My Pueblo, Revisited

Now that I have a less than a week in my pueblo before swearing in and moving north, I’m getting a little nostalgic.  Part of it is the fabulous weather, sunny and warm with constant breezes.  This is winter in Nicaragua and it’s a pleasure to walk around in it.  Last week I was assigned by my language facilitator to interview a resident of the pueblo about how life was 40 years ago in this town.  I visited Dona Petrona, my host mom’s older sister.  Dona Petrona was a safe interviewee, having hosted twenty-some volunteers herself.  She knows how to slow down for us.  The interview consisted of several questions, but after the first few, Dona Petrona wanted to talk about her life with the volunteers and in particular how sad she was when each volunteer left her house.  This is a lady muy carinosa and her heart breaks when she loses a volunteer, so much so that she takes to her bed for a few days until she recovers.  She told me a story about a black volunteer who lived with her and then moved on to her site.  The volunteer called Dona Petrona in tears because her new host mom rejected her because of the color of her skin.  Dona Petrona reminded the volunteer of a song she had sung to her during her training about an angel with black skin who was taken up to heaven.  The volunteer hadn’t understood the song at the time, but when Dpna Petrona sang it for her again over the phone, the volunteered cried and thanked Petrona for reminding her of the song.   I was happily diverted from my interview by these stories and had to return the next day to finish up.

  When I got there Dona Petrona had some fabulous, truly amazing sorbete for me, some fruit flavor and a real treat.  We finished the interview and I was asking her about the various barrios around my pueblo.  I’ve always wondered who lives there.  Petrona offered to show me the next day. I showed up on Wednesday and we started to walk out of town.  The paved roads changed to dirt as we came to the first of two barrios.  In both there was a greater population of the poor than in the pueblo.  We passed many house with dirt floors, outside kitchens with wood fires, children playing outside in the dirt.  But we also passed some neat little family compounds consisting of a house and several reed  or stick out-buildings roofed with thatch.  At one someone called out to Petrona to come in.  We did and a toothless woman named Consuela gave me a big hug as did her husband, a very old and leathery looking man named something Angelo.  It’s normal to hug on first contact in Nicaragua but I still am a bit awkward with this but should’t be at my age.  Three generations live in this compound all cooking and eating together and taking care of each other.  This is what happens in Nicaragua.  Thje family is always there if you get sick or lose your job or   need any kind of help.   I met Consuela’s daughter making tortillas on the outside wood fire stove.

The best thing is to walk with someone like Dona Petrona.  She knows everyone and in between houses she tells me their stories.  We came upon 4 or five children—about 7 years of age—playing in the road. Two little boys were building a kite from sticks and plastic bags.  Petrona stopped to talk to the two little girls.  It seems she heard one of them use a bad word.  In the nicest possible way she told them that such words were not good for them  This was because the words were ugly and the girls were so beautiful.  The girls ducked their heads and giggled, but Petrona kept talking.  They knew she meant it.  She is privileged to correct other people’s children.  He stature, this culture, bestows the privilege.

I saw so much on our hour walk.  I heard PC say we should get people to walk around with us in our site, but didn’t get it until I saw it in action.  I get stuck on my norteamericano values—how would you ever ask someone to walk you around town in the U. S.  But I thinks it’s a kind of honor to be asked, acknowledgement to the person asked that s/he has importance.  And there is nothing like being introduced by an insider.  It’s a win/win.  I’ll do it right away and often in my new site.

Anyway, my days with Dona Petrona made me nostalgic for my pueblo.  How many other great people would I have met had I not been embarrassed of my poor Spanish and studying all the time? My host mom and I are comadres, language notwithstanding.  We will miss each other.  I am easy to be around.  I know how to disappear when needed.  I think I was easy for my family to live with.  I’ll miss my host dad, too with his jokes and willingness to try to explain as simply as possible complicated subjects like the influence of world debt on labor in Nicaragua.  I had a great time here.  And it’s clear I can come back for a visit any time I want.

