of the bank need it. each bank sets up its own rules and what is permissible. the loans are short term and paid back with interest, which allows for all of the members to grow income. it is microfinance on a super small scale within the community and doesn't need any outside funding. i am very excited to hopefully start one in my community once i am on site.

training on the whole has been interesting so far. i'm looking forward to more integrated training where we are working hands on in the community and less sitting in a classroom describing random situations. for me, i find it difficult to do those exercises because i don't spend a ton of time describing things like that in english either. how much can i say about how a person looks? they have brown hair, skinny, pretty nice... what else do you want to know? haha. i've been told i need to use more details for such descriptions though. i'm working on it. ;) according to the training director we're going to start having some more liberty soon to self-direct study.

fun stuff: we went to a beauty pageant to select the queen of the fiestas patronales on thursday. it was a serious event with tons of people there. us being the gringos showed up when they said it was going to start, but then proceeded to wait for about an hour and a half until the room filled up. we had close to front row seats of all the action. there was dancing, singing, music. the whole deal. it was great until we decided we needed to leave early. my family was waiting for me to eat dinner and the others' families were expecting us home soon. unfortunately, the room had filled up so that there wasn't any way out. we literally climbed through the crowd, on top of chairs, through groups of people until we reached the back. it was awesome. haha.

nacho, my host dad

related to the beauty pagent, there has been a fair of sorts in the main center of town this whole weekend with artisan crafts, music, games, and even a mototaxi race. i missed the race, but i totally would have been there if i knew there was going to be one. the fair was fun, but it was interesting that most of the booths seemed to be selling similar things. a lot of them even looked like stuff i saw in panamá. i've heard that other countries pay nicaragua factories to put “hecho en X” on products and then sell them as their own. something to think about next time you buy that cool braclet you think is unique to whatever country you're in. either way, i'm not sure how anyone makes money on these things when they're all selling the same thing. i'm sure that will be something i am constantly investigating during my time here.

not much else to report. just life as usual for the moment. getting used to a new routine, schedule, etc. if you've read this far, i'm proud of you. i had a whole week to catch up on.  

a small little adventure

today was my first day at my host family. i was a bit concerned at first considering i had all day to do... nothing. what am i going to do? i haven't made much of a connection yet with my host family, so i anticipated being very bored. it was a little both.

i slept in because i was exhausted. several days of very little sleep takes its toll after a while. my host bro and i seem to have bonded by playing on our computers at the table, so we did that for a while after getting up.  then we watched some soccer and talked about our favorite teams. then we headed into town along with my host sister to get the lay of the land.  our house is about a kilometer outside of the main center, so it is a bit of a walk.  i anticipate taking little mototaxis for the most part that cost C$6. we ate some ice cream. it was delicious. it was cloudy at first, and even rained a bit, but then the sun came out while we were walking around so it got fairly hot. i think being hot is going to be a theme of my life here. it was comforting, somewhat, to know that my host siblings were also hot and i wasn't just the crazy gringo.

after lunching, i took a nap, because i love naps.  they have already noticed that i like to sleep. thanks to my fan they bought me, it was much more comodo. after that i beat my host bro at chess. it was his idea to play, so i don't feel bad. haha. then we went off to visit laguna del apoyo.

Laguna de Apoyo

traveling in latin america is always an adventure, even for short distances.  sometimes you wonder how old is the vehicle you're in and if it will break down at any moment. other times it is packed full of people yet still continues to pick up one more person on the road because there is always room for one more.  we took a bus to catarina, which wasn't very full. we walked a ways up a hill to the mirador at the laguna.  it is a beautiful little lake inside a crater next to a volcano. beyond the laguna is the city of granada on the shore of lake nicaragua.  neither of my siblings could remember which volcano it was, but a little google mapping says it was mombacho. very cool. i want to climb some of them at some point in the next two years.  hopefully once we've settled a little more into training i can sneak away to one of the close ones with a few people and climb one.

kevin, my host brother.
we were having a discussion about smiling for the picture.

here are a few pics of my siblings. kevin is 15 and katherine is 19. kevin goes to a local private high school here in masatepe and katerine goes to la universidad centroamericana in managua. she's studying engineering of some sort.  i forget what specifically she told me.

i counted the smirk as a success.

katherine, my host sister. 

the laguna and volcano. unfortunately, it was a bit cloudy.

pupusa.

