Second Hand T Shirt of the Week

Not necessarily funny shirts but shirts that have reminded me of home. Teams I've played against in Sports.

1: Beachside Soccer Jersey

2: New London Basketball Pinney

3: Avon Old Farms Lacrosse Pinney

8.25 The Psychology of Sitting

“…people in the Western civilization no longer have time for each other, they have no time together, they do not share the experience of time. This explains why Westerners are incapable of understanding the psychology of sitting. In villages all over the world, sitting is an important social activity. Sitting is not a ‘waste of time’ nor is it a manifestation of laziness. Sitting is having time together, time to cultivate social relations.”

                        -Andreas Fugelsang

I have no idea who this guy, or what he’s famous for, but I came across this quote in one of the books the Peace Corps gave me, and it made me think a lot about my current situation. Currently, this has been the one aspect of the culture down here that I have struggled with. For those of you who no me well, I’m not one to sit around and let life pass me by. Whether it’s exploring a new place, trying a new food, or just running down the same beaten path for the 100^th time, I like to live to keep myself moving. For me, I’ve always considered sitting around as a waste of good day light, and essentially (for me) that’s synonymous with lazy.

So moving down here was a real change of pace, because as I quickly found out, there is a lot of emphasis on “sitting around”, and waiting for your neighbors to stop by and talk for a bit. Just today my host mother asked me, “Why do I exercise seemingly night and day? I had to try to explain to her that I physically get anxious and sluggish if I’m not constantly moving, and she just couldn’t understand that. Well she understood what I said literally, but had no way of relating to my condition. And that is because a successful day can be sitting around your house or on your porch, and having a handful of good conversations with your neighbors and community members. Weekends have proved to be the toughest time for me, because being new in town and not being able to leave, I don’t have anything scheduled. And exercise can only take up so much of the day. So I’ve been forced to embrace what I refer to as the sitting culture.

It does have its benefits is the first thing I’ll say. I feel like I’ve already very much become a part of my community because I plant myself outside my host mother’s ice cream shop day and night, reading the paper and saying hello to everyone that walks by. For that I’m very grateful. It’s also a great opportunity to practice my Spanish and talk my self up around the proverbial water cooler. But at the same time, my Spanish is still lacking so conversation is very simple, and I get super antsy. So you have to give and take.

What’s interesting is that it would be very tough to even try and apply just sitting around your porch in the states. It’s a shame, but almost never do people just pop in unannounced any more, or stroll by your apartment to so say hello or see if you there. Because like getting an actual letter in the mail, it’s always nice to be surprised and have a spontaneous conversation with someone you weren’t expecting. Maybe the decline of the sitting culture started with cell phones. No longer do you actually need to go to someone’s home to talk, you can skip that step, and save 10 – 15 minutes of your time. Real bummer. So next time your bored, instead of calling a friend, maybe just walk over to there place, take a seat, maybe crack open a beer, and embrace the sitting culture

The Place Where Buses Go to Die

 

So last week I gave you a small taste of what the bus system is like here, but now I want to elaborate a little bit more. In a word the bus system here is brutal, but I say that as a term of endearment. I’m trying to use brutal in the same sort of way as “sick”, a word that has transformed from its original use to now mean “awesome” or “bad ass”. Every bus is like a thumbprint, completely unique. There are a variety of different body types, each has it’s own special “custom” paint job, and their own personal set up one the inside. It’s not unusual to walk in and see enormous speakers and/or a TV jerry-rigged on to the walls and ceiling of the bus. But of course, they don’t work, that would make the bus too much fun. So from a distance they look vibrant, and fun, as though you should board one just because its there. And to continue on that note, the conductors really try and sell it to you as they drive by on the road. The only comparison I can think of, are the hotdog/peanut vendors at baseball games, slinging their goods all game. And as another volunteer pointed out, when you hear the conductor yelling, “Masatepe, Masatepe, Masatepe”, you kind of think to yourself, maybe I would like to go to Masatepe. 

So inevitably you board one, and things go from vibrant and fun to something…else. And when I say else, I mean crowded. Not crowded in the sense of commuting to work during peak hours, but worse. So packed that you really can’t even move, which means getting off is a constant struggle and needs to be premeditated. Because let’s face it, you’re climbing over people and struggling to get by. And there is always a vendor with a five gallon buck standing in the aisle, selling corn on the cob. I’m laughing now just thinking about it, because you would literally just never see that in the states. Corn on the cob for the man on the go. And between the intense heat and/or rain, things can get uncomfortable. Things aren’t always like this, but that’s what you tend to remember and expect. The best way to put it, is that it’s not the kind of cultural experience I would eagerly share with my parents, or anyone who is uncomfortable with their personal space being breached.

