July 9th
I slept pretty well today but woke up to an unusual sound I heard through my earplugs – a soft roar. It hit me as soon as I took them out what the roar was – hurricane-like rain. Great. I had to wake up early as it was – 5:30 – but to top it off, it was pouring which would further inhibit my motivation to actually get ready and leave. I started buying food to increase my calorie intake (I think I doubled it), so I ate 2 Goggins cauldron-sized bowls of cereal, then my host mom gave me some pineapple followed by a half liter of milk. This all meant that I could save one of my calcium supplement pills for today! Hey, I’m all about saving anything that can be depleted – why not?
Fortunately, the rain stopped just before I had to leave, so I was able to walk with Jordan to the bus stop to catch the bus to Managua without a problem. However there was one problem – the cobrador told us to fit 4 people in the back row. This yielded Jordan, Avi, and Owen all sitting on the bench, and me partially sitting on the edge of the bench, with my entire body smashed together with my legs on top of each other because there was no to put them. It was incredibly uncomfortable, times 70, for an hour and twenty minutes. Oh Nicaragua! Thank you very much! Please keep giving me these learning experiences!
We arrived in Managua after a seemingly endless bus ride and only have to wait a little bit before a Peace Corps mobile showed up to haul us to the office. There we sat around and waited for the other volunteers to show up before finally beginning our training sessions. The morning training session was about how to properly conduct interviews with business owners – taking note of the topics to bring up to warm up to the interview, demeanor during the interview, questions to ask, when to provide advice. The session itself was really actually very helpful in providing substance for an interview, but it was a tad spotty in places. My thoughts concerning this were further amplified when we observed an interview of a business owner of a video game business in Masaya. For some people, the interview was useful – and I’m glad they took away something from it. The only thing I focused on was his dirty coffee table, how the owner was fidgeting the entire time, with anything within arm reach, how intimidating the interviewer was, and how this was totally not the way I was going to approach interviews. Nevertheless, thank you Peace Corps for giving me ideas!
After some of us woke up following the interview observation, we all hopped in the Peace Corps ambulance (well, that’s what they look like), and got hauled off to the gigantic mall in Managua that reminds me more of the U.S. than well, the U.S. Personally, I hate it, and refused to pay their exorbitant prices for fast food. Oh my god – a heart attack for a 5-dollar cheeseburger! For that price, it must be good! I maintained my “to hell with these prices” mentality and just bought an ice cream cone to hold me over until…whenever the next meal was. However, I got lucky again, and the guy who drove us told us he was heading back to the office, so I could get a ride to the grocery store if I wanted to go. Hell yes! I picked up some overpriced thing of Peter Pan peanut butter (granted it’s not the 6 lb jug from Sam’s that I’m used to, but I’m not here to complain…all the time), some bread, bananas (not the ones for export – those are 78% more!), and a juice and satisfyingly ran across the highway so I could make my way back to the PC office.
It was all worth it and I felt I was a lot more satisfied with what I had than the others judging by the look on everybody’s face (a guess, but for practical purposes, let’s just assume I was right). This was followed up by a couple of presentations from the Catarina and Niquinohomo groups. I’d tell you what their presentations were about, but I’m trying to keep readership levels high, so I’ll spare you the riveting and captivating details. Yea, I’m sure some of you feel cheated about how Peace Corps life really is, but you’ll live. Following the sessions, I asked my program director if she had thought about any other sites for me before deciding Achuapa for my site. She told me that she hadn’t thought about sites that would’ve been good for me until I told her I liked Achuapa. She said that it just made sense – the previous volunteer had been timid, introverted, and had bad Spanish, and he left. I on the other hand am super extroverted, have a good Spanish level, and super enthusiastic about just being here. Then I was informed that as soon as I mentioned Achuapa, the interview was over. Well it’s good to know I was right on the money/convincing.
In addition to the all of the aforementioned, PC got 2 cakes (bad communication amongst staff members) for all the people who had birthdays – Joanna during the site visit, David’s birthday was today, and Kat’s birthday is the 21st – Peace Corps was just covering the bases. For practical purposes, they threw Avi’s name on the cake too…even though his birthday was a while ago…and he already got a cake. This just meant more gluttonous goodness for all of us – particularly since Georgia (our program director) bought an AMAZING (if you’re reading this Jordan, it was amazingly terrible) chocolate/caramel/whipped cream cake. It definitely made me nostalgic for the U.S., even though I don’t eat that type of crap in the U.S. since I’m a health nut – but let me have my moment.
