I have no idea where to begin on this update, there is just so much to talk about. I think I’m going to start from today and then work my way backwards so I have plenty of fresh thoughts still in my brain.
First I’d like to wish Doug Brown a speedy recovery and to let him know I’m really excited to see him and Jan when I’m back home for xmas!
Today I woke up at a semi-decent hour…about 9am…yes yes this is not the greatest hour I know. Lately since I don’t have classes at 8am I’ve allowed myself to sleep a little later than normal. My new room gets a lot of light so I can never tell if the sunshine means it’s 6am or 10am, it looks the same! Jessica, one of my sitemates in Somoto (her and Matt are married and are Health volunteers who got here 3 months before me, I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned that) called me to see what time I wanted to meet up to talk about a project we are trying to get started. After making myself some coffee in my brand new fabulous French press that Mom and Dad sent me, and watching a little bit of the Nica election drama (I’ll cover that later in this post) I grabbed the 5 letters I’ve been meaning to mail forever and headed down to the post office. The ladies who work there love PCVs and they are so incredibly nice to all of us. It’s nice to know that they take really great care of our mail and make sure our packages are secure once they arrive. I actually ran into Matt on the way with his and Jess’s dog Astro, cutest dog in Nicaragua he looks like a cross between a Labrador and a fluffy white type dog (his official “breed” is called “Nicaraguan Highland Retriever”). That’s the good thing about Somoto, small enough to run into anyone you can think of on a given day. Anyways, made it to the post office and had 3 letters from Jan, 1 from Mamow and a big package from Rosine! Thank you so much! I talked to the ladies for a bit then headed off to SILAIS where Jess works.
I finally got to see where Jess works, I’ve been meaning to for these past 3 months, and met some of her co-workers in her office as well. Jess explained her general vision of the project and showed me a tentative timeline of the action plan. The idea is this to create a Sex and Reproductive Education binder filled with laminated posters and other interactive training materials and then each school in all of Madriz would receive this binder. In addition, we would be running trainings for the teachers on this subject matter all throughout the year and teach them how to utilize the materials in the binder. It’s not that the teachers don’t have this information, they all do, but Jess has this great idea to take it to the next level and present them with basically an interactive guide so the kids aren’t bored out of their minds in class. A couple years ago the Ministry of Education tried to implement a program like this all throughout Nicaragua but ran into religious complications in some of the school districts. Jess already has permission and support from the Delegación of Madriz (sort of like the equivalence of a School District Supervisor) to start this project, so all we need now is to get the details ironed out for example: which age group we are targeting in the high schools, what kind of monetary support can we secure from the community, who will be running trainings (doctors, nurses, etc.), and much more. I’m really excited to work on this because I really have nothing concrete planned from now till January since the school year ends this week, and I get the chance to meet and work with different people around Madriz. It’s also great to collaborate with another volunteer! Brownie points from the boss hopefully!
Speaking of projects, with this “free” time I have at the moment I’m also trying to develop the secondary project I’d like to focus on during my service. My boss had suggested to me in the beginning to do an organizational analysis of Fabretto, to evaluate their “institutional capacity” (I believe that is a development term…haha). I gathered up some resources last week in the PC office to help guide me on the path of defining what it is that I actually want to evaluate. The way I see it, no matter what I end up discovering about the NGO and no matter what suggestions I will give them in the end, they can use them or not and it wont matter because it will still be very beneficial in my future grad school applications. I want to define this project well and then present it to the Fabretto bosses in Managua so they know and I know what my actual objectives and goals are for the project. Hopefully when I’m home I can contact some other NGOs and ask some questions about their organizational structure. If anyone has contacts, please let me know.
The new house is going well, except for my disaster area in my room. I don’t have shelves or a closet to put my stuff in, that’s another project for the coming month, so all of my stuff is basically strewn across the floor. This is the first house I’ve seen in Nicaragua that has sky lights and lots of well placed windows to let in a lot of natural light. The regular lighting on the ceiling is really good too! The kitchen has lots of cabinet space and a bar stool area, we don’t have a full-sized oven like the Cusmapa house but supposedly Don Freddy (our Nica roomie) is working on getting one. We’re quite happy with our tiny conventional oven, but it’s hard to cook large dishes when we have many people. Last night we made Chicken Pot Pie again, but this time in our little oven and it turned out great! We are sort of living the “fachenta” (fancy) lifestyle with our ceiling fans and hot shower hookup, but hell I’m not complaining. The cable was installed 2 days before the election and it’s really handy to have CNN in Spanish and a couple of movie channels. The problem with living in a bigger site, you either pay 80 bucks for something not so nice to live by yourself, or you pay 50 bucks to live in a not nice area of the city. The Ag and Health volunteers tend to get put out in the boondocks and usually don’t pay anything to have their own place or don’t pay to live with a family. I will take this set-up anyday! I get a clean, safe house in a safe part of town and I can cook healthy food whenever I want! Yes I probably should live with a family, but I’m around Nicas so much of the day anyways and Don Freddy is always here, so I really don’t speak that much English anyways. In addition, Mike is always so nice to the kids and almost every day they stop by the house (sometimes I’m not in the mood, but I deal with it)! We’re hoping to put a ping pong table or dart board outside soon. This week I started my new tradition of reading outside in a rocking chair at night and the mosquitoes tend to stay away for the most part. I finished “Good in Bed” by Jennifer Weiner, who also wrote “In Her Shoes”, and I’m still trying to finish Jeffrey Sachs’ book “The End of Poverty”. Hopefully by the end of the week that book will be completed, so I can read William Easterly’s “The White Man’s Burden”…which is development theory that goes against Sachs. It’s always good to have both sides of the story.
