Futbol Jersey Fridays

So as I briefly mentioned in one of my (own) posts, I've started to become heavily involved in the creation of  Men's Futbol League in Villa El Carmen. In fact, because of my willingness to help, I've actually been elected to the Board of Directors for the league. Who would've thought at my age I'd already be on a Board of Directors, that's going on the resume for sure. But it might also have something to do with that most people associate here associate Americans with money. And that's one thing I dont' have, or am willing to just hand out.

That being said, some of the communities that want to be involved are very poor, but uniforms are a very important to them. So while I'm currently in the process of reaching out to the American Youth Soccer Organization, I also wanted to pose the question to you all: Do you know anyone, or have any contacts that have on their hands a surplus of men's soccer jerseys? If you do, please let me know at sam.shepard12@gmail.com ,and I really appreciate any feedback I can get. And of course, any involvement with donations will be tax deductable, providing we go through the steps of becoming a Peace Corps Partner.

The Russians Return To Nicaragua: Mike´s POV

Atlanta looked comparatively plain out the window when the jet touched down on the tarmac.  It was a perfectly reasonable day, but I was viewing it against the unforgiving backdrop of a just-concluded week in, for all intents and purposes, paradise.  Instinctually, despite the unwelcomed symbolism of the action, I flipped on my blackberry for the first time in a week.  I left it alone for a few minutes to silently go berserk in my pocket as I gathered my backpack and duty free rum.  When it finished vibrating, I glanced at the painful numbers of unread work E-Mails.  As the first one I'd read, I selected the message with zero potential follow-up responsibilities: The Merriam Webster Word of the Day, January 21.  The word was "weltschmerz," pronounced VELT-shmairts, and it means a mental apathy caused by comparison of current state with an ideal state.  As I walked down the hallway towards customs, my skin unevenly dark and salty since the quick bucket shower I took in the morning, and my hair maintaining the consistency of pine straw, I thought about the blatant irony that went along with that Email showing up on the date of my return.

I'll quickly mention something in order to ensure I don't forget to: the trip was insanely fun.  Both Nicaragua and Sam proved to be natural hosts.  It was safe, but not too safe, relaxing but not too relaxed, drunk but not too drunk, organized but not too organized, and clothed, but still pretty damn naked at times.  Frank and Allison's contributions to Nic of Time have been great strides in the daunting task of textually capturing perhaps the greatest abroad experience I've had.  I'm going to forego adding to the storytelling and instead prod a little at the things that our trip to Nica have caused to putter around in my head ever since my reluctant return.

First off, my friend Sam Shepard.  All we've really heard about Sam’s progress and experiences related to his travels, local fluency, and the constitution of his stomach, have been from his perspective.  This makes it relatively difficult to understand just how he's changed over the course of his experience without his inherent modesty filtering the details.  Personally, that was probably the thing I was most anticipating finding out with my visit.  I talked to Sam on the phone a few hours before his initial departure from the states.  He spoke unsteady, quiet English in a manner that projects the distant image of him standing in a dark room.  I realized after hanging up that I had never come close to being in that kind of a position: standing at the edge of a cliff you spent weeks climbing to exhaustion, with basically no idea how the descent will be.  And then he jumped - into the plane, into Nica, into the Peace Corp.  I have no experience with how that kind of a leap shatters your routine and forces your life into perfect ambiguity.  The questions it raised for Sam must have been countless.  The only real question it raised for the guys and gals back home was "what's all this going to do to Sam?" 

As a 3rd party who spent a week with him, I’m taking the opportunity to provide an unfiltered evaluation of this, and I'm happy to report that he's clearly taken the experience thus far in unshakable strides, and is currently just KILLIN IT down there.

It was truly impressive.  Sam led us from one adventure to the next, issuing commands to local swindlers to get lost and getting us passed obviously corrupt law enforcement without paying a penny of the bribe they were expecting.

To capture what's changed, I went back a couple years to March and April of 2010, when Sam was probably in his campus apartment convincing the party to relocate a few doors over so that my apartment took the brunt force of it.  We had just about all of our best friends on and around that apartment block.  We were all in the same place: our comfort zones.  It's an apparently idealistic state where each day is a breeze except for the lingering knowledge that it was all going to end soon.  Only now do I realize that in the grand-scheme of things, that static comfort zone is one of the last places you want to spend very long periods of time.

It's become apparent to me during the course of my recent career and then solidified during my time in Nica, that the largest part of growing up into the person you're targeting, where nothing that falls in front of you can shake you, is expanding your comfort zone to include all of the potential obstacles.  And the only way to expand it is to leap out of the preconceived idealistic state into something that you really aren't sure how to handle right now.  But once you wrestle it to the turf and subdue it, you own it forever, and you say "what else you got?" to the world.