Peace Corps, being kind of Peace Corpsy (I think I need a more functional adjective), dropped us off at the UCA so we could go home. This just meant that we couldn’t take a direct bus back to Masatepe, but just the better. Everybody wanted to rent our own bus to take us all home, but I didn’t particularly care since I’d get there faster on another bus. Jordan and Lindsay ended up agreeing, and we caught the first microbus out of the UCA. I ended up sitting next to some cheery Nicaraguan guy underneath his enormous suitcase, however with the way Nicaraguans driver, this was a welcome obstruction to witnessing the impending accident we’re always about to get in.
In San Marcos, to unwind, we ended up going to a the facenta (stuck up) bar/restaurant so we could just chill out and collect our thoughts/recuperate. It was a nice time to relax and we hung out for around an hour before catching a mototaxi back to our towns.
A good way to end the day. Bring on tomorrow!
July 10th
Thankfully I had a light schedule today, so that meant I could catch up on sleep – which is exactly what I did. However, as I’ve found typical, I got a phone call (two actually, but I missed them both) from Peace Corps. I figured it was either the med office, or somebody from HQ telling us about some meeting. Either way, I’m too cheap to call them back. Yea, that’s right – the government can call me back. Jordan ended up calling me to tell me that we had a session for our Masatepe group in two hours, so we had to read 3 sections in this book and then go discuss what we read and take a quiz. Thanks for letting us know ahead of time! How am I supposed to adapt to Nica time if PC keeps giving me tasks mere hours before the deadline? Culturally insensitive, that’s all I have to say.
I stopped by Jordan’s house about an hour before the training session to discuss the book/get the virus off of my flash drive that she gave me. Eventually I figured it out, and we also discovered that her computer/flash drive was a virus haven. Nevertheless, we cleaned it for the now, even though it will just be virus laden the next time she plugs it into a computer. What do they say? It’s the little things in life that add up? That’s right! Short-term satisfaction – that’s what gets you through the day in the Peace Corps.
As luck would have it, Jordan immediately got a fever in the 30 minutes I was away from her house, so she skipped the training session. I showed up about 5 minutes late and waited for Peace Corps to show up. Not surprisingly, Ernie showed up 20 minutes late, without ice cream. We tarred and feathered him immediately after he stepped out of his car – at least that’s what we wanted to do. The ‘training session’ ended up being less training and more…chisme session, but asi es la vida no? Eventually we got around to the training session we actually planned, but it totally lacked the formality/structure. Hey, just becoming more accustomed to life in Nicaragua! Nevertheless, the session lasted a daunting 2 hours (god knows how) before we finally parted ways.
I wanted to take a walk to Flor de Pochote, a scenic overlook 5 km north of Masatepe, but with the weather being suspect, I headed over to the cyber for a bit instead. After updating myself on the world news (I swear that world news was more exciting to me when I was reading it everyday – context, I’m useless without it), I left the cyber to find that the clouds had parted to bring me the sunshine I’d been yearning for. Where was it earlier when I had enough time to take the scenic walk? Perhaps a Nicaraguan ploy to thwart my opportunities to see the lovely parts of my training town? I’m comfortable shifting the blame.
Oliver called me when I got home to tell me that he has a job interview on Monday in Managua in English, and that he’d like to practice with me before he has the interview, so I told him to come on over…and I left. Haha. Usually he says he’ll show up, then 38 days later, he shows up – so I figured I’d have some time to do some errands. I headed with Jordan to the bank and the grocery store (I’m going to miss both of those when I’m in Achuapa). Craving the caloric subsidy of my Nicaraguan life – corn flakes – it was necessary to pick up some milk. However, as fate would have it, I couldn’t turn down the chocolate ice cream bar that looked (that’s what ice cream bars do right?) at me through the freezer glass – so I got one of those too.
I found Oliver in front of my house upon returning home, “Why are you here already?” I said to him to make myself appear less culpable. He’d been there for 15 minutes – very un-Nica of him. However, we buckled down and I grilled him with some tough generic interview questions for him to practice his English. His English is amazing (for having only studied 6 months), but he still has some issues with past and present tense. Aside from that though, I’m really impressed with his level. He’s applying to a customer service center in Managua that pays around $500 a month. To provide a reference – that’s more than lots of Nicaraguan doctors get paid. I don’t know where these jobs came from, but they sure are a lot more lucrative than Peace Corps. I mean that’s why I joined the Peace Corps ri….errr….no.
I kicked Oliver out of my house at 5:30 so I could attend a youth group meeting, and headed over to grab them and Jordan. We decided to take a trip to the laguna to the north of Masatepe (had no idea there was one until today) on Saturday at 8 AM, and then discussed our presentation we have to do for Peace Corps the following Friday. The initial reaction of Javier and Mario, our youths, was apprehension, but after telling them there would be cake – this was no longer an issue. So hopefully that goes well.
Managua tomorrow for HIV/AIDS day (is this a world event or just a Nicaraguan one?)
