Friday, September 14, 2007

Well, I´m starting to settle in and become adjusted to my new lifestyle here. I´m enjoying doing pretty much everything outside, including bathing, brushing my teeth, washing my clothes, and attending spanish classes. The weather changes on a dime ehre during the rainy season (invierno). One minute its hot and sunny and the next its cold and pouring down rain. I´m learning to brink my rain coat everywhere with me.
Im also getting comfortable with the standard mode of transport, the converted american school buses. They are REALLY crowded. The other day, my fellow trainee, had to hang out the door for lack of room on the bus. It was an adventure!
My spanish is improving, or at least I´m losing my inhibitions of saying the wrong thing and I´m now trying to talk to everyone and ask them for help.
The family life is getting better and I´m starting to understand the connections. I live with an older couple and their 2 daughters and their children and children´s children live in 3 other houses next to us. My host mothers brother also lives in a house with some other relatives thats owned by another daughter who lives in the states.
Peace Corps has really been making us run around with lots of training. We´ve been so busy this last week with all sorts of training and in any free time I get, I´m doing homework or trying to start this youth group, which so far has been a disaster. Its really been a challenge to gather youth that I cant really communicate with and convince them that they want to build a garden with us!
My fellow Peace Corps trainees and I walk around town everyday to try to meet more youth but haven´t had much luck, so we resorted to a muddy game of frisbee the other day and it worked! Pretty soon, kids were coming to us and we were all slipping and sliding around in the mud! My host mom was not happy with me when she had to handwash the huge mud stains out of my khakis!
As for the ag training, last week we learned to build a square meter garden, compost, and identify Nica fruits, vegetables, and trees. Not as easy as it sounds.
One of our projects this week was to build a community map with the youth. We did two maps, one with the boys and one with the girls and it was interesting to see the different points of interest for each...nintendo and soccer fields for the boys and the names of people´s homes for the girls.
Another project I did was to interview people in my household about their daily activities. My host parents wake up at 4am everyday to start chopping wood for the fire to make coffee and breakfast, then work all day, my mom cooking and cleaning around the house, making candies called cajetas (sugar & milk...mmmm...really good) and going to town to sell the candies, my father working on a farm (finca), until they go to bed at 8pm. The youth go to school in the morning then come home for lunch and the girls help out with chores while the boys hang out and play soccer or nintendo (the nintendo is a collective place they all go to play). In free time, most people just sit and talk...the effect of a lifestyle without all the money and gadgets of an American lifestyle to keep them busy.
As for my diet, I´m eating rice and beans for almost every meal, mixed with some other random things. Cup of Noodles and a tortilla for dinner last night. A piece of meat for breakfast the other day...and once in awhile some vegetables. But, I must say I enjoy most of the food (even though its not very healthy for me) and it makes my host mother really happy when I tell her I like it (she hugs me everytime I say "me gusta").
On the job front, we had our first interview with our future boss (the APCD) for him to get to know us and our experience. The Peace Corps Nica Ag focus is on small farming and sustainability so cattle work is not really incorporated into that. Most people dont have enough money to own cows and the fincas with cattle are usually wealthier than our goals. However, my APCD thinks there might be a possibility that I can work at a site with cattle and pigs. Yeah!
Today and tomorrow are holidays here...patriotic days...so we´re in town watching the parades and enjoying the festivities. Sunday and Monday we´re hiking to a waterfall as part of our technical training (water quality tests and plant identification) and spending the night at a nature reserve. Should be fun.
Then its back to the grind trying to learn spanish and get this dreaded youth group going!