Site visit In SISLE

Hi All!
I got back from my site visit in Sisle (pronounced sissily) on Friday!

 It is a beauitful town, we drove through all these mountains and lush green rolling hills. It is up against a lake and they grow mostly coffee and then the usual beans and corn. Unfortunately my camera has still not been fixed so I did not take any pictures so you are just going to have to take my word for it!

There are a lot of ongoing projects that I will be following up on. There are 3 exisiting community banks, two of which are women´s cooperatives that have both started mills for corn and coffee. There is also a coffee cooperative and a basic grains cooperative. There will definetly not be a lack of things to do! I was also asked about a thousand times to give English classes and I figure even though it is unrelated to Agriculture it is the least I can do to try and pump up my town about me,
This is in consideration of the previous volunteer who the whole town worships and adores.  here is why...She was amazing! She started 2 community banks, got one of the womens groups funding to expand thier mill into a processing plant, built like 25 improved ovens, spoke fluent Spanish, built her own house, and her brother is a catholic priest who gave guest sermons in the local church...did I mention the whole community except for two families is Catholic?
How I am going to follow her act I do not know but I am going with " I am funny and entertaining with my bad Spanish and lack of knowledge about all of the Catholic saints"
It is really lucky for me I have been through my first communion and that I have some knowledge of all of it, because the family I stayed with for my site visit (who I really like!) prays 3 times a day! The couple is an old couple of 85 and 73 years old and they have a HUGE Family! I think they had about 6-8 kids and then they all had kids and then the kids all had kids! THere have been deaths, divorces, affairs and such so it is rather hard to keep track, but everyone I met told me their relation to the family and was incredibly patient with my horrible Spanish which is even harder for people in the country to understand because they speak really really differently. I also tended to invite myself over to a lot of family business organizations like the coffe cooperative meetings and community banks which they didn´t seem to mind. One of the more interesting experiences I had was going to a coffee cooperative meeting which was icnredibly organized and informative. The only down side was it started an hour and half late (which unfortunately is the norm here...and I would like everyone to keep this in mind when I get back and am always late! ) They informed about pesticide and insecticide use which tends to be really over used here, and the other unfortunate thing besides the over use is many of the products that are banned in the USA because they are dangerous are then brought and sold here. There is also very little use of protective gear because it is to hot and it is expensive to buy. The great thing was after all of the training on correct use of pesticide and organic alternatives they showed the documentry FOOD INC (which was in Spanish) we watched almost the entire thing and it was incredible to see a Nicaraguan reaction, I was also really ashamed watching it, but also greatful that they could see some of the mistakes American agiruclture has made. It was an interesting realization for me as well that I am always so careful about what I eat here for fear of infection, but really there are many many dangers in the states as well and the benefit here is that I know where my food comes from. I literally see the field it grows in the cow or chicken it is produced from. It was an awesome full circle moment for me on Site visit and I would really appretiate everyone at home watching it!

That being said I am proud to say I did not get sick at all on site visit! Which after my technical training week of being sick as a dog, on crutches in the mud, sleeping on mats with 10 other volunteers, was my BIGGEST fear! I would say about 80 percent of my communication was body language and holding my stomach with a pained facing and pointing at food and water that I couldn´t drink. They have this great expression here when you can´t eat a food "me hace daño" It litterally means it hurts me..but it can change- like one day coffee can hurt me and the next day I can handel it! IT has been the key to my eating success here! That is the wonderful thing about being a follow up volunteer is that everyone in the community already knows that gringos have week stomachs, so you can follow on the previous volunteers diarreah trails! :) Sorry if that was vulgar, we have gotten very comfortable talking about these things over the past 3 months! I really didnt have anything to worry about because the food on site was great! The family I stayed with for my visit was really great about boiling the water and casually asking me what my favourite food was and then serving it to me like they already had it the whole time. It was really funny cause some little girl (a grandchild of some sort) would ask me what I like to eat in the states and then the next meal it would magaically appear on my plate! :) I cannot say enough how incredibly generous everyone in this family was to me!
Unfortunately, I will not be living with them because the room is not big enough and doesnt meet peace corps standards, just down the street from them the previous volunteer build a little mother in law unit next top another house and I will be living there, which I think will be nice for my own sanity and independence. Also the other family I feel really close with is just down the street and my new family has two teenage daughter and one young son who I think I will get along with really well!
The other kind of comforting thing I just found out today is that my friend Vanessa will be really close to me in the neighbouring town! So I feel like as usual I have been put exactly where I was meant to be!
Right now I have one more week to finish up with our youth group, which has it´s competition on Friday and try to focus enough to study for my final Spanish interview which is on Wednesday of this week. I just hope I can get through everything gracefully and I can improve my Spanish and technical skills enough to be of real use to my site when I arrive.
I was told by a fellow reader that my blogs are both enjoyable and a tad long ( so for all the mothers out there who have more than a million things to do i will not blabber on about how much I miss all of you and love you!)
Sorry for the lack of pictures on this one! Hasta pronto!
XOXO
Alicia

