The Working Man^s Post

Well, after a combined total of 2 weeks spent close to death with bacterial infections and pneumonia and very little urge to write blogs, I have returned to almost full strength and spirits with an increased writing interest.

So it has recently come to my attention the lack of professional content in my posts-to-date and I feel the sudden urge to correct said deficiency.  So that the loyal reading community doesn’t think that all I am doing here is sweating profusely (although that is true) and noting the bodily noises of family members, I would like to summarize my work to date in the community and my plans for the future…perhaps as much for your viewing pleasure as for my personal organization of thoughts.

The Peace Corps, as the name might imply, is an organization dedicated to promoting peace in the world through the mutual exchange of cultures and ideas.  Through this experience, volunteers and host communities can arrive at an understanding of one another’s cultures.  However, we can’t really just show up and say “We come in the spirit of peace and brotherhood,” and say that we are doing anything.  Sooooo, the Peace Corps also works for the development of the host communities by meeting their need for skilled volunteers to help act as facilitators in the community’s self-directed socio-economic change.  What I think I simultaneously like most and hate about the Peace Corps is that we don’t have any money.  What so many recipients of international aid have come to expect from the international community is just that…more aid.  It has become increasingly evident to me throughout the first 4 months of my service that aid dependency is real.  I think that people who have been accustomed to receiving aid whenever they need something, will continue to think that aid is the only thing that will get them out of poverty.  Consequently, when I say “Hey,lets start a project in the community!” they say “Great, how much money are we getting?”

I can’t say that it surprises me, I mean the same thing happens in America all the time with parents spoiling their children.  Why would someone get a job when their parents are always buying all the things they need and bailing them out.Although that analogy doesn’t really translate because, in the case of my community, if somebody stops giving you money, there are no jobs.   Or maybe it does translate, I heard Americas economy was in rough shape right now or something…

I guess what all of this was meant to say was that my work is to promote local and self-sustainable development within the community that doesn’t rely on external funds to prop them up.  A lot of people like to use the word grassroots development because we are working on the ground level to help people help themselves.  I hate the word grassroots.  I think it’s an overused buzzword in development…but it does manage to get the idea across.  Because of this, many of the projects I try to bring to the community are meant to be low-cost, usually low-tech (but not always), easily replicable, and promoted from within the community.  For example, I helped work on a project with a guy named Ernesto, who is one of my good friends here, and the mayor’s office to bring building materials and some skilled laborers to help build a backstop and several retaining walls for the baseball field.  We got some help from people on the baseball team in terms of manual labor and we also carved out the baselines to make it look all fancy. 

I‘m also trying to work a lot on promoting drip irrigation systems during the dry season so that people who don’t normally plant all summer because of lack of water can grow small plots of vegetables for home consumption or for sale.  I’ve already helped set up a particularly bad-ass system with my host dad where we have a bunch of tomatoes and watermelon.

To kind of piggyback on that, I want to start making biofertilizers (a mixture of cow shit, molasses, milk, and tree leaves fermented in a special container) to reduce fertilizing costs and petroleum dependency.

Another thing that has kind of defined my work up till now has been the Community Bank.  Community Banking was an idea pioneered by Peace Corps in Africa and has since been successfully implemented in communities all over the world.  Basically, community banking is the idea that multiple people saving their money in a group can accumulate much more capital and have the power to provide and receive loans from the money they have saved together (something not usually afforded to rural farmers in many countries).  Also, since the groups are usually 20-40 people all from the same community, there is an element of trust within the banking system (a trust that I have never felt with my current banking provider, Fifth Third).  Also, there are an infinite number of secondary benefits that come from people being organized and having money – I have heard of banks that give out scholarships to students in their community, banks who start small businesses with loans from the bank, etc….and all without a single dime of outside funding.  I have been working with a group of about 25 people to start a community bank and it seems to be going really well so far.  We have had several organizational meetings and saved once so far.  I just had a large box made to store the money and am working with one of the women who is going to be the accountant on the math of running a bank.

