To my beloved friends and family,
I feel I have kept you all in the dark for too long. I amn aware that all of you have had but one thought/ponderance/obsession pertaining to my trip to Nicaragua, and now I will put your minds at ease.
I have decided to grow out my facial hair for my time in Masatepe.
I still shave the sides, so it's not completely "No-Shave November"-esque, but the 'stache and chin have maintained the manly reggedness that you have all come to know and love. Now, someone's going to ask, "Why does he do that to his beautiful face?", to which I would respond, "Not exactly sure. It just feels right."
And now witht the stuff you might actually care about. Training has really picked up the pace. We recieve technical training from PC staff and current volunteers for hours on end on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and have class all day on Mon, Tues, and Thursday. My Spanish class and I, consisting of 3 other people, started a youth group that meets twice a week as a platform to begin spreading our "Use a condom or you'll get HIV and pregnant" gospel. It's one of the training requirements and I can't tell if the kids, 12 to 17 years old, keep coming back because they enjoy it or because they're bored and school doesn't start until next week. Established volunteers have like 10 youth groups that they juggle, which is quite impressive and makes having youth groups in general seem more fruitful of a task than just the one. I also gave my first talk about HIV to about 20 women in the waiting room at the centro de salud (Health Center doesn't sound right so I'm using centro de salud.) Doing the charlas there is common because they've got time on their hands to listen while they're waiting for something and couldn't escape even if they wanted to. My next talk is going to be on nutrition. We make little posters to put up while we give it, and I think I could definitely get used to giving them. It's nice to feel like I'm on my way to making a small differece, but all the volunteers tell you it gets much easier once you're done with training, at your official site, and don't have the strict and busy schedule imposed on you. Not to mention the PC continuously mentions that a good part of the impact you will make comes in the close relationships you build in all areas of your life. That's why they refer to it as a 24-7 job.
I also never brought up the food here. If I could use one word to describe Nicaraguan food, it would be, without a doubt, "fried". EVERYTHING is fried. The most common traditional dish is gallo pinto, which is fried rice and fried black beans combined and fried again. And gallo pinto is served with every meal. Every day. Breakfast usually also includes a fried, scrambled egg, simple bread, and a cup of absilutely delicious coffee. (Taylor, you are my resident expert on coffee, so when you come you can let me know if it's actually that good or if I'm just biased.) Lunch, the most important and biggest meal of the day, has some sort of meat or carb dish, usually fried, and fried plantains. To wash it down I get a refresco, which is a blended fruit drink. It's usually made fromsqueezed orange juice mixed with granadia, which I had never heard of before coming here, but is fantastic. I also got a tomato, onion, and chilote salad with lemon juice and salt once, and it was so refreshing to get vegetables that I made a huge deal about how much I loved it and now they serve it to me everyday for lunch. But it really is delicious. Dinner is usually gallo pinto, bread, refresco, and whatever else happens to be easy. It has to be prepared and eaten in the hour we have before novelas, after all.
Basketball. I played it. Kati and I were looking for a place to play soccer because our normal place was shut down for some reason, and they were playing basketball on the other court, so we challenged them to 2 on 2. The rims are bent and super bouncy, so perimeter shooting is almost impossible. Furthermore, they play rim instead of posession, clearing it is only out of the key, and inbounding is unannanounced and always directly beneath the hoop, so the entire game takes place within a 5 foot circle in the key. And they must have gathered all strategy from watching And 1 and NBA basketball because defense is practically nonexistant and everyone just drives the lane, usually calling a foul. I went back the next day because I was bored,a dn there was a semi-pro team playiong an official game there. It was far from what we would expect semi-pro ball to look like, but Nicaragua is a baseball country, give them a break. What was most exciting for me was seeing the team. Extremely breif and oversimplified Nicaraguan demographics lesson time. The east coast of Nicaragua was settled by the Brittish for a while and they brought with them a good deal of Caribbean inhabitants. For that reason, English, Spanish, and a Creole language called Miskito are all spoken on the side, and the black population is much higher than on the Pacific coast. So the coolest part was seeing the team that had like 6 black guys that looked just like African Americans in the US, but spoke perfect Spanish. For me, I don't know if most people have seen that or not, it was like the Starburst commercial witht the Japanese guy that plays the bagpipes and has a Scottish accent; it was awesome. That same day the two guys we played against were there and asked me to play on a different team representing Masatepe. I went and practiced with them the following day, but they put me as a center. Yeah, at 6 feet tall, I'm a center. Once again I did ok, but I'm still debating whether or not I want to play with them because the style is just so very much not me. But I'll keep you posted ont he one.
I feel like everytime I have less to say in these things, but write more. Once you acheive the level of fame that is 11 followers, the fans become your world. By the way, I will get pictures up before I come home, I just have to travel an hour on bus to Managua to do it, and it could be a while before I have that kind of time. But I will do it.
Love,
Nick