Time Passing Quickly

My brother Nelson always says this phrase to me in English… “Time passing quickly” now it is all I can think of every time I think about writing this blog! There were days (especially while I had my cast on) that everything seemed to be moving soooo slowly, like the Spanish class would never end that day, like I had my cast on for ages…or we would never find out our sites…and now my cast is off, we have started a new cycle of Spanish classes and today I found out my site!

SISLE in Jinotega is my site. It is actually two towns, near each other. I will be the only volunteer between the two, and it is one of the bigger sites available for volunteers. My site packet says there is a lot of walking between sites (yay!) and a lot of different groups to work with. I will go on Thursday to visit my site for a week (kind of like a test run before I swear in).

 It would be an understatement to say that I am nervous…not that I do not like the sound of the site, because I do, but it is all so overwhelming. Right now I am feeling happy about the location, which is in the north, which has cooler temperatures (temperatures falling as low as the 60’s in the winter nights) and grows coffee and Cacoa. I am also looking forward to the established groups that exist.  For example there is a women’s group who has started to mill and sell coffee, and there are established community banks in both the towns, as well as an agriculture cooperative. What I am feeling uncertain about is my ability to be of use here…I feel completely insufficient for this town, especially since the site packet says "this is a well developed sites with high expectations for their volunteer" I am sure Peace Corps has their reasons for thinking I can handle it, but I don't know them right now!  I do feel like I will get the hang of it after a few months…and hopefully with 6 thousand people in my ‘community’ my Spanish will sky rocket! The other thing I am feeling a little “Trieste” (Sad) about is leaving my WONDERFUL family who I will now be really far away from, and leaving my whole training town and my training group. Our group could not be much more spread out across the country and even though Nicaragua is more like the state of New York and it seems closer, in reality travel takes much much longer, and we don’t have the income to travel or the time off to visit eachother often. I am really going to miss, what I have come to know as my support system here, both the Nica side and the Aggie side. BUT if anyone knows the silver linning of moving I would like to think it is me! And even though it is always hard to say goodbye, it is always a new door to more friends, more love and more support, so I just have to hope for more loving Nica family members and closer relationships with volunteers in my area!

This brings me to tonight! It is 11:30 pm here, and tomorrow I will have one of the busiest days I have had yet. I will start at 5:30am washing my clothes, then go to my neighbours house at 7am for a lesson on African Red Worms. Then Spanish class at 8am to noon. A quick lunch break and back to class until 3pm when we will go to another Charla, this time about meeting and working with our community counterparts. Then I will go to an American Diner here to eat a salad for the first time (this is really just for fun) Then we have a meeting with the leaders of  our youth group who were elected tonight to attend the the market competition we have been preparing together. (our product for the market competion is an acne soap). In order to compete in the competition at the end of the month, they have to complete and evaluate a market study, prepare the soap, make a flattering package and a suitable label to accompany it. They also have to try and sell the product and explain the possible gross income of the potential soap business. All of this is before I give an English lesson to one of my neighbours and then pack and clean my room, because I leave Thursday morning to visit my new site. And I have been reminded many times I HAVE to clean my room because another volunteer (who has been here a year) will be visiting while I am away at my site visit, to take an ‘update’ intensive language course ( I too, will do this in one year if I make it there)

