Archive for January, 2007
We started today with a general orientation on how things work between the organization and the schools. Then we took a ride out to see al the schools. 3 of the 4 schools were closed even though the classes were supposed to have started today - they just are finishing their summer vacation of 2 months. The guy driving us around said, “hey, this is Nicaragua… get used to it!”. I guess the schools occasionally cancel classes and forget to tell anyone at La Esperanza. Oh well, at least we saw where the schools are. Most of the school buildings have been built by either a Japanese group or by La Esperanza - the Nica government usually provides only one tiny building per school (that would barely hold 30 kids) but the schools have as many as 190 kids. It’s a banana republic for sure. We have our teacher training tomorrow and on Wednesday we hit the schools.
I seem to be getting tagged as the interpreter for the group because we have some volunteers that don’t speak much Spanish and others that don’t speak English. The Spanish level of most of the volunteers is fairly basic so they would really struggle translating. I’ll tell you it’s HARD to play interpreter! There’s a young woman from Taiwan that spent her childhood in Uruguay and majored in Spanish in the university in Taiwan and her Spanish is excellent - better than mine - but English isn’t her native tongue so she shies away from translating, so that leaves it to me and the volunteer organizer who speaks Spanish fairly well. It’s good practice for me!
Last night I went to hear the Nicaragua Youth Symphony play a concert of Beethoven and Mozart. The kids did a pretty good job although they struggled with their intonation quite a bit. However for the final number they were joined by an 18-year-old Korean-Nicaraguan kid who played Beethoven’s first piano concerto with them. This young fellow, Mauricio, played very well and lifted the other kids’ level considerably. It’s always fun to watch young kids playing music, whatever type it may be.
I just found out there’a a swimming pool that you can buy a membership for and that thrills me becuase running every day in this heat is melting me. Swimming sounds soooo good right now. We volunteers get a 20% discount to boot. The Nica kids don’t see many runners so they make fun of me as I run by them and usually challenge me to a sprint which is fine if I haven’t run too far but if I’ve been running a while in this heat it about kills me. Some of them race me in street shoes because that’s all they’ve got. No $100 running shoes here folks. Sometimes it bothers me that I have pieces of electronic gear that cost more that their families earn in a year. The laptop I’m writing this on would keep them going for a couple years. I still am having a hard time deciding what I think about this 1st world/3rd world divide. It’s not so simple to form an opinion and I suspect I’ll muse quite a bit about that in this blog.
January 29th, 2007
Today I’m just killing time waiting for the volunteer orientation tomorrow morning. They’ll give a talk about how it all works and then we’ll go visit all of the schools, even though we’ll probably each work at only one or two. There will be 10 of us newbies on Monday making a total of 35. By the end of February that number will grow to 42. La Esperanza Granada was started in 2001 by a tourist family from Holland and it is growing almost too fast for them to handle. Right now they sorely lack for housing space. A retired newspaper publisher who lives here 6 months out of the year, is a big donor and supporter of the organization and he is considering buying another house for the volunteers. Right now their one volunteer house is full and the rest of us have had to find other accommodations. Some have grouped together and rented houses while others do like I’m doing and rent rooms from locals.
I’ve found that one has to get used to daily power outages and water outages. They do unplanned rolling blackouts and so far it’s happened every day. I also got up yesterday to find no water in the house so I had to wait until the afternoon to shower. Basically what happens is they won’t allow the tourist areas (hotels, restaurants etc.) to be without power or water so they divert resources from the residents’ homes to those areas. The residents seem to be ok with this because they see the big dollars that the tourist industry brings in. I guess I’d go without electricity and water part of the day if it meant the difference between having a job and being unemployed. No one has air conditioning except the hotels. The houses don’t have hot water either so cold showers are standard. It’s not so bad because it’s 85 degrees outside by the time you get up and the water comes out of the tap at room temperature so I’ve found it to be no problem.
