HIV talk and Turkey-day plans

The end of this year has proven to be very busy for me all of a sudden.  I finally have the funds for the oven project so I’ve been scrambling around trying to have meetings with all the families to coordinate buying the materials and transporting them.  So far I've bought and transported half the bricks to 5 houses and am looking for more bricks to complete the rest.  The families with bricks are now in charge of building the table that the oven will be built on, so I've been visiting their houses to make sure they’re measuring it right and using the right materials for it.  I’m still waiting on the 55 gallon metal barrels.  The guy who’s transporting them for me isn't returning my calls and I don’t know when he’s going to bring them.  Communication is non-existent here sometimes.  My goal is to get at least a few ovens finished before mid-December, when I go home for Christmas.  I’d love to give some families the opportunity to have an oven for Christmas baking!

Me giving a community HIV class

This last Friday I held an HIV charla (educational meeting) for my community.  After attending the HIV workshop in Esteli last month with 4 of my community members, I decided to plan a meeting for my own community to spread the knowledge.  It was the first health charla I've done in my site.  Only about 20 people showed up (even though I officially invited around 30 houses), but I’m glad they even showed up at all.  They were all people I know, and most of them were actually the women from the current oven project with some of their kids.  I invited two other health volunteers to come help me, and I talked with a doctor from the ministry of health (MINSA) about coming to give his viewpoint on HIV in Pantasma. Unfortunately the meeting started about an hour late like they always do, seeing as no one showed up until then, and the doctor had to leave for another meeting so he left early.  He had brought a lab tech with him and was going to offer the HIV rapid test after the charla, which would have been great because people could have gotten their results that day instead of having to go the health center.  The charla went well over all though.  I was pleased with the people that did show up, and disappointed that some people I know well didn't show up even though they lived only a few houses away.  The next day a neighbor boy showed up at my house who never has before, and told me that some other people were interested in the topic of HIV and wanted to know when I’d be doing another charla.  So at least the word’s getting out there and creating interest in the community.  The next health activity I’m planning is a health fair for the community to be held at the school on December 2^nd.  I want to have various booths of info including HIV/AIDS, STI’s, dental care, nutrition, basic hygiene and hand washing, and maybe some pregnancy and baby care info.  Two other health volunteers have told me they could come help me, and I plan to ask the education department of MINSA if they can provide support as well. 

Doing a condom demonstration on a wooden dildo with a health volunteer

As for Thanksgiving this year, I've been invited to have dinner with a former Peace Corps volunteer at the hotel she owns in Granada.  She's invited 3 current volunteers to stay the night at her hotel and have Thanksgiving dinner and then breakfast the next morning.  I just have to pay to get myself there.  Not too shabby!  I'm really looking forward to it.  I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your families back in the States!  

~Sarah~

Peace Corps Cookbook Contribution

A returned volunteer who was making a cookbook from all the Peace Corps countries came upon my blog a few months ago and asked if I would be willing to contribute a Nicaraguan dish.  So I did, and here it is (look for Nacatamales):

 peacecorpscooking.wordpress.com

Thriller and Cow Butchering

So sad for me that I don’t get to celebrate Halloween here.  Nicaraguans are familiar with the American holiday, and here they refer to it as “Noche de las Brujas”, or Witches’ Night, but it isn’t celebrated.  In fact, some families condone it and think of it as relating to the witchcraft and the devil (which many people in the states also believe I guess).  I’ve heard stories of volunteers attempting to explain and share the celebration with their Nica host families or communities and the community in turn having a prayer meeting to try and “save” the volunteer from the satanic display.  I don’t bash the culture or religious practices of Nicaraguans, but thanks to my own American cultural experience, I’m programmed to love celebrating Halloween and am totally missing out on the autumn feeling  of changing leaves, gusty winds, and the promise of pumpkins, costumes, and Halloween TV specials.  In an effort to alleviate the lack of fall here, I started teaching Michael Jackson’s Thriller in my dance class.  I downloaded the video and showed it to the girls in my class, and then I taught them the first section of the dance exactly from the video.  It’s been really fun for me, but I don’t feel like I’ve successfully expressed how iconic this dance is in America to them.  They definitely know the song, as they know most of Michael Jackson’s popular songs.  But they hadn’t ever seen the video before and can’t truly know the level of popularity and following it has achieved in the States.  So I tried to share a little of the October-Halloweeny feeling I love so much from back home.  I think it’s also been a nice break for them from Bellydance (however I do plan to revisit the style in the future).