As agriculture volunteers, we also provide a series of so-called “appropriate technologies” that are meant to decrease deforestation and promote better environmental practices.  First, there are improved ovens.  The ovens that have traditionally been used in Nicaragua are big dome shaped ovens that use up a lot of firewood to heat up.  We have been trained in making a newer type of oven that is smaller, more efficient, and uses much less wood.  The same principle also applies to our improved stoves that are much more efficient and have a chimney that directs smoke out of the kitchen and is healthier to use.  Indeed, I have met many a house wife here that sounds like a pack-a-day smoker but has never touched a cigarette in her life.  The third and coolest things we have been trained in are biodigestors.  Basically it is a big bag about 2 meters long and 1 meter wide that converts cow manure and water into methane gas that can be used for cooking.  (one quick side note about cow manure that I think is funny: the word for shit in Spanish is mierda, and since we work in the rural areas where nobody really needs or wants to watch their language, even the training documents on biodigestors and other things cow-manure related say mierda de vaca instead of the more politically correct estiercol de vaca).

There are also a million other things that I want to do in the future that are really cool.   Pig farms, animal vaccination, youth groups, learning accordion, reforestation with silvo-pastoral or precious wood plantings, live fencing, rain-water harvesting, women’s gardening group, blah blahblah.

The hardest part for me so far has been convincing people that I don’t have money.  As Peace Corps volunteers, we can apply for funds to do specific projects, but we can’t just give out money randomly.   I know in some cases there are volunteers with bleeding hearts and large bank rolls that privately finance stuff or people in their communities…unfortunately for La Danta, they got the standard-model PC volunteer with $100 in his bank account and student loans out the ass.  I like it better that way though, because, even though it’s a pain to explain to everybody that I’m not here to hand out money and , no, I’m not here to proselytize, I can recommend to you and work with you on how we can figure out a solution that you had an active part in. 

Photos For a Rainy Day

Its weird experiencing tropical storms in person.  Before I was only familiar with them as spinning colorful blobs on a green screen while a jolly meteorologist drew circles and arrows and notified Caribbean travelers of affected vacation spots.  Here, the rain from the so-called “broad surface low” has pretty much shut down everything in my area.  Lets hope it doesn’t evolve into Hurricane Rita. 5 days of constant rain is not only annoying in the sense that the roof starts to leak and you can’t do laundry because there’s nowhere to dry it, but it also can be destructive.  People near my site have already lost some of their crops.  Unfortunately the low lying volcanic soils of Chinandega that make it so fertile and great for cultivating also make it susceptible to flooding.  For this reason I have been stuck in another city unable to get back to my house because the highways have been washed out.  However, since this is the first chance I have had to get wireless I have the opportunity to give you, the viewing audience, more pictures that are long overdue.  (this time, in slideshow format to demonstrate the awesome versatility of WordPress blog hosting) Okay so the slideshow feature wasn’t working…looks like you get gallery again.

Short Stories

Inside Jokes With Myself

Having a good sense of humor is important in getting ahead in life.  I think that people underestimate the power of a good laugh.  In Nicaragua, I feel as if my sense of humor is lost on a lot, if not all of the people. This is probably because my humor draws from a long history of pop culture references and just being American in general.  Don´t get me wrong, people here are really funny and they laugh all the time, just not at my jokes.  One time I got really exited because I just knew I had the perfect joke to tell but by the time I got it out the conversation had moved onward and all I could do was hang my head and Charlie Brown shuffle away.  So as a means of compensating, I have I series of inside jokes with myself so that I can laugh…at myself.  Here are two examples:

1. Soup is a very popular dish her in Nicaragua, so when people see a paticularly good looking chicken walking around, or a fat pig, or pretty much anything edible, they say “That would be really good in a soup with tortillas.” Likewise, if there is an animal that is dead, they say “Put it in the soup!” For example, a truck that I was riding in ran over a chicken and everybody in the truck shouted, “Throw it in the soup!” Whenever Nicaraguans say it, though, they are at least half serious.  Whenever I hear them say it I can only think of one thing – Carl Weathers in Arrested Development.  (For those unfamiliar here is a link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a33ig18dscA).  So whenever people talk about making a soup, I laugh a little bit harder than everybody else because its an inside joke.

2. There are two cats in our house.  They are annoying.  In the middle of the night they come into my room and try to walk around on shelves and other precarious ledges that I have put things on.  Because it is pitch black, they always knock things off of the shelves and it always makes a lot of noise.  I decided to make traps for them on the ledges so that when Misi the cat decides to mess with my shit and winds up inside the pastic bag I hid at the end of the ledge, I wake up and laugh a little bit because its an inside joke.

