A stressful time and a death

August 19^th – August 21^st

My first full day back after a long weekend was not as action packed as I thought it’d be. My class in my campo school was cancelled, and I also learned that my classes in my other schools would be cancelled the following day as well. Thank god I already had my business competition.

With nothing else to do, I did some major yoga (I’m getting back into the rthym of it again), and continued reading my book River Town. In fact, I finished it:

River Town – A. The memoirs of a Peace Corps volunteer in China. While this volunteer lived in a large city in China, most of his experiences were reminiscent of my own here in Achuapa. Furthermore, he changed as a human in ways he thought he wouldn’t. It’s a great perspective of Peace Corps service and a really well written book.

Later that Wednesday, I went to the birthday party of my now 5-year-old neighbor, Omara. Being the first official birthday party I’ve attended I had the expectation that it would be similar to a party in the States – and I was wrong. It’s a custom to show up late, so I planned on arriving late as well. However, a handful of kids were yelling at my from my neighbor’s yard because they wanted me to show up, so I got changed and headed over right around when the invitation said the party would start.

I dropped off my gift among the anonymous gifts (I wrote my name on mine), and sat down and awkwardly waited with everybody else for the rest of the invitees to show up. When everybody showed up, it more of the feel of a structured board meeting than any birthday I’ve been to – very systematic. Once everybody showed up, they set up the piñata and a couple kids tried breaking it. Once it was broken, and the kids had grabbed their candy, they handed out food to all the guests. This same process was followed with a drink, then once again with rice pudding for. Omara then blew out the candle on her cake, and the cake was distributed (with me getting the first piece since I took pictures of her). Everybody finished eating the cake, they all left. From start to finish, the birthday party was an hour and 15 minutes long. There was close to no socialising, no singing happy birthday, no opening presents, and no dancing. It all went by so quickly that I stuck around and helped clean up.

Some of the neighborhood kids

I had planned on spending the better part of the night at the party, but when everything was said and done, it was only 5:30 – not even dinnertime! So without much else to do, I cracked open another book, thus continuing my insane month of reading. Being so early, I once again assumed (incorrectly once again) that I’d spend the whole night reading. However, come 7 PM, I just couldn’t keep my eyes open (even though I’d done practically nothing the entire day)

Thursday was much of the same of the previous day – I spent the majority of the day reading and spoke with 2 of my counterparts to discuss plans for the rest of the school year.

I also continued my return to intense yoga sessions. Before I left for Peace Corps, I downloaded a bunch of yoga PDF files with the intention to do yoga all the time. While this worked out in training, and I got a lot of mileage out of routines, after a couple months in Achuapa, I stopped using them. It was clearly a foolish thing to do because I feel a whole lot better now that I’ve started doing them again.

This day, I also noticed that I’m pushing 4 months without a stomach illness (my 1 week stint in Managua doesn’t count because it wasn’t stomach related). While those of you that are reading may not realise the significance of this, let me tell you that it’s big. Getting a bacterial infection, parasite, worms, or something like giardia is almost unavoidable over long periods of time here.

That said, while I’m stoked that I’ve held out this long without getting massively sick, I’m paranoid that the next bug will hit me soon. In the past, I’d averaged almost 3 months exactly between getting sick with stomach illnesses. The longer these periods of time in between being sick last, the better you start to feel about everything. It’s great to wake up in the morning without having to question my health for that day. From that point when I realise that I’m still good for yet another day, the endorphins start going. Never did I think that I’d celebrate such a basic thing, but I’ve realised that I’ll never take advantage of good health again.

Friday mostly went the same way the rest of the week has gone – I read, and finished another book:

Jennifer Government – C+. In this book, the government is privatized and the world is virtually run by corporations. Everybody is driven by profit – even the police require funding for every case they want to undertake. While the book itself really wasn’t that bad, it has been so long since I’ve read a over the top fiction book that I wasn’t too entertained with it.

I didn’t want to start another book and fall into the same cycle, so after eating lunch, I watched a movie and then went to my friend’s farm where I spent the better part of the afternoon. It was good to get out of the town and just chill out on their farm where there was nothing going on. Another plus was that I could hang out with their cat Chungo. Basically, it was social interaction without the pressure of actually interacting. I can just hang out there and relax instead of having my host feel they need to entertain me. Definitely a good way to end the day.