Last week I helped out harvesting malanga, which is related to the taro root.  I had never tasted malanga until moving to Nicaragua, and I love it.  It grows to the size of a large egg-shaped grapefruit, is the tuber part of a long-stemmed plant with large lily pad-like leaves, and when cooked, is the consistency of a potato, but sweet in taste.  It’s white in color with strips of purple mixed in, and is a popular fried chip snack sold on buses.  I’ve most frequently had it served to me in a soup, and I’m addicted.  One of my neighbors has acres of malanga planted and when I heard he was harvesting it I asked if I could tag along to help.  I was the only woman in a field of about 15 men who were hired workers/family members to get the harvest started.  It involved 3 or 4 men yanking the large plants out of the ground and piling them in stacks, while the rest of us moved from pile to pile, cutting off the leaves from the top of the root bulb with a small machete.  The work wasn’t hard, but after a few hours holding 3 to 4 lb root bulbs in your left hand, cutting off the leaves with your right, your left hand and wrist starts to get pretty sore.  Plus it was really hot and sunny that day, and I had (stupidly) only worn my baseball hat, not my dorky bucket hat that would have shaded the sides of my face as well as the back of my neck.  And the sunscreen I so carefully applied earlier in the morning was pretty much consistently dripping off my face with my sweat like a river, even as I reapplied it like a good white girl.  Once my water ran out at noon, I called it quits and thanked them for letting me help out and learn.  I told him that as my payment (since we can’t accept wages from our community since we get paid from Peace Corps) he could give me a malanga to take home.  He was still confused as to why I couldn’t accept being paid for my work and probably thought I was crazy to want to show up and do the work just to learn and get the experience.  Actually, he was probably perfectly okay with the fact that my half day’s work only cost him one malanga.  I made a vegetable soup with the malanga that night and it was delicious. 

Harvesting malanga

Another first for me this past week was watching the butchering of a cow.  One of my neighbors buys and butchers a cow about once to twice a month, depending on money at the time, and it gets announced on the local Pantasma radio the night before to alert the neighborhood that they can get beef the next morning.  I’ve always wanted to watch the process and see how it compares to what I was taught in my college butchering classes, but he always starts at 3am so the meat is ready to start selling at 5am when community members start to show up at his porch.  Honestly, that’s just too early for me to get up to go watch the bloody butchering of a cow, so I’ve never gone to watch.  However, the other day it just so happened that in transport in the back of a small pick-up truck, the cow died (it must have had a heart attack or died of stress) en route, so when it got to the house they started butchering it right away, and I just happened to be at their house making pizzas for his wife’s birthday.  So I got to watch the whole thing in broad daylight.

I must say, it’s definitely not the sanitary butchering process we see in the States, which is no surprise considering the hog and chicken butchering I’ve witnessed here already.  The cow is placed on its back on a cement slab and they slice back the hide, laying it outstretched on the cement on either side of the carcass, which is the only thing between it and the ground during the whole butchering process.  It’s all done with bare hands, no aprons or any protective clothing to keep the carcass from being contaminated, and the kids hang out close by hoping to help or wanting to touch things, and the dogs and chickens stalk around the carcass hoping for a tidbit to fly off to eat.  The process goes by pretty quickly; within a half hour the full sized cow is cut down to only the head lying on the hide on the ground.  All the parts are hung on hooks from a wooden beam over the front porch, and the requested pounds of meat are weighed in a hanging scale that’s apparently not cleaned beforehand.  As the meat is being sold, the money is exchanged in the same bloody hands that cut and weigh the meat. 

The kids like to help too

Seeing how unsanitary the butchering process is here is definitely unsettling and makes me wonder if people might be healthier if the sanitation and reduction of contamination in the process is improved.  Another part of me thinks that this is the way people have been butchering and selling their meat for generations, and why would they want to change it if there’s no evidence that proves it’s unsanitary when no one gets sick from eating it.  I’ve eaten many meals in this community that have meat from animals that were butchered in the exactly the same way for decades, and I have little complaints.  So in the end, I bought my first pound of beef ever since living here in Wale to cook for myself at home, and it made a pretty tasty beef stew that lasted me three meals.  I figure if the meat is properly stored in a cold fridge overnight and cooked for a long time, all the bacteria should be dead by the time I eat it, right? 

If I don’t post again beforehand, I hope everyone has a great Halloween!  This weekend I’ll be attending a gala that the business sector holds every year to fundraise for their youth entrepreneur competition.  It’s a fancy dress-up type get together with dinner and silent auctions and performances, so I hope it’s fun and that I can find a decent pretty dress to don for the event.  Not often do we Ag volunteers get the chance to dress up and look presentable, so I’ve gotta get it together! 

Housing addition has begun

Wow, is it October already?!  This year has seemingly flow by for me.  I only have 9 months left in my service.  I’m currently still working on getting 10 more ovens built in my community.  The funds have been held up for a while and I’m patiently waiting for the day when my bank account rapidly increases in size.  It was hard choosing the 10 families out of the 25 that were interested to receive the funds for their oven.  I went around and interviewed each family independently to get a better idea of the ones who would maybe benefit more from an oven than the rest.  For example, a family of 8, in my opinion, is more deserving than a family of just 2, considering the mouths fed.  If two neighbors who are good friends both want an oven at their house, I’m going to choose only one of them to receive the funding and they can share the oven with their neighbor.  If a family already has a little store or already makes food products to sell (bread, tamales dulces, guirilas) then they have precedent over a family that doesn’t want an oven to bake and sell food since they will be directly using the oven to improve their income and their business.  There are only a small handful of families I’ve built or will build ovens for that actually want to use it for their business, so most of my reasoning for choosing the recipients was based on family size and their apparent genuine interest in the project as a whole.  It was hard telling people no, but I finally whittled it down to 10 families.  The next problem to deal with (aside from waiting for the money to come in) is finding bricks.  In the winter my community stops making bricks because it’s harder to bake them in the rain, so I might have to wait until summer comes along (January) to actually find bricks.  Hopefully there’s another way.  I’d love to get all of them done before Christmas. 

