Richard’s Reckless Travels

June 6^th                 

Today I followed my new routine (which I’ll eventually break), of doing yoga in the morning. It has been raining at night hardcore generally, so my opportunity to keep up my jogging habit has always been thwarted. Furthermore, I haven’t been able to go out to my broken swingset to do my pull-ups. So since I was up at 5 AM (once again, for whatever reason), I busted out my yoga mat (aka my sewn together double sheet) and proceeded to once again kick my ass. In light of how completely exhausted/sore I’ve been after doing it, I considering rethinking the way I’m going to exercise.

Anyway, after working out, I had a quick lunch, got dressed, and headed over to Jordan’s so we could head to San Marcos for training. It really feels routine to walk up to the highway from our house and just hop on some bus now. I don’t even flinch and think about how different it is from the U.S. anymore. So the bus showed up when we were walking to the highway, and we ran and jumped in the back door of the school bus as it was driving away (it reminded me of Paraguay!). Jordan got on first, but when I got on, there didn’t appear to be too much room to sneak in, so I ended up riding about 30 seconds hanging on the ladder on the back of the bus. Eventually I was able to squeeze my way into the back of the bus – and amazingly 2 other guys along with the guy who shuts the door was able to as well. Almost as soon as I got on, I became super cautious about guarding my valuables. I’d decided not to bring my backpack today for this reason alone. We had packed about 120-150 people on the school bus, so it’s not much room to lay down the law if somebody touches your stuff – but I got lucky. There was a guy standing in back of me, and another guy standing in back of him. This man had a backpack and was ‘going to open it’ when his hand somehow made his way from his backpack, up my leg, and toward the opening of my pocket (where I was carrying tons of stuff today). Unfortunately for him, I caught him and might have broken a finger, I wasn’t sure. He was eager to get his hand away after I proceeded to severely injure his wayward hand, and promptly jumped off the back of the bus at the next available opportunity. Vagos.

Training today was at Ave Maria college in San Marcos, and was run by University of Alabama, but has since changed to another prominent university, whose name I can’t remember. It’s the nicest schooling establishment I’ve seen in all of Nicaragua, and all the students who attend, do all of their classes in English. Apparently, it’s one of the best high schools in the region.

Being the prompt American’s we are, we made it through the gates and to the place where we were to have training without any assistance, nor holdups – a sign of growth! We were also the only volunteers who were able to do so. The makings of a champ à right here.

Training involved teaching us how to facilitate youths and what types of strategies we could use when we get to our sites. The TEFL group showed up as well, but unfortunately they split us up for the morning session. It’s always great to see them because we all get along so well. Still this surprises everybody who works at Peace Corps, as every Nica group in the past (which is composed of 2 or 3 groups of volunteers – in our case, SBD and TEFL) has always hung out with their own group and not gotten along with the other groups.

The afternoon session taught us about health emergencies, and how to handle various situations. This provided us with many ideas I had not even considered to do, such as giving numerous people Peace Corps numbers to call in the event that you’re incapacitated and need to contact them. The session last session was what everybody showed up for – to find out where our volunteer visit was going to be. As is per usual, they dragged it out and made us wait to find out where we were going, but we speeded it up by not having any questions and thwarting their plans to keep us waiting. I was the second person in SBD to find out where I’m going for 4 days next week – Chinandega, Chinandega. It’s the department capital in the northern most department on the Pacific side of Nicaragua. It’s also known as the hottest place in the country, or as Josh Berman (author of the Nicaragua guidebook) said: “Did we mention it’s hot in Chinandega? It’s so hot in Chinandega, you can expect to break a sweat in the shower. This is what it feels like to be a rotisserie chicken.” So now you all know what sorts of temperatures I’ll be expecting. They told me I was going there, and my first reaction was “Oh noooo it’s so far away.” However, since it’s one of the biggest cities in Nicaragua, it’s on one of the main highways (I think there are 2), and thus, the trip from Masatepe to Chinandega should take around 3 and a half hours.

After the session we all parted ways and went home. I did my normal nightly schedule of doing nothing/pretending I’m doing something productive, and visited the bakery. Aside from that, I tried to figure out how much it costs to make a phone call on my cell phone and was still left extremely confused and no closer to figuring it out than I was at the beginning. In the past 4 days, I’ve made calls of:

15 minutes for $1

20 minutes for $3

31 minutes for $5 (twice)

And last night I made a call of 58 minutes for…34 cents.