August 22^nd – August 31^st

The 22^nd I spent the majority of my day hanging out in my house and reading since the potential of doing activities on the weekends is severely diminished. During this time, I finished yet another book (I’ve lost count of how many I’ve put away recently):

The Other Side of the River – B-. A book about a murder in St. Joseph/Benton Harbor, Michigan. The two towns are physically divided by a river and are super racially charged due to the racial barrier that this river has created as well. The book was written to solve a murder of a black teen in the white part of the town, but the author discovered nothing new and only delved into the potential theories he had. The book is well written, but the book was more about race relations between the two towns as opposed to the solving of the murder.

On the 23^rd, instead of waiting around, I headed down to Malpaisillo to help Brie with organizing her competition. I helped wherever I could, and we made the final preparations on Monday before the competition.

The 25^th really left me with a sour feeling all over. I won’t discuss what happened, but rather detail my perspective on how I now feel about development. I realised that no matter how hard one tries to do good things for anybody, there can always be somebody whose goal it is to ruin the outcome. There doesn’t even have to be any reason for the deplorable actions of this person aside from being prejudice. I don’t understand what drives people like this. The people that are most hurt by these actions are the people from this country. It was super disheartening to see a completed bigoted person ruin something that would have benefited so many. I was so shocked that I briefly considered quitting and going home due to the disenchantment of seeing people who claim to be there to help the people but do the exact opposite. I quickly reconsidered since what happened did not happen in my site – I couldn’t punish people that didn’t do anything. However, at the same time, the incident caused me to lose a lot of faith in what I’m doing. Definitely the lowest point of my service (even though it didn’t directly happen to me).

I headed back to Achuapa on Wednesday for a couple of days of classes and activities before heading down to Managua on Friday for an in service training session. While I initially had no interest whatsoever to go to the session, I ended up grasping more from the session than any other session I’d attended in the 15ish months I’ve been here. The meeting also scared the crap out of me because we started talking about post-Peace Corps plans.

While I’ve always had a problem living in the now with all the decisions I make, professionally, living in the now is the only way I’ve ever approached it. I always had the goal of joining Peace Corps. Well, after realising that goal, I’ve had no fixed plan since. I know I want to keep studying (looking at Environmental Economics) for a master’s degree, but aside from my personal education, I’m not sure. I know I’m not interested in a government job or a development job. I would like to keep teaching though – perhaps I could make a career out of that. However, I don’t know when I’m going to get into the “OK, let’s get into career mode.” I love studying and learning new things, but going in and out of an office every day will never appeal to me. I don’t care what I’m doing. I need a job interacting with people on a regular basis. I want to be tested and challenged. If I don’t have a job that’s not constantly challenging, then it’s not for me – and the job that fits this description best is teacher. I know that after Peace Corps, I’m not going back and taking it easy in the States – I’m going to pack my bags and go somewhere else for some new experience. So we’ll see how it goes and when I finally kick into that mode.

Saturday we had a meeting in León with all the volunteers (a sort of welcome meeting). I’m not big on hanging out with the volunteers, so after about an hour of that, I took off and chilled out in my hotel room. Later that night, I went out for a nice dinner and had a glass of wine. It’d been so long since I’d drank (around 6 or 7 weeks), that I got a headache. In spite of the physical discomfort, the day in the hotel really helped me calm my nerves and gave me the feeling of having spent the day in a spa. It doesn’t take a whole lot of luxuries to release all the tension I build up while in site.

Sunday, I headed back to site in the afternoon, and went and visited a friend of mine that’d gotten in a motorcycle accident. She’d been in the hospital for around 40 days and won’t be able to walk for 3-6 months apparently. I spent a couple of hours talking with her before heading home for dinner.

