First half of Tina's trip to Nicalandia!

My best friend Tina is here in Nicaragua visiting me for 10 days, and we’ve had a good trip so far.  It’s great to have a friend that has lived and understands the Peace Corps experience come visit me because she knows the feelings and frustrations and emotions I’m going through towards the end of my service.  Plus she speaks Spanish so I don’t have to do any translating (not that I really minded when other family and friends came to visit, it’s just easier to have conversations with people when everyone understands each other).  I’ll get to our trip in a minute, first let me fill you all in with the last few weeks in site.

A successfully completed charla!

The girls group teen pregnancy charla that I was having such a hard time coordinating is finally done and over with.  I decided to have the last few meetings before the actual charla at a different house where a majority of the girls lived in, since they’re sisters, and all of them showed up and we actually made progress on getting the activity organized.  The day of the charla at the school they all showed up in their Camp GLOW t-shirts that they received at the camp, and put on a pretty decent charla for the 5^th graders.  I had to help them out here and there to keep the flow going and to organize the rambunctious 5^th graders, but overall they did a good job and I was glad for it to be over.  After we finished one of the girls told me as we were walking out that she was looking forward to doing another one!  And I’m thinking in my head, yeah, but you barely even showed up for the rehearsals for this first one, and you think I’m gonna help plan another one?!  But hey, if they are truly motivated and show up to practice another charla, then great, I’ll help them out.  But I think I’ve kinda had my fill recently of these girls and their lack of motivation.

My community watching photos of my vacation in Peru

A few weekends ago I finally got my hands on a projector and decided to do a photo slide show presentation of my vacation home for Christmas and also my trip to Peru, so that my host family and other neighbors could see what other countries look like.  I set up some chairs in our living room and bought a 3 liter bottle of soda to serve for everyone who came, and they all laughed and enjoyed the photos of my trip visiting my family and the places Tina and I saw in Peru.  Then the next night (to take advantage of having the projector still) I played some episodes of Planet Earth in Spanish and invited some neighbors to come over and watch with popcorn.  Not many people showed up, but those that did seemed to enjoy the movie.

Atop the cross overlooking Jinotega city

So this last Wednesday Tina flew in to Managua and we headed to Jinotega for the night to stay with my friend Paul and have dinner with all the volunteers that live in the city.  The next morning we hiked up to the cross that overlooks the whole city, and man, my calves are still sore 6 days later!  It’s basically a hike straight up the side of this mountain on cement stairs that the city recently built in the past year for hikers to make it up more safely.  I was huffing and puffing the whole way up.  But the view at the top was nice and we got some cool photos.  Then Tina and I headed to La Bastilla Ecolodge, which is on the way up to my site, and stayed two nights there.  It’s a really beautiful place on the top of this overlook into a reserve and protected area, so there’s tons of tall, fully grown trees and lots of birdlife.  We took a short hike and saw various birds, including a violet sabrewing hummingbird, a golden-olive woodpecker, lots of yellow-backed orioles, and many other things.  We heard a keel-billed toucan and various groups of howler monkeys in the distance but they never got close enough. 

On our hike at La Bastilla

Pretty view of the Datanli reserve at La Bastilla

Enjoying Gloria's chicken soup at my house in Wale

After La Bastilla we headed to my site and Tina got to meet my host family and some other families in my community and finally see where I’ve been living these past 2 ½ years.  We saw lots more birds and took as many photos as possible.  I was hoping she’d get to see the national bird during our trip, the guardabarranco, or turquoise-browed motmot, and we saw 3 in my site!  I also requested that Gloria make us my favorite meal, chicken soup with dumplings, so we had a delicious meal as well.  We only spent two nights in Wale, since there’s always so much more to see when you’re on vacation, so after my site we headed down to Managua to meet up at the office of Paso Pacifico.  They’re an organization that works mostly in the south part of Nicaragua working on animal conservation, reforestation, and environmental education projects.  I contacted the director, who is based in Ventura, and she said we could spend a day doing some enrichment with a small group of spider monkeys they take of at a sanctuary in Sapoa, a town near the border of Costa Rica.  So I’ve been collecting toilet paper rolls and cereal boxes and plastic bottles and various other enrichment items from my house to take with us to make toys for the monkeys.  We’re headed there today, and possibly tomorrow

A turquiose-browed motmot we saw in my site

we’ll be visiting a sea turtle egg nursery that’s run by a local women’s group on one of the beaches down south.  We’re kinda playing it by ear on this second half of the trip, since I didn’t have great communication with the organization ahead of time.  But so far everyone’s been really nice in the office and I’m looking forward to working with and seeing some animals!

Keep posted for the next blog to hear how the remainder of our trip went!

~Sarah~

Pig feed and Community banks

I’ve successfully made two improved stoves this month!  That’s the same amount of stoves I made in site all of last year.  I’m hoping to make more in my community as word hopefully catches on and more people become interested. 