The only existing link is that every bus seems to be made by Blue Bird Corporation. Does this name ring any bells? It may seem familiar because Blue Bird, an American company, made seemingly every bus in the US in the last half century. Think, go back to your youth and try to remember seeing the Blue Bird logo as you stepped onto the bus, and what the bus looked like exactly. Because chances are that bus is still running, only not in the states anymore, but down here in Nicaragua. I don’t know how they manage to do it, but the Nica’s keep these buses running well beyond their shelf life, and power to them, as they’re all still going strong. I like to think though it’s a testament to American Ingenuity. And it always feels good to see “All-American” written amidst all the Spanish bummer stickers and sayings plastered all over the bus. 

This is one of the more plain buses, just remember that my camera is broken and I haven´t been able to take pictures for a while.

Surprisingly, the bus system here is also pretty extensive. You can get anywhere you need to via bus, including (practically) every small village. And you’d be surprised at the regularity of some buses. I emphasize some, because the kicker is that most are pretty irregular in their run times. They may leave at the same time, mas o menos, every day, but they don’t arrive on time (not that there is really a set schedule). And this is due to the fact that you can be anywhere on the side of the road and flag down a bus. It’s now like the states where you need to be at a designated stop at a designated time. Just anywhere will do. So it’s the most convenient thing in the world, as well as the most inconvenient thing in the world if you’re in a rush. But if worst comes to worst, just flag down a pickup truck, as most drivers are willing to give a ride in their flatbed, at the price of nothing. Great way to get around.

This past weekend in fact I used the bus to get to Massachapa, a local fishing village to get out of the Villa and explore a bit. It’s a really pretty and scenic town, and I’m a little jealous of the volunteer who is stationed there. It’s a nice size town, there are certain industries that I would enjoy working with as it’s on the water, and the best part about it: good surf. If I’m lucky I buy a board this week, and I’ll be shredding by next weekend. Just get pitted man, so pitted. I got that going for me, and I’m working my way into the football scene down here so life is good. Tune in next week for a new section, School in the Spotlight.

¨All aboard the FunTrain¨ 

                    Richmond Ultimate

Veek Vone in la Villa

So the first word that comes to mind when I think of life in la Villa is HOT. Caliente, pica, calor, there’s no way around it. I’ve just had to accept that almost all my the clothing that I brought is going to get destroyed, because daily, I sweat through everything I wear. I never really understood the concept of undershirts before coming to la Villa. Why wear two shirts? Won’t that make you twice as hot? But now I get it. And I still continued to be amazed at how much my shins sweat, or at least how much sweat collects down there. Depending on if I can catch, scratch that, find a mototaxi or not, I have to walk a couple kilometers back to the highway from three of my schools. From knees up you can’t really tell how much I’m sweating (thank you undershirt), but you look at my shins and its almost comical, like I just jumped into a puddle about knee deep. So are the problems of my life right now.

But the big news is that I’ve visited all of my schools, met the teachers, and observed all of my counterparts. Did I mention there are seven schools, with seven different counterparts? And only one is located in the city center, so I’m doing a lot of traveling each week. Traveling has its ups and downs. In one hand it keeps me busy, and I almost always end up having some unusual interaction on the bus. The down side is that bus’s, my primary mode of transportation, aren’t the most efficient, and rarely run on schedule. Oh they’ll come, but who knows if it will be on time. The bus system here is pretty wild, but I’ll save that for a later post, I digress. Now for whatever reason, I had very low expectations of my counterparts, and I kind of blame that as a result of my training. It is made seem that the teachers here can’t even tie their own shoe laces, let alone teach a class that is completely foreign to them (is that a pun? If so drink). So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the quality of teachers was overall very high. Some are seasoned pros of the class, with two years of experience under their belt, due to the prior all-star volunteers in Villa El Carmen, Nicole and Casey. Three are completely new to the class, but are solid teachers. They may not understand the concepts the first time around (that’s why I’m here) but they’re enthusiastic about learning the themes and teaching it to the class. So all in all I consider myself pretty lucky. I’ve heard (and seen) stories of uncooperative counterparts, aggressive principals, and uninterested delgados from the ministry of education.

