Some Pictures!

This is me and my training town buddies!
Kaitlyn, Denise, Misti, and Jenny.
We are standing outside Misit´s house on the
Calle Principal.

This is Laguna de Apoyo again. This is the view from the

top of our hike. The hike up was not so fun....

This is Alex and me in Catarina. Behind us

Laguna de Apoyo which is actually a volcano crater.

We went swimming there a few weeks ago and had

to make the KILLER hike up. It was SO beautiful though!

Me, Olena, Suzy, Emalee, and Analea at Catarina.
Kaitlyn and Alex at our vivero technical session.

One Month In Country

It has officially been one month in Nicaragua! Time has gone by quickly with how busy we´ve been, as well as the fun we´ve been having. Sorry we havent been posting a lot, but we´ve been way preoccupied. To make up, we´ll make this post nice and long.

Tomorrow we head out to our ¨volunteer visits¨, which means we´ll be staying with a current volunteer, asking many questions and tagging along to observe they´re daily activities. I´ll be visiting the area of Chinandega in the extreme northwest of the country and Kaitlyn will be going to the area of Leon, which is just south of Chinandega (Both very hot...but on the coast!). We´ve both been able to meet our hosts since they gave ¨charlas¨ (chats) to our training group. It should be a good time and a nice break from the training regiment.

The last few weeks have been high stress. The combination of langauge class, technical training, and work with the schools and kids is quite a lot to take on. Last weekend was our long awaited ¨vivero¨ project with our youth groups that we formed(a group of about 25 sixth graders), which is a fun, educational tree nursery project.

This week was intense as we had to give our own ¨charlas¨ (a word we´ll be refering to a lot in the months to come). My group´s first was done as a group to our youth group. However, due to some confusion on the teachers´part, we ended up with far more kids than expected (about 50!) crammed in a tiny classroom. In the end, we did manage to fight through the panic and chaos and give an effective presentation on self esteem. The next was a charla done as a duo in a classroom, which went beautifully. The kids were great and I made some stellar animal drawings for our food chain explanation.

We also had a scheduled soccer game with the kids, which was a major confianza (trust) builder with the kids. We can´t walk by the school now without getting swarmed by kids and shout outs. It was also encouraging that the girls were just as excited about playing as the boys were (girls are traditionaly discouraged from play sports here). It was also interesting that THEY demanded that the game be girls vs. boys.

The kids here are incredible to work with. They are extremely motivated, energetic, enthusiastic, and gracious. It amazes me how excited they get to do things like draw a map of their community, talk about environemtal projects, build a vivero, or just play some soccer.

Apart from all the work, we have had a little time to relax. A group of us took a hiking trip into a nearby extinct volcano a few weeks ago (Laguna de Apollo). The crater is now a very, very deep lake, which is very interesting because it has floating rocks (pumus) in it. We also got to see some howler monkeys on the hike down. After the hike we had lunch in a tourist town at the top of the volcano´s ridge, which has the most incredible view I´ve ever seen. From there you are above the lagoon, and beyond is an active volcano (Masaya) in the near distance on the right. To the left is the colonial city of Granada on the other side of the lagoon, and beyond that Lake Nicaragua, which you can see clear across to the to the mountains on the other side. From that one point you can see a huge piece of Nicaragua. We also got to grab some pizza and burgers there to indulge our cravings for American food.

On another note, my practices with the soccer team have now earned me a uniform! I´m just waiting for a weekend when my schedule doesn´t conflict and I can actually have time to play a game.

Adios for now and we promise we´ll try to post more frequently so that the posts wont be quite as exhausting as this one...

Background Infor

Some people have mentioned that we haven´t filled everyone in on how this whole process works, so for those of you that are still in the dark, here´s a basic outline of our schedule.

We had a 3 day staging in DC and a 5 day stagin in the capital city of Managua

We then arrived in ¨training towns¨, all located close to one another in the area near the city of Masaya (an hour from Managua)

Here we spend three months living with a host family and receiving langauge, teaching, cultural, medical, leadership, safety, etc. training 6 days a week. Very regimented and tiring. Kaitlyn and I live a 10 minute bus ride from one another, seperated to help us in our language learning and cultural adjustment.

In about a month Kaitlyn and I will be assignend a site and do a week long site visit to get to know the place, people, our ¨counterparts¨ that we´ll be working with, and find a place to live.

After three months of training we are ¨sworn in¨ as volunteers at the end of a week long session in Managua. After that the two of us head for our site where we´ll be serving permanently for the next 2 years.

So that´s the plan, the details later.