Birth of Meester Chele

In Nicaragua, pretty much everyone has a nickname (or sobrenombre).  When I got to my site, I wondered what people would call me.  At first it was just Brian (nobody can really say my real name) and that was a little dissappointing.  Until one fateful day when I was in the Somotillo market with my host dad, Santana.  We were chatting with another guy about something when a blind man came wandering in between us asking for money. He started off in Spanish, but, probably because he heard my accent, started speaking to me in English: “Meeester chele, please give me money.” The word “chele” is used do describe people with light skin in Nicaragua.  Obviously most people from the US fall under this category, but it can also be used to describe light-skinned Nicaraguans as well.  Santana thought that this was hilarious and so, after telling everyone in our village, I have henceforth been known as Meester Chele.

Manners

After being in my new home for over a month, I have been drawing many similarities between living in Nicaragua and living in college.  I remember before all of us left that magical place known as Dayton, Jim told me that I was going to miss his farting.  As it turns out, I don´t have to here.  My host grandmother has some of the best farting skillz in all the land, and is not ashamed of it one bit.  Like Jim, she takes pride in a good head-turning, room-filling fart.  Also like Jim, the best ones come at night when we all lay down to go to sleep.  I´m not sure if it is culturally appropriate to laugh at farts, but I do, because it reminds me of living in Dayton and makes me feel a little bit more at home.

Then there is the issue of lugie-hawking and spitting.  In our family here in Nicaragua, we don´t spit outside, we spit inside.  On the floor.  But its not a good spit unless you make as much noise working it up as possible.  The more disproportionate the amount of work to how much you get out, the better.  (From this, I also draw parallels to college when part of the morning ritual was wondering how much spit Jim was actually going to work up from 15 minutes of throat clearing.)  Although I must say that spitting on the floor is liberating.  Its a dirt floor, which for the record is 100 times more awesome than having a real floor becuase you can literally do anything you want to it and it doesn´t matter.  The only difference is that you have to wear sandals all the time.  But again, that was also the same in college, especially junior year when sometimes I wished the moldy linolium tile actually was a dirt floor because it would have been cleaner.  (That was also the year when I learned that you get what you pay for).

Jellicle Cats

I already mentioned that we have two cats in the house.  What I didn´t mention is that they are almost identical, they are both male, they are both named Misi, and they are bitter rivals.  They are, in fact, worse than dogs.  When they beg for food, which is literally every time you have food, they meow with the most pathetic and annoying meow you have ever heard from a cat.  Also, they think the food belongs to them, so they jump on you while you are eating to try and claim what is rightfully theirs.  Then there are the fights which are actually fun to watch, until your bed becomes the arena.  They told me that my mosquito net was an important and ingenious contraption that would keep the mosquitos out of my bed at night and prevent me from getting malaria and dengue fever.  Alas, there are not mosquitos in my community and I was debating on whether or not to take it down until one day last week.  The cats started fighting again and I was just posted up on the sidelines watching the cats clawing each other to death and the family scrambling to get a broom to break them up.  This time, however, the broom just managed to sweep them towards and into my room where they jumped on my bed.  With the mosquito net securely attached, my bed became a Misi vs. Misi WWE Cagematch.  Eventually, after throwing sufficient things at them, one Misi ran away, leaving the other Misi trying to escape out of the back but having no luck whatsoever.  Instead it decided that it would be a good idea to just hang from the side of my mosquito net and let me throw more things at it until it finally ran away.  I was not made aware of this before, but cats urinate while they are fighting.  Needless to say my bed was not smelling the best with Misi piss everywhere.  Ever since that fight, it has been all-out war between them at all hours of the day, including last night at about 1:00 AM when they started wrestling  and tried to settle it in the cage yet again.  Luckily, my mosquito net was securely attached to keep mosquitos and cats at bay while I slept.

Honestly, after this whole ordeal with these damn cats I am finding it less-reproachable that my grandpa used to trap and drown feral cats.