So let me try and explain my role in all this. Peace Corps small business volunteers have been teaching this class for ten years now, initially with the consent of Ministry of Education. But within the last two years, MinEd, seeing the benefits of the course and tangible progress, made the course mandatory for every student in cuarto and quinto ano of every segundaria, the American equivalent of every junior and senior of high school. Every year has a block in their schedule referred to as O.T.V (Orientacion Technical y Vocacional) that is supposed to teach a life lesson, and now that is filled with the Emprendedurismo course, as opposed to say welding. (And I’m not joking about the welding class. One of my volunteer friends has to rotate each week between teaching enprendedurismo and welding, because the principal doesn’t like the course for whatever reason.) So since the class is so new, many teachers are not remotely qualifed to teach it, or don’t have the resources to properly teach it. MinEd is severely underfunded and doesn’t have the money to print an Anthology of the course for every teacher in every school. That’s where I step in. My primary goal, among others, is to train my seven counterpart how to effectively teach the endprendedurismo course over the next two years. Teach them so well, that if a new teacher were to replace them, they would be able to go a step further, and train that new teacher. The idea is sustainability. I could just go in and teach the class myself, but what good would that be once I left in two years. Each school would be back to where they started. The course is pretty brilliantly planned, and I’m surprised something like this isn’t offered in the states. I think it would be wildly popular. In a nut shell, in the beginning of the year, the class breaks into work groups of 3-8 people, and develop an idea for a product or service. Over the course of the year, the students learn different aspects of starting a new business, and for homework or class work, apply their new knowledge to their own product. They learn about Market Studies, SWOT analysis, Costs and Prices, and all that fancy business stuff that liberal arts majors look down upon and don’t understand. Stuff that only us business majors “up on the hill” would understand. That work is then saved and put together, to eventually form an elementary business plan to go along with what is hopefully a finished and manufactured product or service. So technically, after graduating high school, these kids would have the means to continue their business. What’s even more rad, is that at the end of the year is competition, that starts at the local level, continues to the regional level, and the best groups compete at a national level. So there’s tons of incentive for these students to be enthusiastic about the course.

And on a smaller side note, the second place winner of last year’s competition, the “Fab” Fabio, is from Villa El Carmen, and recently with the help of the previous volunteers, just received a large grant from USAID to continue his business. So I’m at ground zero of the creation of a small business, which is just where I wanted to be.

On a social note, Villa El Carmen is super tranquilo, but I’ve doing my best to keep busy. I started exercising again, which is a good thing. Didn’t do that for awhile, and let myself go for a bit. Just by running around town, I’ve gotten offers by previously strangers to join sports leagues, and at the least opportunities to talk with new people, and practice my espanol. I’m experimenting with teaching English tomorrow with a new friend of mine, we’ll see how that goes. I’m simultaneously nervous and excited for that one. And this past weekend I got the opportunity to visit Mercado Oriental, the largest market in Central America. Pretty out of control, I don’t know if I could’ve handled it without my new host mom (who tried to convince to buy designer jeans. Only the best for her new son) Who knows what the future holds, hopefully surfing, but I’m taking it a day at a time.

And a special congrats to Lucy and Zach, couldn’t be happier for you two!

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive, and not after he is dead”

-          Meyer Wolfshiem

Second Hand TShirt of the Week

It´s been awhile so I´ve got a couple. Once again, I unfortunately don´t have any pictures, as my camera is broken.

1: ´I´m Your Bad Habbit´ worn by a large obese women, that is hopefully no ones ´habbit´
2. Í´m not a gynecologist, but I´ll take a look¨ Worn by a creepy older man
3. ¨dear santa, I know that I have been bad...¨, worn by a middle age woman, Courtesy of Cassi in Campoapa

A Wild Weekend

Wow, what a weekend. So much has gone on these past couple of days that I don’t even know where to start. So I’ll try and start at the beginning. I apologize ahead of time for what will surely be a long post, but my access to the internet is now a bit more limited that I’m in my new site. And that there are no pictures, since the camera is still broken. So take a deep breath, and here it goes:

I’m now officially a full fledged Volunteer for the Peace Corps Nicaragua. I think I used the word bonefied, in my previous post, so that too. So what exactly does that mean? It means a couple of things, the first and foremost being that I have almost 100 times more freedom, and that the Peace Corps won’t be leading me by the hand anymore. If I hadn’t made that clear, that’s what it felt like during training. It wasn’t a bad thing necessarily, but after three months it’s nice to make most of my own decisions and create my own schedule. Outside of classes at my seven schools in site, I’m free to do what I please, be it joining sports leagues, start up youth groups, creating secondary projects, or just do nothing at all. Sometimes between all the kids and all the language, that’s all I want to do, sit and listen to American music. So prepare yourselves for all the adventures I will be relaying to you in the coming months! La Segunda Cosa Grande es que solamente puedo hablar en espanol. Minus some english teachers in the area, I am legitimately the only person who speaks English in my community. So the language is going to start coming much faster. Number three is that I no longer have my support group around me, the aspirantes that have transformed from strangers into strong and close friends. I almost took for granted the bonds we made during training, and we certainly took advantage of our last weekends together, especially after swearing in at Los Pinos. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything, even if it did come at the cost of a few steps back in my Spanish. I’m gonna miss those guys.