Monday

It is only monday and already my brain is about to explode. Today we spent alot of time talking to the mayor and the teachers at the school we will be working at. We also had interviews with one of the Peace Corps directors to see where we will be placed for our permanent site. Everyone in our town is busy getting ready for the big parade on Friday to celebrate Independence Day in Nicaragua. I promise that by the weekend we will post some pictures. Love and miss you all!
- Kaitlyn

Week One

We have made it through our first week of training! Our days are jam packed with lots to do. On Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesday (AM only), and Thursdays we have language classes all day. They are really interesting, not at all like a typical Spanish class. We meet our teachers at a fellow PCT (Peace Corp Trainee) house and we have class, usually on a porch. Most of the Spanish is practical and applicable to trying to live in Nicaragua. We have learned how to ask for directions, how to navigate the transportation system, and how to buy things, (always count your change!) We have also been bombarded with vocabulary! After classes we have homework and we need to go home and talk with our families.

Wednesday afternoons, Fridays, and some Saturdays we meet up with the other Environmental Education volunteers (about 18 of us) for technical sessions in classroom management, health issues, environmental issues, etc. It is really great to see the other trainees, (especially each other). Our group is really awesome. Everyone is really nice and we all seem to get along really well. It is a pretty young group, we range from about 21 to 30 years old. There is one other married couple in our group and an older married couple in the Agriculture group which is currently north of Managua, so we don´t get to see them until we swear in as volunteers on November 16th.

Friday our group traveled to a local college to listen to a really interesting speaker about the natural resources in Nicaragua. It really is a beautiful country but it has a lot of problems with trash, deforestation, and poverty. The talk really made our job here seem daunting. It is going to be a long, ongoing process. Saturday, we visited this really interesting self sustaining farm in the campo. There we learned how to plant our viveros (tree nurseries), which we are expected to do with our youth groups next week.

Part of our training is working with youth. This week we start doing observations in local schools and gathering youth for a youth group. Obviously, these are considerably daunting tasks when you speak little Spanish. However, these activities are important steps to get us ready for our final sites. This week will be busy as we have interviews with our Associate Peace Corps Director, school observations, youth group meetings, and class. We are exhausted, but are still enjoying it!

My family (Kaitlyn) is very nice and very patient. I have a mom, a dad, a 10 year old brother, and a 2 year old sister who is SO cute. They are really kind people, but I wish I could talk to them more. I have exhausted my limited supply of Spanish, so there are many moments of awkward silence and weird looks. I suppose the language will come soon, but for me it is never fast enough! I have my own room and running water (for the most part). There is a major energy crisis here, so they shut off the power during the day from about 7am to 4pm. It isn´t so bad because we are usually in class during that time. Overall, it has been a positive experience, although it still hasn´t hit me that Nicaragua is my home for the next two years. Right now, my goal is to make it through training and learn Spanish!

My family (Alex) is also really great. They have hosted 8 other volunteers before, which is a lot for these host families. I live with my host mom, who is a grandmother that takes very good care of me, her 26 year old daughter, 24 year old daughter in law, and her 4 year old grandchild. They feed me very well, plenty of rice and beans of course, but also a lot of chicken, plantains, and of course amazing, fresh juice from fruit I´ve never heard of.

It was great to finally get to our training sites after all of the time spend in hotels. We´re finally experiencing another culture! Training was great to meet all the volunteers in our group, and it´s also sweet when we all get together for our larger classes. As I expected, PC volunteers tend to be very dynamic people. We´re all from different backgrounds, but we all have a good deal in common and so get along swimmingly. I truly seems like the people who serve are some of the most interesting people from our country.

As Kaitlyn said, the work is exhausting when your spending your days trying to decipher and speak another language. By our last language class on Thursday my brain was totally saturated with Spanish vocabulary. At the same time the projects and assignments pile up as your having to spend all your energy trying to learn Spanish. On Tuesday we´re supposed to have a youth group meeting about planting trees, in Spanish of course...

The goal of integrating into the community was made a little easier for me this week however, since a teenage neighbor of mine invited me to play soccer. It was a lot of fun and I got to meet basically all of the young guys in the town. Now they want me to practice everyday, get a player´s ID, and play in their games...yet another activity I´m going to have to somehow find time for. Definitely awesome though! The guys in my town are really chill.

In the future, I´m going to create a list of all the funny things about Nicaragua that makes one realize that they´re not in the States anymore. However, I´ll give one small anecdote for ya´ll. While in language class on Thursday on one of our group member´s porches, our professora´s lesson was interrupted by the squeals of a piglet. She noted that, ¨Oh no, chanchito es muerto.¨ The three girls in my group were a bit distressed as the pig´s squeals slowly subsided over the next five minutes.

On that note, until next time!

Training!!!

Kaitlyn and I have finally made it through the week of boring orientations, both in Washington DC and in Nicaragua´s capital city of Managua. We are now in our training towns, living with seperate host families in the department of Masaya, which is about an hour south of Managua. Kaitlyn is in a bigger town while I´m in a tiny pueblo. Both of our families are extremely friendly and even more patient with our language abilities. We´re both finding that we are picking up Spanish quickly, although it will be a long three months of hard work until we gain the proficiency we´ll need to work in our sites. The days are crammed with language training, all in Spanish of course. Time is running out on our computers so we´ll post more info soon! Although this is all really exciting, we still miss everybody!