The Quick Update Post

I am a little under the weather.  Two days ago I think I drank some bad water.  I was visiting another volunteer who lives close to me and ended up having to spend the night because it got dark and it is dnagerous to go to my site in the dark.  I woke up the next morning feeling a few shades greener than usual.  Luckily Katie let me borrow her bike so I could get home faster…little did she know that it would save me an embarrasing encounter on the side of the road.  As I huffed and puffed the 30 minutes to my house – uphill mostly – quite literally drenched in sweat from the scorching 7:00 AM sun, I thought I was going to die.  In fact I think I kept repeating this sentiment to myself for the duration.  I tried to stop to take a #1 break but was scared of the explosive #2 that had plagued me the day before so I decided against it.  When I finally arrived home, I took off all my clothes without saying a word to my family who kept asking me what was wrong, chugged 2 huge glasses of water, went to the bathroom and projectile vomited all over the yard.  I must have been quite the spectacle.

After a day of sitting around feeling and smelling like hot garbage and trying to figure out what I had by talking to my host family I decided to go get an exam.  Talking about sickness with my family is incredibly amusing because I don´t really know that many spanish words for symptoms and health related things so we resort to making motions and accompanying noises.  To ask me if I had upset stomach and rumbling in my lower intestines, my host grandma made spirit fingers over her belly and made a noise not unlike that of a Puddy Patroller from the Power Rangers.  She then proceeded to tell me about previous bouts of diarrhea that had afflicted her including one colorful recolection of a stool that burned so badly she thought a hot chile was passing through her culo.  I nearly gave a stool sample laughing so hard at her.

As it turns out I have another amoeba infection (that makes 2 if your counting) and trust me one was enough.  Also theres no AC minivan to drive you to the clinic while you curl up in the backseat and your mom puts on Don Henley´s Greatest Hits to make you feel better.  There is a giant school bus rocketing down the side of brokeback mountain in the heat with the Black Eyed Peas blaring over the HUGE speakers in every bus. They love the BEP here.  Needless to say it wasnt the best experience but I ended up getting my medication and eerthang will be better soon.

So here´s a quick update in bullet point format for brevity:

• I am playing baseball on the village team.  I didnt realize how serious the league was when I joined however.  This led to me being stuck out by a National Selection pitcher the last game. The two best teams from the department head hire people from AAA leagues and the national selection.  Our team doesnt have that luxury. Although, baseball is really easy to learn in spanish because all the words are pretty much the same, just said in a steriotypical spanish accent. (honron, eshortestop, raayfeelder, center feelder, heet, flyowt)
• I am also playing soccer with our village team.  We fare much better against unsalaried teams and have tied two games. While I realize that alot of time is spent playing sports and not “doing Peace Corps work” I will have none of it because I am enjoying myself and meeting a ton of people in the process.  Also we have a lot more to talk about.
• I am starting a shool garden
• Im sure there are other things but i cant remember and I have to grab my bus.

How El Recreo Won at the Game of Peace Corps

Lack of blog posting…blah blah blah…I´m sorry…blah blah blah

Okay so the last three weeks have been super occupado and I have much to tell.

The theme for the week of July 17th is the competencia/feria del productos for the youth groups that each of the training towns started. In case I forgot to explain the project in detail earlier, basically one of the goals of training was to form a youth group in your training town, teach them about entrepreneurship and operating a small business, and commercialize a product to be presented and sold at a product fair.  Our youth group, like many, was off to a rocky start at the beginning, but as the weeks went on, we held a steady group of people at every meeting and got the ball rollin. After many hours of deliberation and a long-winded debate over the boy´s desire to make bread and and the girl´s insistence on making jewelry, the boys finally won out and we went on with making bread (while losing a lot of the girl participants in the process).  After assuming the delicious task of trying many of the different types of bread offered in the barrio, one of my fellow trainees decided to make a sample of banana bread which is rarely sold in Nicaragua, if at all.  It was a huge hit among the members so we went foreward with making good ól american banana bread in Nicaragua.  After picking up a couple of new members we were cookin´with wood.  and started making and selling bread with a small initial investment from each of the members of the group (I had to spot some of the members because people were having a tough time coming up with the money).  The way it worked out, we were actually making a pretty decent profit margin (positive aaaaalpha) of around 80-100%.

Fast foreward to last week when we (the trainees) returned from our site visits where were holding meetings every day for at least 2 hours making all the preparations for the product fair (making the bread, decorations for the display table, posters showing the commercialization of our product, and the label/company logo that took me 2 hours to make on MS paint).