I have no interest whatsoever in cooking a huge dish of rice and beans, so I buy them from my neighbor every night and make some other dish with it. This time, I went over there to hear an off comment of, “Oh, Richard, did you hear? One of you best students died on Friday.” After further inquiry, they told me it was one of my good students in my private school. The explained that he went to the stadium for a while, and then later in the day, he collapsed in the street and died. It wasn’t all that clear who they were talking about though. They told me his name 2 million times, but their descriptions of him didn’t fit the kid I was thinking about. I headed back to my house to grab my camera (I took pictures of every one of my students), and asked my neighbors to confirm that it indeed was my student who died. It was then that I learned that it was another student who died, but was the brother of one of my students. While I was relieved that it wasn’t one of my students, it was sad because I did know the boy.

Death and severe injuries here happen so frequently, I can’t believe it. While it’s shocking that so many catastrophic things can happen to such a small town, what’s even more shocking for me is the fact that a death or serious injury can be such casual news. I guess that really illustrates the kind of history this country has gone through. In spite of this though, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to view such events as they are here. All in all, this was by far the most trying week for me professionally as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was one of the first times that I’ve been really pushed with something that didn’t involve something away from my main job. I’m glad to have had the experiences of the past week for what I learned from them, but at the same time, I’d really rather not experience such things in the future (as if I had some influence on them).

When in doubt, let Donald Duck lead the way

March 18^th

 

After going to the gym for a bit, I headed over to Los Caraos to teach my class. After presenting the material (doing a market study), I told my kids that after they finished the questions and after I OK’ed their questions, they could use class time to go out and do their surveys (they needed to do 30). Upon hearing this, most of the class just got up and left. After grilling them and about half of them came back to the classroom. Slackers.

 

March 19^th

 

The couchsurfer observed my class in one of my schools today, so I just said he was there on behalf of the Ministry of Education to observe the conduct of the students because he heard they misbehaved too much (even though they’re my best class). Following that class, I headed home for a bit to plan for my class at my private school (the first class with my new Thursday class time). I showed up at my class and my students kept telling me class was cancelled, that my counterpart wasn’t there, and a bunch of other nonsense. I got them all in the classroom, and they protested to cancel the class because they wanted to play kickball. They wasted tons of time complaining, so I said if they didn’t complain the whole time, and participated, they could leave early when we finished the material. They did just that (but nobody took notes – bad idea), and we got out after about 20 minutes (instead of an hour and a half). Since the class was over, I hopped the next bus out of Achuapa, and headed to Malpaisillo for an early start to my birthday weekend.

 

March 20^th

 

We headed out around 11 and went to Chinandega for the “big” day (we were going to celebrate my birthday on Friday instead of Sunday). We lounged around most of the morning before getting things started in the afternoon. Our friend Carlos showed up with a present for me – a tank top with 23 on the front and my “name” Goguez written on the back. Since he’d arrived, we headed over to Lagos (the amazing food place in Chinandega), and going to the baseball game.

 

We showed up at the game in the 3^rd inning with the expectation of losing our voices by the end of the game. We got a good start and heckled away for around 15 minutes. The 4^th inning came around and the opposing team was up to bat. With one out, a batter popped a foul down the right field line. Just when the ball had reached its peak, the power in the whole stadium went out. Since we’d just gotten there, we weren’t about to just leave, and we thought the lights would eventually come back on. Alas, the power never did come back on, so we just sat around screaming refund, and getting our game’s worth of beer.

 

We left the stadium and hitchhiked backed to Luis’ house. Once there, Luis and Carlos set up a piñata and blind folded me and gave me a steel tube to break the piñata. Unfortunately, I just ended up removing paint from the short part of Luis’ wall the piñata was suspended from, and was unable to bust open the piñata. Eventually, we just brought it down on the floor and skewered the piñata. We then found out how piñatas are made in Nicaragua – a clay pot surrounded by the piñata itself.

 

We headed to Dilectus afterwards to…continue the night. I’d had enough around 12:30, so Luis and I took off for his house afterwards.

 

March 21^st

 

Just more Lagos. Nothing else happened. We tend to follow a “Party day, recovery day” pattern. That was the plan anyway, but Brie’s friend Carla showed up and wanted go out, so we went back to Dilectus (but to the outdoor bar) for a couple of hours that night.

 

March 22^nd

 

Today was what yesterday was supposed to day, a day of nothing. So I spent my birthday just chilling out.