Some of you are probably wondering why I am bothering to explain all of this….well

 1. So you know what my life is like here and 2. So you understand why I haven’t updated my blog in over 3 weeks/ checked me email. :)

I am not just a slacker correspondent and also the cast made it rather hard to get to the internet café! So I do have a lot to update you on but rather little time to explain it all. Here are the highlights and lowlights of the past 3 weeks…

Mix of high and low light….

1. For tech week we went to the border of Hondurus with a wonderful group of 6 aggies and another 5 agirucltural volunteers who have been here a year. We learned how to build improved stoves and ovens which decrease wood use (yay for the trees), and decrease smoke inhalation (yay for the lungs), We also made a biodigester which basically converts cow dung into gas and compost (yay for cows, gardens, your gas money, and the trees!)

The low light…

1. Getting super sick on my technical week, using an outhouse in the mud on crutches….sleeping on mats in a room with ten other people….

The high light

2. I got better! Everyone took such good care of me, I really bonded with people, and Peace Corps seemed to be impressed I made it through the other end of tech week!

Other low lights…

3. Not being able to fix my brand new i-pod which got water damage and therefore not having any of my books, or music or a camera
4. The stresses of training and learning a new language
5. Finding out I will have to leave my new family and friends
6. Realizing I have gained weight already…2 months in…and how it has turned into a running joke in my family that I will not be able to fit into the dress I brought for my swearing in ceremony when I become a volunteer…and how much joy they take in fattening me up and then grabbing my love handels (or as they call them here your ‘tire’) :) The thing is though, is that here being fat is consider beautiful so they really do mean it in a nice way!

Highlights

2. There is a tradition that for our last night of Tech week we all meet up in Esteli and the aggie volunteers who have been here for a year take us "trainees" out for a night on the town! I went dancing with all of the Agriculture volunteers …in a cast and crutches!
3. Getting my cast off last Monday and being able to walk without crutches this Monday
4. Getting tons of mail!!! A package from my mom full of goodies, pictures and letters from aunts and uncles, letters from friends and family! I really cannot say how much it means to get that stuff here, it is such a heart warmer/ long term smile provider.
5. Learning how to make tortillas with my sisters and then eating them warm with local honey (which they thought was the craziest thing anyone has ever done with tortillas and refused to try it)
6. Watching the youth give their presentations to apply to go to the competition, and seeing that we really are providing a learning experience in leadership and organization
7. Seeing my friend Vanessa who I have not seen in 3 years and then finding out I will be only an hour away from her on site!
8. Being introduced to AMAZING locally made chocolate!....And then spending half my weekly wage on that choclate
9. Seeing our “Huerto” (field) after 3 weeks of not being able to see it because I couldn’t  walk through all the mud on my crutches. What started out as a dry dirt field is now a green lush field of medium sized corn stalks, and big bushels of squash , 700 tomato plants and 3 rows of beans. We also harvested our first squash which I ate for breakfast this morning!

I hope this paints somewhat of a picture! And if I manage to add the pictures from my sisters camera you will see a couple pictures of the house and family activities!

So much love to all of you and I really do appretiate all the mail and emails and even though I can’t always reply in the same manner I hope you all know what it means to me! More later!

Alicia

This is a picture of an improved oven we made on tech week!

 My training week group, and me trying to hide my cast!

 A volcano we visited the week before, I climbed part of it with my cast, but it wasn't to satisfying..beautiful

Pictures!

Muletas y Llesos

Hi All!

