Mid-Service Reflections: Main Accomplishments and Setbacks

Now that I’ve got a year of Peace Corps service officially under my belt, I’d like to take the time to reflect on what I’ve accomplished and what has gone wrong, so that I can learn from the good and the bad and do things better in my second year of service. We, as volunteers, are told over and over again that Peace Corps lasts for two years precisely for that reason. Here’s hoping for a productive and eventful year that will make a lasting impact for years to come…

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Successful compost production and vegetable harvest in two school gardens. Since making composts and vegetable gardens in the schools is one of my primary jobs here, I’m pretty satisfied with the results. The students in the rural areas were super excited to bring trash into school and make composts, and when all of our hard work gardening finally paid off (with the help of the rainy season), the kids were able to eat the delicious squash, tomatoes, and cucumbers they produced.

Establishing myself in my community, my neighborhood, and my house. I’m happy to say I feel safe and comfortable where I’m living. My house is cozy and inviting, and I’ve learned to accept what it lacks as part of its character. I trust my neighbors and feel welcome anytime in any one of their houses. I can now walk down the street and be identified by name and not just by “gringa” (although that, I’m sure, will never go away since the population size is about 25,000). Just being comfortable where you are and not feeling the need to escape in order to feel free or accepted in such a foreign place, I feel, is a major accomplishment.

Building lasting personal and professional relationships. Having lived in-site for a year now, I have made a substantial number of friends and professional contacts which will serve as great networks for future projects and ensuring their sustainability.

Not getting dengue (knock on wood). Recently there has been an outbreak of dengue in Nicaragua, a sickness with horrible flu-like symptoms transmitted by mosquitoes, hitting many of my fellow volunteers and even Nica friends in-site. With the help of my mosquito net, frequent town fumigations (though not the healthiest nor the most environmentally-friendly option), and nightly applications of (DEET-free) bug repellent, I have luckily remained dengue-free. Now that the rainy season is ending, it appears I *may* be safe…that is, until next year.

Making an environmentally conscious “campesino” contact for tree planting and gardening. I have been working regularly with a farmer in an outside community who produces all of his own food organically and plants new trees every year. Although I’m not really teaching him many new techniques since this is what he’s already been doing for years, I find him as a reliable resource to successfully carry out reforestation projects.

Fewer ducks killed on Dia de San Juan and Dia de San Pedro. You may recall my work with petitioning, talking on the local radio, and preaching in church about promoting an animal-friendly alternative to the cruel treatment and decapitation of what probably amounts to hundreds of ducks on these two holidays. Unfortunately, the tradition has not been altogether banned because, well, it’s tradition, and people are not receptive to such a drastic change. There were, however, significantly fewer ducks sacrificed as the awareness campaign had awakened people to the suffering that could easily be curtailed. The tradition, I had been told, had slowly been dying out anyway, so hopefully in a few years a more animal-friendly approach will be taken as a form of celebration.

Waking up in the morning and thinking in Spanish. Mi mejor logro!

SETBACKS

Having to start from scratch with new teachers. Our work as environmental education volunteers is just that: the environmental aspect + the education aspect. At the beginning of the school year, I had selected six teachers with whom I would be working, completing a two-year cycle of observation, demonstration, co-teaching, and observation again. However, every year the Ministry of Education makes changes, moving teachers to different grades and sometimes even different schools. These changes are inevitable and unpredictable, but they make it so that much of my work remains rushed and/or incomplete. However, I also see it as an opportunity to improve my teacher selection process in the following year so that I am only working with those who truly want to learn from and share their knowledge with me.

Secondary projects falling through. Among my English classes, eco group, youth group, and work with the women’s soccer teams, all of them have fallen through. The English classes had lasted a good nine months or so, but despite widespread interest in learning English, fewer and fewer people were coming to class on time, doing the homework, and even coming to class altogether. So I unfortunately decided to end the class when two weeks in a row not even one person had showed up. However, now I am giving private nightly classes to one person at my house and they seem to be much more promising. As far as my eco group, youth group, and women’s soccer teams, there was an overall lack of interest and people were not showing up to meetings/practices. The women’s soccer teams still exist, but I have resigned myself to just playing with them rather than coaching them. I lost the patience of getting up at 5 AM every morning to find only three people at practice who didn’t even want to exert any physical effort.

Low tree survival rates. I’ve successfully planted some trees, both in the schools and in different communities, but not as many of them as I had hoped had survived either their 3-month period in the nursery or their post-transplantation time. In one of the schools, they decided to fumigate the school grounds just weeks after we planted trees, killing virtually all of them. Unfortunately, many of those losses were beyond my control.

The environmental representative from the Mayor’s Office getting laid-off. Yup. And after all we were hoping to accomplish in the following year with eco-groups, starting a recycling program, ending trash burning, and working together with the Tourism Commission, the federal government decided to cut the Municipality’s funding, and so all recent hires and projects will be terminated by the end of this month. It’s going to be difficult starting from scratch and losing one of my most important contacts and collaborators.

FUTURE ASPIRATIONS

Ending trash burning a) in the schools, and b) (slightly more ambitious) in my site. Just shortly before I had learned that our Mayor’s Office would be losing its one and only environmental representative, we had written a letter together and delivered it to the Delegate of the Ministry of Education about how it is illegal in Nicaragua to burn trash (of course it isn’t enforced) and that schools are centers for learning that should be setting a positive example for future generations to follow. Many of the schools not just in the rural areas where there is no trash collection, but in the urban center, as well, where a truck passes by every week, continue to burn their trash right on school grounds where children run and play. If this practice could only be eliminated in the schools, when these students grow up and have their own kids, they’re going to remember what they practiced as children and do the same. Unfortunately I will be losing my main collaborator in getting this accomplished, but since the letter has already been written and delivered, the only thing left to do is to continually follow-up and wait. And as far as eliminating trash burning in-site, I know this is quite an ambitious task, but if it could first get eliminated in the schools, and perhaps be made into a pressing topic to be discussed on the local radio, much could get accomplished in just one year.

Collaboration with the Tourism Commission on making my town more ecotourist-friendly. Right now the Tourism Commission is working on promoting tourism in my town, starting with visits to a local organic coffee farm and day-hikes. A website has even been created, both in Spanish AND in English (because one of the main people in charge is originally from England), which shows great progress and a huge step in the right direction. I can only hope they see my willingness to get involved in the project and seek my help, even if it is just to get the project off the ground and running. Take a look at the progress they’ve made so far: http://www.tourismatiguas.com/.

Collaboration with my new site-mate on secondary projects. Starting the end of November, I will be joined by a Peace Corps TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) Volunteer in my site. I am hoping that between the two of us we can come up with some new ideas and collaborate on project-planning and completion. Maybe she can even give me tips on how to maintain interest and motivation to come to class with my English students.

Doing things better the second time around. Keeping in mind all of the above, I want to change the way I went about doing some of the less-successful projects this year so that they will be easier the second time around!

I’d like to finish by saying that I am so proud of my fellow group of environmental education volunteers with whom I came to Nicaragua, who is still 18 volunteers and going strong 15 months in! They have survived bus accidents, deaths in the family, dengue, and countless unsolvable illnesses, and yet they are all still here, ready and welcoming the new year. We are now the “senior” environmental ed group, so let the countdown finally begin! Congratulations to Nica48 Environment and Nica45 for finishing up – you guys make it all possible.