 

March 23^rd

 

I headed back to Achuapa, and rolled in around noon for the start of the week. Little did I know that this week would hold virtually NOTHING for me.

 

March 24^th – March 26^th

 

These days were completely worthless. March 24^th, much like the 23^rd was spent doing nothing since I don’t have classes. I got a handful of new movies and shows from Phillip, so I watched those in addition to playing a new game Luis got (Sim City 4 – bad news). March 25^th, my class in Los Caraos was only 45 minutes long because of some competition between Los Caraos and my public school in Achuapa. Thursday, I was going to get my kids all caught up on the market study, and then give them time to ask questions about the exam in the next week, but both of these classes were cancelled. So I taught class for a grand total of 45 minutes the whole week.

 

March 27^th

 

I wanted to meet the principal of the school out in Largartillo (a community 5 km up in the mountains from Achuapa), so I woke up early to go to the TEPCE meeting that MINED has every month for every school district in the country. I generally don’t go because I plan with my teachers individually, but one of my counterpart’s showed up in the morning and said I needed to show up as well. I spoke with the principal of the primary school in Largartillo to see if she’d be interested in the spelling bee. She said she would be interested in doing it, so I told her I told her I’d stop by after Semana Santa (the first week of April). Afterwards, I went to my instituto where the secondary school TEPCE was to find out why they wanted me there. They just wanted me to write what classes I’d be doing for the month – something my counterparts could have done without me, but whatever. This incredibly taxing activity took me 15 minutes, and I headed back home.

 

The lights were out, so I just cleaned my house, and did some errands. It’d been a while since we hadn’t had power, so I couldn’t figure out what to do. Usually when I’m bored, I play a game, or watch a movie, but now that wasn’t an option – so it was back to the hammock with a book. The power finally game on around 6 PM, and I threw on the first episode of season 2 of Mad Men (great show). This was a short-lived activity as the bus Brie was coming in showed up 10 minutes later. I continued my cooking practice with some barbeque chicken and vegetables (oh man I missed barbeque sauce SO much).

 

March 28^th

 

I woke up super early and did the dishes, and we got a good breakfast in before finally realising the activity we’d planned to do for a while – go to the waterfalls in Largartillo. With 2 litres of water and a couple of Clif bars, we set out for the 5 km, straight uphill walk to Largartillo. It was overcast, breezy, and cool out so the walk itself was actually quite pleasant. We walked around a kilometre before we saw a truck going the direction we were going. We asked for a ride, and saved a ton of time by getting taken the last 3 kilometres (which are the steepest part of the route) to the Largartillo empalme.

 

Once in Largartillo we started the arduous process of finding the waterfalls. We got out of the town itself (well, more of a road – I think there are around 15 houses in the whole town), and down the path to the waterfalls pretty easily with directions to walk to the cow corral and ask the people in the house where the waterfall is. We trekked for about 20 minutes before stumbling upon a house. There were a bunch of cows in the yard, so we figured this must be the place – after all, this was the first house we’d seen since we’d left the town. Brie went and asked the guy if he knew where the waterfall is in a conversation that went as follows:

 

“Buenas!” (This greeting she shouted was drowned out by cow moos, so she said it again)

“We’re looking for the waterfall. Do you know how to get there?”

“Waterfall? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There is supposedly a big waterfall down this road.”

“No, there is just a small stream to bathe yourself with a pail.”

“Oh…uh…well where is that?”

“Through here.”

At this point, I chimed in:

“They told us that there is some huge waterfall called Las Lamas, laguas, or something like that if we keep going down this road.”

“You mean Las Laguas?”

“Yea, yea, that’s the one.”

“Oh yea, you’ve never been to it?”

“NO. That’s why we’re looking for it.”

“Oh yea! Just keep going straight down this road!”

 

So all in all, this conversation was worthless as there was only one road to go down in the first place. We continued down the road and asked the same question to a lady on a horse – she too confirmed that the waterfall was just straight down the road, and the road ended at the waterfall. Awesome. So this would be super simple to get to. We walked for a while before gradually going down hill, passing through some sort of gate. I’d heard that we had to pass through a few farms to get to the waterfall, so this made sense. Some guy with a machete was up in the hills and paused for a few seconds to watch us come through before continuing his work. This must have meant that he wasn’t surprised to see us in his farm, so I thought. We finally got down to a small stream where a guy mounted horse was.

