Alligators, the President, & Heads Up, Seven Up

It has been an eventful week. Last Sunday, two volunteers from the departing group came to visit on their grand tour of the Rio San Juan. On Monday, we headed down the river with five other friends to visit a wildlife refuge called Indio-Maiz. We stayed at the pretty hotel there and hiked around looking at the howler monkeys. That night, after we had finished eating, the hotel owner’s son called us down to the river in order to see all the alligators that had come out to prey. There were about five enormous alligators within flashlight view and the whole scene by the river seemed straight out of Peter Pan (but none of these alligators ticked).

On Thursday, the president of Nicaragua, Enrique Bolaños, came by helicopter to my site to inaugurate several different locations. One such location was the Health Center, which is now two years old. Somehow it didn’t quite look right that the president was cutting a ribbon in front of a building that already needs a new paint job. My whole town had banners hanging everywhere welcoming the president and commending various roads and buildings that the government had funded. The Japanese ambassador accompanied the president and so there were strings of Japanese and Nicaraguan flags draped all over the place. However, many of the trash cans that are normally on the street were removed since they are unsightly resulting in tons of plastic bags, ice creams wrappers, and plastic soda bottles accompanying all the other decorations welcoming the president to my site. Beautiful Boca de Sabalos.

On a different note, I always get a huge kick out of the kids in my town and this week was no exception. I’ve always found them to be particularly creative with the toys they produce out of trash. For example, they crush two liter bottles and use them as toboggans to slide down the cement walkway on the hill that leads to my house and one future toy impresario came up with the plastic coke bottle filled with rocks on a string idea that revolutionized toy trends in Sabalos. Every kid had a coke bottle filled with rocks trailing him for about two weeks. This week, I was headed up to the mayor’s office when I saw two eight year old boys standing a few yards apart, each with a large disassembled cardboard box held as a shield in front of him. On the count of three, they ran as hard as they possibly could into one another and then fell over beating each other with the cardboard flaps. Once they tired of this, they got up and went back to their positions to smash into each other all over again. Another day, I walked by two much smaller children, probably about 4 years old, sitting in a cart on the side of the road. They called out, “Alexis!” and just as I was about to say hi back, they screamed, “We’re little!” Laughing, I told them they were correct, they are very little. Finally, on Wednesday as I was headed to the school, I passed a little boy that lives at the end of the walkway near my house and he yelled out to me, “Alexis, its pretty!” When I asked him what was pretty, he shouted, “You!” and then ran off giggling. This is probably the only compliment I have ever accepted from a Nicaraguan male with a smile on my face.

After giving all the kids their weekly dose of higiene lessons in the schools, I played American classics "Simon Says" with the younger grades and "Heads Up, 7 Up" with the older grades. Simon Says was slightly altered to fit my lesson, so maybe "Alexis says brush your teeth" didn't quite do the game justice. The kids loved heads up, seven up, though. I kept telling them not to peek with a grin because throughout my childhood I always cheated at any game that involved keeping your eyes closed. Mothers marveled at my placement of donkey tails, children squealed in delight as I cracked open the piñata, and I always knew who put my thumb down in heads up, seven up. So, who am I to tell Nicaraguan children not to cheat?

Alligators, the President, & Heads Up, Seven Up

It has been an eventful week. Last Sunday, two volunteers from the departing group came to visit on their grand tour of the Rio San Juan. On Monday, we headed down the river with five other friends to visit a wildlife refuge called Indio-Maiz. We stayed at the pretty hotel there and hiked around looking at the howler monkeys. That night, after we had finished eating, the hotel owner’s son called us down to the river in order to see all the alligators that had come out to prey. There were about five enormous alligators within flashlight view and the whole scene by the river seemed straight out of Peter Pan (but none of these alligators ticked).

On Thursday, the president of Nicaragua, Enrique Bolaños, came by helicopter to my site to inaugurate several different locations. One such location was the Health Center, which is now two years old. Somehow it didn’t quite look right that the president was cutting a ribbon in front of a building that already needs a new paint job. My whole town had banners hanging everywhere welcoming the president and commending various roads and buildings that the government had funded. The Japanese ambassador accompanied the president and so there were strings of Japanese and Nicaraguan flags draped all over the place. However, many of the trash cans that are normally on the street were removed since they are unsightly resulting in tons of plastic bags, ice creams wrappers, and plastic soda bottles accompanying all the other decorations welcoming the president to my site. Beautiful Boca de Sabalos.