I’d like to give a quick congrats to my Auntie Anne and Uncle Mike who are almost finished with their 2nd to last final semester of their teaching careers! What are you guys going to do with yourselves??? I know Aunt Anne with be happy to never have to teach the sophomores or freshmen again!!!
Let’s see, we’ve covered today and the house…oh yeah, Managua last week. On Wednesday morning at 4:00am I woke up to my phone ringing and it was Nikki up in Ocotal asking me if I would be taking the bus she was on. Whoops, totally didn’t wake up at 3:30am to take the 3:45am bus to the intersection to take the same bus she was on! Instead I woke up late and took the 6am bus to Managua a 3.5 hour ride, and I was late getting to the National Competition. Luckily none of my kids were competing so I didn’t have to worry about getting there late, it was only 40 minutes late anyways…but Goggins (from my SBD 47) made sure to give me a hard time about it. I had missed the Ambassador who came for a little bit, but it was ok since I had already met him the week before. I’m glad that he is putting interest in PC programs and I hope Obama doesn’t decide to replace him because he seems really chill. In less than 60 days Obama will get to name U.S. Ambassadors to all of the countries, usually the high-profile countries get replaced with people Obama will want, but I think Nicaragua isn’t really high on the priority list. The group who ended up winning was from Ticuantepe, near Managua, and they created a Pinapple sauce (like Apple sauce you can eat plain, but made of pinapples). It was fun to see the kids present their Powerpoints and the best part of the day was getting to eat lunch at the Intercontinental Hotel, aka the fanciest hotel in Managua. I was really happy to see the teachers and directora (principal) from Palacaguina show up to the competition and they seemed to enjoy themselves. Palacaguina was the school in Madriz whose volunteer (from my group) left before the regional competition, and I helped prepare their 3 teams and organized funding. They didn’t have a team win regional, but they still wanted to go and see the final competition. It’s great to see that they are a school who continue the LEC (Creative Business) course without a volunteer there and are committed to keeping the course going. My plan is to I be keep open lines of communication with them until another volunteer is placed in the site next year, in case they have any questions with the course. The awards ceremony closed up around 2:30pm and then we saw our Safety and Security Coordinator burst through the doors and realized something was wrong. Although it was nothing big, there was a political march outside the hotel right next to the mall. Still, it was something to take heed as the FSLN (Sandinistas) group began throwing rocks at cars in the mall’s parking lot (about 200 ft. away from us) and some even took bats and clubbed the hell out of the vehicles. I guess the “purpose” was to target the rich of Managua…Christ, really?
Elections for Mayor, Vice-Mayor and the Council (I think it’s like a council) were on Sunday the 9th and then the results were announced Monday morning. Somoto was taken by the FSLN, which was included in the statistic: 98 out of 100 elections in Nicaragua were won by the Sandinistas. Not a happy day for the Liberal Party to say the least! Right away Managua and Leon became the centers of controversy. In Leon, thousands of ballots were found in a dumpster (guess which party? Oh yeah, the Liberal’s ballots) and even more ballots were supposedly claimed “invalid” due to strange markings that magically appeared on even more Liberals’ ballots. Might I note that here in Nicaragua you don’t vote for the best candidate, you vote party lines no matter what! I don’t always vote Democrat nor Republican, I evaluate the policies each candidate wants to implement and then I chose based on a set of personal criteria. I would think (hope) most Americans would vote in this manner (and I would hope one would at least know the candidate’s name). That doesn’t happen here, you are either with THEM (and choose the number corresponding to the party on the ballot) or against THEM, “them” being one of the parties. So Leon was having issues, but the big topic lies in Managua todavía (still). Managua is a huge election with two well known candidates, and a population that has nothing to do but fight amongst themselves. I probably would too if there was no work (that’s a whole other topic). We got a taste of Nicaraguan elections last Wednesday and they continue to smash up cars and buildings in other parts of the city; burning is also very common. I have to say though, people throwing rocks at each other is horrible, but very entertaining on the TV. One minute a group of FSLN supporters would be throwing rocks at PLC supporters, and then the next minute the PLC would retaliate by bringing more people and throwing more rocks at the FSLNers. Meanwhile the camera crews are right in the middle of the fights trying to film the atrocities, you can even hear the camera operators throw out a couple swear words as the rocks barely miss them by a couple inches. There is still no decision about the winner of Managua and even if they finally announce it, I’m sure the other party will not hesitate to contest the win and call for more uprisings. They are recounting ballots still and who knows when this whole mess will conclude.
