At this point in my service all my fellow aggies from my
group are in the process of finishing up projects (or are just killing time
since they’ve already finished their work in their sites) and are planning for
their trip back home to the States. The official
leave date for my group is the end of July, but some are leaving as early as
the first week in June, depending on their grad school start date or a new job
that’s waiting for them. There are a few
volunteers hoping to stay in Nicaragua and find jobs with local NGO’s, but I’m
officially the only AG volunteer from my group that’s staying on as a volunteer
for a third year. So what am I feeling
right now? A little bit of loneliness that
I’m not leaving with the group I arrived with.
A longing to be going home to all the things I miss about home. An eagerness to start looking for a career
back in the States. Restlessness with
the difficulties of the Nicaraguan culture.
But also motivation to have a productive and successful third year. When I was preparing to leave for Peace Corps
service, two years seemed like a long time to be away from home. There’s the nervousness of having to leave
the home and the culture you’re accustomed to and be immersed in a new language
surrounded by new people. But once my
service started and my Spanish improved a bit, I began to realize how tedious
and difficult it can be to get projects started and keep them going
successfully in a two year period. Now,
after 2 years of service and finally achieving an advanced Spanish speaking
level (yeah!), I still have such a long list of projects I’d like work on. These past two years have flown by, and so trying
to get projects done during this next year will go by even faster. But it will help to give me more time to
research jobs that I’d like to apply for while I’m still here.
So, an update on what I’m currently working on: The school
donation project from Fillmore Elementary school in Lompoc is still going. I finally got someone from my site with a
truck to help me haul the 20 pre-school desks from the carpenter’s house in the
next town over to the primary school in my site. He’s currently building two teacher’s desks
that were bought with the donation money that I hope to have at the school
within the next few weeks. The chalkboard in the pre-school classroom
was installed and recently painted this past weekend. And soon I’ll be organizing the oldest
students to help me paint the world map mural at the school with paint bought with
the donation money. I plan to also paint
a map of Nicaragua later on with the extra paint from the world map.
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| The new pre-school desks |
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| Painting a new chalkboard in the pre-school classroom |
Of the 6 women’s baking groups I originally formed, 3 are
still organized and regularly show up to the classes I give. Recent recipes have included focaccia and
ciabatta bread, bread rolls, chocolate chip cookies, and pineapple cake. The other 3 groups have kind of fallen apart
due to lack of money or just lack of organization to keep showing up on the
dates we set. But now that the rain has
started there will be more money coming in with the crop harvests so I hope to
start up again with all of the groups in the coming months.
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| One of my women's baking classes, making pizza |
I’ve started a girl’s youth club, which they’ve named “Club
Las Estrellas”, or The Stars Club, and have given two charlas so far. Some meetings I give an official life skills
talk (health topics, making good decisions, communication skills, etc.), and
other meetings we just do fun activities like dance or games. I’m planning on inviting “specialists” to
some of the meetings to make them more official, like nurses from the local
health center to talk about birth control methods, and also other Peace Corps
volunteers to help me facilitate certain topics. So far the 8 or so girls that have
participated have seemed to enjoy the discussions and willingly participate,
and I’m hoping to attract more attendance in the coming meetings to build
confidence and education in the community.
An old project I’m trying to get going again is the primary
school garden. The 5th and 6th
graders have a class called Orientación Técnica y Vocacional (OTV), which means
Technical and Vocational Guidance. It
focuses on agricultural activities like school gardens and tree nurseries, so
I’m using that class period to organize the school garden with the teacher and
students. If you remember my blogs from
the previous years, I haven´t had much success motivating the students to
maintain the work in the garden, and we haven´t had many vegetables come of
it. This time, through the OTV class,
I´m trying a new strategy of having the 5th and 6th
graders compete against each other for the best half of the garden. The winning grade that works the hardest and
hopefully has the best harvest will of course win a prize (of which I haven’t
decided yet) and that will hopefully motivate them to keep up the work and
actually take an interest in getting a good final result.
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| The 5th and 6th graders in starting their new garden |
Something fun and totally un-work related I did recently was
go fishing! I went with Paul, my fellow Pantasma volunteer, and one of my Nica
friends from my site, Nely. She knows a
guy whose cousin has a row boat, so we took it for a little spin around the
lake. Lake Apanas is about a half hour’s bus ride
from my site, and so three of us decided to try our luck at fishing the other
weekend. Nicaraguans don’t use fancy fishing
poles. They use nets or a simple flat
piece of wood to wind the fishing line around to catch fish. We didn’t have any bait, and figured we could
just find worms along the lake side.
When that failed, we were given partially cooked corn to stick onto our
hooks, which was a total joke, but it was all we had. It was also highly comical because the boat
had multiple leaks, so water was slowing trickling into the bottom of the boat
and we had to use a plastic bowl to occasionally scoop it out. Nely can swim but had never been on a boat in
a lake before so she was nervous and kept a close eye on the water level that
was seemingly threatening to sink us.
Paul very gentlemanly did all the rowing while us girls sang songs and
changed the lyrics to fit our current fishing adventure situation, like “pasame
la pana, quiero botar el agua” (pass me the bowl, I want to toss out the water)
or “quiero sacar pescado, para cenar delicioso“ (I want to catch some fish to
have a delicious dinner) set to the tune of “Preparame la Cena” by Calle 13 if
you know the song. It was funny and a fun
day, which ended with a huge rain storm as we were paddling back to shore. Needless to say we didn’t catch any fish, so
on the way home I quickly jumped off the bus at a local venta and bought some
fish to take home and fry up for dinner.
Although it was delicious, it would have been much more rewarding to
have caught it ourselves. Maybe next
time.
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| Fishing with Paul and Nely, bucketing water out of the boat |