Allow me to set the mood for the product fair:

We stepped off the type of big yellow school bus that dominates the public transit system here (decommissioned school busses from the US) all in ourmatching white dress shirts to 11 other groups of trainees and their respective youth groups mulling around outside of the venue for the product fair.  There are two seperate groups of trainees that arrived in May – Agriculture (to which I belong) and Small Business.  There is a very public and heated rivalry between small biz and ag when it comes to product fair.  Although each of the 12 individual groups are competing against one athother, there is a side competition of sorts betweens Ag and Small Biz to see who wins more awards at the fair.  Peter, our Ag project specialist pulls all of the ag volunteers and their groups to the side and explains that even though Small Biz is technically more “in their element” than we are, Ag volunteers are tecnically better at everything and that he was sure we would win.  Quite honestly at this point I know we have a good product and an organized presentation, but I feel as if our group does not have that much of a chance of taking home a prize.  Nevertheless I keep encouraging our group that we are going to win while simultaneously belittling the other groups.

Everybody is nervous as we are about to give our presentation including me.  I had picked up some type of cold the day before and was loaded up on meds which made it difficult for me to focus on the task at hand.  All things considered. the presentation went incredibly smoothly and everybody was really enthusiastic when we finished.

As they announced the prize for best label, I knew that our running banana man (pictures to come) was good, but couldnt stand up to the hand painted coconut shells, who ended up winning the prize.  As they announced the prize for best presentationand best taste, I was sure we had a great chance at winning, but as the group who made the chocolate covered bananas (yes, there were plently of arrested development jokes made at their expense), my hopes of winning anything were diminishing.  This was further augmented by the fact that 3rd and 2nd place prizes were taken by other groups.  Then a fun thing happened:

We won 1st place!!

Maybe it was the drugs I was on, but I was shocked when they announcedPanadería El Recreo as the winners.  Once I did realize that we won, however, there were plenty of “let´s go!”s and “shut the f__k up!”s coming out of my mouth.  Luckily none of the kids could understand me as I was quite vulgar in my celebration.  As prizes each of the kids won a new backpack full of school supplies and 2 whiteboards.  I was so damn proud of them.

Also, Agriculture ended up taking 4 of the 6 top spots including yours truly, who came out on top.

And thats my story of how, despite all of my doubts and preoccupations about the youth group, some humble breadmakers won the product fair.

Site Placement

I found out my site placement the other day.  This is where I am going to be living for 2 whole years of my life.

Community: La Danta

Nearest City: Somotillo

Department: Chinandega

I just met the man I will be living with (aka my new host dad) yesterday and he seems like a really cool person. We are going on site visits for a week starting todayin which we live with our host families, get to know some of the local people and basic geography (like hospitals, police stations, etc) and just kind of hang out and get to know everbody.

It sounds like Chinandega will be perfect for me.  It is really hot there as it is the lowest lying department in Nicaragua.  Because of this, it is also the department that was affectesd most by hurricane Mitch back in the 90`s.  It seems like some areas are still struggling to recover but if Santana Dìaz (new host dad) is any indication, there are a lot of interested and hard working people there.

Marketing 101 in Nicaragua

I thought I should comment on the various advertising strategies available in nicaragua considering my youth group has to start marketing its product soon and I just find them plain interesting.  Almost nobody uses TV commerials to promote except for the biggest compnies in Nicaragua like El Gallo Màs Gallo (basically a Best Buy with a chicken for a mascot that also sells mattresses and motorcycles) and Tip Top (a fast food chain that specializes in chicken).  For the rest of us, there are a vast array of other marketing opportunities.  For example:

Paint your ad on the side of a building (there are hardly any billboards)

Have a truck drive around the barrios and have someone yell your advertisement out of a megaphone (if it sounds annoying, dont worry…it is)

Walk down the street yelling out what you are selling

Walk up and down the aisle of a bus that is waiting to depart pedling your wares

Word of mouth – widely considered the best form of marketing, it is depended on heavily here

I don´t want it to seem like I´m talking down on the lack of media blitzing here.  On the contrary, I think it is far better than having to wait through more than 30 minutes of
commercials for an hour program.  Its also nice not to have to see someone freezing their ass of in the middle of winter dressed in an uncle sam costume trying to flag down cars to stop in and get their taxes done.