Because of the riots in the streets, a lot more PCVs ended up staying in Managua that night and through Thursday as well. I had planned to stay in Managua anyways from Wednesday to Saturday because we had a Safety and Security coordinator meeting on Friday and there was no point to drive all the way back home, stay for a night and then drive back. Another perk to living in a Department Capital is being an EAP (Emergency Action Plan) Coordinator, or in my case the EAP Alternate Coordinator since Matt and Jess got here before me. The Coordinators are in charge of reaching all the PCVs in their department during the implementation of the EAP. For example, in preparations for the elections and possible violence, all PCVs had to remain in their sites from Saturday the 8th till whenever they told us we could leave our sites. It was Matt and Jess’s job to contact all volunteers in Madriz and report back to the Managua office that they had spoken to or contacted in some way all of the PCVs. In case Matt & Jess are gone, I would take over that role so that in an emergency it would be my responsibility to contact everyone in Madriz...therefore I had to go to the training as well. The Safety and Security Coordinator had the lady in charge of S&S at the Embassy come to our meeting and spoke about the Embassy's role in general when it comes to safety of U.S. Citizens and when it comes to PCVs. I learned that in almost every department there is a "warden" in the capital city who acts as a contact point in case an American citizen needs help or there is a state of emergency. We have a warden here in Somoto, so I will be meeting him soon so I know who he is...and hopefully make a new friend. A warden is usually an American Citizen or a Nica national who volunteers for the position, it's unpaid so they do it out of the goodness of their heart. It's good to know that if something were to happen in Nicaragua or to me, I would have someone to contact locally. I can also attest to the PC's attentiveness when it comes to Safety & Security of the volunteers. There are so many precautions put in place and I feel that PCVs in Nicaragua are very safe and if they are ever threatened, there are actions that will be effectively taken. So don't worry, I'll be fine! Somoto is so tranquilo, but I will always keep a close eye out for creepers! Especially this weekend when we have carnaval!
The New Somoto House!
Mike vegges out in front of the tele
Looking out from the front door, it's like a carport...this is where we want to put a ping-pong table and dart board.
Notice our cute little garden to the right.
Front door and our brand new rocking chairs!
Kitchen with the barstools, my room's door is to the right.
The kitchen, a little messy...but that's why we have a maid! She only comes 2 days a week though...so we have to keep it clean the rest of the time.
Our kitchen stove and "washer machine"
The "pila" where you wash your clothes, it's a stone washboard.
I told you I had a ceiling fan!
My room is a disaster at the moment, I need a make-shift closet...it is my next project (is that ok Mom?)
We have a mural painted on the back wall outside, supposedly by a famous guy in Somoto.
Our clothes lines, really nice to have outside now!
My own bathroom...jigga jigga yeah!
This is the cold shower, the hot shower is in between Mike's and Freddy's rooms...I sneak in there when I can. Mom and Dad, notice the luffa on the wall!
Norelis our old neighbor with Oso (Bear) the dog
Oso and the cat that was so cute, but would tear apart the trash in the kitchen at night.
I just think this is a fun picture of Oswaldo and I
Oswaldo, Callie's bf, with the Bull Fish we caught...soooooo ugly!
The Bull Fish and the crabs we caught for the Stone Soup
Oswaldo and Bull Fish, Shot Number 2
Ernesto and I caught crabs! Haha, get it?
My bag full of crabs, those guys were hard to catch!
The sand bar of Las Peñitas in León
Oswaldo, the Nica who wears Cowboy boots with John Lennon-style sunglasses to the beach.
In the moutains of Madriz
More mountains, so green and fresh
Even more mountains...
The baby who was confused why a white person was riding the bus...who would have thought?
This is one reason why Somoto is so clean, you can find a trash can on every block. Also there is a cleaning crew of ladies that goes around at 5am to pick up the street trash...finally the mayor's office does something right!
An adobe house in Somoto that I walk by daily.
Speaking of Alcaldía, this is it! I wonder where the tax dollars got spent in 2007...oh wait that's right, they were spend building the Mayor a brand new building! No further comment.
Byron and I, on the bus ride to Managua this past week. It was nice to have a friend to talk to for the 3.5 hour ride! He is the Gardening Teacher and works at the Somoto Oratorio with me.
