Richard’s Reckless Travels

July 16^th

Today I woke up super, super early (4:45) because I had good intentions, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions – so they say. Kind of how the day unfolded in the long run.

When my alarm went off, I searched around for the clock so I could turn off the alarm, but couldn’t find it in the dark. I ended up just hitting the desk until I hit the clock, and in the process knocked most of my things on the floor – but the alarm turned off. Success! I wanted to go to the gym but ended up putting it off until 6 AM. Just had a light 2-hour workout and then headed back home by around 7:30.

After eating, Jordan and I did some errands and then stopped by the cyber. It’s kind of weird going so long without using the internet and getting online to find so much huge news that has happened. I was astounded to find that the U.S. had the highest inflation in 25 years for a month, and Zimbabwe was doing a little worse with an inflation rate of 2,200,00%. For those of you that aren’t really mathematically inclined – that’s 4.18% inflation every minute of the day. How terrible.

We had to make a trip to Managua this afternoon, so I went home and ate lunch really quickly before we headed to Managua at 11:30. Strangely, I haven’t grown weary of eating gallo pinto so frequently, but as they say – variety is the spice of life. I’m starting to understand why.

After a relatively comfortable ride to the UCA, we all met up and had an “NGO Fair” for lack of a better name. There were 6 organizations, and each of us has the opportunity to work with some of the organizations that have a presence in/near our sites. One of the NGO’s told me that there is a guy in Achuapa who wants to export honey to the U.S. and that I should talk to him to see what’s up. Awesome! Maybe I could finally realise one of my dreams of being a beekeeper – in Nicaragua no less! Learning about this guy who wants to sell honey was really the most useful information I took away from the charla itself. After this, I had to go to the PCHQ where I was briefed over the word choice of a certain comment I made on a video. Words say a lot.

After this rendezvous, I once again had to make my way from the PCHQ to Masatepe. Avi was with me, so we had to make our way back – and this came in the form of a regular ol’ school bus headed to Pontillo (wherever that is). The bus roared by us and we lamented the fact that it was totally oblivious to the fact that we in fact wanted to catch the bus. We stood around for 2 minutes before ultimately deciding to run 3 blocks to try to catch the bus at a red light. Magically this happened. However, there were a good 150 people on a school bus made for 65, so I ended up riding a couple of blocks hanging outside the door, but ultimately I made my way inside of the bus. It took a really roundabout way of going to Masatepe, but this just meant that seats started to open the farther we got from Managua, AKA we didn’t have to stand the whole time.

About an hour and a half later, we got into Masatepe (and saved a whole 10 cords in the process by taking this as oppose to the microbus!) and headed home. I downed another plate of gallo pinto, met up with Owen to give him a book, and paid Oliver some money I owed him (he bought me some peanut butter which unfortunately was crunchy, next time I’ll specify creamy).

2 years from today my Peace Corps service is over. Crazy.

Oh and Gram – a charla is a presentation, more or less. Just a talk about something.