May 9^th – May 10^th

It’s the weekend – I did nothing. But I did eat super well and learned how to cook several kinds of potatoes.

May 11^th

Being Monday, there is generally very little to do in Achuapa. Furthermore, I don’t have classes or any other work scheduled for Mondays due to Peace Corps meetings and whatnot that tend to happen. But I did get into the gym – and did some personal training for the son of the gym owner. Afterwards, I met up with Noriko (the Japanese Peace Corps Volunteer) to discuss the nutrition charla I would be giving with her the following day in the health center. Also a frog jumped into the corner of my bathroom door when I was shutting it, rendering a non-shutting and very squishy way to keep my door open (it didn’t die).

May 12^th

I was still a little unsure what I was going to talk about this morning, so I woke up early and reviewed my material for the nutrition presentation I was going to do in the health center. At 9, I went to the health center to find that there weren’t too many people there (We were just going to give the presentation in the waiting room). After waiting a bit, we had a group of about 35 people on hand to listen to me blab about the importance of eating well (the point I kept driving home was that they could avoid being sick/avoid being as sick by simply improving their diets) for around 25 minutes (15 minutes longer than I originally planned on talking). Following the charla (it went quite well), I headed home to do some quick planning and ate some lunch.

That afternoon I went to the primary school to teach chess to the 6^th graders (a meeting that has failed to happen for 3 weeks). I arrived to find a handful of kids actually there waiting for me. Unfortunately, neither the directora nor the sub-directora were there for me to get the chess boards, so we played soccer for a bit. The sub-directora eventually showed up, and I taught chess to about 9 kids, with 1 that really grasped it. Well, one is better than none.

A chicken was wandering around my porch when I got home and I ended up trapping it between my door and the fence. Chickens aren’t the brightest. Afterwards, I planned with Profe Maria.

I started seeing that I had garbage missing around the time I was called a CIA agent back in November. I was thinking that people might be stealing my garbage and spying on me to find out if I was actually a spy or something. Turns out the kids that live on the corner of my street dig through and play with my garbage (empty cereal, bags of oatmeal, juice bottles, etc.). So if anybody could send any small toys (I don’t even care what it is), that would be great.

The stupid vago chicken

May 13^th

I prepared myself a little more for my class today (Equilibrium point – the hardest class we have to teach due to the math involved), and headed to Los Caraos with my fingers crossed – hoping that the kids would grasp this class better than the previous class (which they didn’t understand at all). Amazingly, the class turned out to be the best class I’ve taught in my year here thus far. Brie gave me some hints for the class (have the class teach me the class after a brief explanation), and they were invaluable. I’ve definitely saved a lot of time by focusing on the main topics in the class instead of wasting my time in the early (and less important sections) of the course. So, if all goes according to plan now, my students will have learned everything necessary to participate in the local competition (which will be in August) by June. They’ll have 3 months to pull something together – I’m on top of things this year.

After class, I walked around town making visits and planned with my counterparts from my two other schools. I got done with everything by 3:15 with the expectation that I could go to the gym at 4…only to find out that the person with the only key didn’t show up (this is why I need the key, which I’ve been promised, but has yet to be realised). So I headed to the park and did a bunch of pull-ups instead. In the midst of this, 2 of my students showed up to do pull-ups with me and I sat around talking with them for about an hour about travelling, weight training, and why I don’t drink in Achuapa.

I had dinner at my buddy’s house and then came home and planned for my classes the following day.

Keeping busy-ish.

May 14^th

Today was relatively uneventful; I went for a jog then prepared myself for my classes for the day. For my private school kids, this would be their last class before the exam. In order to assure that as many students as possible get a good score on the exam, I’ve had the students to exams that are exactly like ones I’m going to put on the exam, except with different numbers. On top of telling them exactly what is on the exam, I’m going to give them the formulas needed to calculate the problems. How much easier could it get? No memorizing, just plug and chug. Unfortunately, the students failed to take advantage of the time in class and were screwing around a lot. The majority weren’t paying attention, and I kicked my first student out of class. The discipline is always an issue, but is an even more severe issue when my counterpart is not teaching with me. So the kids kept screwing around, the class left, and so did the students – with the exception of my 2 best students who stuck around to ask questions.

After class, I headed home and got my home all prepared and cleaned up. I made myself some lunch then headed to Chinandega on the last bus out of Achuapa. I rolled into Chinandega at 7:30 and Luis and I headed down to the park for some pupusas (for those of you that haven’t read my previous 10 million entries, pupusas are an El Salvadorean tortilla-like food with cheese and/or meat on the inside. They’re delicious. Then in true Chinandega fashion, we ended the night in a bar (but the high class bar).