One of the improved "Inkawasi" stoves I built recently in my community

A neighbor's pigs enjoying their new home-made concentrate mix

The swine project is also slowly making progress.  I’ve come to the conclusion that I won’t have enough time in my 6 months left of service to officially request funding to make pig pens for some families in my site, so I’ve decided instead to work with each interested family individually and make improved husbandry plans with them.  I’ve talked with two families so far and have suggested ways to improve their health care and diet for their pigs.  The other day I made a home-made diet with a woman who agreed to try something new, which is mostly that she weighs out specific amounts of each ingredient to make a more-or-less balanced diet.  It consisted of corn, beans, rice semolina, salt, and crushed egg shells.  They’re ingredients they already use for their pigs, but I’m trying to help them organize a better feeding plan so they can put more weight on their animals faster.  Right now they mostly feed their pigs dried corn kernels and whatever food has accumulated from a slop bucket of kitchen wastes (old tortillas, beans, rice, banana peels, and the bean water that they were boiled in).  We’ve decided to try feeding this new weighed and measured diet to a skinny sow and her 3 pigs, with the idea that we need to put more weight on this skinny nursing mother and hopefully grow the pigs faster than normal.  We’re also planning on weighing the pigs each month to see how much weight they put on over this diet improvement process.  Since I won’t be able to request outside funding for this project, I’m planning on using the funds raised from all the bra sales to help these families either pay for materials to fence in their animals or to buy improved feed ingredients to improve their nutrition.  The fencing materials will last longer though, so I’m leaning more towards that idea, however I need to work with these families first in the initial stages of this swine husbandry improvement project to be sure they’re willing to work with me and make some positive changes for their animals.

The girls from the youth group participated in a 3-day camp where they participated in various life-skills activities as well as fun obstacle course games and ice-breakers.  As part of their participation they’re supposed to organize and participate in an activity back at home using the information they learned from the camp.  So it’s up to me to help them put this activity together.  They decided they want to give a charla on early pregnancy to the 5^th grade class at the local elementary school.  All sounds great so far, right?  Not so.  Trying to get these 6 girls organized and working together productively has been one of the most trying activities for me during my service.  It’s obvious that these girls are reluctant to have to do anything after having participated in this fun sleep-away camp with all their friends.  I’m pretty sure they were surprised to find out they actually had to do some homework afterwards, and are now procrastinating and taking it out on me for trying to get them organized and working.  We set a date to work on the activity and maybe 2 of them show up, or when they do all show up they all want to leave early before we’ve finished what we have to do, or they goof off and talk over me or ignore me when I ask them productive questions to get them moving.  The other day I almost started crying out of frustration after a meeting with them, since we got very little done in the 2 hours that they actually stayed to work.  Towards the end of the session I had to leave the room to get something, and when I came back half of them had slipped out of the house and already started heading home.  I had to call them back so we could review what’s left to be done and to agree on the next meeting time.  It’s driving me crazy how irresponsible and lazy some of them are!  I don’t know how to handle these kinds of things very well, especially since it’s not my charla, it’s theirs.  They’re the ones who will be presenting this information to a classroom full of kids, not me, so if they don’t show up and practice what they’re going to present, then they’ll feel pretty stupid once they realize how dumb and unprepared they’ll look in front of an audience.  I’m trying to help them get organized and practice what they’re going to say, but no one wants to participate.  I’m the one trying to prevent a car crash here, ‘cause I don’t think they realize how difficult it can be giving a public talk, and I’m worried that they’ll fail because I didn’t prepare them enough.  I just don’t know how to wrangle all of them together and keep them focused to get the damn work done.  We had one more meeting a few days ago, this time with a new strategy of having the meeting at one of the houses where most of the girls in the group live, and luckily everyone showed up this time and did a great job getting the work done.  We're scheduled to do the charla tomorrow (March 12th) in the afternoon for the 5th grade class, and I'm praying the all show up and do the work they've agreed to do.  

On a positive note, the community bank that I started all on my own a year ago has finally closed their first yearly cycle, and in the last meeting they received back all their savings and the interest they've earned over the loans from the past year.  They finally got to collect all their money for their year’s hard work in saving it, and then we opened the next year’s bank cycle that same meeting, with 3 new members joining.  It was a big success and I’m really hoping they use the money they’ve saved for something good, like improving their house or investing it into some other type of income generating activity.  That’s part of my job, to show them how they can use the money they’ve saved to make even more, like a baking sales project.  Most of the women in this bank have participated in my baking classes so I’m planning on discussing that idea with them.  I have high hopes for this little bank, and will work closely with them until the very end of my service, helping them in any way I can.  

Me with the old and new members of the 2nd cycle of Banco Unido after a successful first meeting!

Thanks for reading and enjoy more photos at sarahinnica.shutterfly.com!

~Sarita~