Unfortunately for me, the construction on the spare room in the backyard at my house has begun.  The worker who put in my floor and doors when I moved in has finally finished this other project he was working on so now he’s available to start the extra room that I’m planned to move into.  So now every morning at about 6:30am a couple of workers show up at my house and start pounding away on their work, nailing boards, mixing cement and cinder blocks, and cutting rebar.  It’s not the noise so much that bothers me, it’s the fact that they’re working directly outside my door each day, so I get no privacy to just sit and read a book or cook food without their eyes bearing down on my back.  The other day after they finished and left, I went out with my measuring tape to make sure the dimensions are what the owner told me they would be, which was 4 meters by 3 meters, plus an attached bathroom.  Well it turned out to be a little narrower than 3 meters, which makes it that much harder to fit my furniture inside the space that’s about half the size of the room I’m currently in.  I figure it’s just another one of those inconveniences in my Peace Corps experience that I’ll have to accustom myself to, and it’s of course not the worst it could be.  If they in fact get the work done in time and I end up having to move to this other room, then it will only be for about 6 months of the remainder of my service, and I’m pretty sure I can deal with that just fine. 

The additional room construction progress

Due to the construction of this new room my Bellydance classes have come to a halt.  The space I was using to give classes in the front part of my house is now full of bags of cement, rebar, and 2x4’s.  Plus I’ve been out of site the past few weekends and couldn't give class.  So now I’m thinking I’ll start teaching the classes at the school, since it’s pretty much always available on weekends and has much more space than my little house.  Plus, that may attract more students since the school’s a more centralized location.  I really don’t want to let these dance classes die out because the girls are really enjoying them and it’s something good for me too.  Considering I’m not doing a ton of work these days, I really want to hang on to something good that’s fun for me and also benefits the community. 

Well it looks like I might finally be involving my community in HIV/AIDS issues.  There’s this workshop at the end of the month being presented by the Healthy Lifestyles sector focusing on educating about HIV/AIDS specifically with coffee producers who hire migrant workers during the coffee picking season.  I hadn’t asked around in my community because everyone who has coffee farms here is mostly a family run business that hires small groups of friends and neighbors to pick coffee each year.  Well, I got a couple of texts from Health volunteer friends asking me why I hadn’t applied for the workshop, and I told them that my community was too small of a production for what it seemed like they were looking for.  It turns out that not many people have applied to go, and almost no aggies, so yesterday I made a bold move and took advantage of the fact the the local Empresa (co-op) in my site was having it’s monthly meeting.  I attended the last part of the meeting and then asked to make an announcement to the group, explaining the workshop and how I’d like to go and bring interested members of my community with me to attend.  I felt really nervous getting up in front of this group of about 30 people, since usually the topic of HIV/AIDS makes people uncomfortable (because they don’t know much about it!), but my job as a volunteer is to teach and facilitate, and I have yet to do anything regarding this health topic in my community.  So I got up and announced the workshop and told them if they were interested they could see me after the meeting (I knew if I asked to see a show of hands of who was interested that no one would make a move in front of the whole group).  Well, I waited quite a bit for the meeting end (turns out they weren’t done yet), but during the waiting I had 3 men get up and come outside to talk to me about it!  One was a man I know well, and he told me he was really interested in learning about it, but that he couldn’t read, and if that would be a problem. I was super happy that he made a point to get up and talk to me because many people are super shy or embarrassed that they can’t read, so that was a good moment for me.  I told him that there may be other people there as well that couldn’t read, and that I’d be at the workshop with him to help him if he needed it.  Plus, he’s still going to be able to listen and learn a lot, which is the most important thing.  In total I had 5 people tell me they wanted to go, which was 5 more than I thought.  Now the only problem is figuring out if I’m allowed to bring 5 with me.  That’s actually why I’m at a ciber today, to send in the application for the workshop, and ask if I can bring that many people.  I sure hope so, cause I don’t like telling people no when they want to learn!

More updates later. . .

~Sarah~

Independence Day Celebrations and Dance Performance

This past Friday morning, on September 14^th, at 4:30 in the morning, I was woken up by the loud rhythmic pounding of drums driving up and down the highway in front of my house.  I was confused: Were they the marching band from the high school traveling to Jinotega city for a competition? Why were they drumming so early in the morning?  Was is the primary school in Wale and did they seriously have to start practicing that early in the morning before the parade that day? That was a silly question, because I knew well that people here regularly get up at 4 and 4:30 in the morning to start their day.  

September 14 and 15^th are national holidays in Nicaragua, the 14^th celebrating the anniversary of the battle of San Jacinto, and the 15^th celebrating the independence of Central America.  Each year all the local school bands get together and battle it out in Las Praderas, the biggest town and the municipal seat in Pantasma.  On the 14^th all the schools celebrated in their own communities, and this year is the first year a band has been formed at the primary school in Wale 1, where I live, so it was exciting to have the newly formed band march up and down the street through the community.  They’ve been practicing practically every day after school for the past few months preparing for the Independence Day celebrations, rehearsing all the band’s various rhythm patterns, the dance team’s dance choreography, and the group called “los guirros”, who play this metal raspy instrument in time with the drumming of the bands.  The uniforms were sewn, the hair was gelled, the make-up was applied, the tights were put on, and the band marched up and down the street throughout Wale 1 in the hot sun with sweat dripping down every forehead. 