My Pueblo, Revisited

Objectives and Dogs

I’ve been thinking about this blog and I have a couple of disclaimers I want to make..  There are some constraints on writing that I’m afraid may leave a false impression.  First, although the national election is today and the politics in Nicaragua are intensely interesting, PC has a policy of strict neutrality when it comes to any political expression, which as far as I can see, means no expression at all.  It would be hard to talk about politics without betraying an opinion, so saying nothing is the best course.  Second, I don’t want to write anything that would offend an average honest Nicaraguan.  There are hard things to see in this country and they are especially visible to people who aren’t used to them. I’ll write about one below: dogs. Until I understand something better I hesitate to describe it because I’m afraid my norteamericano response would leave a false impression.  As a result sometimes I worry that what I write will sound like a travel brochure full of quaintness and local color. Enough said on that topic. Reader beware.

We are heading into the last 2 weeks of training.  The final language evaluations are next Friday.  I have made my peace with them.  I know what I know and no more at this time.  PC is sponsoring a workshop for teachers and each training group has to prepare a 1 ½ hour charla, on a subject regarding the teaching of English.  My group is talking about lesson planning, and my part in particular is objective writing.  This doesn’t sound too interesting as a topic, but it is to me. I have become a little passionate about how we teachers use the students’ valuable classroom time.  Especially here, where time is so hard to come by.

For example, I learned yesterday that there are 220 school days in Nicaragua.  Officially.  Compare that to the 180 days usual in the U.S. But those 220 days don’t happen, especially for English class.  To begin, English class meets on average for one 2 hour class and one hour class per week, compared to other subjects that meet daily.  And in fact, English classes last 1 ½ hours and 45 minutes respectively, for a total of 2 ¼ hours per week of English instruction. Secondly, school often doesn’t happen.  For instance, this week there was one day of school.  Why? A holiday ( Day of the Dead), a political meeting for teachers, and two days related to the use of schools as voting places.  This is an unusual time, but school is cancelled for all kinds of reasons. In a lecture yesterday a representative of the department of education said that actually there are 70 class meetings for an English class in the year, about a third of the school days and from what I understand that is optimistic (I’ll bet he doesn’t count the days when school is closed for torrential rain).  As a result, I am on a tear about using that remaining class time as well as possible.  And that means a special obligation to get the purpose of those few classes clear. Hence, my topic: writing objectives.

Nicaragua is beautiful right now.  We are entering “winter”. The days are nicely warm but right now there is less humidity and it actually gets cool at night.  My family thinks it’s cold, but I think it’s fine.

My birthday was last Thursday and I got more celebration than I thought. PC is all over birthdays so I got text congratulations from my jefe and others.  Then my family celebrated by—are you ready for this—having a pizza motorcycled in from the nearest city.  It was served to me with a traditional birthday drink made for me alone, chiche de jenjibre, made of ginger finely ground, rice, canelo (cinnamon) and coco.  It clears the sinuses and was pretty refreshing.  The next day the training group met and my two 22 year old Texan sitemates rose to the occasion by buying a bag of candy for the group and for me 2 packages of microwave popcorn and a marshmallow and chocolate lollipop. They really surprised me with that one.  Everyone sang happy birthday and then I was taken out for beers after class.  An altogether satisfactory birthday.

Dogs.  Whenever you travel abroad you see street dogs.  Same here.  They are pathetic and skinny and not-neutered and really scruffy and dirty.  They are a part of the landscape and after a while you don’t notice them much.  We have three dogs at my house.  All day long they are tied up on short leashes in a place where there is shade and water.  They are fed. At night they are let loose to guard the house.  They bark at whomever comes along, usually only street dogs.  When I got here I was horrified about the dogs, including the dogs at my house which I was not allowed to touch because they did not know me.  Now I am not.  Our dogs have a better deal than street dogs.  They are free to roam around the yard for about 10 hours a day. The family doesn’t play with them, but they get shots and occasionally washed.  It seems a pretty good deal for them, given everything.  And in a place where there really are no extras, the dogs need to earn their keep. 

This blog isn’t nice and thematic. But I’m going to add a couple of pictures.  Just learned how to do it.  2 cute Nica babies:

 Me and volunteer Chris atop Masaya volcano in the rain:

I’ve been thinking about this blog and I have a couple of disclaimers I want to make..  There are some constraints on writing that I’m afraid may leave a false impression.  First, although the national election is today and the politics in Nicaragua are intensely interesting, PC has a policy of strict neutrality when it comes to any political expression, which as far as I can see, means no expression at all.  It would be hard to talk about politics without betraying an opinion, so saying nothing is the best course.  Second, I don’t want to write anything that would offend an average honest Nicaraguan.  There are hard things to see in this country and they are especially visible to people who aren’t used to them. I’ll write about one below: dogs. Until I understand something better I hesitate to describe it because I’m afraid my norteamericano response would leave a false impression.  As a result sometimes I worry that what I write will sound like a travel brochure full of quaintness and local color. Enough said on that topic. Reader beware.

