Nicaragua - Week 2

So its week 2 here in Nicaragua and it already feels like Ive been here for months. Independence Day weekend was fun. There were lots of festivities - a parade with kids from all the schools marching and dancing, a traditional folkloric dance, and of course, spending time with my host family. There basically isn´t much to do here besides spend a lot of time with my family. Ive been actively seeking out places to go dancing but they basically dont exist anywhere nearby.

Lets see what else is new...I went to a soccer game (my third one so far including 2 of my town vs another in Nicaragua - professional games, and one of my brothers games). The games are fun and people are really intense...the fans can get really roudy. I went out the other night to a bar with my host brother and his friends, and one of the other trainees, which was fun. Since theres not much to do here, going out to a bar becomes the highlight of your week!

Today we had an interview with the director/manager of the environmental program, basically just to go over our resumes and assess our strengths. Thinking about my future site continues to make me nervous, but I try to take each day one day at a time and not get too worried. Im sure with all the training we´re getting things will work out (I hope!).

My days have been continuing with Spanish classes and technical/medical talks on Wed, Fri, and Sat morning. Im not really sure if my Spanish has improved much but I feel more comfortable speaking and I think Im able to understand more.

We met with our youth groups yesterday (as practice for what we will actually have to do at our sites). We´ll be starting our garden on Saturday, growing probably tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, and maybe squash and/or watermelon. Its nice that we have this as a sort of practice for the ¨real thing¨, since I dont really know what Im doing (we had about a 2 hr talk which is supposed to be sufficient for successfully growing veggies). But hopefully the kids/young adults (most of them are actually in their 20s) will get something useful out of it since Nicaraguans dont really incorporate many veggies into their diets, and it can serve as an additional income source. The youth group will be meeting 2 times per week and we´ll be coming up with an additional project initiated by the group members (could be something to benefit the community, sports, art, etc), besides the daily or weekly maintenance of the garden.

That´s pretty much all that´s been going on! Not too exciting, but life here is muy tranquilo (calm), so most of the time is spent sitting in a rocking chair relaxing and conversing (in Spanish, of course). I hope my actual site is as good as this one, in terms of my family, food situation, and access to transportation, internet, etc. But I guess everything takes time to get used to and I´ll have to wait 2 1/2 more months to find out! Hopefully I´ll be much more patient when I return to the states, since the key theme here with pretty much everything is patience. So we shall see.

Keep the updates coming and thanks for the comments, as well! I will try to start taking pictures this week and post them. I don´t have a thumb drive but I can see if I can borrow one from someone or buy one. Patience, everyone! ;) Much love.