I think I’m winning over the señora in my house. She told me last night that she wanted to invite me to join the family for her famous Saturday fish stew but when she came to my room I’d gone out (I’d gone running - man, I’ll have to get accustomed to this heat!). She also switched from the formal Spanish version of “you” (usted) to the familiar (tú). Their house is very nice compared to the others that I have seen around town. I’ve seen other houses because folks sit on the sidewalk in front of their house in the evening with their front doors open. As I walk around it’s easy to see inside as you go past and I have yet to see a nicer place than this one.
The Nicaraguans speak Spanish with a VERY strong accent. They drop the final “s” off all words ending in “s”, speak very quickly and have a slurred “marbles in the mouth” kind of pronunciation. It’s taking me a little time to get used to it. I was sitting on a park bench yesterday chatting with a young guy who was here applying for a job. We had been talking for a while and he asked me “cual es tu nombre?” which means “what is your name”. I heard “cual es tu novia” which means “which one is your girlfriend” and I answered that I’ve only been here 2 days and don’t have a girlfriend just yet. He busted out laughing of course. I went to the market yesterday and man is it a wild scene of movement, colors, sounds and smells. I’ll return one day to take a video of it as soon as I figure out why the battery on my video camera won’t recharge. I think the insanity of the market will translate fairly well on video.
January 28th, 2007
It’s not fun getting up at 3:30 am to catch a flight but I managed. I had a one hour layover in Atlanta but all went smoothly and I arived without problems and with all my luggage - a big relief since Granada is an hour from the Managua airport and it would have been a hassle to get anything if it arrived later. On the flight I chatted with a Nicaraguan fellow who had fled the country during the war. His father was a colonel in the army of Somoza, the dictator that the Sandanistas overthrew. The Sandanistas had executed his father so he was obviously very anti Sandanista and anti Daniel Ortega. Ortega is the current president but he is most famous for his role as the leader of the Sandanistas. My seat mate on the plane thinks that Ortega will wreck the country and try to take dictatorial power. On the other hand Felipe, the fellow that the volunteer agency sent to pick me up at the airport, has exactly the opposite opinion. He says that all of the presidents since the war have done absolutely nothing to help the poor and Ortega ran on a platform of aid for the poor. Felipe thinks that Ortega will change the country for the better. It’s going to be interesting to get more opinions from the Nicaraguans I meet and from what I hear EVERYONE has an opinion on politics here.
I have rented a room in a house here - it’s not a homestay because I don’t eat with them or anything but they have been very cordial to me and it has many aspects of the homestays I did in the past while studying Spanish. The room is actually in what you could call the garage and it’s pretty spartan. At first I wasn’t sure whether I’d made a mistake or not but I found out what some of the other volunteers have and I think I actually did pretty well. The house itself is very nice - it appears that the family has money and has live-in help. Unfortunately my room is very near the street and right on an intersection of two streets that don’t have a stop sign. Rather than slow down at the intersection they barrel ahead full speed and lay on their horn to warn drivers on the cross street… all night long. Latin America is a loud place in general. They say that the difference between Latin America nd the USA is that in the USA you have the right to silence and in Latin America you have thr right to make noise. It’s just a difference in view point. Unfortunatley that’s not going to help me sleep.
I’m not yet going to try to form any opinions on Granada or Nicaragua in general until a spend a little more time here. First impressions can be misleading. One thing I will say is that Granada is rapidly becoming gringolandia. Americans and Europeans are coming in droves to buy homes and retire or just live as expats. The low cost of living makes even a US social security check an upper-middle class income. Any kind of reasonable pension allows one to live very well. They tell me that it’s very common for 70 year old men to come down here and marry 20 year old Nicas. The girls are pleased to have money and a nice place to live and the men are happy for obvious reasons. By American standards it sounds a little smarmy but if you’ve seen what the young women face without any financial support it’s hard to judge very harshly. Again, I’ll wait to form any strong opinions on anything here until my first world mind starts to get a grip on third world life.
January 27th, 2007
