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...