Parliament? Clowder? Ostentation? Covey?

I was looking through some material on English idioms today, and I found all these words about animal groups...definitely have never heard some of these before, have you?  

A Gaggle of Geese. A School of Fish. A Troop of Kangaroos. A Flock of Sheep. A Pride of Lions. A Pack of Wolves. A Herd of Elephants. A Parliament of Owls. A Swarm of Bees. A Colony of Ants. A Plague of Locusts. A Cast of Hawks. A Clowder of Cats. A Drove of Cattle. An Ostentation of Peacocks. A Covey of Quail.

Funny interactions with children (Volume 2)

Yesterday, I was studying on my porch when a bunch of the chavalos across the street dared this one girl to come over and ask me "Where do you live?"

Good question, little ones. I myself am not quite sure what the correct answer is. I told them that I was going to live here for two years but that I am from the United States. Then they asked me if I had "the chip," aka the computer chip that according to a completely absurd news report is what Obama is apparently going to implant in every American citizen now that he's been relected. I told them that the chip is a lie and showed them my wrist to prove that it was chipless. The little girl replied, "Well, only Jesus knows if you have the chip or not." I countered this logic with "Sure, but I think Jesus would tell you that the chip is a lie." Then I showed them pictures of my house and family in the United States to prove to them that I am indeed humanoid and not part computer. 

Then, at their suggestion, we played "Mando, Mando" a game in which I would name objects and they would go find them in the street. This resulted in a  giant pile of flowers and leaves on the porch which I later redistributed, so as not to be a cruel dictatoress. 

Basically kids are super entertaining, especially when they aren't yours.

Quien Causa Tanta Alegria?

La Concepcion de Maria!

*Who causes so much joy? Mary's Concepcion!  (This sounds a lot catchier in Spanish)

Purisima Swag

Purisima is a holiday that is unique to Nicaragua, a 9 day celebration of Mary the mother of God. It's a time of great joy but also a time to ask Mary, who I think is the official patron saint of Nicaragua, to pray on their behalf.  I should be clear on this- Catholics around the world celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Concepcion of Mary as a "Holy Day of Obligation"- meaning you have to go to church even if it's not Sunday, but to my knowledge, Nicaragua is the only country that goes quite so all out. Purisima is sort of a cross between St. Nicholas Day and Christmas and Halloween with a giant serving of Mary on top. I will explain what I mean by this shortly. 

At least the way it's celebrated in my town, Purisma festivities start 9 days before December 8th, the actual feast day (a novena of masses). The celebrations start with 4 am fireworks and bell ringing, followed by 5 am mass. After mass, the parishoners process through the streets with a statue of Mary to a different sector of the town every day. The people living on that street are responsible for providing breakfast foods, such as nacatamales or bread and coffee to the adults, while the kids run to one house to get goodie bags filled with sweets, oranges, sugar cane and chicha, a bubble gum pink sweetened corn drink. It's a quite a chaotic, but entirely joyous melee. The same thing goes on in the afternoons- there's another small procession and prayer session followed by more treat giving (this is why I made Halloween comparisons). It's so beautiful to see neighbors working together and chipping in to provide those with even fewer economic means with holiday treats. And the scale in which all this is done is quite impressive. The other day, I watched a member of my extended host family as she cooked a gigantic, and I mean enormous, vat of chicha over a fire. It probably yielded at least a hundred baggies! Another cultural thing: most refrescos, fruit juices, are served in small plastic bags. To drink them, you rip off one corner and squeeze the contents upwards into your mouth.

While Purisima is a time of festivity for many in Nicaragua, it's also turning into a time of great tension as Nicaragua's religious demographics change. For example, there are giant Purisima altars all along one of the main streets in Managua. Evangelical groups have turned out to protest these installations, on the charge that the statues of Mary are "idolatry" which is against the Bible's teachings. 

Rio San Juan, which only had one Catholic priest for a vast region of the country during the war years, experienced a big growth of evangelical churches that has carried over to the present day. I was chatting with the local priest the other morning, and he told me that in most of the communities he ministers to there is peaceful coexistence, a mutual respect despite the distrust between the different Christian sects. However, one of the communities has a much smaller Catholic presence, and their Purisima procession was booed at and hit with small stones.

It makes me sad to hear such stories given how similar on a fundamental level all the Christian religions are: they hold the same book to be the basis of their religion for crying out loud! They have the same figures and tell most of the same stories. They call God by the same name! If you can't get along with that much in common, is there any hope for the so- called civilizational clashes?** I have an especially hard time fathoming this kind of tension, given that I take a super universalist view to religion (same being up there, many different paths) and having grown up on the East Coast of the US, where religion is a private affair, but where there is generally a lot of respect and collaboration between different religious groups at the local level. The guess the most I can hope for is that sharing this perspective could somehow be constructive.