What?????? They charge us per minute to make calls, but I can’t seem to find a common factor in any of the above values. This is a total crapshoot. It seems like if I make continuous 15-minute calls, I’ll get the best bang for my buck. But chances are, the next 20-second phone call I make will cost me 10 dollars, so who knows. 

Eventually I’ll figure it out.

June 7^th

Today was my down time day since tomorrow I’m headed to Chinandega. My game plan for the day was to get rid of my ridiculous 500 Cordoba bills so when I’m on my visit, I don’t have to pay for a dollar bus ride with 25 dollars. So after putzing around for a little bit in the morning, I headed over to the Palí supermarket to buy toilet paper and food for my trip tomorrow. I ended up just getting a pack of gum, yoghurt, and toilet paper…so…I didn’t get much for my 3ish hour bus trip. Damn! Being cheap gets me again! I sauntered back to my house just in time for the first game in the Euro Cup, and watched that for a bit. Luckily, even though we got rid of cable, I’m still able to watch the games.

Some volunteers from another town showed up in Masatepe, so I met up with them and spent some time walking around town with them. After which we headed over to Avi’s house to get in my rocking chair time. As I mentioned previously, it has become a past time for virtually every volunteer, and it’s really something you look forward to – particularly when there are other volunteers to chat up. It’s just a bit of the Nicaraguan culture that has rubbed off on us.

I got back in time for lunch where I got my long awaited serving of rice. I don’t know why, but I’m always looking forward to having rice and beans every meal. The only thing I can attribute this to is that eating it ensures my digestive system stays in good working order. One of the guys in our group had to have an enema because for one reason or another, his body decided it wanted to be constipated for 8 days. Lesson learned from that – eat my rice and beans. Mmmm!

I ended up watching the second game of the Euro cup, reading a book, and I finally scratched the surface of my enormous movie collection that I brought with me. When I started drifting off, Jose, the head of Peace Corps security showed up (I forgot he was coming) to check out the area that Jordan and I were ‘aggressively followed’. So he picked us up where we learned that last night some volunteers were robbed a knifepoint but thankfully were otherwise O.K. Then we headed to the police station where Julio had a police officer ride with us while we told him how we got home. Aside from forgetting how we got home, it went all pretty well, and he drove us back to Jordan’s house. Jordan and I talked for a bit just about how stupid we felt that Peace Corps security had to check it all out for us, when suddenly Julio showed up again. “Hey, we think we found the guys who were going after you.” Neither of us quite understood, as we never gave a description of these guys or anything. However, they had cruised the last street (the street we have to walk to get to the institute we teach at), and they had found a group of guys that has been a problem in the past and he wanted to see if we could identify one of them. We drove up along side some of them and we’re able to identify any of them. However, among the second batch of ‘chavalos’, sure enough, there was the guy I’d been yelling at just a little more than a week ago. The police officer wanted to arrest him on the spot, so they drove us back home, and if all went according to plan, they went and arrested said bad guy. Wow.

The rest of the night just involved packing and using up all my cell phone saldo again. I just don’t get it. I could probably make millions by starting my own cell phone company here in Nicaragua and having easy to understand rates, good customer service, and even provide good promotions!

So there you have it folks, I’ve devised a plan to stay here my entire life. Anybody want to help me finance this operation?

June 8^th

Today, I woke up at midnight after one of the trainees that got robbed called me to get the numbers of all the trainees in Masatepe. Ultimately, I woke up wicked early because of the excitement associated with finally getting out of my training site. I woke up early like I normally do, so I broke into my routine – I did some hardcore yoga. I may be losing weight, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that prevent me from exercising. There is one downside to this – I’m always starving.

But whatever.

I ate my breakfast, double checked my things, and headed to the bus stop for the first step of my trip to Chinandega. I was going to meet one of the trainees in the park, so I showed up 20 minutes early. We were going to rendezvous with Avi and take the bus together…but 8 AM rolled by, and the bus showed up, and I was the only one there. Avi was moving at Nica time (But I wasn’t really surprised), and I hadn’t heard anything from the other trainee (David).

I saw one of the trainees from Nandasmo, Liz, prancing around the central park in Masatepe, and called her out. Apparently she was catching the same bus and for whatever reason had ventured into the town. She hopped on the microbus and drove 2 blocks before we ran into Katie Earle. Finally, one more stop in Masatepe yielded 2 more trainees that were heading in the direction of Managua. All those trainees were headed for Leon (or thereabouts), so they got off at a different bus depot.