May 15^th

Today was a pretty low-key day that saw us do very little since Luis had a class to go to. Ben, the SBD volunteer from Villa Nueva showed up for the day and we headed to the baseball game (it’s the playoffs now). Without our buddy Carlos (who told us he was going to show up but never did), the game just wasn’t the same. Fernando showed up with a friend, but the game was dull without all the heckling that Luis and I generally do in the presence of Carlos. He brings out the loud side in us, and sometimes, that’s just what I need. Without the screaming and yelling that typically personifies the type of experience we have at the game, I ended up falling asleep and Chinandega trudged itself to a 7-2 loss (we thought it was 4-2). Following the game, we went the bar outside the Dilectus nightclub and hung out for a couple hours before heading home.

May 16^th

After sleeping in for a while, we grabbed a licuado in the park, and Ben headed back to his town. During the day we did absolutely nothing until Lindsay and her site mate Xemo (I have no idea how her name is written) showed up and we all went to dinner at Lagos (our favourite restaurant in Chinadega, though Paraíso, the new bar, is a close 2^nd). Moscow circus was in town, so after eating we all went over there to do something different for a change. Surprisingly, there was an enormous line to get in that stretched all the way to the highway, so to the end of the line we went. The main draw of the circus (the part that Luis and I were looking for) was the Ossito (little bear) that was “casi humano” (almost human). Earlier in the day, we’d been joking that it was “almost human” because he would be selling the tickets and would be outraged to get a 500 cordoba bill (nobody has change for them), or that he would be security and would eat anybody that got rowdy. This made plenty of sense to us, but unfortunately neither of these potential events happened. The circus was set up an iron and scrap metal recycling yard that I didn’t even know existed, but it seemed like they maximised all the space and squeezed every possible vehicle they could into the lot. We bought the cheapest tickets because 20 dollars seemed like a little to steep for a Russian circus in Nicaragua. With our 5-dollar tickets, we expected pretty poor seats and that we’d be unable to see much. However, upon entering, we saw that there were only around 15 rows in total, and our cheap seats provided plenty of buffer zone in the event that tigers, or the ossito got lose and went on a killing rampage; Luis and I even discussed potential evacuation strategies.

The circus was pretty entertaining and boasted a super lame clown who, coincidentally, also road a dirt bike in their steel ball of death (where 3-5 motorcycles are all driving around at the same time). The “ossito” left a bunch of unanswered questions as from where we were sitting it looked very much, acted very much, and moved very much like a person in a costume. Furthermore, it was wearing a kind of towel skirt. Very suspicious. There were also around 8 tigers who would take swings at the trainer. Much to our disappointment, every time the tigers would take a swing at him (see  always), the always missed. For me, this was the best part of the circus. They also had acrobats and tightrope walkers – the typical circus venue. At the end of it all, after coming out to take a bow, they brought out the “ossito” which was definitely not the same bear that performed (though they claim otherwise), and a tiger so you could take a picture with them. The tiger had its neck chained down, but would always throw up his head and growl when people went to have a picture taken – this amused me much. I would’ve paid just to see the tiger do that for a couple hours.

May 17^th

That morning, we grabbed a licuado in the park and Lindsay and her site mate headed back to their site. Once again, Luis and I were bored out of our minds and killed time by going to the park later that afternoon with Carlos and eating ice cream/making commentary about a couple that was sitting there – the guy clearly had done something wrong, and his girlfriend was pissed. This entertained us for around an hour and we headed back to Luis’ house. That night, we met up with the new health volunteer in Chinandega and went out to Paraíso with him. He’d only been in site for around a month, so we exchanged some stories for a couple hours over beers. The entertaining part of the night was that some girl in the bar randomly bought me a beer – a first. However, we remained suspicious as it appeared to us that all the guys she was with were gay. Either way I got a free beer out of it.

May 18^th

I had to get up super early in the morning so I could get to the Peace Corps office at 9:30 for my one-year medical exam. Fortunately, I fell asleep on the microbus for the first time in my life, which made the time fly by (it’s around 2.5 hours in microbus). I dropped off my PC passport to Mimi (the lady who works the phones at the office and knows every single face of every single volunteer before they even learn who she is) to get my visa renewed. Afterwards, I had some time to kill and headed to the volunteer lounge to wait until my appointment. A couple volunteers from my group showed up for their medical appointment as well, including a TEFL volunteer who I hadn’t seen in almost a year. On top of that, I saw the SBD volunteer in the town an hour south of Achuapa, she was meeting with the PC Nicaragua director to discuss something. Afterwards, she told me exactly why she was there – she was getting married to a Nicaraguan she’d been dating since she was a trainee 2 years ago.

