June 24th
I’ve kind of learned to sleep in, so today I laid in bed until around 7 before rolling out to do some reading for an ‘exam’ I had. However, not only that, I had to do some last minute preparation for my interview with our program director regarding our site assignment.
Jordan and I showed up at around 9 to find that our program director was going to show up 30 minutes late (Surprised? No.), and that the other program specialist was going to show up around that time to give us our quiz on the book we’re reading. So I hooked up to the wireless internet signal that we can get from Owen’s porch and surfed the internet. I’m still kind of dumbfounded that it’s possible, but it’s something I’ve grown to love as I save 50 cents (almost a third of my daily salary!) every time I don’t use the internet at the cyber café. That’ll buy a box of milk and 2 piping-hot corn tortillas! A penny saved is literally a penny earned here.
I was the second one to get interviewed, and I jumped in there with my excel spreadsheet (I opted to not go with the powerpoint presentation). Georgia (our program director) asked me about my volunteer visit, my fears (none), what would prevent me from completing my service (nothing), and what I didn’t like about my job (students aren’t that motivated). Then, out of left field, she threw me a curve ball. She said there was something about my behaviour that “disturbed”. She said that whenever I’m talking I’m always all over the place, and she was wondering why. She didn’t know whether it was because I was anxious to get things done with, whether it was because I was nervous, or just had a lot of energy. I reassured her that it was just because I’m an animated person, and not to worry. I get excited about things and lose track of my thoughts. She said this could be a problem in a smaller area with relations. This I countered by saying that I can’t think nearly as fast in Spanish as I can in English, so I really haven’t had that problem. Furthermore, I haven’t had any problem making friends with everybody, so I’m not concerned with interactions with people and being misinterpreted. After having dealt with that, she asked to see my excel spreadsheet. I presented my arguments for my preferred sites (I think they’re 14 out of the 20), as well as gave her my reasoning for not liking other sites. I just mentioned Achuapa as one of the sites I ranked highest, and that’s where the conversation was focused for the rest of the interview – Achuapa, the counterparts in Achuapa, the working experience in Achuapa, etc. So…I think that might be the site I go to (at least that’s the feeling I got from talking with her). It’s the most isolated site out of all the selections, doesn’t have a site mate, and is one hour from the nearest volunteer. On top of that, there are only 4 buses that leave the town everyday. However, I’m not going to jump the gun and start speculating just yet. I still have 3 days until my fate is decided.
After that, I had to go home to finish preparing a class, and eat before I had to give a class to my 9th graders. The theme was their lives in 10 years, but I started late due to the bell that seems to ring sporadically as opposed to on some sort of set schedule. I had a lot of behavioural issues today as well, but for the most part I felt I dealt with them pretty effectively. I did reach a point today that totally thwarted what I was trying to do – I had a student that wouldn’t participate, wouldn’t talk to me, and wouldn’t look at me. I called on him and told him to go to the front of the class to present his life in 10 years. He said NOTHING, and sat in his chair as I stood there asking him for 5 minutes why he wouldn’t present what he wrote. He wouldn’t even acknowledge me; he just stared as his desk. I couldn’t do anything with that, and definitely couldn’t spend more time trying to get him to say something. But after that – nobody would participate because they all saw that he didn’t have to participate. I did thwart one student’s attempt to do the same thing by effectively chasing her to the front of the room, and when she tried to go down another aisle to her chair, I cut her off. She ran out of the classroom and tried to go in the backdoor, but I cut her off at the door. Eventually she presented and it was great, and very thorough. I don’t understand why she didn’t just present in the first place.
After the class, I had 2 hours of downtime before I had to head back over to Owen’s house to work on our powerpoint presentation on the survey of the pulperias that we made yesterday. We have to present our findings tomorrow at our training session, and had to finish the presentation/decide what we’d discuss.
I got home, and in the midst of writing my journal, my host mom asked me if I could help one of her friends with church with her English. She told me she wanted a translation, so that was what I thought I would be doing. She arrived about 3 minutes after I found out she wanted a translation, and she started speaking English with me immediately. She was applying to be a liaison between the Interdevelopment Bank of America and the Nicaraguan government. She has an interview with the company and wants me to help her with her English (particularly technical words), and give her interview questions so she can practice. She’s going to come back tomorrow night and I’m going to give her suggestions on how to improve her pronunciation and grammar. Her interview is with 6 American big wigs, and she’s just flipping out. Coincidentally, I just taught my 10th grade class about interviewing yesterday. So I busted out my business book and I went over it with her, and gave her tips about how to present herself, and convey positive, convincing characteristics about her that would give her a better chance of being offered the position. Pretty cool.