Let me reel this into orbit.  What all this has to do with Sam is that he is far and away the best illustration of the process I just described.  He left college and flew to a foreign country, landing in a rather undesirable city where the cement flood ditches beside the roads are filled with burning trash during the dry season.  Probably as far outside his comfort zone he'll ever get in one leap.  He landed there and stared total uncertainty in the face. 

And he won.

Now as he further conquers the current situation, he'll take the looming complacency that this kind of victory brings with it and build it into a fire under his ass, to promote that perpetual challenge that I believe the very most successful people in the world share.  Because now if the same thing falls on his desk two days in a row, he'll feel that complacency and look around from something more.

Sam's got all that now, and it shows me what kind of a level I need to get to.  And it's possible what I learned from the trip isn't entirely about career ambition or drive.  It may also be about developing a transparency in your life's work and hoping to hell that through that window is something meaningful.  Hoping it's eventually leading to something that's positively impacting the world, impacting individual distinct faces, and therefore impacting you as well.

A Return to Normalcy

Bye T-Bone

 As my old host mother put it, “Se Acabó la Buena Vida!” (The good life is over). This past month really has seemed more of a vacation than anything else. Between my friends visiting, the Super Bowl, and being able to surf a good bit, anyone monitoring my daily habits may have questioned if I was really a Peace Corps volunteer. And although it was fun, too much at some points, I get to a point where I just needed to be doing something productive. I need to get my hands dirty in work again. So I was more than ready to dive headfirst back into work with the start of school this past Monday, February 13^th.  Or at least I thought I was.

As I’m sure some of you can attest to, after not having done something for awhile, you tend to remember all the good things about it, and dwell on how you can improve on your past experience and successes/failures. You get excited, you start planning in your head just how everything is going to go once you’re behind the reigns again, which of course is flawlessly. After a semi-successful idea exchange with all of the business volunteers, plenty of small informal talks with a handful of friends, and plenty of time to plan on my own, this is exactly how I had felt walking into the classroom this week. And it was then that reality kicked back in, and I remembered just what the Nica classroom and educational system was like. The Nica classroom and education system lacks organization, and coming in as a lone outsider, it is very difficult to combat. So as I start off the school year again, on unsteady ground, the emphasis will be organization, at a both a classroom level, a teacher relationship level, as well as with the individual students. I have a difficult task ahead of me, but I’m fully refreshed, and up for the challenge!

You Hear Me? I’m Living Alone!

One of my move-in helpers

So as I so briefly mentioned in my last post, I finally am on my own again, after nine months of living with two different Nicaraguan families, in two different Nicaraguan towns. I am ready to move out onto my own, but I do leave with somewhat of a heavy heart. Given the option to live alone right off that bat, I may have taken that option. But now, being on the other side of nine months, I realized how much of a mistake that would have been. Coming into Nicaragua, in a lot of ways I was like a child. I didn’t know my left from right; I couldn’t speak the language, and didn’t know how to do anything. All the technology and necessities to which I had grown accustomed were no longer there and I was back to square one. I literally had to ask my host mother that first day in Niquinohomo how to flush the toilet, since there was no running water, or how to take a shower. As you may imagine, awkward discussions to partake in with a person you just met, and doesn’t speak your language. And just when I finally got my bearings, I graduated to the big leagues, transforming from aspirante to volunteer, and headed to a new home in Villa El Carmen. And although not as lost as I originally was, I still had a lot of growing up to do. The best part was, I still had my ‘mom’ to always point me in the right direction. Literally, if I was ever lost or needed directions, she was always right there to clearly and slowly explain the way. Remember, my Spanish still wasn’t great when I got to my new home. Since then, I’ve learned to cook like a nicaraguense, talk like a nicaraguense, and live the nica way of life. Oh, I am still and forever will be a gringo and chele, but with the wonderful help of my lovely second and third mothers, Dona Ivonne and Profe Lesbia, I’ve learned how to assimilate into my communities. I can never really thank them enough for the lessons they’ve both taught me, and I wouldn’t of traded the experiences and takeaways for anything. Had it not been for some unfortunate timing, I imagine I would have continued living with Lesbia for another month or two.