Wale 1 marching band parade on Sept. 14th

The Wale 1 marching band and dancers

After the parade through the street, everyone gathered at the school for “el acto”, or the presentation of the band and various speeches and dances prepared by teachers and students to celebrate the anniversary.  Earlier during the week some of the girls who come to my dance class asked me to choreograph something for them to perform, so I put together a very basic Bellydance routine and we practiced it almost every night that week at my house.  There were 4 of them who participated, and they were all already part of the band somehow so they would already be wearing their uniforms.  I simply gave them some scarves to tie around their hips and put some flowers in their hair to create a more Bellydance friendly look.  Oh, and I had them tuck their shirts up so their midriffs were exposed too.  They were so cute! 

Of course just as the parade made its way to the school, the power went out so the computer that was set up with all the dance songs couldn’t play any of the music through the big amplifier that was brought.  Luckily I came prepared with my little iPod speakers and so the girls were able to perform the Bellydance routine for everyone, even though the speakers were a little too quiet for the size of the crowd.  I spoke briefly while they were taking their positions, telling the audience that this dance style came from the Middle East, and was called “Bellydance”, or in Spanish “danza de vientre”, and that it was something new to enjoy.  The girls performed the dance with smiles and poise while I proudly watched and took video and photos of their first Bellydance performance, of the first Bellydance performance in all of Pantasma, probably.  It was great!  They didn’t miss a single step, even after messing up several times during frustrating rehearsals at my house the previous week.

My little Bellydancers!

After they finished I hooted and hollered, causing everyone to awkwardly stare at me before realizing it was time for them to applaud the dancers.  Here people don’t really have the applaud etiquette that Americans have, and so sometimes the clapping is super delayed and doesn’t come until the dancers are actually leaving the stage.  It’s like they don’t recognize that when the music ends and the dancers stop that the dance has actually ended, and they need the prompt of the dancers actually walking away from the stage to start clapping for them.  So usually when I’m in large group situations and someone has just performed, I jump into applause at the appropriate time after a performance and that usually catches on quickly with the rest of the crowd.  But during the girls’ dance I had my hands full with my camera so I couldn’t applaud them right away, so I hooted and hollered until I could put my camera down to free up my hands, and that totally caught the audience off guard and they all turned their heads in surprise at this sudden uprising from the local gringa.  I didn’t care and wasn’t embarrassed or anything, I’m used to people reacting funny to me in crowd situations, and I was just so proud of the girls and their flawless dance performance that I had to shout out something!  It was a good moment, for them and for me. 

The happy dancers and teacher after a great show

I’m hoping that the impromptu dance performance during the 14^th celebration at the school will motivate the other girls in my dance class to perform someday.  I’m continuing to teach Bellydance every Saturday in the afternoon, and hope that it turns into something more.  Eventually I’d like to switch to hip hop or salsa or something a little more mainstream to attract more community members.  Maybe Thriller for Halloween?  We’ll just have to wait and see!

Oven workshop and Dance classes

August 17, 2012

The ovens/stoves workshop in Chinandega went well.  I hadn’t been previously trained on the theory of how that particular design of stove worked and what the actual studies were that proved that they aided the environment and the health of the family.   A doctor came to give a presentation about the effects of smoke on the health of the family and the types of illnesses caused due to over exposure (bronchitis, asthma) and a Peace Corps staff member from the environment sector did a section on the effects of deforestation in Nicaragua due to cutting firewood for cooking.  The use of these improved cook stoves decreases the use of firewood in the house by 70%.  So I was able to learn some things during the workshop as well as teach how to make an oven.  I had two volunteers and a handful of their Nicaraguan counterparts help me make the oven.  There were some issues with the table that was built for it; the mud used didn’t dry enough and due to the overly large size of the table the weight of the oven started to cave the table in.  Half way through the building process we had to wrap the outside of the table with chicken wire in an attempt to keep it together.  So at the end of the afternoon we decided not to put the roof on just yet in hopes that it would dry more overnight.  The next morning we came back and put the roof on, but it was visibly obvious that the oven itself was settling and expanding due to the soft table, so I’m afraid it will fall apart over time and will have to be redone.  There are some volunteers that live in the area that will help keep an eye on it and said they would re-build it if necessary in the future.  It sucks thinking that whole day’s work might have to be redone, but at least the people in the workshop were trained how to build an oven.

Mixing the mud for the oven workshop

 

The oven workshop (you can barely see the mouth of the oven in the background)

This past week I helped my friend Alicia build an oven in her site for a women’s group that want to use it for income generation.  It started raining during the building process and there was no roof built yet for the oven so we had to scramble to find a plastic cover to keep it from melting away during the rainstorm.  Luckily the mud we used was almost pure clay so it stayed nice and glued together as we were building it. 