My bus stop was Israel, the end of the line in Managua. It was actually a million times better than I ever imagined it would be. I’d seen far worse in Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. There is a minibus that goes directly to Chinandega which I got on and waited. They don’t leave until it’s completely full, so I ended up waiting for about 20 minutes. Coincidentally, in these subsequent 20 minutes, Avi and David showed up, and we ended up taking the bus together to Chinandega.

The ride to Chinandega was relatively uneventful, but you could definitely feel the temperature getting hotter the closer we got to Chinandega. I had to hop a taxi to the volunteer’s house who I was going to visit, so I followed his vague directions and headed into Chinandega. I didn’t mess things up like I thought, and ended up finding him sitting on the sidewalk outside his apartment helping out some of his students. To put it lightly – this is far from the Peace Corps experience I ever expected to see.

He lives in an apartment above a business in Chinandega in a really nice neighborhood, just down the street from the meeting point in the event of a rise in the Peace Corps security level. Mostly everything about it is like a normal apartment (minus the presence of an actual kitchen). He’s got a TV, cable, a Playstation, some furniture, minifridge, microwave, and can’t cook just like me. To make things even better, tomorrow morning he’s going to be getting a high-speed internet connection. Basically, I wanted to know how to handle finances when I got to site, and he provided me with some very logical wisdom regarding how to handle the finances. Incidentally, he also studied econ in college (Syracuse in case you wanted to know Gram), and is totally pinche like me. He said that leaving your site and traveling around really eats up your salary, and that there’s no problem if you don’t leave your site. You can live really well if you just stick around you site.

After hanging out for a bit with him and his friend, we headed over to some restaurant where we got a steak, which was incredible. It kind of set me back as it was 40% of the money PC gave me for food, but whatever. I also hit up one of the supermarkets here where I found more American goods than I would in Safeway. I even found Skippy and Peter Pan peanut butter. I bought a box of cereal, a bag of milk, and 12 bananas for my breakfast tomorrow. If I get placed in a city like this, I don’t think I’ll ever leave Peace Corps.

I also finally realized why no PC volunteers ever told me what they made. The cost of living is so much different from the U.S., it’s totally ridiculous to even think about. That has been a cultural thing I have grown to learn. You really can’t put it into perspective.

This experience is great though. Being a PCV in a city is more like just like living in a regular city as oppose to the stereotypical PC experience. It’s a city, so the economic demographic is completely different from that in small towns and the countryside – a good thing to experience.

June 9^th

Today was going to be my first ‘official’ day observing Luis today. He’s got a nice apartment, albeit a very unfurnished one – so I slept on a sleeping pad on the floor. Fortunately, the apartment lacks most of the bugs you find in Masatepe simply because it’s a city location (with the exception being the cockroach that we killed tonight).

I woke up at my typical time of around 5:30 and tried out my first Peace Corps city breakfast – corn flakes and cold milk. It was amazing. It made me feel like I was back in the states again, what with being able to enjoy my comfort food. It was almost like I’d totally regressed to what it was like to live by myself. I had my bowl of cereal (the cheapest box – imported from Miami), a couple of bananas, and some jelly on my whole wheat bread. It was absolutely amazing.

Luis and I headed to his class around 7:30 and caught a cab over there. We got to his school around 7:45 and hung out for a bit while the students all arrived. His institute has around 250 students and is significantly smaller than the school I teach at in Masatepe. Nevertheless, being in a huge city, the school is a WHOLE lot different than Masatepe. Most of the students who attend his school are kids who have been kicked out of other schools because of discipline issues. It was good to see his classes and how he dealt with such issues as I got a good idea of how I’ll handle the situations in the future. I’d really like to be placed in a big city like Chinandega, so being able to see how students in the city act was a real eye opener, but not discouraging at all. I really think it would be a great opportunity, and being a city person, I think it’d be the perfect situation for me.

He had 2 classes back-to-back, and then a planning session with his counterpart when school was over. Luis and I headed over to another institute that is down the road to speak with some people about figuring out when he was going to start teaching 2 classes over there. The institute where he’s going to start teaching new classes is enormous, and is the second biggest school in the entire country. It was a whole lot different, but I’m not too worried about something like that as all Nicaraguan students generally all have the same feeling towards schooling – so bring it on.