July 11th
Well the day started out early since we all (TEFL and SBD) had to meet at the UCA at the ungodly hour of 7:30 AM. After doing all the morning routine, I stopped by Jordan’s house before we caught the microbus for Managua. When we got to the main street, we were surprised to see the microbus passing, so we flagged it down and got in. The bus was 15 minutes earlier than the bus we had thought it was supposed to leave, but we just didn’t think about it. When we were around San Marcos (or something), the microbus stopped, and the cobrador got out and started whistling down the street. We had no idea what was going on, but just went with it. However, he then told Jordan, me, and some other guy who was seated next to us to get out, and he threw us in a mototaxi. There was no explanation to what was going on, and the mototaxi just kept going straight down the highway. “Are we taking a mototaxi all the way to Managua?” we both thought. However, after about a mile or two in the mototaxi, it pulled over, and we pulled over and hopped back in the microbus. Apparently a policeman, or somebody had caught us, for overcrowding, so we waited for him to pass, and then they threw us all back in the bus. Not sure what the deal was, but it was definitely a new experience.
After arriving at the UCA and meeting up with a bunch of the TEFLers, we piled into a number of PC mobiles to get hauled over to some location for HIV/AIDS charlas the entire day. Most of the charlas were pretty informative, and gave us ideas for ways to give health charlas in our sites to groups of people – be it youths or adults. Really, there is no sort of interesting and informative way to describe what happened during charla as the subject is all pretty direct. In other words, it was like we were all in middle school again.
After the charlas and parting way with the TEFL volunteers, 12 of us piled into a microbus and headed to San Marcos. After a relatively uneventful trip through the pineapple fields of Ticuantepe and the other towns on the route, we arrived in San Marcos, but not exactly with an immediate desire to head back to our training towns. Some of us had heard of a pupuseria near the Ave Maria College, so we went venturing around looking for said restaurant. It ended up being right in front of the school in some sort of warehouse/apartment building type of restaurant. I really couldn’t explain exactly what it was, but it was quaint and provided a good atmosphere. To top it off they blasted all those great 80’s hits that any good Nica eating establishment can’t be without. It was a good time to just relax with everybody and unwind after the training session (in a way that didn’t involve going to a bar).
Around 9 of us caught the last bus back to Masatepe and planned to go to Perry’s (the TEFL volunteer in Masatepe) house to play cards. I ran home quick to unformalize my attire (aka I put on sandals) and eat. When I got over to Perry’s, I found the group unsurprisingly ready with the cards, and unsurprisingly, a couple of bottles of rum (I guess this is cultural assimilation). I’m going for the Peace Corps body (get in wicked good shape, then when people ask how I got in such good shape, I just tell them I went on the Peace Corps diet – the diet/exercise program that pays you! [Though this amount is negligible, and probably won’t beat inflation]). Anyways, I wasn’t feeling the booze today, so we just sat around for a couple hours and played some cards (but don’t tell the evangelicals!). It was a good time as we always tend to unwind from our typical focused on training-type selves.
Tomorrow, Jordan and I are headed to the Laguna de Masaya with our youth group (I think), hopefully it goes well.
Thanks for the letter Heather! It got here today! Amazing – 4 days!
July 12th
The morning started early today – because I had plans! I woke up early because Jordan and I were going with our youth group (well, it’s less of a group – there are only 2 people in it) to the Laguna de Masaya. It’s around 7 zillion kilometers north of Masatepe (though I didn’t learn that until minutes before leaving. We rendezvoused with Javier and Mario in front of Jordan’s house and began the trek to the Laguna at 8 on the dot. The street that passes in front of the main church in Masatepe goes the entire way to the Laguna and goes from being an urban street, to semi-urban, to rural, to a road in the middle of nowhere, to being completely unpaved – that’s right, you reach the end of the road.
It became incredibly obvious that as we continued our walk, that Masatepe was actually on a mountain – I had no idea it was so high up. The entire route to the Laguna is a massive descent and at some parts the road is easily at a 45-degree angle, I’m actually surprised some cars can ascend it. The road descends at a this ridiculous incline for 7 kilometers until you actually hit the sand of the area surrounding the Laguna. Nevertheless, the route itself is absolutely gorgeous, and after 5 km, you pass a restaurant, which is the last piece of civilization before you get thrown into the wild. The only way to describe how the land around the Laguna is to say it’s exactly how Jurassic Park is. There are rolling mountains, a jungle, all the jungle noises, and then to top it all off, you have a view of the Masaya volcano. It’s gorgeous and just completely savage.
After the highway just random ended (I don’t even know why the last 2 km of the road were even paved, it’s totally worthless), the road gives way to massive boulders and rocks in the middle of the road. The good thing is that the route from there is relatively flat and sandy. After around 25 minutes of walking down this path, suddenly the Laguna popped out of nowhere – and the ungodly amount of garbage strewn across the ‘beach’ became visible. Being the end of the route though, we were exhausted, so we just sat down amidst all the garbage and enjoyed a deserved snack.