 

“So…we’re looking for the waterfall.”

“Waterfall? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” (There appeared to be some kind of different dialect spoken so the guy didn’t quite understand the word waterfall)

“We heard that there is a huge waterfall around here.”

“Nope, just this little brook.”

“Are you serious? I heard there were 3 or 4 waterfalls around here, some are really big too.”

“Oh, you mean the salto with the place where you can swim as well.”

“Yea, I guess so.”

“Oh, those are WAY down this river. You’ve got to walk a long way. You missed the path; there was a little path way up the mountain that you needed to take to get to the waterfall. You could follow this river, but then you wouldn’t know how to get back.”

 

At this point, some old guy with a machete showed up literally making noises like Donald Duck. He shook the hand of the guy on the horse with yet another Donald Duckesque noise. “Well, this guy will be no help, he only speaks…duck,” is what ran through both of our heads. Then the guy on the horse took off laughing and the duck man with a machete came up and started speaking to us in Spanish thankfully. We told him we were looking for the waterfall, which he confirmed existed, but way down the river. He then went off on some tangent, telling us about a house that is like a hotel and has amazing soup. He said no more after this, but merely motioned that we should follow him. So we did.

 

We walked a bit before coming up to a fence, “Shhh…the owners live right there.” he told us. So without a word, we trespassed through the fence and across the guy’s property that had the river flowing through it. The guy with the machete led the way, chopping things at random (even if it wasn’t in the way of the path – he just was going nuts with his machete). He led us zigzagging up and down the mountain for a long time before we heard a river. “Great, we’re going towards the river,” I thought, only to start heading up the mountain and away from the sounds of the river. Neither Brie nor I had any idea where we were going, but we but got a sense that we were going towards this hotel with the soup we neither asked about, nor wanted to go to. I finally asked him where we were going, and he said we were being quiet since we were trespassing. It didn’t answer my question, but I just went with it. Fortunately, we ended up taking a path back down the mountain, one that was incredibly steep. This path eventually ended up at the waterfalls where the guy explained that it was always super full during Semana Santa. We gave the guy 20 cords for unexpectedly being our guide, and went and checked out the waterfall.

 

The waterfall itself was more of a series of waterfalls that dropped around 200 feet in total in a bunch of 50ish foot waterfalls. They were all surrounded by huge boulders, which made exploring super easy. We hung out there for about an hour, eating a Clif bar, getting hydrated, and just relaxing next to the water.

 

After taking the waterfall in, we scaled the boulder wall out of the waterfall area to blindly find our way down the path we hadn’t taken back to Largartillo. Since nobody had crossed the land we were on, we made our way back to the place where the duck man told us the path was by merely following the marks left by our sandals in the ground (which could’ve proved to be as reliable as Hansel and Gretel’s plan). The path led around the mountain along a thin path through god knows where. While we were walking without a clue, we were afforded some incredible panoramic views. The path wound around and around before bringing us to a fence. We followed a series of fences before miraculously ending up bath on the main road to Largartillo (which was next to the house with an ACTUAL cow corral. Nobody was in the house when we passed by, so we were unable to ask the way).

 

Now on a familiar path, we walked back into Largartillo and ran into one of the gringo’s I’d played Frisbee with a couple weeks ago. There were a handful of other white people there, one of which had a couple of questions about Peace Corps that we answered.

 

With the goal of getting to the good comedor for lunch (which might be closing at 2 PM), we began the journey back to Achuapa. From the entrance to Largartillo on the dirt highway back to Achuapa, you actually can look down and see the town – and it was not close, it was a long way…down. I had my fingers crossed that we’d have another truck give us a lift, but it was not to be. Nevertheless, we got into Achuapa around an hour and 10 minutes after starting off from the Largartillo empalme, not bad (it’s about 5 km).