We are heading into the last 2 weeks of training.  The final language evaluations are next Friday.  I have made my peace with them.  I know what I know and no more at this time.  PC is sponsoring a workshop for teachers and each training group has to prepare a 1 ½ hour charla, on a subject regarding the teaching of English.  My group is talking about lesson planning, and my part in particular is objective writing.  This doesn’t sound too interesting as a topic, but it is to me. I have become a little passionate about how we teachers use the students’ valuable classroom time.  Especially here, where time is so hard to come by.

For example, I learned yesterday that there are 220 school days in Nicaragua.  Officially.  Compare that to the 180 days usual in the U.S. But those 220 days don’t happen, especially for English class.  To begin, English class meets on average for one 2 hour class and one hour class per week, compared to other subjects that meet daily.  And in fact, English classes last 1 ½ hours and 45 minutes respectively, for a total of 2 ¼ hours per week of English instruction. Secondly, school often doesn’t happen.  For instance, this week there was one day of school.  Why? A holiday ( Day of the Dead), a political meeting for teachers, and two days related to the use of schools as voting places.  This is an unusual time, but school is cancelled for all kinds of reasons. In a lecture yesterday a representative of the department of education said that actually there are 70 class meetings for an English class in the year, about a third of the school days and from what I understand that is optimistic (I’ll bet he doesn’t count the days when school is closed for torrential rain).  As a result, I am on a tear about using that remaining class time as well as possible.  And that means a special obligation to get the purpose of those few classes clear. Hence, my topic: writing objectives.

Nicaragua is beautiful right now.  We are entering “winter”. The days are nicely warm but right now there is less humidity and it actually gets cool at night.  My family thinks it’s cold, but I think it’s fine.

My birthday was last Thursday and I got more celebration than I thought. PC is all over birthdays so I got text congratulations from my jefe and others.  Then my family celebrated by—are you ready for this—having a pizza motorcycled in from the nearest city.  It was served to me with a traditional birthday drink made for me alone, chiche de jenjibre, made of ginger finely ground, rice, canelo (cinnamon) and coco.  It clears the sinuses and was pretty refreshing.  The next day the training group met and my two 22 year old Texan sitemates rose to the occasion by buying a bag of candy for the group and for me 2 packages of microwave popcorn and a marshmallow and chocolate lollipop. They really surprised me with that one.  Everyone sang happy birthday and then I was taken out for beers after class.  An altogether satisfactory birthday.

Dogs.  Whenever you travel abroad you see street dogs.  Same here.  They are pathetic and skinny and not-neutered and really scruffy and dirty.  They are a part of the landscape and after a while you don’t notice them much.  We have three dogs at my house.  All day long they are tied up on short leashes in a place where there is shade and water.  They are fed. At night they are let loose to guard the house.  They bark at whomever comes along, usually only street dogs.  When I got here I was horrified about the dogs, including the dogs at my house which I was not allowed to touch because they did not know me.  Now I am not.  Our dogs have a better deal than street dogs.  They are free to roam around the yard for about 10 hours a day. The family doesn’t play with them, but they get shots and occasionally washed.  It seems a pretty good deal for them, given everything.  And in a place where there really are no extras, the dogs need to earn their keep. 

This blog isn’t nice and thematic. I was going to add a couple of pictures but my attempt failed.  I'll try to learn how next week.

 Me and volunteer Chris atop Masaya volcano in the rain:

I’ve been thinking about this blog and I have a couple of disclaimers I want to make..  There are some constraints on writing that I’m afraid may leave a false impression.  First, although the national election is today and the politics in Nicaragua are intensely interesting, PC has a policy of strict neutrality when it comes to any political expression, which as far as I can see, means no expression at all.  It would be hard to talk about politics without betraying an opinion, so saying nothing is the best course.  Second, I don’t want to write anything that would offend an average honest Nicaraguan.  There are hard things to see in this country and they are especially visible to people who aren’t used to them. I’ll write about one below: dogs. Until I understand something better I hesitate to describe it because I’m afraid my norteamericano response would leave a false impression.  As a result sometimes I worry that what I write will sound like a travel brochure full of quaintness and local color. Enough said on that topic. Reader beware.