On a different note, I always get a huge kick out of the kids in my town and this week was no exception. I’ve always found them to be particularly creative with the toys they produce out of trash. For example, they crush two liter bottles and use them as toboggans to slide down the cement walkway on the hill that leads to my house and one future toy impresario came up with the plastic coke bottle filled with rocks on a string idea that revolutionized toy trends in Sabalos. Every kid had a coke bottle filled with rocks trailing him for about two weeks. This week, I was headed up to the mayor’s office when I saw two eight year old boys standing a few yards apart, each with a large disassembled cardboard box held as a shield in front of him. On the count of three, they ran as hard as they possibly could into one another and then fell over beating each other with the cardboard flaps. Once they tired of this, they got up and went back to their positions to smash into each other all over again. Another day, I walked by two much smaller children, probably about 4 years old, sitting in a cart on the side of the road. They called out, “Alexis!” and just as I was about to say hi back, they screamed, “We’re little!” Laughing, I told them they were correct, they are very little. Finally, on Wednesday as I was headed to the school, I passed a little boy that lives at the end of the walkway near my house and he yelled out to me, “Alexis, its pretty!” When I asked him what was pretty, he shouted, “You!” and then ran off giggling. This is probably the only compliment I have ever accepted from a Nicaraguan male with a smile on my face.

After giving all the kids their weekly dose of higiene lessons in the schools, I played American classics "Simon Says" with the younger grades and "Heads Up, 7 Up" with the older grades. Simon Says was slightly altered to fit my lesson, so maybe "Alexis says brush your teeth" didn't quite do the game justice. The kids loved heads up, seven up, though. I kept telling them not to peek with a grin because throughout my childhood I always cheated at any game that involved keeping your eyes closed. Mothers marveled at my placement of donkey tails, children squealed in delight as I cracked open the piñata, and I always knew who put my thumb down in heads up, seven up. So, who am I to tell Nicaraguan children not to cheat?

Like a Pack of Camels

First and foremost, I must share the most exciting news of the last few weeks: avocado season has arrived in Nicaragua! The avocadoes here are enormous, about the size of a nerf football, they are ubiquitous, and pretty damn cheap to boot. This means I will be snacking on avocado salads, guacamole, and a new chilled avocado soup recipe I found for the next four to five months. In the U.S., I never paid much attention to which produce was available during certain times of year mostly because we are able to buy virtually everything in supermarkets year-round and also because I rarely cooked, but now I know the thrill of seasonal crop yields. And they are indeed thrilling.

Every four months a new training group of volunteers arrives in Nicaragua. First come the health volunteers (like me), then the small business volunteers, and finally the agriculture and environmental education volunteers. Accordingly, every four months a group of volunteers departs and there is a big going-away party (or despedida) for them at the beach. As some of my good friends are leaving with this group, I headed to this party with my buddy Jess on the 10th of March. Given the amount of dust on the highways right now, we decided to go on the big cargo boat that crosses the lake of Nicaragua instead of taking the bus. The slight inconvenience of the boat is that the journey takes 15 hours; from 3 pm until 6 am the following morning. The upside is the boat has food, bathrooms, places to string up hammocks, and a tv with dvd player on which Nicas watch all types of awful movies. Jess and I set up our hammocks and were also accompanied by funny Spanish travelers, one of which never told us his real name but instead insisted on being called MacGyver.

The ultimate party destination (and where all the Peace Corps despedidas take place) in Nicaragua is called San Juan del Sur. It is one of the touristiest areas of the country and is also a current hotspot for investment. A cab driver told me that his plot of land, which he bought 5 years ago for a little over 500 dollars, is now worth over 100,000 dollars. Perhaps not the most reliable source, but it paints a general picture. After a day spent in the sun, we headed out on the town. Upon meeting up with other volunteers, I thought I recognized a friend from home (or from Charleston to be exact). So, I did a double take but figured there was no possible way. But it looked so much like him. And it was him! Michael Kauffman, one of Nick’s good friends from college was sitting at a table filled with my Peace Corps friends! The small-worldliness of it all was incredible (his girlfriend is good friends with one of the departing volunteers and they were in Costa Rica for law school Spring Break and so came up) and we got to hang out all night and the following day. Now, most volunteers don’t drink much on a regular basis in their sites, so when a big group gets together to celebrate, it can get a little ridiculous. People act like it may be their last chance to drink and so they try to get in as much as possible, somewhat like a pack of camels filling up their humps at the watering hole before the long trip across the desert. It may not be the healthiest thing, but it makes for a fun night!