 

Un Día en la Vida…

I have been laying here for a little over an hour and can’t seem to fall asleep so hopefully writing about my daily schedule will help because just thinking about it usually puts me to sleep. “But Ryan, how could Pre-Service Training be boring? You’re in a different country having tons of new experiences!”  Sure I am, and I have been having a great time don´t get me wrong.  It´s just that during training you are I am very scheduled and lose a lot of the freedoms I had been waiting 20 some years to have.  The stuff that happens during the week feels a lot like work (in Spanish for my mom and aunt in the US who are convinced I can´t speak Spanish because I don´t like to perform at the dinner table) :

Todas las mañanas me levanto a las 6 porque todos los perros
en el barrio estan peleando y fregandome. ¡Què jode! Mi mamà me pregunta,
”¿Comò ameneciò? ¿Va a beber cafè ahora?” Usualmente yo contesto, ”Amenecì
tuàni, ¿y usted? Una taza muy grande por favor.” Mi mamà me prepara un
desayuno de frijoles, tortilla, aguacate del palo en el patio, y juevos
revuelto.  Despuès, me ducho con agua
fria de un balde porque la agua no està encendido en nuestro barrio por las
mañanas.  Me visto, hago mi tarea, y va a
clase hasta el mediodìa.  Al primero las
clases estaban en mi casa, pero ahorrita estan en la casa de una de mis
compañeras.  Solo aprendemos español en
la clase, pero tambièn hay lecciònes sobre la historia de Nicaragua, aspectos
culturales, y mitos y leyendos.  Al
mediodìa regreso a mi casa para almorzar.
A veces, mi mamà prepara pollo o carne asada, pero todos los dìas, hay
arroz, frijoles, tortillas, y frescos.
Despuès, mi mamà me manda a descansar en la hammaca por un rato para que
mi comida me cae bein.  Regreso a la
clase a la una hasta las tres de la tarde.
A veces, tenemos que preparar para nuestro reuñion con el grupo de
jòvenes, y trabajar en el huerto.  Si no
habia lluvia el dìa pasado, tenemos que regar las plantas y el abonero para que
no sequen.  Mi hermano y yo corremos 3
kilometros casì cada dìa a las 6 de la noche porque no hay mucho sol y por eso
està màs fresco.  Cenamos juntos a las 7
y miramos programas de televisiòn como Ripleys Believe It Or Not, Canal
Discovery, o una pelicula.  Despuès, mi
hermano y yo vamos a la venta para comprar una gaseosa o galletas.  Me acuesto a las 8 o 9 de la noche (muy
temprano para una Nica).  Escucho a
musica español que bajè de mi hermano y escribo en mi cuaderno o mi
computadora.

I don´t have any spell check on this brokeback WordPad program as I was too cheap to spring for Microsoft Office Suite so please forgive any spelling mistakes.  Anyways, so my day usually consists of class, youth group and garden with as much conversation as I can fit in to practice español.  Twice a week we go to technical training sessions in various cities in Nicaragua to learn about such things as:

Making compost, gardening, Nicaraguan agriculture, Peace Corps approach
to development, how to fill out Peace Corps paperwork (aka how to daydream),
conducting market studies, what to do if you get malaria or dengue fever,
etc…..

On an unrelated subject, I did not realize how much TV everyone here watches.  I think I expected to be immersed in a culture completely or at least mostly removed from the world of cable television, but, thanks to my family´s access to 100 channels of cable TV
and obsession with Ripley´s Believe It or Not, I can get my daily Dean Cane fix
without having to go through unsavory channels (pun intended) of business.  Cable is the first (and sometimes only) peice of technology a family will invest in here besides cellphones (literally everyone has one).  Of course, everything is dubbed over in spanish which is great because it helps my spanish tremendously when I have to comprehend the story about the dog who can smell cancer in spanish (unbelievable? believe it).
Also, my brother has a small obsession with the Fast and Furious franchise so we have watched all 5 of them since I have been here.  This has prompted me to make a list of the
movies I have watched here and that I am thankfull for the simplicity of their dialogue and plot line so I can follow along more easily in Spanish:

Rambo 2, Rocky 1 and 2, Fast and Furious 1-5, Major Paine, The Sandlot (¡va
a matarme Smalls!), Home Alone 2.