If I spelled the title correctly it means crutches and casts…yes I already hurt myself.. I was playing soccer on Sunday with my Soccer team and we were loosing by 3 points and then I rolled my ankle over the tiny ball (they play with this tiny soccer ball that is more like a handball here, because the court is so small) and ended up getting a tour of two different hospitals in Nicaragua. But what I really want to share is the cultural experience of it all…I actually think I learned more in that day (in regards to new Spanish vocabulary and Nicaraguan attitudes) then I have in the rest of the 4 weeks.

It was really to bad the day ended like that because that morning I remember thinking I can’t wait to put all of this in my blog! What an amazing experience being on a soccer team is here! I woke up at 6am and had to be on the field at 7am. This was the opening of the season and a very big deal! Ofcourse in Nicaragua me being on time meant no one else was there…The coach strolled up around 7:15 in his Soccer Jersey and baggy track pants, walked me through the basic rules and handed me a ten page rule book in Spanish (wishful thinking on his part) around 8:30 all the teams were gathered.

In my town (which is pretty small, but there are smaller ones) They have 3 women’s teams, 4 men’s teams, and 3 kids teams. It is incredibly funny some of the names they come up with…(most of them being famous football teams “Madrid”, “Barcelona”, “Chelsea” and “Warriors” then the little guys being “mini warriors” and ect. I have pictures of the event but we all lined up in our teams and walked through the town in a kind of march. They were all decked out and had a DJ and microphones, we had a political speaker and prayer, it was a huge day of pride for the town, soccer is huge here! It is one of the only positive things youth have to do around here. From our youth group I have learned it is one of the youth’s biggest joys, and an incredible way to keep them out of trouble because it gives them something to strive for and be proud of. The team I am(was) on, is the defending champion so we got to play first. I actually really didn’t do that bad all things considered, and we only had 5 girls so I got to play A LOT. I was having an amazing time…and then I fell…it was pretty bad, I knew it when it happened and they were telling me so as well. There were about 100 people all around me, even though the game continued. An interesting thing about rural sports games in Nicaragua is people get hurt all the time, and no one stops for one second. I literally fell to the floor, rolled off the field and waved another one of my team mates in. They didn’t stop the game and they never do. It is so unlike the states where there is a time out called and the cameras all zoom in on the hurt person. There is also no medic on sight. My coach (who I think is 18 years old) was the one who kept saying I needed to go to the hospital and there were about 4 other guys yelling things I didn’t understand, when a motorcycle appeared…( this was my ride for the hospital) Thank Goodness Motorcycles are prohibited for peace corps volunteers and my friend Sarah was there keeping me totally calm, while calling peace corps medical, and at the same time explaining in Spanish that I couldn’t go to the hospital on a flipping motorcycle with a hurt ankle…AND repeatedly asking for ice (which no one wanted to give me because here they think that going from hot to cold is bad and that putting ice on an injury is dangerous…they also say you can’t shower after you exercise or eat) it has been a somewhat interesting experience showering based on all these little wives tales, between those in my busy schedule it can be rather difficult to find the time!

Anyway I went to the first hospital in the town bus…I remember everything so clearly, Here I am getting into this bus (with passengers in it b.t.w) and all of my town is watching me as I am holding back tears and sweating like a mad woman. Ice in one hand and my dirty shoe in the other, I waved goodbye to, literally, my whole town. My coach and Sarah came with me to the hospital (not before we dropped off the rest of the passengers on the bus). The hospital was an adventure in itself and thank goodness for my coach because we wouldn’t have been able to steer ourselves around without him. We got the x-ray and saw the doctor in record time. As they are trying to explain to me that my ankle is dislocated and they will have to “re-arrange it” (is the direct translation) and I am balling like a trawling and saying “Yo tengo meido (I have fear)! And I can not be tranquilla (Calm)” I think this “scen”e convinced them I needed drugs ( well that and Sarah hinting at it over and over again) They were about to give me an injection of what I understood as a rather heavy sedative, when Sarah’s phone rang. As I am pulling down my pants for the tranquilizer needle the Peace Corps doctor says “don’t let them inject you with anything, it is against Peace Corps policy!” “ wow that was close!” Anyway they decide that I have to go to the main hospital in the big city, which I do with the help of my coach who came the whole way, spent hours waiting around for me and ended up missing his own soccer game...He was so sweet and even though we had trouble communicating he calmed me down so much and I will forever be grateful!