We got back to his school at around 10:15 and had to wait until classes were over so he could plan the next class with his counterpart – unfortunately this involved waiting 2 hours. We got pretty bored after a while, and with 10 minutes to go, Luis said, “Forget it, I’m not going to wait for them to ring the bell, I’ll do it myself.” So ring the bell he did, and we met up with his counterpart where we planned the class. It was a relatively easy topic, so planning the class took roughly 10 minutes, and then we were headed back to his apartment.

As it was lunchtime, we wanted something to eat while we watched the Euro Cup, so we went over and grabbed some fried rice at the Chinese restaurant that is down the block from his place. Once again, not what I expected from Peace Corps…but I’ve got no problem with it. We enjoyed our Chinese food and watched the Euro Cup before taking a short siesta. Following his siesta, we headed over to the laundromat to drop off Luis’ clothes. We headed over to the bar in the central park to wait for his clothes to dry. He’s a lot like me with regards to his personality, so we get along pretty well. 

After spending about an hour there, we headed to the supermarket, got some milk, picked up his clothes and headed back to his apartment. It was the director (principal) of his school’s birthday today, so we headed over to his place to give him a gift. Luis lived in his house for 5 months before finding his apartment, so he has a really good relationship with him. Just as soon as we arrived, we were invited to stay for dinner, where we were promptly served chicken, rice, beans, avocadoes, eggs, and tomatoes – a good, hearty Nicaraguan meal. Unfortunately, after dinner is began to rain like crazy, so we just hung out for a bit and read the paper. It was then that I realized how unfortunate the economic situation in Nicaragua is right now. Inflation for the month of April was the highest it has been since 1999, with a rate of 19.7%! To think I was concerned about the rate of inflation in the U.S., this doesn’t even compare.

It didn’t stop raining, so we had to run home in the torrential downpour the 9 or so blocks back to his apartment. Now it’s just relaxing for the rest of the night.

Hopefully I can get a city for my PC site! I find out my site on June 27^th, so it’s getting pretty close. I’m starting to get pretty excited.

June 10^th

With all the formalities I had to deal with on the volunteer visit completed on the first day, I didn’t have anything to do the second day – little did I know that was the game plan.

Luis was getting his high speed internet installed (on a Peace Corps salary!), so we needed to wait for the guys to show up. The cable network is 2 buildings away from his apartment, so we can literally see them when they’re walking to his house…but, this is Nicaragua, so promptness isn’t exactly expected. Nevertheless, at 10:20 on the dot they showed up…but didn’t really do anything, as they stood around and chatted for an hour and a half before leaving without finishing the installation of the internet. We called them back and they told us that they would show up…sometime today. In other words, we had more time to kill. I somehow stumbled upon an Italian movie with Spanish subtitles that was absolutely amazing at around 10:45, and the movie finally ended at 3 PM. The movie ended and we had absolutely no idea what it was about, nor what it was called. It was amazing though and helped us kill more than 4 hours (after some research online, we found it was called La ragazze di San Frediano).

In light of spending most of the day watching this random movie (with 3 minutes of commercials that came on after every hour), we threw away all the good time to walk around the city. This is fine though as Chinandega isn’t a tourist town at all (this is obvious once you get here), and it doesn’t really have any noteworthy attractions. However, I still love it and hope PC sends me to a city so I can get this type of experience (even though it’s nothing like I expected).

We headed over to the ministry of education to pick up a business proposal for a grant that Luis is applying for, and then headed back to his apartment. This was the only thing related to work we did today, but it was good to learn about. Peace Corps provides a grant of $2,000 for every volunteer when they find a project that is worthy of such a grant. In order to receive the money, the organization (in this case, the institute he works in) prepares a sort of business plan with a total breakdown of why they need it, how much it will cost, and what steps they will take to implement their project. 

On the way home, we stopped by at the other (there are 3) supermarket that is Chinandega, and this one was the most like America of them all. They even had milk CARTONS. It was great – I bought some peanut butter and a box of juice, and we headed back to Luis’ apartment to wait for the internet guy. We went and sat on the corner across the street from the cable building and talked with the street vendor. After around 20 minutes, we just went and got them to install the internet so we could go do something.

After it was all squared away, we were tired of sitting in the house (especially after watching an epic movie all day), so we headed down to the park…to sit in the outdoor bar. We hung out with Luis’ friend Fernando for about an hour then headed back to his apartment where I ate my last bowl of cereal (mmmm….), a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and watched an hour of the Simpsons.

I’m headed back to Masatepe at 8 AM tomorrow morning, but I’m ready for it. This whole visit was a real eye-opening experience.