We are heading into the last 2 weeks of training.  The final language evaluations are next Friday.  I have made my peace with them.  I know what I know and no more at this time.  PC is sponsoring a workshop for teachers and each training group has to prepare a 1 ½ hour charla, on a subject regarding the teaching of English.  My group is talking about lesson planning, and my part in particular is objective writing.  This doesn’t sound too interesting as a topic, but it is to me. I have become a little passionate about how we teachers use the students’ valuable classroom time.  Especially here, where time is so hard to come by.

For example, I learned yesterday that there are 220 school days in Nicaragua.  Officially.  Compare that to the 180 days usual in the U.S. But those 220 days don’t happen, especially for English class.  To begin, English class meets on average for one 2 hour class and one hour class per week, compared to other subjects that meet daily.  And in fact, English classes last 1 ½ hours and 45 minutes respectively, for a total of 2 ¼ hours per week of English instruction. Secondly, school often doesn’t happen.  For instance, this week there was one day of school.  Why? A holiday ( Day of the Dead), a political meeting for teachers, and two days related to the use of schools as voting places.  This is an unusual time, but school is cancelled for all kinds of reasons. In a lecture yesterday a representative of the department of education said that actually there are 70 class meetings for an English class in the year, about a third of the school days and from what I understand that is optimistic (I’ll bet he doesn’t count the days when school is closed for torrential rain).  As a result, I am on a tear about using that remaining class time as well as possible.  And that means a special obligation to get the purpose of those few classes clear. Hence, my topic: writing objectives.

Nicaragua is beautiful right now.  We are entering “winter”. The days are nicely warm but right now there is less humidity and it actually gets cool at night.  My family thinks it’s cold, but I think it’s fine.

My birthday was last Thursday and I got more celebration than I thought. PC is all over birthdays so I got text congratulations from my jefe and others.  Then my family celebrated by—are you ready for this—having a pizza motorcycled in from the nearest city.  It was served to me with a traditional birthday drink made for me alone, chiche de jenjibre, made of ginger finely ground, rice, canelo (cinnamon) and coco.  It clears the sinuses and was pretty refreshing.  The next day the training group met and my two 22 year old Texan sitemates rose to the occasion by buying a bag of candy for the group and for me 2 packages of microwave popcorn and a marshmallow and chocolate lollipop. They really surprised me with that one.  Everyone sang happy birthday and then I was taken out for beers after class.  An altogether satisfactory birthday.

Dogs.  Whenever you travel abroad you see street dogs.  Same here.  They are pathetic and skinny and not-neutered and really scruffy and dirty.  They are a part of the landscape and after a while you don’t notice them much.  We have three dogs at my house.  All day long they are tied up on short leashes in a place where there is shade and water.  They are fed. At night they are let loose to guard the house.  They bark at whomever comes along, usually only street dogs.  When I got here I was horrified about the dogs, including the dogs at my house which I was not allowed to touch because they did not know me.  Now I am not.  Our dogs have a better deal than street dogs.  They are free to roam around the yard for about 10 hours a day. The family doesn’t play with them, but they get shots and occasionally washed.  It seems a pretty good deal for them, given everything.  And in a place where there really are no extras, the dogs need to earn their keep. 

This blog isn’t nice and thematic. But I’m going to add a couple of pictures.  Just learned how to do it.  2 cute Nica babies:

 Me and volunteer Chris atop Masaya volcano in the rain:

 

Objectives and Dogs

 

Objectives and Dogs

Objectives and Dogs

Rosquillas

In three weeks I’ll be packing up my unwieldy suitcase, my backpack and daypack and heading north to my new site via a 5 hour ride in three different buses.  I am not looking forward to that journey, but I am very happy with the town, my new Nica family and 4 counterpart teachers, each of them sweet and eager to learn how to better teach English.  They are so glad to have me.  One said she was glad PC didn’t send a man.  The fact that I’m older works for me here.  In Nicaragua, I am la senora.  I have the hope of creating “confianza”.  Confianza is relationship built on trust.

