Whats up In May

So Sports Fans, I apologize that my posts are growing fewer and farther in between. The truth is that I’ve been super busy, a mix of work and pleasure. Many members of my community have mentioned to me, “Estaba perdido, Samuel” (which literally translates to “you were lost”, but means more along the lines of “you haven’t been around”), which only half true. The true part is that I have been out of the community affair amount for X-Rays, despedidas, and pleasure trips (read: not sex trips). The other half of the time I’be been running around my municipality working, or trapped in my house trying to type up one of the many reports I need to hand in before I’m allowed to officially leave Nicaragua, which is now only a month and a half away!

A month and a half away…throughout my entire service it never seemed like I would get to this point. And now that I’m here, I’m reminded of any age old Shepard Family Motto: Finish Strong. Now is not the time to get lazy, and coast through my work, in fact in means the opposite. There are still so many things that I want to do and accomplish, on a personal level and a work related level. And what’s more, now after two years, I really have a handle for how things work, what to expect, and how to get things done. Projects just keep presenting themselves in front of me, and end of service reports aside; I’m busier than I’ve ever been. And to top it off, I need to try and see all my friends as often as I can before we part ways for who knows how long (a sadder thought among many good ones).

So what have I been up to that past few weeks…work stuff first. I headed out to the eco-lodge in my municipality, Los Cardones, to work with the employees on financial education (AFE). AFE is a new PC Nicaragua initiative that deals with, you guessed it, further educating adults on how to manage their finances. So I spent two hour sessions with the employees discussing the importance of saving, the different type of family expenses, saving plans, the advantages of saving vs. buying on credit, and then individually tracking their own monthly incomes and expenses. While I’m sure the seminars were beneficial to them, I was equally impressed with what I learned and witnessed. First, it was interesting to plan out monthly expenses and salaries. Although the majority had guessed how much they actually make and spend, it was the first time they actually saw their yearly salary. Before the charla, the owner and I put together a spreadsheet of the actual monthly (and in effect yearly) salaries of the employees. Most eyes were popping out of their heads.

 

Now going into the charla, my only real expectation was that most Nicaraguans didn’t know why they should save, y por consiguiente, don’t save. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The first activity we did was (anonymously) write on sticky notes why its important to save, and I was flooded with great answers: for my children’s education, to improve the quality of life, repair my house, for retirement, and for unforeseen health problems among others. So re-checked my premises, and deviated from my original plan, doing the same sticky note dinamica, but with a different question: Why is it hard to save? Without getting into too much detail, because I could go into length about it, the two main problems that the average Nicaraguan faces are unforeseen costs/problems and no institution to help them save. The first problem is easy enough to understand: a family member gets sick or moves back into the home, kids need materials for school, cost of living goes up, etc. Or worst case scenario, the patriarch is a drunk, and spends a large portion of the monthly salary on booze, tobacco, and women… a sad reality of life down here that most families see in one way or another. But what’s more problematic is that there are no institutions available to the average rural Nicaraguan, neither physically or literally. Physically in the sense that, banks are (largely) only in the department capitals, which require up to a full day of travel to get there. Literally in the sense that, there is a literal mountain of paperwork that is required to open a bank account, and if you manage to fill all of that out correctly, you need a relatively large amount of money to open an account, and then transaction cost are too high to make it worth it in many cases. The truth is that large institutional banks don’t typically want small accounts, because it’s just as costly to maintain small accounts as large accounts. The drawbacks can outweigh the benefits, which helps to explain all the paperwork and barriers to open an account. Although is more thoroughly explained in the book “Poor Economics”, a read I highly recommend.

On other work related notes, I’ve been busy organizing the second Opportunity Fair of Villa el Carmen, which means weekly emails and phone calls to different Universities and Vocational Schools in and around Managua. College isn’t for every student, an idea I think is just as applicable to students in the states as students in Nicaragua, so this year I put a bigger effort in finding Vocational schools that would be willing to attend. And since come the end of the semester, the emprendedurismo teachers can no longer count on my support, I’ve arranged a three session charla, where all the professors and I will meet up to discuss the more complex topics of the second semester, build a network of trust between themselves, and discuss the best practices for each topic. Believe it or not, it was only the third or fourth time where we were all united under the same roof at the same time. Due to the isolation of each school from the others, and the lack of public transportation to some of the communities, its never easy to reunite everyone.