Me and Alicia with our finished oven

Over the weekend some volunteers had put together an Opportunity Fair for 5^th year high school students (here they go to 5 years) to get job interview skills and tips for writing their resumes.  I invited some youth from my community and 3 ended up coming.  Last week I also visited a community where a new couple of Ag volunteers from the new group are posted.  They live near this place called La Bastilla Ecolodge, which is a tourist lodging in the misty mountains of my region of Jinotega.  But it’s also a school for 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th year high school students to specialize in agriculture studies.  Families can send their kids there to finish school with a more specialized focus, but they have to pay for it of course.  One woman in my community has two sons that attend there so she invited me to go visit the campus during one of their school fairs.  I thought we’d be buying produce and other ag products that the students have produced, which is what it has been in past years.  But this year it was just some dance performances and raffles, kinda boring.  But we got there a little early and decided to walk up the hill from the school to go visit the Ecolodge, which was really pretty.  It’s a protected area so it’s surrounded by mature growth forests up in the misty mountains.  The buildings are fairly new, I think they’ve been building the place within the past few years.  There’s some hotel room like cabins, plus two decks with tents and private bathrooms for those who want to “camp” up in the mountains. 

La Bastilla Ecolodge, Jinotega

Another interesting activity I did last week was judging an English singing competition in a nearby Pantasma community called Malecon.  An English teacher there had met a Peace Corps volunteer friend of mine who teaches English in Jinotega and she put me in contact with him since I live in his area.  So I took the bus to Malecon and waited around awkwardly at the school until the English competition was ready and organized.  There were three other judges; one guy who speaks novice English that I’ve run into in Las Praderas, the main town in Pantasma.  I was kinda bummed it was him since he’s asked me multiple times for my phone number so he can call me and practice his English (no way! Not wasting my time that!).  He’s actually a nice guy but it’s really annoying having to deal with men all the time who think I’ll just give away my number because they speak a little English.  One of the other judges was asked at the last minute (literally the last minute before the competition started) to judge.  He was another guy I had run into on a bus from Jinotega that came and sat next to me because he wanted to practice his English with me (catching a pattern here?).  He’s also a teacher and speaks much better English than the first guy, but was equally annoying in asking me for my number on the bus so he could call me and practice his budding language skills.  What I told him was that I don’t just give my number to any random guy I meet, even if it’s for “professional” reasons like wanting to chit chat in English.  He was surprised I said no, and was less talkative after that.  So the day of the competition he was super excited to see me and told me excitedly and expectantly that now that we’ve met twice it’d be okay to give him my number now.  I couldn’t help being my annoyed sarcastic self and replied with “oh, I can give you my number now?”  He didn’t get that I was joking and misread my tone as being sincere, so I felt kind of bad since his level of English doesn’t allow for much sarcasm.  So I had to go through the awkward rejection yet again of telling him just because we’ve met twice doesn’t mean I’m going to give him my number, I still barely know him and I don’t work with him.  At this point he’s already looking at me expectantly with his phone perched eagerly in his hand to type in the digits, which is super annoying because it shows how much he expects that I’ll just go for it so easily.  So again, he gets kind of annoyed and begrudgingly shoves his phone back in his pocket.  So these are the guys I have to deal with during the rest of the afternoon.  They were still being friendly, but it was kind of uncomfortable trying to be nice to them when they thought I was being rude by not handing my number over.  Whatever, call me a heartbreaker if that makes you feel better. 

So the English competition itself was interesting.  I thought it was going to be some kids stepping up to the mic individually with their memorized American song.  It was actually groups of kids doing a dance routine with one or two people doing the singing.  The dancing was pretty sad; most girls were super shy and didn’t have one ounce of stage presence.  I wish I could have given them more tips after the competition but everyone kind of scattered afterwards.  The singing was super hard to hear sometimes because they either weren’t speaking loudly enough into the mic or the mic seemed to actually be turned off.  One group of guys did “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by Guns ‘n’ Roses and dressed up like the band. They air guitared with their bandanas and Slash hair and everything.  They were really funny and ended up getting 2^nd place.  The first place winners were a group of girls that did “Queen of Hearts” (I honestly had never heard the song.  This country loves old 70’s and 80’s US songs that we don’t listen to anymore really).  The girl singing had the best pronunciation of the words and the dancers were the most animated of all the numbers.  Honestly, none of the 9 groups really sang well.  They either had horrible tone and pitch or the pronunciation was so off that I couldn’t understand a single word.  But you have to work with what you’ve got!  The top 3 winners from this school will move on to the municipal competition which I think is in October.  The teacher asked me if I could judge then too, which I told him I probably could. 