I spent time at the high school observing classes.  In my town there are two “tornos” or sessions.  Students go to school in the morning or afternoon, not a full day.  This is the case all over the country (in some places there is a night session as well) because there aren’t enough schools for all the students in this young population.  But in my town there is a third session on Saturday for the “Sabatinos”.  I hadn’t run into this before. Apparently there are adults and young people who never graduated and want to finish their degrees.  Sometimes they have jobs and can’t get to school.  Other times they live in the country and the bus fare to get to school is too much for them to attend daily.

The town itself is up a steep hill from the highway.  It has a beautiful shady park, two sports arenas, a library, a health center and a “casa de materna” a hostel-like place where pregnant women from the country can come to live for 2 weeks before their due dates.  Apparently serious problems can arise when women go into labor and can’t get to medical facilities.  There are few cars and so women stay at home which is fine until there are complications.  The “casa” gives them a place to stay and a way to the hospital or medical center for a safer delivery.

 The town is full of large outdoor adobe ovens used to bake rosquillas, a pastry made of corn meal and flavored with sugar or cheese and drunk with coffee.  They are  good by themselves.  I finally tracked down some black coffee without sugar (a rarity—everyone uses sugar) and tried them out. Very good combination.  The coffee was the best ever.

PC assigned me to make a map of the town, so one day I went to the park to get a cup of sugared coffee from a little stand there and sat down to start the map.  I was joined on the bench by a young man who asked who I was and what I was doing.  I explained and asked for his help.  Before long there were 4 guys—all in their early thirties—working on my map.  They split into two groups and it became a kind of competition.  I encouraged both teams and I have two good maps, signed by their makers.  It amazes me that it’s so easy to get people to talk to me and now I have 4 acquaintances, one of them with same age and name as my older son. My Nica friend was pleased to find that out.

I was invited to dinner at the home of one of my counterparts along with a PC volunteer who lives in my site,  She works in health.  While dinner was being prepared I was served coffee and rosquillas. A half hour later I ate the best meal I’ve had in Nicaragua.  Marisol is a gifted cook.  She made some wonderfully flavored chicken, rice and veggies.  After dinner she explained her work as a teacher of sewing to women and the possibility of work for women who learn to sew.  Work is the crying need here.

My new family lives on the edge of town on the side of a hill.  The house is built of brick and the rooms have peaked ceilings.  There are adobe tiles for the roof.  The house is designed as a series of rooms open to a walkway with plants and trees on the other side.  There live in these woods roosters, hens and chicks, three dogs and a kitten. There is a latrine a little way off, an area for laundry and an outdoor oven on which some cooking is done although there is also a large eat-in kitchen.  There is also a large living room and beyond that a long patio with a view of the mountains, my favorite place to sit in the morning with sugared coffee to watch the the mists lift off the hills. The best part is the  shower, outdoors of course, but because the water is so cold, the family—mother really—heats water on the outdoor stove to add to the cold water to get warm water for a bucket shower.  The best, although when I return I’ll insist of heating my own water.  Before she leaves for work at seven, my new Nica mama heats the water, scrubs clothes to hang on the line, makes coffee and breakfast, makes lunch for when everyone returns at noon and takes her own shower.  She needs help.

Suffice it to say, I love it there and I think it has the potential to be a very good site from the PC point of view.  There will be a lot of work.  I need to co-teach 16 hours per week and co-plan with the counterparts for those classes which will take a good deal of time.  There’s already some interest in a community English class.  And I want to do some project with women and work, but don’t know what yet.

More later.  Forgive the weird type change.  That happens from time to time and I don’t know how to fix it.  

Going North

After seven weeks of training, PC announced our permanent sites today.  There were some very happy aspirantes ( we would be volunteers) and some disappointed ones as well.  This has to do with the process.  PC gave us a list of open sites with descriptions.  We could pick our best three.  Then we had interviews.  What this process did, I think, for some people was to get them invested in a site.  Not getting it seemed personal or at least a disappointment.  The truth is that with a couple of exceptions nobody had ever been to these sites.  That didn’t stop some aspirantes from getting their hearts set on them.  I have learned a lot from this process, to wit, that we don’t really know what we want, but the process of having to say we want something weds us to our own choices, uninformed as they are.  Easy for me to say. I asked to go to the mountains, to a small community.  And that’s what I got. 