I did my medical appointment, which was much more of an informal chat than a med appointment, and got an appointment set up to go get my dental check up at 11:30. The dentist office is way on the other side of town, but I was able to bargain down to $1.25 to get over there. My taxi driver turned out to be a physics teacher, and I chatted him up the whole time about the class I teach, and about the problems of being a teacher in a Nicaraguan classroom. He had no idea where I was going, so we drove around asking people where it was, and eventually found it.

Once in the office, I waited a bit before being brought into the room with the chair and being told to wait a little bit – and wait I did. I was sitting around for 20 minutes before the dentist showed up, looked at my teeth for no more than 20 seconds, told me I had no cavities, then told me she’d be back in 7 little minutes. Around 35 “little” minutes later, she came back and cleaned my teeth with her dental pick or whatever. She was so brutal with the cleaning, that she probably couldn’t have drawn more blood from me if she decapitated me. She had little pieces of cotton that she’d use to absorb all the blood from her cleaning – I feel this should be the first indication that she is using a little too much “elbow grease” to quote my dentist in the states. Her cleaning process consisted of stabbing your in the gums and going up from that. On a few instances, I was concerned she was on the verge of pulling out my tooth. Eventually I got out of there minus a few liters of blood – but with clean teeth, and headed back to the office.

Luis was in the office when I got back, and after finding out from Peace Corps that I’d have to spend the night in Managua (this is probably the thing I dislike most about Peace Corps, Managua is terrible), we headed out for a couple beers. From the bar, I went to the hospital to have my appointment with a dermatologist (I have around 12 plantar warts, and one regular one on my foot – gross). She showed up 30 minutes late, but my appointment was pretty quick and she prescribed a regimen and told me to come back in 15 days to burn the rest off with liquid nitrogen. Cool – whatever, I just wanted to get out of there.

There weren’t any taxi’s in front of the hospital, so I walked all the way to the highway to try to catch one. After a good 10 minutes I just resorted to catching a microbus, which was 80% less and coincidentally took the same amount of time as a taxi. After getting dropped off on the highway I ran to the office, grabbed my stuff, got my prescriptions and caught a taxi to the UCA (I refused PC’s hotel room and left – choosing to either stay in Chinandega or Malpaisillo since I had to be in Achuapa by noon the next day).

May 19^th

I caught an early bus out of Malpaisillo and got back to Achuapa in time to do my chess/domino club at the primary school. There, I taught a handful of kids how to play dominoes/domino strategy. Afterwards, I headed over to my counterpart’s house to discuss a review I was going to do with the kids. The rest of the day I spent doing nothing – I just practiced cooking potatoes (something that has become sort of a daily ritual for me now).

May 20^th

After teaching my class in my campo town, I came home and wrote the exam for all my 4^th year kids. To prevent copying, I wrote 3 versions of the exam – this I felt, would prevent any copying during the exam. I then showed the exam to my counterparts who gave it the go-ahead.

May 21^st

After giving doing a final review of the material with my kids in the Instituto, I headed to my private school to finally give the exam. Several times I questioned whether or not the material was too easy (we did examples in class that were identical to the ones on the exam), since there was nothing to fool the kids on the exam. They knew exactly what I was going to put on the exam. However, I decided to ignore that hunch because I knew that my students would surprise me and fail anyway – and fail they did. After 3 hours of grading 17 exams (I was giving partial credit to those who turned in their scratch paper), I had the results – 6 people got more than 95% (with 2 getting more than 100%), 1 person with 85%, and the rest of the class got less than 50%. One student didn’t even get 5% on the test. I was super disappointed, but the 6 super good grades were evidence enough that the test was fair. This was a downer, so I just dwelled on it the rest of the day.

May 22^nd

The highlight of the day – the parent of a student that failed my exam said the parents of the kids in 4^th year wanted a meeting with me because they were concerned about their students.

May 23^rd

I went on my morning jog (I’m getting my endurance/enthusiasm back), and after getting cleaned up, I took the initiative. Instead of waiting for a meeting with all the parents of my students in 4^th year, I was going to go to the house of every one of them and speak to their parents individually. I decided to go to the house of every student instead of just the houses of the students who performed poorly on the exam, just to be fair and avoid any potential misunderstandings. I started a little before 8 AM, and went to the house of the first student on my list, coincidentally her mother was the president of the Parent/School Union. Her daughter did super well on my exam (and showed up to my house the previous day for help with her English homework), so this made my case super easy. I kept doing this routine until I had visited all but 3 students (who lived in a comarca super far away). I initially was worried that the parents of my students who had poor grades in the class would not be understanding, and would be pissed at me. It turned out to be just the opposite; I was received very well in everybody’s house (with one exception) and received the support of the parents. One comical moment was when I went to the house of one student who really does poorly in my class, she told me that her parents weren’t home/were on vacation and she didn’t know when they were coming back, and that she had no family members that were home either, “Then who is living here with you?” I asked. Just then, her Mom walked in and asked who I was. Needless to say, she got in trouble. All in all, I spent 4.5 hours non-stop visiting every student’s house in my private school class.