So the actually swearing in ceremony was very formal, so formal that I had to wear a tie even. Let’s hope the first and last time in two years. Am I right? Besides being at a very nice convention hall in Managua, the whole process had the feel of being way too long winded. It was in conjunction with the 50^th Anniversary of the Peace Corps (blame that one on the budget cut), and it seemed like everyone in attendance was getting some sort of award or recognition. I didn’t mind it too much, it was interesting to hear a lot of our guests talk, but I felt bad for my host mother (who deserves host mother of the year by the way) who had to sit through all of it. I will definitely miss my host family, but I’ll save that for another post in the future. What I did enjoy was hearing the Charmay of the US Embassy talk. The US Ambassador to Nicaragua retired on July 19^th, and there has been some problem in finding a replacement, so the second in command, the Charmay is what I believe he called himself, spoke and said something in particular that made an impression on me: “Eat, dance, and share with your community. That is the purest form of Democracy”. I took those words to heart, and certainly plan on doing all three. We had the privilege of meeting him at the embassy the day before, and he’s a real straight shooter, I look forward to future encounters with him.

But, that wasn’t the most interesting person I met this past weekend. Usually after swearing in, there’s a big dinner at the Country Directors house, full of American food and beer (what a foreign thought at this point), but that got cancelled. And can you guess why? I bet you can’t. It’s because Daniel Ortega, the democratically elected president/semi-dictator of the country invited us to the Presidential house to meet us in person. Now let me stress that this has never happened in the Peace Corps Nicaragua history before, we’re the first group he’s extended an invitation like this too. So we entered nervously, and not knowing what to expect, into the press room of the Presidential house and sat down in front of the cameras. As we found out later, the entire three hour event was shown live throughout the country, and multiple members of my new community were quick to point out the cameras loved me (probably because I was in the front row right in front of Ortega). When Ortega finally entered, casually an hour late, he went around the room and shook each one of our hands, and then individually interviewed each one of us, asking about where we’re from, what we studied, where we were going in Nica, and all sorts of other questions about Small Biz/Agriculture. Absolutely an incredible experience, especially since he doesn’t speak English. It was as much of a test of our Spanish as an interview. One thing I took from his responses is that he loves to speak on tangents, especially Anti American tangents. We “learned” all about why the US is to blame for why the intercontinental canal is in Panama rather than Guatemala, among other things. So all in all, it was definitely worth the time that we would have otherwise been spent partying. I’d say extremely worth it.

From then on, the weekend was one big celebration and sort of a last hurrah for all of the newly crowned Volunteers, in both Small Biz and Agriculture. Our eventual departure means we will spend less and less time together as a group, and there’s even a chance I’ll never see some of the Aggies again. It was the first time we’ve really had an opportunity to party together, and mix it up, so we made sure to have as much fun as possible. In fact, the whole weekend had the feel of a college spring break or beach week to me. Someone was “celebrating” at almost any hour of the day, and we were fortunate enough to have nice enough weather to lounge around the pool all day swimming, playing cards, playing guitar, and generally relaxing. And what would the weekend be without dancing. Those of you, who know me well, know that I love to dance, even if I’m a fool out on the dance floor. Three months ago, I would have told youI really dislike the Nica music, regaton, but now I’m a huge fan. Wwe all invaded an outdoor night club into the wee hours of the night. We danced almost to the point of exhaustion, and when we walked away, it looked like we had all just jumped in a pool. We may have looked extremely sloppy, but everyone walked out of there with smiles from ear to ear. I hope some pictures surface from that night.

So when I woke up Sunday morning, I was full of mixed emotion: excited to return to the Villa, but sad I was about to leave my close friends. And especially after this weekend, I felt much closer with everyone, and some more than others. But that’s the way life goes, and once again I just gotta adjust to the change. This week, I’m about to embark on a new life, and who knows where it will take me.

“The Future Belongs to those who Prepare for it”

            - Nica Minister of External Cooperation