PC asks us not to reveal the name of the town on a public posting for security reasons, but if any friends read this blog and want to know just send me an email.  You can google the site.  Suffice it to say that my town is in the northern, more mountainous region of Nicaragua.  I’ll be the first English teaching volunteer at the site, but I’ll have a site mate, a volunteer from another sector already there.  I’ll be working with 4 English teachers in a very large high school, large because although my town isn’t very big, kids from all the 22 small surrounding towns come to the one school.  I am very excited about this opportunity.  I understand that the counterpart teachers are eager for the help and are willing to find a time to meet all together to work on plans.  This is a big concession on their part. Nicaraguan teachers don’t get paid much and often try to work other jobs.  Or they have families to take care of and that is time consuming in this country where, for instance, laundry is done by hand in a concrete sink with a built in concrete washboard, rinsed by hand, wrung out and hung to dry. But I have big dreams of making a real functioning team to design classes and materials and of establishing a bank of lessons and teaching aides that will survive my time at the site.  Big dreams for someone who just learned where she’d be a few hours ago.

I can say that my site is in a pretty interesting area of Nicaragua is you like the outdoors. Look up the Grand Canyon of Somoto and Miraflor Nature Reserve. Two friends of mine here pulled Leon and Granada, the two bigger historical cities.  Another volunteer is on an amazing volcanic island and another is on the eastern Caribbean coast.  So there are lots of places to visit on vacation.  And in the meantime, if small gets to be trying, I can travel a half hour or so in different directions to 2 decent sized towns.

Monday we all leave for a five day site visit.  I am excited to be going and scared that my Spanish won’t be good enough.  But I know enough to get by and if the small talk gets too rough in Spanish I can flip to English with those 4 counterparts who, thankfully, speak English at least somewhat.

On a lighter note, I learned how to withdraw from the bank into which PC deposits my training living allowance, about $35.00 per month. I’ll get more, $200, when I swear in but will have to pay my own room and board from that.  PC picks that up now.   Feeling confident and flush, I looked to buy a pair of jeans in the market and small stores of Jinotepe.  You can buy used American clothing, but it’s not organized well at all and so you have to do a lot of pawing through racks. The style of jeans here is skin tight.  Another challenge.  Didn’t buy anything first time out. I found out that I’ll need to pay about $10 for a decent pair.  So you can see there won’t be a lot of new clothes.

Next time I write, I’ll describe my new site The first person I can entice to visit me in Nicaragua can do me the favor of bringing a polar fleece.  I think I’ll need it.

Going North

Nature v. Nurture

My training site sits about 500 feet above sea level which means we get some breezes sometimes to relieve the heat.  But this past week it has rained nearly continuously and hard, scary hard sometimes.  When it rains like this mothers keep their children home from school.  When I questioned my language facilitator about this she explained that the theory is that rains bring down unhealthy dirt and pollen from the central jungles and these have bacteria that infect the children.  I was skeptical, but this view is widely held and may be the experience of countless NICA mamas.  I’ve always liked big weather but this insistent rain gives one pause.  It hasn’t affected me much.  My towel doesn’t dry, my carefully placed pictures of home fall off the wall, it’s cooler and I am more tired and hungry.  Minor compared to the big rain.

Nature is pretty real here.  Dealing with it takes up a lot of family time. Even in the houses of middle class people the indoors is very close to outdoor.  The houses are built to let air in.  Many are barn-like to the extent that they have peaked roofs covered with sheets of undulating zinc roofing.  The eves are not closed in so the air can come in.  Inside walls are built up 7feet high to divide up rooms. That way air can circulate.  Windows are high on the walls so that when it rains the extended roof protects the rooms.  My house has walls that meet the roof.  Nevertheless, three doors are always open as are the windows.  Needless to say the house is permeable to nature.  We have cats to take care of rodent nature, but the flies love it inside and a major concern of my host mom is combating their hated presence.  People don’t kill them.  They wave them away from food and cover anything people will eat so that the flies can’t get to it.  This protects health and discourages the flies. But at night, when we don’t get water and the dishes stay in the sink  until they can be washed in the morning, the moscas (flies) get to them.