The only exception was the family of a student in my class that I know very well. I know the student’s parents very well too. Unfortunately, this student performs very poorly in my class because he’s never paying attention. His parents didn’t see it this way though, and instead blew up at me saying my exams are written poorly, that the Ministry of Education says I can’t give exams worth so many points, and that so many people are failing the class because my teaching methodology is poor. I need to understand the difficulties of every single one of my students and teach according to their struggles. In other words, she was making excuses for her son having performed so poorly. So now they’re demanding a meeting with all the parents of the students, the principal, and the Ministry of Education delegate in my town. What a nightmare. This stressed me out. The lights went out for the rest of the night afterwards – this stressed me out too.

The frog that keeps trying to come into my house when it rains

May 24^th

In light of the brain damage I encountered at the end of the day yesterday, today after going on my jog and cleaning myself up, I did some “prep work” if you will. First I headed to the delegada’s house to ask about having a meeting with her Monday, and made it for 3 the next afternoon. Then, I headed to the sub-directora’s house to discuss what plan of action I should take in response to the parental threat I’ve encountered. So I discussed everything with her, got on the same page, she gave me things to talk to the delegada about, and told me the administration of the school would back me. Then I went to my counterpart’s house and talked to her about what went down, and she too told me she’d be behind me, “Let them have their reunion.” She told me.

After figuring out my position and seeing what kind of potential roadblocks I could encounter, I headed to Johani’s farm to get away from the nonsense that is Achuapa. It’s the perfect retreat for me when I’m stressed out because it’s outside the town and lacks all those town noises (people selling stuff, blaring music, generators, welding, etc.). I hung out at her house for a few hours and helped her with her English homework before going back to good ol’ Achuapa.

Yesterday, a friend of mine (who used to do bodybuilding before getting sick), told me the previous day that he had some weights for me that I could bring to my house. When I got back, he was next door and said I could come pick them all up. Not having any idea what to expect, I brought my backpack and headed down to his house. Once there, I discovered that he had makeshift barbells made of iron bars, iron ball bearings, concrete, and what appear to be some sort of iron wheels (perhaps from a mining cart?). Needless to say, the backpack would be worthless with this, so I’d have to bring them to my house one by one. It was about 300 meters up a hill from my friend’s house to my house and I figured it’d be cake. Well, I did 5 trips carrying barbells that were 60 lbs and more, and it rendered me absolutely exhausted – I couldn’t even grip a glass of water afterwards. All in all it took me an hour, and I’m still not done because I had no strength to grab the last makeshift dumbbells. But finally – a gym! No more paying 3 dollars a month to go to the gym for me! With this new acquisition, I now have the most complete gym I could ever care to have in Achuapa – now I’ll be able to get back in great shape again. It also means no more waiting to go to the gym, or not being able to go because it’s raining. Talk about a high point. Awesome.

My new badass gym

May 25^th

I took a day off from jogging and instead woke up early to continue my “preparation” in the event that the 4^th year parents in my private school want to lynch me. First I headed to the house of several families to discuss their student’s progress in my class (both went well). Afterwards, I went to the Institute to discuss some things with the directora and sub-directora. Furthermore, I helped Johani a bit with her English homework. Come afternoon, I had my meeting with the delegada to discuss the issue I have in my private school. The basis for the meeting was to discuss what I’d been doing to improve the grades of the students, what I had changed, and things I had done to essentially give free points to the students. I then mentioned the problem with a family and the students that I have. She started out by saying that she was behind me all the way and finished by mentioning that if the school, students, and parents are going to screw around with me like this, she’ll just pull me out of the school and I can just keep teaching in the public schools. This answer was not what I expected – so much in fact that I was rendered speechless when she said it. I’ve always disliked the school due to the poor behaviour of the students and the lack of support from the administration, but I had never thought about leaving (well, I never thought it was possible). After the meeting, I called up Georgia (my PC boss) to tell her everything that had went down. After filling her in, she decided to get involved to, and is going to attempt to help smooth things over for me.

Tonight, I also experimented cooking – I made an AMAZING spicy potato burrito. The first time I’ve ever experimented and come up with something that tasted great. Add another cooking skill!