Protracted Struggles

Cute little gecko! They run all over the walls here and eat nasty insects.

Short post for today because I'm lazy and I have to write 6 essays. What am I, in college? I can see the light at the end of the tunnel with training almost being over, although I have 2 basically unstructured months ahead of me that might very well be the proverbial train...

So anyway, this week, I co-taught a 7th grade English class with my host brother at the high school here in El Rosario. It was a great class, really fun and communicative, but there was one funny aspect that I had not taken into account in my planning: students here are REALLY perfectionist. One of the activities that we had planned was to have the students make a smiley place and have them listen to move the face to practice prepositions of place (up, down, under, above, in, on, etc). I figured it would take them about 10 seconds to rip out a piece of paper and scribble a face on. Wrong. It took over 10 minutes for them to draw perfect circles with perfect features. Quite a few kids took out protractors and began laboriously tracing a perfect circles. This was even after I had repeatedly used the line "Nobody's perfect, except God" with them. Even though we work in public schools, there's not really separation between church and state here...I picked this line up from one of my Nicaraguan counterpart teachers. One girl took so long that I took away her drawing and gave her my ugly example smiley face. Take that little girl, don't you try to be all perfect at me!
Lesson learned: don't expect to be able to rush the artistic process.

On another side note, it's gotten cold here! In Carazo, we've reached the windy season. It's really nice weather, like 60s/70s and windy...Not really what I expected, but I'm LOVING it. Especially knowing that I will be sweating all the time in about two weeks when I go to my site.

El Rio San Juan es 100% Nica!

As the saying goes, Rio San Juan is 100% Nicaraguan, and that's where I'm going for my service! I'll be in San Miguelito, a small town of about 3,000 that is on the shore of Lake Nicaragua. Rio San Juan is a province that's long been neglected, largely because of the lack of transport to the region, and also because of border conflicts. It's a paradise, albeit a very hot and mosquito riden paradise. I visited this past week to make connections in town, meet my counterpart teachers and observe their classes, and meet our new host families.


San Miguelito is picturesque. The town's big draw is a wharf that juts out into the lake. From there, there's a gorgeous view of nearby islands, the Island of Ometepe, formed by the volcanoes Concepcion and Madera, and on a clear day, you can see all the way to Costa Rica. There's a beautiful church and a lot of color everywhere. The stars at night are gorgeous and clear.

I'll be working with 4 different counterpart teachers at 4 different high schools schools. One teaches in the morning, two in the afternoon, and one on Saturdays. It's going to be a bit challenging to manage all of their demands on me, but I think that's probably a good thing in the scheme of things. This is the first time Peace Corps has put TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) volunteers in Rio San Juan, so there's a lot of excitement, and opportunities to organize teacher training workshops. Two of the schools are off the beaten track, in smaller communities with only about 100 students. When I visited these places, it was hard to not be struck by the poverty and the seeming remoteness, even thoughl I've gotten used to a lot in the last few months. But the students and the teachers in these schools are really motivated, welcoming, and excited to work with a Peace Corps volunteers which is simultaneously humbling and exciting. It's going to be a bit difficult to find my niche at site, but I'm excited to start.

I'm also really excited about my new host family. They are really cool, very relaxed. I'll have four host siblings, ranging from 15-30 and there's also an adorable baby. And last but not least, there's a cat-calling parrot and a lot of chickens.

In short, I'm excited, nervous and ready to go in 3 more weeks.

The String Cheese Incident

My host brother asked me the other day where I would draw the line at trying new foods. "I eat everything!" I told him. Instead, I was proved a liar by one of America's favorites: Kraft Cheese.

Peace Corps is teaching me that I am a pretty fachenta person. Fachenta, my favorite word in Nicanol, is used jokingly (or not) to refer to a person who thinks they are better than others. I definitely wouldn't say I think I'm better than others, but it's becoming rather obvious how obnoxiously refined my tastes are. This is evidenced by the fact that the things that I miss the most from home, after the obvious family and friends, are bookstores, attending lectures, art museums, pesto, dark chocolate, Equal Exchange's lemon tinged espresso and mate lates. Basically, I'm a giant snob.

Anyway, the cheese problem ocurred while visiting my host family. On my first morning there, my host mom made me breakfast: delicious eggs and bread, with a side of two slices of Kraft American cheese, still in the wrapper... I was already feeling sick and had slept horribly, due to the fact that I wasn't used to the chickens outside my door yet. There's a pretty good chance my host mother had gone at least slightly out of her way to find this cheese for me. I needed to eat it. Yet, for whatever reason, the thought of having to ingest the orange substance almost made me gag. I've been known to scarf down Kraft macaroni in prodigious quantities in exam season, so it wasn't a question of principle. Sometimes that many fake particles can taste delicious. But I couldn't do it. I stared at that cheese, loitered over my coffee, thinking I might be able to manage a bit. Nope, no dice. In the end, I just told her I wasn't very hungry and left it at that.

And felt vaguely un-American.

The Challenges of Representing America

Being in Peace Corps always raises interesting questions. Often, the questions are silly, such as "How does one balance the desire to not offend with the lack of desire to eat bright orange cheese" or "Is it inappropriate if a parrot is cat-calling me as I am bathing?" (context on these stories later). Other times they are more profound like "What do I actually think God is like?" or "Is development at the local level meaningful and impactful without macrolevel change and given the vast inequality that exists at the global level?"


A lot of times though, I get called on to provide the answers. Inevitably, often with strangers who don't know me very well, but sometimes also with family, political questions about the US come to the fore. Basically, we've been instructed to just avoid these conversations, but that's easier said than done. And under certain circumstances, I think it's more constructive to engage with people. For instance, there was this one time that a TV station published a report saying that Barak Obama was going to implant chips in everyone if he got elected. That was an easy one to repute. Other times, being able to engage is a critical part of gaining confianza, roughly translated as trust. It is difficult to gain confianza with Nicaraguans who are very conscious of their history without at least tacitly acknowledging that the US role in their county has often been extremely negative for the majority of its inhabitants (that's putting it pretty diplomatically). Finding some sort of balance is essential.

It's difficult to feel that you are being called to defend US policy when you vehemently disagree with it. I am most frequently asked to comment on US-Cuba policy and US immigration policy. I don't want to defend the Cuban embargo. I don't want to defend deportations that separate families. I hate that the word "illegal alien" is applied to millions of people in my country, as if they weren't human beings. I try to state my opinion neutrally and back away, but it's challenging not to be able to engage as I might at home.

Luckily, I have 2 years to get better at handling this sort of thing.