 

Completely dead, sunburned, dehydrated, and starving, we drank around a gallon of water, some Gatorade, and some cantaloupe. This energized us enough to walk over to the restaurant in town. Following the incredibly deserved lunch, we lost all energy whatsoever, and just chilled out and got out of the heat.

 

Come dinnertime, we made more barbeque chicken and vegetables and watched Milk, the movie with Sean Penn. Great movie.

 

March 29^th

 

We had a handful of vegetables left over from the chicken the previous night, so we threw these in some omelettes. All in all, I’d say my cooking ability has increased a good amount – I’ve lost the fear to improvise while cooking, I just lack common sense when it comes to things you can do, like putting fruit in oatmeal. Not my brightest moment.

 

We had lunch again over at the comedor, and Brie took off at 2:45.

 

That afternoon, I wrote a couple of exams for my schools this week (half the points on my exam in my private school are from the class where nobody was taking notes). With that out of the way, I finished up the 5 episodes of Mad Men that I have, and went to sleep. It should be a pretty low key week with only exams. But then again, I’ll need a low-key week considering my buddy Jeff is coming to visit me from the States on Saturday.

 

Geeks who drink, Bikes, Buying sprees, etc

So on Saturday I celebrated my birthday in my typically unorthodox manner. Being my golden birthday (22 on the 22nd), I decided to shoot for something incredibly significant – an extremely long bike ride. Now I’ve done long rides in the past – 21 miles on my 21st birthday, 45 miles riding from the NW corner of DC to George Washington’s house in Virginia, and several weeks ago I took a 35 mile bike ride as preparation for my then undecided birthday ride. However, this one blew all my previous rides out of the water (not to mention all strength I had in my legs). I met Jon, my bike buddy down at a coffee shop by my house at 9 AM on Saturday. From there we proceeded to take an epic bike ride around the Denver metro area that included riding to Cherry Creek State Park, Centennial (a new city for those of you who know the pre-2005 Denver), Park Meadows Mall, Littleton, then ending for lunch in downtown Denver. All in all, the trip was a length 69 mile bike ride (coincidentally, the combined ages of Jon and I). Mind you we both did this ride on a fixed gear bike, and it was just great – but after around 50 miles, my quads really just wanted to fall off. All this lovely riding was coupled with, of course, a ridiculous 15 mph headwind, and 45 degree weather (after hitting 70 degrees, or 20 degrees celsius for my international/pretentious readers, the two days) with a chance of snow and rain later in the day (which I beat!). I was shooting for golden birthday significance, so I had an elaborate plan for the rest of my day all planned out. However, as most know things do not go “according to plan” (see Corpse Bride allusion), and I clearly was not anticipating how exhausted I’d be after the bike ride (it’s ONLY 70 miles). So I took a nap – one that turned into a 2 hour nap – and following it, was too tired to go out to dinner or follow through on the rest of my plans. So the rest of my birthday consisted of ordering a pizza and eating birthday goup/parfait (delicious by the way).

The next day, in light of my inability to properly stand up, I took it easy for the most part. However, then the inevitable happened – restlessness. Those of you that know me probably know what this means. Yes, that’s right. I went on a bike ride. I had some DVD’s that I borrowed from Jon, so as if I needed some excuse to go riding, I decided to take the 6.5 mile ride to his house to return the DVDs (Corpse Bride and Quicksilver if you were interested. Quicksilver by the way is one of the worst movies ever created. Shoddy story? Terrible continuity (continwhat?)? Kevin Bacon? Sounds like we’ve got a winner here.). After a couple of hours of bike talk, agreeing on the acquisition of yet another bike (I’ve still got over a month here!), and buying a bike bell off of Jon (which most likely will lead to my lynching on behalf of my neighbors), I headed home for a brief Easter (oh yea, it was Easter) dinner then off to Goosetown pub for – you guessed it – trivia night! So I rode on over there (of course!) where Phil and I served up a 5th place finish and an amazing 8 dollar beer tab!

To cap off all this crap – I have pretty much finished all my big purchases for Peace Corps. I ordered a headlamp, backup set of headphones, digital camera, 4gb camera memory card, and I might order some tshirts (so I don’t have to ruin all my awesome tshirts in PC).

Maybe I’ll buy an umbrella.