Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Various



Every morning on Sandinista radio you can hear a lovely song, Nicaragua, Nicaragüita, written by Nicaragua’s most famous composer, Carlos Mejia Godoy, whose family hailed from my part of the country.  I urge everyone to google the words and look for a way to hear it on line.  It’s a waltz and when I first heard it I thought it was a love song.  It is, but it’s also a song of the revolution and the words are tough.  The singer says that he always loved Nicaragua but loves her more now that, drenched in blood, she is free.  I told my Spanish teacher I wanted to learn the words.  As it happens he is also a guitar teacher and so at our last lesson we sang the thing maybe 6 times to his playing. 
Spanish lessons occupy 6 hours a week.  Until school starts in February, I’ve been spending another 6 hours (15 if you count time for transportation) teaching a bit of English to the guides at the only tourist attraction in these parts, the Somoto Canyon.  The canyon is a good distance from where I live, but I love going because I get out into the country.  There is not much going on in my quaint pueblo, no markets or stores except for the little pulperias which sell a few necessaries.  There is no place to go for coffee or a beer (actually there are two bars but decent folks don’t go there.)  There is no restaurant or café.  For those amenities I travel by taxi 15 minutes to Somoto.  In Somoto there is a grocery store (Pali, owned by Walmart), street vendors, a municipal market, eateries, 2 hotels and dozens of little stores selling used American clothes and plastic items.  Somoto is hardly a metropolis but it saves my life.  I love it when two days a week I have to be there between activities.  I buy myself a frugal but delicious lunch.  I check out the post office.  I use the cyber, buy fruit and vegetables. I check out the bakery hoping against hope that they have whole wheat bread (I’ve found it twice) and, begrudgingly I enter the Pali to buy things I can’t buy anywhere else.
I also have been working with 2 of my 4 counterpart teachers.  One of them is a single mom who lives in town with children aged 14 and 2 and with her grandmother who is ancient and toothless.  I have been showing up 2 to 3 times a week to help this teacher, call her Domitila, study for a huge test she has to take in March comprising all she has learned in English.  The topics she has to study are complex—like verb forms people don’t actually use much. But she has a very limited ability to speak English thanks to an educational system that prizes grammar over communication. Domitila is a large loud woman whom I have grown to like a lot.  She is a survivor.  She complains with big gestures.  She calls herself “gorda” and when I politely insist that she is merely “hermosa” she roars.  So funny, that gringa. The opportunity to help her out during vacation here has made a bond.  I think we’ll be able to work together when school starts, and I tell her that by the end of 2 years she’ll be speaking English, which she will at some level.  She roars at that idea, too, but it pleases her mightily.
I have spent some time with another counterpart, call her Erica, a slight woman who lacks confidence.  She is married to Juan Carlos and has a one year old, Juan Carlito.  I have visited with her several times, but she invited me for lunch one day.  She and Juan Carlos both trained to be English teachers and they very much want to speak fluently.  They want me to give them lessons, really conversation opportunities, on some kind of regular basis.  Peace Corps warns us that there are all kinds of people who want that deal.  But these two are so earnest, so plagued by the difficulties imposed by the educational system (for instance, in order to be able to teach one or two sections of English, the job for which they were trained, they have to teach 3 or 4 sections of something for which they have no training or love, e.g. music), that I am inclined to find a way to accommodate them.
Saturday I’ll be leaving my present home to an interim house out in one of the barrios of my town.  The house I’ll be living in is one of the houses the government builds for the people who have nowhere to live.  It’s basic but acceptable.  I’ll have a room and kitchen privileges although the kitchen has no refrigerator or oven, just a two burner stove top.  I will move again in early April to take over the room of another volunteer in my site when she returns to the States.  Her place comes with a mini fridge, stove in a good sized room.  I’ll spend the rest of my time in that space and I’m excited to get there.  In the meantime, I’ll be living like a Nicaragüense.  I’m probably going to be eating a lot of peanut butter ($6.00 a jar and worth it) and oatmeal.  You could do worse.


Various