Peace Corps is really good at training.  Part of training for us was preparing for the emotional ups and downs of service.  We were warned that there would be times when we’d question the usefulness of what we were doing or feel overwhelmed by the foreignness of the place.  At such times we were advised to hold off on the blog and turn to the journal.  But a friend emailed an inquiry as to what I’m actually doing now and I was struck by the two ways in which the question, “What am I doing here?” can be understood.

So, apropos of one way of interpreting the question, I’ve been in my permanent site for 3 weeks.  My job is to help Nica English teachers develop better teaching strategies toward the end of more ‘communicative” learning.  I am also charged with helping to develop materials for classroom use in this country where the only existing material is a whiteboard.  Finally, I’m supposed to find ways to teach English to interested people in the community.  I am permitted to develop other projects secondary to my main English-teaching obligations. But there’s a hold on all this work. School is out for the year.  This is summer vacation.  Classes resume in early February.  Peace Corps schedules us into the new site with 2 months during which I am supposed to “integrate” into the community, not actually work. 

Theoretically, some time for getting settled is a good idea, but as you can imagine, this integration part is hard.  For the first time we are on our own, some of us with limited language skills, living with people we don’t know who may or may not be excited to have us here.  I can tell you what I’ve done by way of integration: introduce myself to neighbors, visit and chat at various small businesses in town like corner markets, tortilla and rosquilla sellers, hang out at the park hoping someone is interested enough to stop for a chat (this actually works often), go to church for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, go to the high school graduation, visit the local Department of Education office, meet the police, try to figure out who are local leaders so I can talk with them about community needs, etc.  I have tried, but the truth is there’s still a lot of down time every day.  So I use that to reread training material and, especially, study Spanish maybe 3 hours a day. I have to feed myself so I shop and cook. There’s still time left so I’ve been reading a lot of very good novels and enjoying that. At night I listen to music, write in Spanish in my journal and read one thing or another.  I admit to playing solitaire.   I also have done a little traveling.  I have a PC site mate, Jenny, who has showed me how to get around the closest large town for food, cyber and banking needs.  She also took me to a bigger city, Esteli.  I’ve met some other volunteers from the area.

So, in short, this is a hard time for me with some up sides.  But I recently had a project that really excites me fall into my lap. Another volunteer in the small business sector let me know he’d meet a Nica guy who operates a tour service for the only real tourist attraction in Madriz, the Somoto Canyon. The owner employs 6 guides who need to learn English so they can better do their jobs. I agreed to meet with the owner. Lacking his name or phone number, but with a general idea of where his business was supposed to be in the nearby town, I headed out to find him. When the business wasn’t where I was told it was, I started to ask around in local shops.  In one, a lady didn’t know, but got her employee to put me in a car (yes, I was a little worried) and drive me to the local tourist office.  The folks there listened and knew who the guy was, phoned him and he came to find me at the office and brought me to his place. (This was an amazingly successful negotiation.  It could have as easily ended up that no one knew who I was looking for or that the guy wasn’t around or nobody understood my Spanish, but this is how business is done in Nicaragua—in person, at your house or shop, face to face.)

Long story short, I am thrilled that I am going to try to help these guides so maybe they do a better job with tourists who maybe will tip them more so they can live better in this poor part of the world. I suggested and the operator agreed that I don’t have time to teach them a lot of English, but we can do basics and maybe I can translate the things they say on the tour and help them learn how to say those thing in English. I hope this will be my project in the month and a half before school starts and maybe a little after.  So, that’s what I’m doing.

As to the other meaning of the question, “What am I doing here?” I ponder that sometimes.  I think about my kids and the lovely women in their lives, my friends, my family, my dog, my garden. I think of the odds against making any real difference.  I think of the  difficulty of knowing well another culture, or another person in that culture.  T

What Am I Doing Here?