After all that drama I am told it is a second degree sprain and that the problem is my ligament. I now have a giant blue cast on my leg and use my crutches to hobble back and forth to the outhouse. All in all I am doing well and just want to continue with training and get the cast taken off. Although, it has definitely been an experience, and at times is incredibly irritating, but people visited me lots on Sunday and Monday night to see how I was doing, my family here will not let me help with a single thing and someone is constantly around telling me to sit down and put my foot up, and my youth group all loved it because they got to sign my cast (which was a different concept here, because they wrote on masking tape and signed the tap, then stuck the tape on the cast…I think they did not want to mess up the pretty blue cast, Nicaraguans tend to think like that).

Which brings me to my youth group! Which I have to talk about! They say your lows are low and your highs are high and I feel like it couldn’t be more true! I will admit I have my lows but tonight I had a high that I really want to share with all of you!

Just for a brief background. I am in training. We have training for 3 months, in which we must improve our Spanish to a passable standard, we must plant and care for a vegetable garden and successfully carry out making composts, fences, natural pesticides and such for the garden, we must try and integrate with our community and learn their customs, and we hold youth group meetings twice a week, where the ultimate end goal is to produce a product made from locally available materials that will be entered into a contest with all the other youth groups, in which each group has to present their market study for their product, and has to have sold and packaged their product successfully.

This has been the focus of our youth group and we have had some amazing youth group meetings where everyone participated and presented their ideas and successfully voted for a product. But tonight we had to give a motivation meeting (or “charla”) not related to the product, and we chose to speak about goals…This also happened to be the Charla that our agriculture coordinator decided to come to and we were all not only nervous but also just exhausted. (I am not sure I can clearly explain how busy we are, and how little free time we have, and I don’t really see the point in wasting the blog space!)

Anyway, the night started off as usual (crazy) and we had  problems before with their being to many people in the school grounds who weren’t supposed to be there and were causing damage to school property so we started a check list for entrance. Even though our meeting starts at 6pm no one gets there until 6:20pm and the gate isn’t even opened until 6:30pm. Then we have to stand outside and check people off and wait for the mass of people who always show up at like 6:45pm. We had two exercises, the first was to write your goals for one year and your goals for five years and some people did and shared theirs, but they all took it really seriously, which was encouraging. Then we played basically hot potato but hot cabbage and each layer of the cabbage had a different question about life goals and interests. Everyone go into it, people really answered and listened, one little guy (who is always really energetic and kind of a distraction) had to answer what he was good at, he thought for awhile and then said “break dancing” and proceeded to get into the middle of the circle and break dance. We had people say they wanted to be doctors and international aid workers, or architects. People talked about how they respected their parents and why. As usual, I couldn’t understand everything because it was in Spanish but it was still incredible! After we had them all draw a life map of what they have accomplished and what they hope to accomplish. They took it so seriously and really enjoyed it, some of them presented nervously and the others came up to me latter to show me and explain to me how they wanted to accomplish their goals.  When we finished we were pretty much exhausted but we had to talk to our boss who had been observing…I was pretty nervous…there was a big pause and some light conversation and then he said “guys, that was amazing…this is why we are here…this is one of the best charlas in a youth group I have seen!” It was incredible! We were on cloud nine! He explained how some of the kids had shown how much peace corps influenced them in their drawing, how many of them wanted to learn English or believed they could achieve bigger things. It was a really proud moment for me. I can’t begin to explain what an emotional roller coaster training has been, it is crazy busy, and stressful, we are working with so many different groups and situations and most of the time it is hard to know which way is up, but it is moments like these that make it all worth it and remind us how much joy is yet to come in our final site placement.

We have been told these next three weeks are the hardest and the most stressful, so keep sending me those positive thoughts and know that even if I don’t get a chance to write I am always thinking of all of you and sending you all love!