Now for the fun stuff. Spent a night up in Esteli to party with the business group that came a year after my arrival to see the city one more time and say some early farewells to friends from that group. In the process, I got to take a look at my first Nicaraguan pro sports game, which was a blast. It reminded me a lot of a college soccer game, and made me think that if I only could maintain better shape, I could probably compete! The next day I had my own soccer game, and scored for the first time in awhile. So surprised, adn excited, I jumped up, fist pumped, and yelled booyah. Embarrassing, I know, but I was excited. The following weekend I spent some time surfing with a close friend, who is leaving early to attend grad school. That goodbye really got to me for some reason; I sort of realized that this really is the end, and that there is a solid possibility that I’ll never see some of these folks again.

But the big daddy of trips was this past weekend, where myself and 5 friends traveled east, out to Bluefields on the Atlantic Coast for Palo de Mayo, the annual celebration of the newly arrived rain. Although, since it rains there almost 9 months of the year, I wouldn’t think this would be anything to celebrate. Also, to go back a step or two, the Atlantic side of Nicaragua is like a different world. If we take a trip back in time, sports fans, while the Pacific side and central region of the country was still under Spanish control, the Atlantic Coast remained an English colony for years. As was the custom back then to keep costs low and control global trade, the English brought slaves with them from Africa. This accounts for the large African-American population on the East coast, that speak both Spanish and English Creole, and have their own very unique culture. On top of that, that indigenous population that still exists, the Miskitos, also lives out on the coast too, adding to the cultural phenomenon that is Bluefields. Routinely, while I was walking down the street, I would turn hearing what I thought was English, only to realize it was English Creole (which is almost like a different language), only for the person being addressed to respond in Spanish. The volunteers out there typically walk away from there service speaking alright Spanish, and great Creole. In fact, because it’s so different out there, the coastal region is an autonomous region of Nicaragua that governs itself in certain ways.

Best Bus Ride Eve4!

No Roofs, Just a plastic tarp to hold on to as we're cruising down river

We thought what better time to experience the culture of the coast than attend Palo de Mayo. I could try to explain it in words, but I don’t think it would do it justice. So instead I leave you with some photos of the main celebration, which revolves around dancing…and man those girls can move!

¡What’s to Come!

INSIDEOUT Project

Opportunity Fair

World Map/Family Planning

Happy Mothers!

Mom I love you with all my Heart! And here´s the video to prove it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=591SIL8Tstk&feature=youtu.be

Hey there sports fans

Hey there sports fans, un rato de no verles. I need to apologize up front for not writing for so long, its been almost over a month, but what a month it has been. I feel like I’ve barely had time to come up for air I’ve been so busy, and for awhile too, I was trying to avoid English. Plus with so little time left down here in my official service, I feel like I need to take advantage of every moment possible.

Last time I wrote, I was going through some emotional goodbyes with the first two people from our group to leave. And as I mentioned last time, I thought it was going to take a long time to realize they were gone. Turns out I was wrong.

In the middle of this past April, we – the business and agriculture volunteers of group 56 – had what is called our Close of Service Conference, also known as COS. In this two day... we’ll call it a workshop, we go over all the procedures that we need to do to officially (and properly) end our service in Nicaragua, as well as go over what comes next. By saying “what comes next”, I mean discussing about how to leverage our Peace Corps experience into making yourself an ideal candidate in any job, and maybe more importantly how to put that experience into written form through resumes and cover letters, and later in verbal form through interviews. Although a lot of it seemed like common sense, I know that I also walked away from the workshop with a better sense of how to start preparing for life after Nicaragua. So on a professional side, it was much needed and helpful in organizing my affairs.

On a social side, it was also a very unique occasion. This was the first time since swearing in as volunteers on July 31^st, 2011 that we – all the 56 volunteers still here – had been together in the same room. I hadn’t seen some of the aggies desde we swore in, almost two years ago, let alone all of them at the same time. It seems as sort of a reward for sticking in out so long, COS took place in Granada, a colonial city of Nicaragua with a fun night life, good food, and comfortable accommodations. Hot Water! Air Condition! Bacon! Yes Please! It had been my first hot water shower probably since my folks were here in December. That holds true for bacon as well. Ahhhh. Sweet, delicious bacon. You can bet your ass that the first thing I eat back in the states will be the biggest, greasiest bacon cheeseburger I can get my hands on. So naturally, as a group, aggies and bizneros alike, we took advantage of our locations to go out at days end to catch up and dance the night away. Dancing, similar to hot water, A/C, and bacon, is typically not something you will find in a typical peace corps site, so you got to take advantage of the opportunity while you its there. More than anything though, it was just nice to be able to lazily relax around close friends, and just talk, and laugh, about whatever in English. The times we will see each other are rapidly dwindling, a sad fact. And because another two from our ranks are leaving early, in fact in the next week, that group will almost certainly never be reunited again. I plan on writing more about this phenomenon in the future.