After our break, we started navigating the beach and taking all sorts of side routes that Javier was taking us down. We ran into random fishermen, people swimming (even though it’s in the middle of nowhere and almost completely inaccessible), and barely-there volcanic rock trails. Before we finally ventured back to Masatepe, we carved “Cuerpo de Paz” into a tree (if you’re an environment volunteer, this uh…didn’t happen), and got a picture. However, we got a picture of Javier carving it into the tree, so if anybody wants to prosecute or yell or whatever, bark up his tree.
Javier led us down endless paths, and though I was completely lost, he knew exactly where we were. I’ve never seen anybody with such good bearings in my life, but he ended up finding a back route to the highway and we got back to Masatepe in no time. However, with the WICKED incline of the road, it was an hour and a half walk that was absolutely ridiculous and left all of us incredibly sore by the end of it.
Following the trip, I came home and fell unconscious. After waking from my coma, I did some reading before deciding to go to the store/bank. As my luck generally works out, as soon as I stepped foot outside my door, it started raining, and then the power went out. I refrained to think about the effects of a power outage, and trudged to the center of Masatepe. As the power was out, so was the ATM ($#@&), so I only had 5 cords to buy stuff at the grocery store. Fortunately I was just buying bananas, so 3 cords later, I walked out of there. While I was glad I was able to buy what I needed, I need change/money for my trip to El Rosario tomorrow, so I was still in a bit of a rut.
I headed back home and waited for around 3 hours for the power to come back on, which it ultimately did at 7. Owen gave me a call to tell me that he just met a Japanese Peace Corps volunteer, Yoshida, who is moving into his house after he goes off to his site in 2 weeks. Apparently, she’s a friend of Noriko, the Japanese Peace Corps volunteer that is in Achuapa. I had planned to meet her during my site visit, but with the unfriendly weather during my week there, I wasn’t able to stop by her house to introduce myself. She was hoping another volunteer would get placed in Achuapa because apparently it’s a little daunting being there solo. That made me feel better as I was a little reluctant to just show up, and didn’t want to be imposing (surprising, I know). Good to know I have designated friend already in Achuapa, I’ll probably need it.
July 13th
Today I woke up wicked early for my trip to El Rosario. I met up with Dianne and Sonia in Jinotepe and we hit up a fabric shop. Sonia was looking to buy some fabric to get some pants made, and Dianne wanted some for some headbands, or something. Basically what it breaks down to is this: if you buy fabric and have somebody make clothes for you, it’s cheaper than actually buying the clothes in the store. The store had every kind of fabric, yarn, buttons, and zippers you could imagine. Sonia and Dianne ended up buying tons of fabric and it came out to mere pennies – what a good deal! I’m seriously considering going back to get fabric to get a shirt made.
After the fabric store, we went to the grocery store to tease the inner Americans in us. It had tons of “luxury” goods (stuff we typically consume in the U.S., but is ridiculously expensive here), and we hung out there for about an hour enjoying the nostalgia. After this, we parted ways with Sonia and planned to meet up with her later that afternoon at the TEFLers local hangout, The Greenhouse.
Dianne and I then went and got a cab for El Rosario. The cab itself was…in shambles. There were no door latches, on the inside or the outside. Actually, there wasn’t even an inside to any of the doors either. The glove compartment was taped shut, the steering wheel was tied/taped on, and there was a huge crack in the windshield. I have no idea how this car was still running, but I just went with it – Si dios quiere.
After hanging out in El Rosario for a couple hours, Dianne and I met up with a group of the TEFLers for a couple beers at the Greenhouse. Apparently that’s where they all go after all the charlas we get in training sessions – very welcoming place.
After a couple hours there, I broke off from the TEFlers and hopped a bus back to Masatepe. As the day progressed, I’d gradually gotten really sick. The day started with me having the sniffles, this progressed to a sore throat, and by the time I left, I had a massive headache. All these ailments yielded plenty of distractions for me on the bus ride home. In addition to dying, it started hurricaning on the ride back.
I eventually got back home – completely drenched – but nevertheless, in one piece. I ate dinner quickly, then thought I’d do some reading. Yoshida, the Japanese Peace Corps volunteer in Masatepe ended up calling me to find out when I’d be going to Achuapa so she could let her friend know. Her English is really good, but with my massive headache/fever, I could understand very little of what she said. She kept talking to me about some environmental youth group or something and just went on and on and on about it. It’s all a blur really as I fell unconscious from my fever right after the phone call was over.
But I survived, barely.
Posted by thegoggins 