Lots of love!

Alicia

 p.s I don't have any pictures right now because my camera is out of commission (hopefully, only temporarily) 

Mailing

This is my address- things take about 10 days to get here. Better to mail things in soft packages and not anything to valuable cause they sometimes get stolen

Love to you all!

PCT Alicia Harvey

Cuerpo de Paz~ Nicaragua

Apartado Postal # 3256

Managua, Nicaragua, Centro America

Two weeks of rice and beans

Hi all,

I am  two week into training. I am in a small town near Jino Tepe, about an hour outside of Managua, called Guiquiliapa (sounds like whiskey – li - Apa) I live with a wonderful family of 8 sibling. They are all grown up and most of them have kids. The father Don Eugenio is 67 years old and still walks 4 km from house to field every day and works really hard. I can’t stress how lucky I feel with this family I love them. The two sister are like my mothers here, they take such good care of me. When I had my first case of "Nicaragua" and liquids were coming out of me all over, they helped me clean up, nursed me back to health and took me to the clinic. 

Today May 30^th is Mother’s day here, which is a very big day here, everyone has off work and there are a lot of festivities. The sisters are the youngest of the family. Their mother died tw years ago. Maria is 32 years old and Claudia is 24 years old. They are wise beyond their years and we laugh together every day. Today we decided Maria is my relaxed mother and Claudia is my uptight mother, and it is good because I need a balance! Claudia has a 15 month old girl called Gladicita, named after their mother who passed away. She is so sweet and gives me hugs and kisses everyday. Ofcourse, nothing fills the void of my two little guys in California or my own mom taking care of me when I am sick, but they sure make a great second best!

I was nervous at first about have 5 brothers and the macho culture of Nicaragua, where men cat call and I have heard do not respect women as equal, but, in my family it is not so at all. They are the sweetest brothers. Two of them live at the adjoinging house and the other three have houses further down the road. They all come visit every day as do their kids and their wives, and they all patiently listen to my broken Spanish and make conversation. Even after the father and the youngest brother David (22years old) have worked in the field all day and are rendered exhausted they still ask me how my day was! These men are really incredible, I have so much respect for the whole family. David is studying pharmacy two days a week but also works with his dad. Nelson (the only one who can say a couple phrases in English- and when he see’s me never fails to say “Hello my sister” also works all day with the oxen in the field and comes home and washes the dishes! Everyone has their own unique qualities but I hope from this sample you can see how diverse my family is here and how contradicting they are to some of the cultural assumptions!

As for me, I mostly find myself really busy. I can hardly find time to hang out with my family (let alone help out at my house here) We have class almost all day, and usually have community activities like youth groups, or sports games at night. Therefore, I am finding myself waking up earlier and earlier just to have some time to myself, to either study Spanish, or exercise or wash myself. 

I have been thinking how I would be able to explain what my life has been like here, because it has been so regimented, there are no big adventures to speak of right now, just daily activities. I thought that the best way to explain it would be to do an activity we had to do for Spanish class. A day in the life of Alicia.

Between 5:30 and 6 am I wake up (or as they say in Spanish, I rise myself from my bed) and stumble out to the outhouse.  I think part of the reason I wake up so early is just because I need to pee! (and the guilt of knowing that the other members of my house have already been up for 2-3 hours with the dogs, the oxen, and the damn roosters) -Any of you who thought roosters were beautiful and romantic must never have lived near any. Miracurasly my sleeping self has adapted and they no longer wake me up. But you should all know roosters do not just crow once in the morning like a nice alarm with a snooze button. NO, one crows and then the other one responds, and then the neighbour’s roosters on either side respond and by the end the whole freaking town is cock a doodle doing. – sorry for the side note-

After I wake up. I have to sit and wait 15 minutes because my sisters think it is bad to shower after just waking up, after just having eaten, after just having walked or run or worked (pretty much you always have to sit and rest before you shower) Sometimes I do a short yoga tape in the living room in the morning or I do some Spanish homework. Then I go to the shower which is near the outhouse and we have running water every other morning, so on days we have running water I wash my hair and on the others I just do a bucket bath. The water is always cold which is wonderfully refreshing!