as i mentioned, the ride back was more typical of bus rides in latin america. it was packed full of people and we had to stand in the aisle.  i think i got hit in the head as a guy carrying a fan tried to push his way out of the bus. either way, we survived. on our way back into town we got pupusa. i.e. delicious.  it is like a corn tortilla, but thicker because it is stuffed with cheese and beans. it may have had a little bit of chicken in it too.  then we put "salad" on top which mainly consisted of cabbage in a "spicy" sauce with some peppers, onions, etc. i didn't think it was that spicy, my hermanos did. either way, it was still delicious.

for dinner we ate tamuga which was kind of like a tamale of some sort. it was initially wrapped in banana leaves and had a corn outside.  inside it was stuffed with rice and beef. apparently it is just a masatepe thing.  they don't really make it ouside of this town.  it also was delicious. although i liked the pupusa better.

tomorrow marks the start of full blown training.  language classes for several hours plus a couple hours of applied training in the afternoons.  i lucked out and classes are at my house for the next three weeks so i don't have to walk the kilometer to the other girl's house in my group. it should be fun though.  we're going to make a map of the community and we already have to start recruiting kids for our youth group.  this isn't a youth group like a church one, but it is a group of young people interested in creating their own product of some sort.  then we help them along with the process of planning and implementing the project.  i'm super excited and can't wait to start the training.

here are a few other pics from the last few days.  i haven't taken many...

waiting at reagan forever. 

flying into managua

it's about freaking time! a couple of PC staff in the background.

arrived and hosted

well, i made it to nicaragua. what a whirlwind it has been.

tuesday morning i got home around 5 am after saying goodbye to the gf and proceeded to finish packing up a few things and then got ready to go. staging was in washington, dc so i had to catch an 8 am flight up there. i noticed another girl holding a blue peace corps folder full of staging materials, so we chatted for a little while on the plane about peace corps and how we ended up doing this. staging itself was... necessary.  i can't say it was fun, but i understand the purpose. we covered a bunch of regs and expectations (the first of many times). we also did several activities discussing what we were looking forward to and what made us nervous.  it was nice to know that most of us were worried about the same things.

they gave us some walk around cash for the day/next morning and then said to be ready by 2am to catch the bus to reagan. why we had to get to the airport so early is beyond me, but when you're trying to organize 29 people, mainly early 20 somethings, i guess extra time is always a good thing. so we got to the airport around 3 and sat around for a while while we waited for the ticket counters to open. then we waited some more until finally our flight to miami was ready to depart.

fast forward to arriving in managua... it was cloudy as we flew in so it was hard to see anything, but eventually we could see one of the main volcanos jutting out of the landscape a ways away beyond lake managua. it was pretty exciting to finally be in country. by touching nicaraguan soil, i finally became a member of the peace corps (a trainee though, not a volunteer yet).

the first four days were a retreat where we convered all of the rules and regs again. they stressed the importance of realizing that this is a full-time, professional job... albeit super low paying. it's like they have a bunch of kids just out of college wanting to kill time and have fun for two years or something... weird. haha. it was good though. they laid out the expectations of training and then sent us on our way to our host families.

right now, i'm probably about an hour outside of managua. my host fam lives a bit outside of town on a dirt road, but it still seems to be trafficked fairly heavily.  they've converted the front of their house into a "pulperia" which means a little store basically.  pulpo means octopus, so the store has tons of different things. it also has a little tiendita which has some clothes and other little things. the husband is working in construction in costa rica, so i have a host mother, brother, and sister.  plus carmen, the maid.  my room consists of four concrete walls, a tile floor, and a corrugated sheetmetal roof. i have a full size bed, so those twin sheets i was so ambitious about packing won't be very useful. also, apparently they were very concerned at lunch since i was sweating like a beast, so they went out and bought me a fan for my room. haha.

i think on the whole, i can definitely say i overpacked. and i knew that, but i didn't realize it would be to this extent. i thought i'd have to do laundry by hand every day, but my family has an empleada (maid) that will wash my clothes apparently. i might shed some stuff when i leave this location for my actual site.  i primarily have to be dressed business casual all the time anyways, so i don't really need so many t-shirts and stuff. or maybe even one of the pairs of jeans that i have. i don't know. that's getting ahead of myself.

it was quite the adventure hanging my mosquito net that peace corps provides. the maid helped me put it up and i swear she looked like she was going to fall half the time she was on the ladder since it was only one side of a step ladder leaned against the wall. but it is up, and i will be quite safe from mosquitos. right now there aren't many bugs. i say that now before the rainy season is about to start. that could change dramatically.

that's about all for now. not many profound thoughts at the moment. just trying to stay awake. tomorrow is our first day off, and i plan to rest for most of the day. from what i hear, we don't get much time off during training.

hasta luego,
aw