Staying clean and presentable is important in Nicaragua.  It’s kind of defining.  The floors of my house are washed (with soap) and rinsed at least once a day, sometimes more.  This includes the patio and porch and the walk up to the house.  The groundcover is kept close by machete wielded by my host dad.  He also cleans up dog poop—nothing dirty near the house. We have a modern family.  When he gets home from work in Mangua after his hour long motorcycle ride, he irons his clothes for the next day and then sometimes just goes to bed.  But he would not think of leaving the house in unpressed pants.  The same is true of the women in the house. The PC places a lot of emphasis on looking professional for this reason, although a polo shirt and clean jeans passes for professional.

If you google it, I bet you’ll find stories about the rains this past week.  There is concern for people in the rains.  I thought of flooding, but the real concern is more economic.  My family explains that much of the work in Nicaragua is “daily” work,  that is work for which you get paid if you do it.  Examples: farm work, street vendors (there are many of these because the job situation is so terrible—50% unemployment or underemployment e.g. street vending), the lady who comes to wash the clothes (can’t be washed if they can’t be put out to dry).  These folks face real immediated problems like no food because they are likely to spend for food what they earned during the day.  No work, no money.  Hence the rain hurts.

On a lighter note, I can report that I advanced in the mid-training evaluation of language ability, but still have a ways to go.  The next 4 weeks will be busy in the regard.  I am not discouraged.  I’ve learned a lot.  Also, I had an interview with my program director about where my permanent site will be.  I asked for the mountains to the north.  I also said I’d go anywhere.  There are no deal breakers for me.  I should know about that by the end of next week.  The good news is that he didn’t say, “We’ve been talking, Carol, and we’re sorry to say your Spanish isn’t good enough.”  Barring something extraordinary, I’m going someplace for 2 years.

Finally, we got to go to volcano Masaya yesterday.  It rained of course, but it was amazing to be at the rim looking in.  No red magma, but lots of sulpherous smoke.  And the best part-- I got to climb to the peak, not much of a hike, but after so much of the sedentary, I loved the slight burn in my thighs. Between the heat and the rain, it’s hard to stay active.  Having said that, I’m losing weight.  Why?  My host mom like fruits and vegetables, we have 3 squares a day ,modest portions, no snacks, no deserts.  Imagine if I could exercise more!

Conversations with My Family

I spent most of last week in Rivas, the nearest city to San Juan del Sur, the surf mecca on the Pacific coast.  I planned and taught 5 classes with a Nicaraguan counterpart and another volunteer. I was assigned to a school a half hour away from Rivas on the most deeply rutted road I can remember, past a side-of-the-road dump, stopped by oxen and horses who wonder what you’re doing in their way.  The school is a small one in a town the population of which is mostly indigenous.  I loved the students who had an earnestness when it comes to studying English which does them real credit considering everything.  They struggled to speak the language and were so openly pleased when they succeeded that you had to love them.  Rivas was a nice break from training.  We all managed to get to the beach for one afternoon.  What a pleasure to walk in the serious sun, but in the warmest water I’ve felt in Nicaragua.

I returned to pour on the Spanish study.  Next week we have evaluations of the language progress to date.  Although I think I’ve progressed, I’m not near where I need to be.  But yesterday I took a long break to talk to my host parents about their experiences during the revolution.  I’m going to write what they said with the warning that I may not have fully understood, but I understood enough to get the picture.  The revolution and the 10-plus years of armed conflict following the overthrow of Samosa is recent history here.

My host mom has lived in this pueblo all her life.  Her dad farmed on the side.  During the revolution, she says the American bombed Jinotepe, a city nearby.  I can’t find anything to confirm that in my reading on the history of Nicaragua and I may easily have misunderstood, but whatever happened to the residents of that city, refugees streamed south to this town and were taken in by the townspeople, sometimes 6  to a house and provided food.  Then, and later, there were food shortages, some of that caused by blockades, some by the disruption of agriculture.  My mom’s father was able to grow enough to feed his own family of ten. The food was not varied but they had enough. Her brother was required to serve in the army and was sent off to the wars in the mountains to the north.  She reports fearing knocks on the door because they could mean the announcement of his death.

My host dad told me that his eldest brother was a member of Samoza’s National Guard.  He says that after the revolution his brother was imprisoned for 3 years and that he and his mom travelled to Jinotepe and to Managua to visit the brother every week. He had another brother who went off to fight with the Sandanistas and returned safe from the fighting in the North. However, this brother has been affected by the war with something psychological that sounds like PTS.  He has periodic recurring bad times. My dad was drafted and served two years, but returned home unharmedPolitical feelings here are colored by the experiences of families during the revolution, maybe less than by theory.