After my shower I get dressed, eat rice beans, and juice for breakfast. Sometimes with eggs and a tortilla and I go to my Spanish class. I have Spanish class from 8am-12pm. It is held in one of the other volunteers houses (there are 4 other aspiring volunteers in my town and we are all in the same lanuage level, Novice-mid) Spanish class is the most important thing in training because we have to move up three levels in Spanish over three months in order to be sworn in to become volunteers for the Peace Corps.

I go home to eat lunch at 12pm. I always eat beans rice and something fried, either chicken or eggs, or bread. Then I try to help do the dishes (which I am usually not allowed to do) or I do homework or take a siesta. Then it is back to class from 12-4pm where we walk around the town and learn about trees and talk to members of the community. These classes can get rather redundant but I think I am learning a lot.

At 4 pm we usually go to the park to play soccer with the girls team (which I am now a part of- we have our first game on June 5^th, there are eight of us in total). After we hold a youth group meeting two days a week from 6pm (really no one shows up until 6:45pm) to 8pm (really no one leaves until (8:30pm). Our youth group project is a competition with other aspiring volunteer youth groups in other communities to make a product using natural resources and market it for sale in small towns in Nicaragua. The youth seem really into the idea!

On the weekends we always have one full day of technical training (composting, running a community bank, making natural fertilizer, ect.) and one day of working in our community gardens on site.

This has been my life for the last two weeks. I have learned so much! Including how to wash my clothes on a washboard ( what a work out) how to pee in chamber pot (part of the reason I just hold it and wake up at 5am) and soooo many other things.

Sorry the blog entries are few and far between but as you can see I don’t have that much time!

These pictures are of my life here.  The first of a technical training where we are using machetes to chop up compost. Kesiah and Sarah are in my training group community. The next is the first rain here, a huge deal as it had not rained in 6 months. It is loud and beautiful and one of my favorite things here. The enxt is little Gladicita, Kesiah and I on our way to our training site, my two sister/ mothers Maria two the right and Claudia to the left. Finally my other two group members Sarah and Brett.

Hopefully the next entry will be sooner than two weeks!

Much love to all!

assignments, reading, and normal BM's

Hello all!

The first good news of my first update in Nicaragua is that everything appears to be running smoothly (BM-wise and additionally).

The first night in D.C. I stayed with Dad and Ira which was really nice! Things were pretty rushed after that- being the social butterfly I am, I of course tried to get to know everyone. It was a long day of information overload and trying to connect with "these people" who I would be working and living with for the next two years.
I never ended up going to sleep because we had to check out of the hotel at 2am and I had to re-pack another 4 times (after seeing what some of the guys had brought I was ashamed into taking some stuff to Dad's house and leaving it there!) Anyway, after about a 32 hour day I was able to sleep on both the plane rides which were each 2 1/2 hours (see how close I am, you can totally come visit!!!)

We got here and started training and doing social 'ice breakers right' away! I really like everyone so far. We all are so like minded and everyone seems to be really supportive.

I am going to keep this short because at this point there honestly isn't much to tell! I don't really know much about what to expect yet. Today we got assigned both our language groups and our host families for the next 11 months. I will be living with a big family of 6 people. We have our own rooms with locks on our doors but the idea is to "integrate" get to know Nica culture and people by learning from our host families. Everything I have heard is that training is hard and exhausting! We have 6 hours of language training a day. Then we also have technical training which includes gardening and composting, youth development, cultural integration, and community banking project. That is pretty much all I know right now! I will give more detail when I have some kind of clue!

But I am safe and happy and healthy and miss all of you already, but am trying not to because I know that the challenges are going to get bigger and will be missing you!

Now there are three other people who want to use my computer so gotta go! Sorry about the broken message ( hopefully- better than nothing)

p.s These pictures are from my friend Ryan Hubbard