Settling In

So I've spent about a week in San Miguelito.  Some Peace Corps Volunteers compare the Peace Corps life cycle to a chick maturing into a rooster...I'm definitely in the chick stage right now: kind of useless, but cute to laugh at, and in turn feeling a bit overwhelmed sensorially by everything going on in this world I've hatched into....Here are some things that have happened.

-My host family in Carazo took a road trip to drop me off in San Miguelito. In true Nicaragua form, we crammed into a pickup truck, with plenty of chinearing (sitting on laps). It was super delightful. I played DJ with my 7 year old neighbor, we stopped to eat lunch near the shade of a brook, we drove past hot dry lands, the mountains of Boaco and Chontales and down to the jungles of Rio San Juan. And of course, we took the requisite photo shoot on the muelle (wharf)in San Miguelito. After they left, I didn't know what to do, so I organized my room and passed out at like 6pm. 

-Rayos! It's supposed to be summer which means it's not supposed to rain all the time, but it still does. Two crazy scary thunderstorms this week so far. 

-So since I am not teaching until the following semester, I don't really have a ton of things to do right now other than get to know my counterpart English teachers and institutos and the commuity more generally.  After hiding in my room and having a lot of sadness and pena (shyness) for the first few days, I realized that the only person who really cares how awkward I am is me. So I am making an effort to get over myself and actually talk to the neighbors and it is making my life infinitely more fulfilling. People here are amazing conversationsationalists, and incredibly open to talking about their lives, which is humbling. People's lives here are marked by so much suffering: war, child mortality, the absence of loved ones in Costa Rica or the United States for work, bad weather, political faultines not working in their favor, strained family relations due to machismo, alcoholism....but most people are still so positive. Its inspiring for sure.

-I've won some celebrity for two things: my host mom thinks my windup radio and sporks are really cool. Also I got some chavalas (tweens) from the neighborhood to think I'm cool by teaching them the fabulous art of friendship bracelets. Thank you Klutz books! Now I have friends! 

-I tried two Nicaraguan standard refrescos for the first time- chica, bubble gum pink corn drink, and pinolillo, toasted corn with cacao & sugar drink. I'm a fan. 

-Buying food here is hard for this gringa. There is no super market in this department. Which leaves pulperias, small stores stocked with random things as the main option. Their name is derived from the word pulpo, or octupus, according to one explanation because there are so many, it's as if there were tentacles everywhere. Regardless of the origins of the name, you often can't see what they sell and have to ask. This is problematic for me because no one actually uses the Spanish name of the thing they want to buy, but instead the brand name. If you ask for leche you will get a lot of hesistation, but if you ask for CentroLac you will be rewarded with a bag o' milk. It's extra bad when the name of the thing is in English, because I have to figure out how they pronounce it. Corn flaake! The best was the other night when my host mom asked me if I wanted maruchan for dinner. "I've never heard of that! What traditional Nicaraguan food might this be?" I pondered, until she clarified by saying it was a soup with noodles. O! Ramen! Maruchan. Duh, I guess. People also sell things out of their houses without signs advertising this, which lends every house a blackmarket sort of quality from an outsider's perspective. So that's a whole different food buying system to navigate. 

-Fun tip from my neighbor who makes cheese: apparently milk is a hot comodity around here. If you want it fresh from the cow, you'd better get there before 6 am....otherwise, all sold out.

-I found out that the direct translation of my new favorite kind of cheese, cuajada, is "curdled." Less appetizing now, though it makes a lot of sense.

-Fish are going to be a big part of my diet here, which is pretty exciting. I woke up from a nap the other day to find my host sister hacking the gills out of some fish with their heads and eyes still on. I also watched a cock fight, which was oddly enough more beautiful and less bloody than I expected. However, my ability to feel empathy for animals is inversely correlated with the amount of sleep I've lost due to the chickens outside my room squaking with tremendous zeal at all hours. At this point,  I could probably personally wring their necks without feeling too much remorse. 

-I've watched an obscene number of Mexican soap operas, which feature characters who probably phenotypically represent at best 10% of the Mexican population and feature storylines that are generally involve a lot of cheating. Thanks to this I can probably pull off an excellent angry crazy woman impression, which could potentially come in handy for scaring my future students into doing their work.   

-I'm still bad at laundry. I washed stuff the other day and my host mom complemented me on how fast I did it and I was feeling so good until it dried and as usual, my black clothes were covered in white splotches. I guess it serves me right for not thinking ahead about how my big city black wardrobe might not be a smart choice for a hot, tropic region of the world where there's a lot of anxiety about devil worship. 

-Jane Jacobs sure was right...having eyes on the street makes on world of difference for public safety. Kids eyes are particularly observant. I talked to some cipotes (little kids) today who remembered  that I had arrived in a truck 6 days earlier, that my host family wanted to buy tortillas and that the kids were eating ice out of cups. I want a memory that good! Then they told me that I looked like a clown, and ran off to do impressive upside-down flips on a wire in front of my house. 

Well, there you have it readers. Week one in excruciating, mundane detail.

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.