August 26, 2012

One super exciting goal of mine has finally been reached:  I’ve started teaching dance classes in my community!!!  These two girls who come to my house often have been asking me for a long time when I would start teaching dance classes, and the other night they asked me again.  I had been dancing around in my house for exercise when they stopped by to see me, and so I figured there was no way around it this time.  So we picked a date, which was last Saturday, for them to come over and learn some dancin’, Sarah-style.  I told them we’d start with a basic Bellydance class first and see how that goes.  I told them to invite all the local neighborhood girls that lived close by, and I also did a little walking around myself and told my favorite families to tell their daughters about the class.  In the first class I gave, 6 girls show up.  In total there are about 15 girls that I’m most close with in my community that I was hoping would all come, but some had other things going on that day and couldn’t make it.  I have my hopes up for more students in the future, because I know they’re all interested.  So we started off with a warm up session where I just kind of danced around with some basic “step-touch” moves to get our blood pumping a little, then we stretched and I started the basic lesson on how to do hip locks, which is a basic Bellydance hip movement.  Some of them are going to need a lot of time to get this stuff down.  I had a hard time getting them to move their hips independently than their torsos or their legs.  It was a pretty silly looking scene, all of these girls with their flip flops and tight jeans wiggling around the room with confused looks on their faces.  I had them move on by trying to travel a little with the hip locks, stepping forwards and backwards to the beat, then to each side as we moved together in a circle.  Some got it okay, but most of them have little to no rhythm, which is a huge pet peeve of mine.  My goal towards the end of the second class on Sunday was to simply get them to walk on tempo with the music.  Even that was hard for at least half of them.  I don’t want to bore them all to death by having them march around the room like little Bellydance soldiers, but I need to teach them some rhythm lessons before we move on to move difficult movements.  Eventually I’ll work on teaching them choreography so we have a solid goal to work towards.  I’m also hoping they get excited and motivated once I show them how fun and pretty the costumes could be.  They could all have their own jingly hip scarves (which I’d like to somehow make with them) and pretty flowers in their hair.  Not to mention all the fun jewelry and make up they could put on.  When I was a kid it was always super fun to play dress up with all my mom’s jewelry.  I hope the moms here go for it! 

Hopefully next blog I'll have some dance class pictures to share!  Until next time. . .

~Sarah~

                                                                                                            

1 year in site and Med brigade

August 5, 2012

I’ve officially been in site for 1 year!  August 1^st was my move in date last year after swearing in as a Peace Corps volunteer at the end of July 2011.  Time has seemingly flown by, yet I also feel like I’ve been through a lot this past year.  I’ve lived with a Nicaraguan host family for 6 months, then moved out into my own house.  I’ve taught various things in my community from English classes to building improved ovens.  I’ve traveled as far north as Somoto canyon near the border of Honduras and as far south as Ometepe Island near the border to Costa Rica.  And I’ve been to both the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts.    I’ve had various visitors from the States come to see this beautiful country with me, and I’ve seen different parts of this beautiful country with various volunteers who live here like me.  Now I have one more full year to keep working and doing what I’ve come here to do: grow and learn and hopefully teach something of value to those who requested it.  It feels like I haven’t really done much in my community, and now I’m feeling the pressure of having only a year left to do it. 

This past week I spent with a medical brigade that came to Jinotega to provide their free services to the community.  They had contacted a local health organization stating the need for translators (interpreters, to be correct), and so they in turn contacted a Peace Corps health volunteer who lives in Jinotega to see if she could gather some of us for the brigade.  So I decided to give it a try.  I showed up on the first day with the plan of only staying for 3 days, but I was learning so much and got so involved that I ended up staying the entire 8 days of the brigade!  The brigade is called IMA Helps (check out their website http://www.internationalmedicalalliance.org/ ), and was started by a woman who works in the Palm Desert area of California, so most of the doctors and surgeons who volunteered their time are from that area or elsewhere in southern California.  Over 90 medical volunteers came for this brigade to Jinotega!  It was huge, and they attended to thousands of locals who came seeking medical help.  There were various surgeons, including plastics, orthopedic, and general.  There were various doctors and nurses seeing patients and giving medication for things that didn’t require surgery.  The first day I was set up with a doctor in triage, interpreting for the patients that came to him.  It was very nerve-wracking for me because I was the sole link between what the patient was saying and what the doctor was prescribing.  It’s a huge responsibility, but after a few days I became more confident with my medical Spanish and the types of ailments the patients were complaining about. 

The second day I was asked to help organize the line in the surgical consult area.  That was a boring and sad job, because people had to sit and wait for hours and hours to sometimes be told what they had couldn’t be operated on, or that the surgery schedule was already full for the entire brigade and they wouldn’t be seen at all.  The surgeons were also doing surgeries all day and so wouldn’t come out to do consults for hours at a time.  I felt really bad being the person to tell them they just had to wait some more and I’m sorry that they might miss their bus home if they decided to wait it out.  But hey, it’s free surgery!  If they’re not willing to wait then they won’t get their chance at all to talk to a surgeon. 

Me at the dental extraction clinic 

The third day I helped in the dental area, with the trailer that was doing tooth extractions.  After the first couple patients I wasn’t sure I could handle watching all the needles in the gums and the yanking of all the bloody molars, but I quickly got over it and stayed the whole day.  Towards the end I was leaning over the patients interested in watching what the dentist was doing.  The following days I helped out between the triage area with the doctors and nurses and the vital signs area where the brigade initially decided which area to send each patient.  It was super interesting, even if it became somewhat repetitive (almost every person complained of “gastritis”, acid reflux, headaches, general body aches, knee and back pain, and the occasional chest pain).  Unfortunately sometimes the only thing the nurses and doctors could do was give them a bag of Ibuprofen or Tylenol to help with their general body pain and describe how they should lift with their legs and not their back.  On the other hand, most of the surgeries they do change lives.  Many cleft palates and lips were repaired, many people received prosthetic limbs that allowed them to walk for the first time in their lives, and others received treatment for medical issues that they otherwise couldn’t have due to the inability to afford a hospital visit.  I did get to scrub in to watch a couple surgeries.  I never would have thought I could have had the opportunity to see something like that, so I jumped at the chance.  I watched a thyroid the size of an apricot be removed, and then later a hernia surgery.  It was crazy to be allowed to stand so close and watch the surgery up close and personal.  And I didn’t faint! 