The first thought I had as I put down my last bag in my new home was, “What am I going to eat? And how am I going to cook it?” "Mom?" It had been so long since I prepared for myself my own meal that it took me surprisingly long to figure that out. (Lucky for me, I only moved two doors down, and am gifted food all the time, especially during those first days without my own stove) Once I jumped through that hoop, things started to brighten up. I started to recognize again all the benefits of living on your own, and memories came flooding back to me: I eat on my own schedule, I arrange things the way I want, the music an be played as loud as I want, I can cook for myself again… heck I can do whatever I want. And by that I mean I’m able to create again, take something basic, like my new house, and slowly make improvements and maintain it. I’ve always somewhat questioned why my own father painstakingly slaved over our lawn, house and property all of these years, and now I’m beginning to understand why. This is really the first time I’ve had my own place, and what I’m learning is that you start to identify with your house. Every change time you add or improve on your house, you’re demonstrating a little more of your own character, be it the new tomatoes you just planted (or had your kids plant), or the Indiana Jones movie poster you just put up on your wall. The house becomes a reflection of you, and you see it in a different light than other people, and see possibilities that other people may not think about. So it’s with an excited attitude that I move into my house. I have big dreams for building and improving on my new home, and already have busied myself in my backyard building a compost pile and wood burning grill, as charcoal isn’t easy to come by down here. And those are just the first of many projects I imagine, and tentatively on deck is a garden and gym – think boulders, cobblestones, and crudely made weights from cement. Because after all, I’m not working with much down here. But that just makes it all the more fun.  

The New Digs

"Screened" in Front Porch

Main Sala

Also the main sala - It's really just one big room under a roof, with a small part sectioned off for my room

Outdoor kitchen

Backyard Patio, complete with bbq pit, compost pile, lemon tree, chile plant, orange tree, and platanos, among other wildlife

Super Sunday, Super Week

How Bout them Giants Baby, 2012 Super Bowl champs!

After a two week vacation with some of my best friends from home, I didn’t think I was going to be leaving site anytime soon. After speaking too much English and spending more money than I probably should’ve, at least logically I should have cooled the jets. But the problem with thinking logically, is that it sometimes means you miss out on the more spontaneous, memorable events life has to offer. But when asked by a Peace Corps buddy if I was going to Leon to watch the game, and realizing that my long lost friend T-Bone (or should I now say King Kobra) was in that area, despite what past logic said, the answer seemed like a no-brainer: Of course I am.

What followed upon arriving in Leon was non-stop fun. A fun part of meeting up with the Kobra, is that he has no fun, so we had to do it the old fashion way: set up a time and a place, and hope that nothing bad happens to us en route. While that was a large part of my childhood, that was probably the last time I used this technique, so it was with a little apprehension that I got to the Plaza, and luckily found him there (which makes up for partially losing him later that night). After a quick stop at a cyber to check in on the progress of a Richmond tradition that went viral for the first time this year, we headed to the bar to meet up with what was suppose to a small gathering of about 7-8 people. So when we got there, it was surprising to see a larger number than that. It turns out that many small groups had independently made plans to watch the game at the same place in Leon, and Kobra and I stepped into a regular bacanal (nica slang for big party). It was an interesting setting to watch the game, because I was one of the only 3-4 people watching the game the entire time, while this fiesta was raging around me. So while trying to honor the G-Men and their dominance, I kept finding myself distracted, talking with friends I haven’t seen in months and trying to keep up with the pace of everyone else. The fun side effect of this was that the majority of the bar didn’t care who won the game, so everyone celebrated and cheered for the winners, the New York Football Giants. It had the feel of being in NYc in a giants bar which was pretty rad. And to make the celebration that much sweeter, the party never really stopped, it just kept going, continuing on late into the night. May or may have not lost Terrence by the end of the night, so it was comforting to wake up the next morning and see him walking around the hostel. Phewww.

            And already being in Leon, it didn’t take a whole lot of persuasion by Terrence to head out to Poneloya the next day to surf and enjoy some day time beers. Now I thought the day was fun, but that night we were graced with a particularly bright full moon, and a rising tide. So we did what any two guys in their early 20’s would do: grab a litro or two, our surfboards, and head out past the breakers to shoot the breeze, and of course, grab a wae or two on the way in back to sure. What a unique experience that was for sure, seeing the wae materialize only ten feet away, scrambling to catch it, and (with my minor luck) bombing down it into relative darkness.

But what may be possibly more exiting than all of this spontaneous fun, is that as of today, well tonight really, I officially moved into my own place down here in Nicaland. After nine months of living with two different host families and being babied around the house (I almost never had to cook for myself), I will become a real person again, living on his own. And for the first time in my life, I am the proud owner of my own house. Granted it’s rented, but since starting college, I’ve lived in a serious of low level apartments, so this is big baby! Got my own front porch, closed in backyard/garden, right on the main street, and the possibilities are endless. Plus as I just found I somehow have internet access. Booyah. More to come on the house, when I’m fully settled it!

These last couple weeks of school vacation sure made up for the lack of activity I had during the beginning of the break, that’s for sure.