Richard’s Reckless Travels

So after two days of training and ice-breaking, I’ve made it to Nicaragua.

My time in DC was spent mostly preparing us for training and getting us acquainted with one another. The group is a real cool set of people with all sorts of great backgrounds. Essentially, it’s like a bunch of people with stories equivalent in awesomeness to the experiences I find myself in. There are 38 of us ranging from age 21 (thank god, I’m not the youngest) to 28. Most of the crew is just out of college by a year or two and generally share close to the same interests as each other. One girl is a yoga instructor and her fan club is growing hourly. It’s also been unreal at how quickly everybody has opened up. It doesn’t matter who you find yourself around – you always have some awesome epic conversation with somebody. Everybody is down with sharing anything with everybody, and it’s great.

We arrived here in Managua today at 1:40 PM (20 minutes late, thanks American), and our training group, country director, and the whole PC staff had signs for us behind the glass of the international baggage claim. We had like a million bags (I had 2 which clocked in at 45 lbs, or 35 lbs below my limit), so I hauled all of them off and was the first one out of the baggage claim to meet the staff. The staff was there with a video camera, and everybody came up and shook our hands, introduced themselves, took our bags and threw them in a truck. Our hotel is a short walk (very short) from the airport so we got right into things.

We’d been up a zillion hours already, so the first bit of training went by in between dozing off, but we pulled through. After a quick rundown of the basics, being given our daily stipend (which amounts to $1.79 a day, but is plenty of money). They gave us 2 weeks worth of money – in other words, we got around $22.30. Modest living, I’m seriously excited about it all. The hotel we’re all staying in is incredible though – 2 pools, wireless internet, and a compound the size of a military base – pretty cool. We met 4 current volunteers and I found out about all the bike places that are available (everybody thought it was great that I bought a helmet in DC and carried it on the airplane)

There are two groups of volunteers – small business development and teaching English as a foreign language. We’re getting split up with the business volunteers going to Masaya on Saturday to move in with our host families. Tomorrow we have our Spanish assessment exam for placement, some vaccinations, as well as some medical evaluations. This is deemed week ‘zero’, so the real training starts next week with 3 days in a row of language training, then technical training two days a week. The volunteers are put in groups of 4-5 where we do all our training together based on our Spanish level. So all those great friendships we’ve got going now will most likely be supplanted by close relationships with our groups.

It appears my bed is covered in fire ants…I’m going to put this off by taking a dip in the pool.

What an experience!