Me and Alicia getting ready to go watch a surgery

The people that worked for this brigade were extremely generous with their time and money to come to Nicaragua for a third time.  They pay their own way to get here and take vacation time from their jobs to help these communities in need.  I felt very welcomed and appreciated during my time with IMA Helps, and would love to help them again in the future.  If anyone is interested and able to donate money to IMA for future brigades, please do so knowing that the money goes to a wonderful cause! 

This next week I’m headed to the city of Chinandega to teach the workshop about improved ovens for a group of Health and Environment volunteers and their community counterparts.  I’ve made an instruction manual to hand out and have presentation to give before actually building an oven with half of them.  The other half is going to learn how to build a stove with another volunteer that has lots of experience with stoves.  I hope it goes well and that people learn something! 

Until next time. . .

~Sarita~

Bluefields and Family Visit

It’s time to catch you all up on what I’ve been up to these past few months.  My trip to Bluefields on the Atlantic coast at the end of May for Palo de Mayo was a fun trip.  Traveling there was the annoying part.  When people travel there they usually take the 9pm overnight bus since the trip is so long.  It takes 5 hours on the bus from Managua to El Rama, which is located about half way to Bluefields where you then get on a lancha (boat) on the river Escondido to head to the coast.  The boat ride is only about an hour and a half, but the thing is you have to wait from 2am when the bus arrives in El Rama until 5:30am when the boats first start to leave.  So you’re all groggy and tired from the bus ride and have to wait in line to get your boat seat number just to wait some more.  Lame.  The boat ride could have been worse.  It’s a fast little speed boat that blows your hair all over the place.  I couldn’t even look up to see the scenery because the wind was pounding my face so hard and drying my eyeballs out.  I sat hunched over trying to keep my hat on my head so I wouldn’t get sunburnt.    

Waiting at 5am to get on the lanchas to Bluefields

Once in Bluefields we all met up with the volunteers that live there for some hang out time.  They filled us in on the May Pole happenings that we could see.   One big event was the parade where all the barrios (neighborhoods) of Bluefields danced in the streets with their group costumes and youth leaders who were in a beauty pagent running for Miss Palo de Mayo.  Each group was led by either an enthusiastic drumming group or a car blasting music that they danced to.  Us volunteers staked out a spot up on a balcony to watch the festivities.  After the end of the parade some of us (me included) joined in the fun dancing along with the drumming and followed the parade to the park where it all ended.  I ate lots of seafood (as was my goal for the trip), including a mixed seafood soup, shrimp, fish, and lobster tail.  I must say I had to try the sea turtle that is so popular on the coast.  Yes, I felt terrible because they’re endangered (though the costeñas say it´s fine, yeah right), but it was just a little piece out of this dish a woman had made at one of the food booths.  It mostly just tasted like the yummy garlic sauce she cooked it in.  Another common food item is coconut oil (I bought two bottles to take back with me).  They use it to make coco bread and cook their gallo pinto in it too.  It’s not the strong coconut flavor I was expecting, but it does add a different level of sweetness that regular gallo pinto lacks (don’t get me wrong, I LOVE regular gallo pinto!).  

Palo de Mayo Parade

One of the day trips I took was to The Bluff, which is a peninsula neighborhood on the outer part of the bay of Bluefields.  You have to take a boat out there of course, and then we walked through the neighborhoods until we reached the beachy spot.  There were only two of about 12 beach shacks open that sold food and beer for the visitors.  I got eaten alive by these crazy giant yellow beach flies and left itching and scratching like always.  My legs really took a beating that day.  Bluefields was really hot and humid while we were there, but it did rain pretty hard a few hours here and there, which took the edge off.  I wish I could have stayed the whole week of Palo de Mayo to experience more of the culture there.  We only went for 4 days.  The population there is mostly black Caribbeans who speak a mixture of Creole English and Spanish.  I loved hearing them speak, it sounds so cool!  I didn’t know sometimes whether I should speak Spanish or English.  If I asked a question in Spanish they would answer in English, or vice versa.   One of my favorite moments walking around was when I passed a house with a woman sweeping her porch, and was about to say “Adios!” out of habit, but before I could say anything she cheerily calls out “Marnin’!” in her English Creole accent.  It totally caught me off guard and made me realize how settled I’ve become in my street greetings here in this country.  It also just put a big smile on my face.  It’s crazy that just on the other side of this relatively narrow strip of land that is Nicaragua there’s a whole other world and culture.  It truly feels like being in a different country.  

Palo de Mayo dancers

The second to last week in June I participated in Tech Week with some of the new Ag sector trainees, which was held in an Ag site about an hour bus ride away from my site.  I was one of 4 volunteers from my group invited to participate in teaching a group of 5 trainees from the new group who are currently in training.  Amongst the charlas taught included making an improved stove, making wine, making biofertilizer, working with youth, and attending a community bank meeting.  It was a fun week and was nice to meet some of the newbies who are just about to start their service.  I remember how I felt when I was at that point in my training last year: worn out on training, frustrated with my Spanish, unsure about what I’d be doing as a volunteer, and worried about where I’d be placed.  All of that’s behind me now (although I think I’m just always frustrated with my Spanish), and it felt weird to be the “experienced one” telling these new trainees what they might expect during their first year in service.  