A big (albeit longoverdue) shout out to the Dallas Mavericks.
How dare that treacherous wench LeBron think he could win a national
championship.

2 Months… The Longest I Have Been Out of the Country

I really wish there was a way to convey the emotions that one goes through in the process of Peace Corps Training.  Unfortunately for the reader, words do not do it justice. But I´ll try

First, you leave everyone you know behind.  Then you meet a bunch of new people and try to get to know them.  Then 4 days later, you leave them and get to know the 3 or 4 white people in your training group really well and the people in your sector kind of well.  You also spend a lot of time with your host family and bond with them over things you have in common (usually the trainee aka me embarrassing myself, sometimes on purpose, usually not).  Then you leave your family and fellow training group and move closer to some other white people but still pretty far away from them AND away from your host family who
have put up with your obnoxious homework assignments (like asking them very
personal questions) and you fumbling with their native tongue.  The whole time you feel like you are taking advantage of them because they are helping teach you a second language AND feeding you AND teaching you about their country while you are just going to take off in 3 months anyways.  Also, between all of the training projects that you have to do, you really don’t have any time to return any of the nice gestures your host family does for you on a daily basis, let alone make it out to a cyber to send emails to the people you
can’t stop thinking about back home (I miss you guys even if I haven’t returned your emails yet!) because after dark is too dangerous to go out to the city and the sun sets promptly at 6:00 pm everday, conveniently when your responsibilities end.

Let’s just say me and training have our days:

There are days like today when I go to the garden and everything is growing
really well and the group of kids at the school went to the garden without you
and cleaned and planted more stuff.
Also, on days like today, a ton of kids show up to the youth group
meeting and the new kids have a ton to contribute and we make a lot of
decisions regarding the product they want to market.  On days like today I feel like I am actually making a difference because people are taking a project that I may have started
or a group that I may have brought together and are taking it away from me
making it theirs not mine.  On these days I’m really hopefull that this group will take this product and sell the shit out of it and make a ton of money. Also on days like today, my Spanish feels really good and I use new words correctly and feel like a badass who can speak two languages.

Then there are days like a couple of days ago when everything seems wrong.  You think about the garden and how futile it is to plant 5 rows of corn and some other shit and how it was just for practice anyways.  You also think about the youth group and how dirty you feel for using them for practice during training and how you are really just going to peace out after 3 months when they will probably need you the most.  You feel bad when people ask you to teach them english and you have to politely refuse because “that’s not what we’re
here for” and we don’t have enough time anyways because we’re too busy learning their language to return the favor.  On days like a couple days ago you finally got a chance to to check your messages for the first time in over 2 weeks only to realize that your computer
or the internet didn’t work or both.  Also on those days you can’t speak Spanish for shit and you get frustrated because you studied it in college and have been living in it for 2
months and you still can’t tell a simple ass story.  Also you feel like garbage because you just found out that you contracted an amoeba who is stealing your food and giving
you diarrhea so you have to evict him with powerfull drugs that don’t make you
feel good either (by the way, I named him Osmosis Jones after my favorite Chris
Rock movie).

But at the end of the day all I can do is write this page about how I have good days and bad days just like in the U.S. except I am in Nicaragua in a job that I love with super great people and I get to go to the beach this weekend.  By the time you have read this I will have gotten internet again and all will be right with the world.

Landmarks ahead:

               July 3 – My mom´s birthday (Happy Birthday Mom!!! Ill try to call you)

July 4 – US Independence Day AND Site Placement Day (when I find out where I   will be living!)

July 11 – Site Visit

July 28 – Swearing In

Music I am listening to as I write this:

The Decemberists (mostly the Picaresque album songs 8 and 9)

+44

Don Omar – DanzaKuduro

Right Side of the Tree – Spring Break Anthem (thank you random)

My Address!

This has been a long time coming but here is my address:

Ryan LeMier, PCT

Voluntario del Cuerpo de Paz

Aportado Postal 3256

Managua, Nicaragua

Central America

 

 Whatever you do DO NOT send boxes because they will get opened and it has to go through customs which takes forever

Mail takes about 2 – 3 weeks to get her if its not a box

All letters are welcome and I will reply

Things that you can send me: peanut butter, granola bars, some cool healthy shit from places like Trader Joes,  and suprises are always welcome!!