I emphasized speaking in English, because up until COS, I had almost exclusively been trying to read, listen, and write in Spanish, because our COS Conference is the same time as our LPI – Language Proficiency Exam. The peace corps loves there acronyms in case you hadn’t noticed. This would be the last chance, and first desde swearing-in that I would be evaluated. Typically, I don’t put much importance in something like this; I don’t often feel like I need to be justified of my own competence. But with my language skill, it was different. Sure at this point I can get by, talk with anyone, and maneuver through any sort of situation that I confront. But there is huge difference between getting by, and mastering the language. The process of learning a language is different…and so long that it’s tough to gauge your own progress. Your improvement is gradual, and the daily frustration is always there. Maybe early on the frustration came from how to conjugate an irregular verb in the present tense, but now the frustration comes from figuring out, for example which preposition you need to use after a certain verb to make sure the sentence makes sentences, on top of correctly identifying the tense of the prior verb, and the adjectives that come with it. So getting by is alright, but it by no means you know the language. I wanted to know that my hard work, my daily frustration was not in vain. So that was one of the reasons that I hadn’t been writing, in preparation for that. And guess what sports fans…the hard work paid off. I scored much higher that I had expected, and left the office fist pumping and shadow boxing my way out of the training office!

And to keep making up excuses, something I usually scold my students for, I haven’t had a ton of internet access. That’s partly due to the lights going out every night for that past week – my prime internet time. But it also has to do with a project I was involved with, what is known as a tech exchange. I have a friend, an aggie, who is working with a women’s group on formalizing a business. Now my aggie friend, Ali, has no business experience, and the group had hit a wall with how to proceed forward. So she approached me, asking to come help out, and with particular gusto, I said yes. I was particularly excited, because despite numerous promises to go out to an aggie site, I had yet to do it.

In the eyes of the rest of the volunteers down here in Nicaragua, us business volunteers have it easy: we tend to live in bigger sites, which typically means ready available produce, markets or grocery stores, a bank, running water, electricity, and internet, whereas aggies tend live in smaller sites, km’s away from the closest highway or major city, in communities no bigger that 50 houses or a few hundred people. That was the peace corps experience I thought I was getting, so I relished the idea of actually living like that, if only for a weekend.

I was a little astonished upon arriving to her site, because I would never call it a town; rather a small community that happens to live along the same stretch of road, in the middle of no where about ten kilometers off the highway. We had hitched in, and hopped off the back of the pickup truck a little before getting to her site. We had an errand to do, buy the chicken we were going to eat that night. Seeing as where we were, I was skeptical where we could buy chicken. That is until we got to the patio of the nearby houses, and saw all the live chickens running around. You guys see where I’m going with this yet? We caught the chicken we wanted, tied up its feet (so as it couldn’t run away), and started the walk back home. Things really escalated, when we got back to the house, when my friend gave me a funny a look, and notions to our (still alive) chicken. Gulp. If we didn’t want to go hungry, someone had to kill that chicken. And being the new guy to the campo, that someone was me.

The odd thing about killing a pollo, is that most folks typically don’t use a knife and cut the head off on a chopping block. Instead, there’s the oddly satisfying style of grabbing it by the neck, and whipping it in a circle like motions to snap its neck. I had seen this done multiple times, and it seemed so easy, had yet to do it myself. I kept reassuring myself this was dinner, and without a second though, I grabbed the little guys throat, and started whipping it around. Turns out its not as easy at it looks, and I more than likely tortured this poor fellow. After five or six full turns, the neck was terribly damaged, but not broken. And like a parent disappointed in a young child for not fulfilling a seemingly basic task, my friend took the pollo from me, grabbed a machete, and put it out of its misery. My manliness was definitely knocked down a peg or two in that moment. 

Aside from that mishap, the rest of the trip was a success. We cooked with firewood (still a common practice in the majority of the country), “harvested” our produce from her garden, and I met the community. The workshop I presented (on the importance of costs, prices, and market studies) was surprisingly well received, and it seems like they learned from it, as Ali reassured me.

So that’s my past month in a nutshell. Still in the schools on a daily basis, but starting to wrap up that, and focus on other projects I’m interested in doing before finishing up my service. This week I’ll be giving some financial education classes to the employees of the eco-lodge in the municipality, I’be been planning the second annual Opportunity Fair, and am working on making a World Map at one of my rural schools, that would include mandatory participation in a Family Planning charla. So I’m staying busy until I finish up. My official last day is July 11^th, two months from Saturday! What a long, strange trip this has been, ehh?