After Tech Week my family came to visit!  My mom, stepdad, sister, aunt and cousin came for 10 full days of Nica touristy fun.  I met them at Selva Negra in the department of Matagalpa, which is an organic coffee farm owned by a German couple.  It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve been so far in this country.  It’s all protected cloud forest with families of Howler monkeys and tons of birds and other wildlife.  We went on a guided nature hike in the forest and were (kind of) attacked by a rogue agouti (small dog-sized forest rodent, not known for being aggressive).  It was my whole family plus another group of 4 people on this nature hike, and we heard this sudden rustling in the bushes like something was startled.  All of our attention was caught by this thing suddenly running through the underbrush, and all of a sudden it shot out from its hidey spot and ran right into one the guy’s legs that was in the back of the group.  He and the woman with them shouted and screamed like little girls as the agouti, no doubt equally shocked and terrified, bounded off his legs and ran back from where it came.  We were all beside ourselves with shock and then just started cracking up uncontrollably at what just happened.  It was so bizarre that this animal would spook out of the bushes and then run right into this guy as it tried to get away.  We were holding our sides with laughter.  What’s also funny is that the guy who was accosted by the agouti was the groom in a wedding that day at Selva Negra.  What a hilarious pre-wedding memory!

Attack of the killer agouti!

After some cool coffee and nature tours at Selva Negra, we all came to my site and stayed at my house for one night.  I spent the day dragging my family to 4 different family’s houses to introduce them to my community.  I had arranged for one woman to make nacatamales for my family to try.  She also made us the most delicious chicken and dumpling soup (one of my favorites that I was so grateful she offered to make!).  It was probably the best soup I’ve ever had, and my family raved about it as well.  We also visited the school and I handed out school supplies that they brought for the kids, including pencils, erasers, books, stickers and sharpeners.  The kids were all super shy of course, and just sat there in their seats looking up with big confused eyeballs at this group of gringos suddenly in their classroom.  The teachers were all thankful for the goodies and talked a bit with my aunt Kathy who’s a teacher and speaks some Spanish (and really wanted to practice her Spanish too :)).  Overall it was a short but sweet trip to my site.  After that we headed to Leon and hit up some museums.  I had twisted my back the morning we left my site and spent the whole time in Leon hunched over like a crippled old lady.  Luckily the woman at the pharmacy knew exactly what to sell me to help with the pain, and after a couple days I was better.  

Enjoying homemade nacatamales

One big pick-me-up during this trip was the compliments some locals gave me on my Spanish.  Two people on separate occasions told me it was obvious I lived in the northern part of the country because I spoke like a northerner.   Apparently I’ve done well and picked up the accent of my community.   Imagine if some obvious foreigner approached you in the States but had a thick southern accent.  It’d be pretty apparent where they learned how to speak English.  Another woman at a pharmacy straight up asked if I was Nicaraguan!  That’s never happened!   After Leon we spent 3 days on Ometepe island at Finca Mystica, an organic farm owned by a young American couple who were super nice and talkative about their finca and things to do on the island.  We went on a waterfall hike and did a nature kayak tour where we saw TONS of waterfowl.  It was really cool.  Their finca is beautiful and totally worth the rocky, bumpy 2 hour taxi drive there.  The food we ate at this place was amazing, so healthy and flavorful (fish filets with cabbage salad, chicken stir fry, coconut soup, homemade chocolate!).  I recommend this place to anyone who visits Ometepe.  The last leg of the trip we spent in Granada, the oldest city in Central America.  My sister rolled her own cigar at Doña Elba’s cigar factory, we drank Macuas, the traditional rum drink of Nicaragua, and hit up the shopping amongst all the vendors in the park and at the old Mercado in Masaya.  Overall it was a great trip: private drivers to and from each city, free hotel rooms and food (for me), and a washer and drier in the private house we stayed in in Granada!  Talk about luxury!  

Rolling cigars in Granada

Saying goodbye to my family at the airport in Managua was sad, but this next week my dad’s coming for a week to visit during my birthday (the 15^th everyone!), so it’s another vacation for me!  We won’t visit as many places as I just did with the rest of my family, but it’ll be nice to maybe visit someplace new and have some dad time.  In the meantime I’m working on finishing my next oven project proposal to send off before my next vacation break.  I’m planning on making 10 more ovens plus one improved stove to introduce to the community.  Next month I’ve been invited to facilitate an improved oven workshop for a group of health and environment volunteers and their counterparts, since they are starting to build these technologies as well.  It’s the first big charla/workshop I’ll have participated in so far, considering I have to teach the whole group how to promote this technology in their community and lead the oven building activity (in Spanish of course).  No pressure!  

Well I hope everyone had a great 4^th of July!  I spent the holiday recovering from the trip, cleaning my house, restocking my fridge, and catching up on a lot of laundry.  It’s been raining everyday so it’s not drying as quickly as desired.  Hmph!  Until the next update. . .

~Sarah~