** I think Sam Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis is complete crap, but I needed a pop social science term here...

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.

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.

October Updates

la diana- I think this word literally means reveille, but this refers to the bad for sleeping tradition of having a band of trumpets and probably some other instruments play early in the morning. Like pre-sunrise.


repollo caliente- Technically, this means hot cabbage, but it refers to the game hot potato, which we play a lot in classes and in our youth groups. Kids who want to be smart alecks will sometimes refer to it as "re-chicken" because there's a comercial here for an online english course that refers to it that way, in jest.

Somebody's been lazy about blogging. So lazy in fact, that this blog post's existence is entirely due to Hilary Clayton pointing out that I hadn't written anything in a while. I don't really have much of an excuse. I have been very busy, but not really enough to justify the length of time in which I haven't written anything. So what have I been up to this month? Cue the highlight reel.

The fiestas patronales, or the party to celebrate the Patron Saint of the town, which happens to be the Virgin Mary of the Rosary, lasted essentially the first week of October. For those with less familiarity with Latin America, the fiestas patronales are a huge deal, in both the secular and religious life of a town.

-During the course of the fiestas patronales:

-A statue of the Virgin Mary (with a baby Jesus in tow) was paraded around the town to stay at different houses during the course of the week. Then, on Sunday, there were even bigger celebrations, with a parade and traditional dances, and all kinds o music.

-On Saturday and Sunday, there was a diana at literally 4 am. And then they shot off fireworks. Not really a fan of this particular tradition.

-In front of my house (and when I say in front of my house I mean literally in the street), there was a carnival. Complete with a crazy ferris wheel, swings and other amusements. Also, there was a lot of CUMBIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
By Sunday night, after a several of days of hearing music pretty much non stop, I was literally shaking from being exposed to noise for so long. It was not a good situation.

There was also a hipica, which was basically a big parade of horses, surrounded by drunk people. Basically, an afternoon of excellent horse watching (think gigantic Spanish stallions) and people watching (crowds of people dolled up to the nines in cowboy gear).

On Sunday evening, my fellow gringos and I went to a fiesta with live music which also featured a lot of people dressed in cowboy gear. A friend of mine attempted to teach me how to dance, which went poorly. At one point, I'm fairly sure that I accidentally punched a couple in the face while trying to manuever to a particularly fast number. Basically, my many attempts to rectify my natural lack of Latin dance ability are completely in vain.At least it's slightly better than my whistling.

The Monday after the Fiestas patronales, we had "Practicuum Week", a week of intensive teaching outside of our training towns, without the usual distractions of Spanish class, youth group and other community integration activities. Four other "TEFLero" (Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) trainees and I went to the fabulous city of Leon, to teach and learn about the volunteer experience from two current volunteers. It was a great, although stressful week. Leon is unbelievably hot, but it's gorgeous. There are 17 churches scattered throughout the city, including the largest cathedral in Central America, and there's a magnificent view of volcanoes as well. Sadly, we didn't have much time to do touristy things, although we did get to explore the cathedral. We worked with Nicaraguan teachers at 2 schools to co-plan and co-teach classes. I only got to teach 3 classes, because Leon was having a carnival and so my classes were canceled on our last day there. However, I got to observe 8 classes, at two different high schools and UNAN, the national university, which was a great experience, because giving feedback is an essential part of TEFL volunteers' job building the capacity of Nicaraguan teachers.

Best teaching moments: Doing a 50 cent (the rapper) impression to try and get the kids to understand the concept of a 50 cents coin, leading a scavenger hunt for garbage to teach about environmental issues, having groups of children draw a human body on the floor of the classroom with chalk, and managing to keep a class of 40 7th graders occupied with a rousing game of "repollo caliente" (hot potato) to teach the difference between there is and there are. We also had a great time throwing an American style barbeque for our counterpart teachers. Although it was stressful to co- plan under time constraints, in a new city, for classes we hadn't previously observed, it was still a good experience on the whole.

So for now, I'm back in my training town enjoying time with my host family, the other trainees, and the youth group and everything else. Savoring the cool mornings and evenings of Carazo, the sounds of the gigantic flock of birds landing in the trees, an unexpected rock concert, the clanging of church bells, the comforting sounds of rainy season, the whistling from the billiards hall, the arguing of the grandkids as they color, or fight over my harmonica or make a pinata...all the sensations that have come to make up my world in the last few weeks.

Tomorrow, I'm going to find out the site where I will be from the next two years. I'm excited...and terrified. I asked for a small site, somewhere slightly cooler, with as many counterpart teachers as possible to work with, without a gringo site mate in the same town, but with other volunteers nearby. We'll see if any of my requests are granted, but I'm sure I'll come to love my new site eventually.