June 25th
Today really didn’t hold much for any of us, but it was full of stuff we needed to do. This week has been extremely busy for all of us in Masatepe, simply because we’ve actually had work to do. We’ve all had classes to teach, give a survey of pulperias to do, make an analysis of the survey results, and make a presentation of our results, interviews, and exams. While this has yielded very busy days for us all it has all been just a nuisance to us. We’re all just thinking about one thing – the site assignments on Friday.
But to give a summary:
We met up at Jordan’s house at 11 today to prepare the final bits of our presentation about our findings from our survey of the pulperias in Masatepe. We weren’t overly concerned with it as our Spanish is pretty good, and we all knew how to do a survey anyway. This was one activity of the business training that wasn’t particularly difficult and one we approached rather casually. We got done after about an hour, and headed back home. It’s Amanda’s birthday today, and I wanted to get her a present. I asked Doña Argentina, our maid/employee/family friend what I should get for her, and she suggested anything that wasn’t sweet – Amanda hates sweets (only child I’ve ever met in my life that didn’t like them). So I went and got her some Johnson’s baby shampoo (smells like apple!) and brought it home to find that she was taking a nap. Unfortunately I couldn’t give her her present until after my training session, so I ate my lunch (which I later found out was chicken giblets mixed with carrots and peas), gallo pinto, and a gigantic platano, and then headed to the casa cultural de Masatepe for our training session.
Today’s session was about how to work with counterparts, and effective strategies that we can use to do so. Furthermore, they gave us ideas for how to do training workshops with groups of teachers. None of us knew that it was something that we would be doing, so it was interesting to learn about to say the least. Following that training charla, our group gave our presentation about our survey results. Everything flowed pretty well, and we had a great theme, so the presentation was definitely successful. We definitely have an advantage being in the highest Spanish level, but hey, whatever. It makes training/being a Peace Corps volunteer that much easier, and it’s certainly something that I appreciate being competent in.
Following the training session, I hung out with a couple volunteers for a bit then headed back home. Amanda was at my host grandma’s house, so I dropped her gift off to her there when I headed to the supermarket to buy my loaf of enriched 100% wheat bread (my new vice). I owed my buddy Oliver money for recharging my phone, so being Nicaraguan, he showed up 20 minutes late (and called me when he was 10 minutes late to ask where I was – “I’m where I said I’d meet you, where are you?). After talking with him for a bit, I headed back home, ate dinner (same thing I had for lunch, thank god I take vitamins), then headed to my host grandma’s house for Amanda’s birthday cake. The cake itself was gorgeous and cost 250 cordobas (~19.3 cordobas = $1). Not only that, it was absolutely delicious, and probably was one of the best cakes I’d ever had in my life. I was so stunned, that I had to tell my host mom what a great value that was. I could only thing of a crappy store cake with their crappy store cake frosting, crappy store cake batter, and crappy store cake price. That’s what a 250-cordoba cake would be like in the United States.
After eating cake, I headed over to Avi’s house where we talked a bit about how we just wanted to find out our sites. Owen showed up and we discussed the issue further. I’m pretty sure we’ve come to the conclusion that we’re all going to have a couple of shots before we find out the sites – to as to relax ourselves. That way, if we get an absolutely horrible site we didn’t want, we’ll be laid back enough that it won’t be as bad. But we all agreed that whatever the site is, we want to be in a mood where we can just give a fist pump and a ‘hell yea!’ Friday is SO close.
And now for a tangent – more completely unconventional happenings in Nicaragua that I’m totally used to now – giant speakers on trucks that drive around the town telling the news. There are a couple of these trucks, which are generally small pick up trucks, with gigantic loud speakers on them that announce the news for the town. They drive up and down every street in town and tell people who died that day (even if it was a couple hours ago), what’s going on in politics, and other important city issues. The sound is always a thousand times louder than loud, and the time somebody dies is never late enough for the news to be announced. Last night at around 2 in the morning, a truck drove around announcing the death of some lady. When you wake up in the morning, if you don’t already know the news, you too much be dead as anybody within a 2 mile radius of the truck can hear what happened.
Oh Nicaragua.
I just want to find out my site.
Posted by thegoggins 
Posted by thegoggins 
Posted by thegoggins 
jam packed with 17 other people. I sat on Jordan’s lap for a good ways before somebody hopped off and I was to get a seat. Not only that though, when somebody else got on, and there were no seats → there was still room! The cobrador whips out a plank, tells me to stand up, and places the plank on my seat and the seat across from me to create a new seat where the space in between once was. Not that is ingenuity.