The following day, about 30 of us headed to a more secluded beach, called Majagual, to continue the celebration. The ocean was perfectly refreshing, the only drawback being the groups of jellyfish (appropriately called medusas in Spanish) that took to attacking us. Luckily, I came away unscathed. As the day wore on, we engaged in heavy discussions of “would you rather.” Some highlights included, “would you rather have suction cups for hands or wheels for feet?” or “would you rather have a soundtrack to your life always playing or the ability to spontaneously break into group dance?” Pretty weighty issues to consider.

Back in my site, I’ve been working hard on finishing up a grant proposal that I’m writing in conjunction with the mayor’s office. We’re soliciting funds from USAID for a trash project in my town. Unlike many parts of Nicaragua, in my site we’re lucky enough to have a trash collection service that comes around twice a week. However, like in most parts of Nicaragua most of my fellow community members still litter like crazy, burn their trash, or throw it in the river. What our project aims to do is improve the current collection service, educate the community about the best ways to dispose of their trash, and generally work on behavior change. Of course this is all pending approval of the grant and I can’t even begin to explain the frustrations of trying to impose deadlines upon Nicaraguans combined with the red tape of writing a government grant proposal. Every day something new pops up: people don’t show up to meetings, the electricity goes out, we need the signature of someone who is in Managua for the week, or someone simply forgets to do the one duty they were assigned to do. I figure, at the very least, it’s a good learning experience. If I can manage to write a grant proposal under these conditions and in Spanish, think of all the amazing things I will be able to accomplish in my life. Like, I don’t know, filing taxes!

The Passion of the WWF

It stands to reason that in a country where the two major religions are Catholic and Evangelical (that is to say, Christian and more Christian), Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” would be a major hit. Now, I avoided this movie in the United States and so obviously had no desire to watch it in the home of die-hard Nicaraguan Catholics. However, when one of the families I’m closest with (with whom I watch my telenovela Monday through Friday) was watching it for the third time in two days, I finally got sucked in. It was quite possibly the most graphically horrifying movie I have ever seen. Whereas in the U.S. parents would try to bar their children from watching torture, here the mother kept calling her two year-old back into the room to watch a bloody, mangled Jesus being crucified whenever she strayed. All the children, age’s two through fourteen were instructed to watch and not allowed to leave the room. Perhaps that was more disturbing than the movie itself.
I’ve actually just come from watching tv at the same family’s house but tonight the subject matter was slightly different. Rather than Jesus on the cross, tonight we watched the WWF’s Royal Rumble straight out of Miami. It is safe to say that Nicaraguans are not too discerning in their tastes when it comes to televised entertainment. Case in point: the popularity of Steven Segal movies. Anyway, in the Royal Rumble, every thirty seconds or so, a new wrestler enters the ring. Since this all takes place in Miami and since I’m from the U.S., every time a new wrestler entered the arena, the kids asked me, “Do you know him?” I would tell them, no, I don’t know any WWF wrestlers. 30 seconds later, “Okay, but how about him?” Nope, not him either. I effectively explained to them the meaning of “white trash” (part of my mission as a Peace Corps Volunteer is to share the culture of the United States) and it turns out there is an equivalent in Nicaraguan Spanish: jincho. As my friend explained it to me, people who are jincho don’t have very elevated tastes and are a bit ignorant. Her example: a girl who wears a short skirt with socks and shoes. I said, yeah, white trash is something like that.
This past week I ran two successful soy cooking workshops with my friend Norma. The first was held at the Casa Materna where one of the 14 year-old pregnant girls I’ve become close with couldn’t help but pet and touch the blonde hairs on my arm and the other was held at the home of a member of my women’s group. We’ve never had so many people come to a women’s group meeting! If you cook something, they will come. In the schools I talked about microbes and the importance of sneezing and coughing into the crook of your elbow and washing your hands. I used glitter to represent the microbes and the kids walked around shaking each other’s hands and passing glitter back and forth. I felt like they were getting the point (it is pretty straightforward after all) until at the end of the charla in several classrooms kids asked me, “and now what do we do with this glitter all over our hands?” I told them that was kind of the point, they would have to wash their hands. In the end, most of them just brushed it off. I’m obviously affecting a lot of change!