  I asked about the feeling of my family and others in Nicaragua about Americans.  Reagan is their nemesis, but they like Americans. This reminds me of the Vietnamese. It’s amazing, the ability of people to distinguish between the actions of governments and those of individuals.

I am impatient with the rate of Spanish acquisition, But when I think of these two conversations yesterday, albeit with people who talk slowly for me, enunciate and pick their words, I am glad I’ve come as far as I have. I’m looking forward to more of these talks, another incentive to study and practice.

Conversations with My Family

Teaching in Nicaragua

Teaching in Nicaragua

I want to write something of the challenge of teaching in Nicaragua and also to report on my first teaching experience here. The background is this:  As I wrote before, this is a poor country.  The teachers are badly underpaid (they receive about $200.00 per month).  Although the government has made a commitment to Communicative English for secondary students,  the challenge remains of training its teachers to depart from the tradition in which they were raised, that is the copying of  English texts and  lists of English words and the learning of rules of English grammar.   We hope to put useful  conversational English, more “authentic” written and read English, into the high school classes.  Apparently it is true that some English teachers don’t speak any or much English.  To make matters worse, there are overcrowded classes and a general dirth of any teaching tools except the students’ pens and notebook, a whiteboard and colored markers.  No text books, no copies, no computer equipment, no electronic equipment of any kind.

Teaching in this context requires great resourcefulness and the Peace Corps is all about that.  It is also about sustainability. I wasn’t sure how that word applied to teaching English, but here’s the deal.  Teachers work with counterparts, essentially training them in the two years of service so that when the volunteer leaves, the expertise remains.  That’s sustainable.  A big part of this is creating materials, essentially out of nothing, to make up for the lack of books, workbooks and the like.  The essential tools of the PCV trade are markers, roles of wide cellophane tape and large sheets of paper.  Additionally PCVs recycle everything.  For instance, if I can find a picture of a family, I can use it to help teach the words for the family, to help teach numbers (count them), to discuss colors, clothes, prepositions (next to), moods (happy, sad), etc.  So pictures get laminated to pieces of discarded cardboard by covering them with cellophane tape and they’re good for a lot of classes.

  Because classes are large, sometimes teachers have the students write their names on name tags and then laminate them with the aforesaid tape. This an aid to learning names and the tape makes the tags durable and you can put tiny stickers on them as rewards for participation.  A friend of mine in the U.S. offered to laminate 50 pieces of paper for me to use in class, a very generous and helpful idea.  But I need 200 pieces.  And getting material from the US is not sustainable.  So the students make their own laminated sheets with the ubiquitous tape.  Instant slates.

So here’s something people could do to help the effort along.  Could you start saving pictures of anything you could imagine I might be able to use from papers and magazines or from food wrappers or anywhere else.  I can use them with tape, or I can trace them and color them.  Also if anyone runs across a coloring book with nice simple drawings I could trace, that would be great. Is there something like a Simpsons coloring book out there?  I hear the Simpsons are popular in Latin  America and I could use the figures for many lessons.

The materials we create are only part of the answer to the teaching challenge.  I taught my first class on the vocabulary for sports to a group of 8^th graders.   I got some good interest by bringing a ball into the classroom.  The kids aren’t used to any kind of real life object so it caused a sensation.  I got them to say the sports they liked and wrote the sports on the board in English.  I acted out the verbs like ”kick” and “hit”.  I got the kids on their feet to repeat the actions and words.  I had a follow up writing activity.  It wasn’t the best lesson in the world, but good enough.  I enjoyed it and so did the students.  They learned some vocab and I reminded myself what it felt like to teach.

 We’re about half way through pre-service training.  Next week I go with a training group to Rivas, a city to the south for some extended practice teaching, a week of it.  I get to live with a present PCV,  that is to crash on a mattress on the floor of the room he has in the house of a local family.  Later in the week there’s a fair where we learn about the sites that are open to receive volunteers.  We can make requests, no guarantees.  I’m not sure I’ll make one.  I might ask to be in the mountains. Still getting my own site is a long way off and there’s a lot of Spanish to learn in the meantime.