Richard’s Reckless Travels

July 17^th

729 days to go! Just kidding.

Woke up at a more reasonable hour this morning – 6 AM – where I pondered over whether or not I’d head to Masaya to get a shirt for the swearing in ceremony. I ultimately decided that I would not because I’m cheap. That 10 dollars could be the difference between me eating for 2 days or starving – who knows what the situation will be at site? Anyway, we have to present our youth group tomorrow to the rest of the business trainees/PC staff about our results, or in our case, our “learning experiences.” I worked on that a little bit before ultimately deciding to work on our business advising report that we also have to turn in tomorrow. We’ve all been doing interviews/assessments of a small business owner (in most people’s cases, this small business owner was in the family), and we do an assessment of their business, and give advice accordingly afterwards. In particular, we look at 4 areas – Human Resources, Production/Operation, Administration, and Marketing. After analyzing their responses and observing the business itself, we lump our recommendations into one of the aforementioned categories. After making the recommendations we are required to make a plan of action for said recommendations and indicate the priority of each. The whole prospect of doing this and providing feedback was incredibly daunting, but after jumping in, I got on a roll and it became relatively easy and I churned out a good 3 pages of recommendations. Just gotta get your feet wet I guess.

In the midst of writing my report, a “Buenas” came from our front gate where some desconocida was looking for me. She just came on in and asked for my name. I had no idea what to make of her – whether she was from the government/Peace Corps/was there to kill me/give me a present or what. It turned out she was the lady who was going to give me my language interview at 1 that afternoon. However, since she was in Masatepe, she wanted to try to get one interview over with in the morning. So I did mine a couple of hours early, and judging from the questions she asked me, I think I tested around the same area. She asked me a bunch of technical questions, about bicycles for example, and riding 21 miles for my birthday. She wanted to tell me how it was – what am I supposed to say? “Well…it was fun, pretty, lots of hills…” I also didn’t/don’t know the names of bike components in Spanish so that really set me back. Overall I was really unsatisfied/pissed with the interview, but whatever. I’m already at a high language level, this interview was worthless for me anyway.

I then headed to the gym for a couple hours to de-stress – god I missed the gym! There is a gigantic (like the size of 2 Olympic swimming pools enclosed paved area in back of the gym where there were around 20 guys brushing kidney beans around on the ground. I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life, but I think they were drying the beans? Honestly couldn’t tell you, but it was just a whole bunch of beans – and now I know the process they go through before they get to my plate.

Following the gym, I worked a little longer on the small business report before meeting up with Jordan and our youth group to discuss our presentation that we’re going to talk about. It was a pretty successful meeting, and we didn’t have to pull information out of the kids like I thought we’d have to. Nevertheless, during the brainstorming process, we asked Javier what he thought about the goal of doing a mini-project. He responded:

Visualizar un proyecto que nos sirve de alguna manera para mejorar el ambiente o facilitar información histórica de nuestro pueblo.

The above is just a bulleted caption for the quote, so it’s not conjugated, but what it says is that we wanted to visualize a Project that would serve the group in some way to improve the environment or facilitate historical information about our town. We were pretty dumbfounded as this is the kind of textbook like answer that we, and Peace Corps want to hear, but it came straight from his mouth without feeding him ideas. Nuts.

After our rendezvous, Jordan and I threw together a quick presentation for tomorrow for the rest of the trainees, and that was that.

Got 2 free pineapples too! Sweet deal!

July 18^th

Today started out as a pretty bad day – with tons of rain. Whenever it rains, almost everything in Nicaragua is bad as it inevitably causes not so happy things to happen.

I woke up to what was a dull roar – no, that’s a bad assessment. I woke up to an incredible roar, even though I was wearing earplugs. I got up to find that the source of this powerful noise was in fact the incredible downpour of rain. Whenever it rains, I have no desire to go anywhere because any and everything you possess will be completely drenched. Basically, you end up becoming so wet that it would be a laborious task to explain to anybody that you were in fact not swimming in your clothes. Another thing the rain brings – mold. When I first read about this in other volunteer’s blogs, I was not really concerned as they pointed out this is spontaneously occurs on leather products. Well, little did I know that mold grows on EVERYTHING. Mold has grown on every single one of my cycling caps, what the hell? I don’t know what the combination is to yield such an outcome, but it’s unreal. Some days I can’t even take this mold.

Wow, tangential.

Anyway, we had to go to Ave Maria today for a training session/youth group presentation, and this rain wasn’t conducive to any of this happening without massive issues. It was raining way too much to not wear my sandals and bring my shoes in a bag, so I compromised my professional look. I ended up arriving at Ave Maria completely drenched anyway, but fortunately, I had some warm/dry shoes to change into – oh yea, that’s planning ahead.

We had a charla on alcohol, which was a pretty standard informative but not overly new information for us. Generally this is how all the charlas are – they fill in the gaps for things you don’t know since most of what they teach you is common sense. Example: alcohol can impair your judgement. Further explanation is unnecessary. This was followed by our youth group presentations. At first only one youth group out of all the training towns showed up because apparently the PC bus didn’t show up to pick up any of the youths. The kids from my youth group were some of the missing youths, which led to worry – our youth group didn’t succeed, and now they aren’t there to help explain what happened? Oh no. Eventually they showed up because they took a normal bus (good kids!), and we gave our presentation. At first I was nervous about it compared to the rest of the groups, since they actually realised a project. However, in the end I discovered that if you presented a convincing argument for the outcome you got, that was ok.

Following the end of the ceremony, our youths got sent home and we headed to lunch. The afternoon session was followed by presentations by the trainees from San Juan de Oriente. They did an amazing job, particularly considering the horribly difficult topic that they had to present – easily the most difficult class we’ll have to teach in all our Peace Corps service.

After the presentation, we did evaluations, and then we all got hit with a total curveball. For reasons I won’t delve into, our fellow PCT Bobby was told he will be sent home and won’t be allowed to continue as a volunteer. Basically they believed he wouldn’t be a successful volunteer, so he’s getting sent home. We were all shocked and incredibly set back by this decision and headed straight to a bar afterwards. Due to potential issues with this, I’m going to limit the description of this incident to this paragraph.

After a couple of hours hanging out with the other trainees, we all headed back home to cenar (eat dinner). This trip home was a quick trip back as we were all going straight back out to San Juan de Oriente to hang out with Bobby for the night. So after getting some food in my system and money from the bank, I headed over to Avi’s house where Owen, Avi, and I sat around and talked with Avi’s host family before taking off. It was about 8:30 by the time we decided to embark – meaning there weren’t busses running. This meant that in order to get there, we’d need to be creative. Or in other words, we’d need to find an alternative way to arrive at our destination.

We ended up catching a ride in the back of a truck where we had a conversation with a police officer that was from 22 and from Masatepe. Apparently hitchhiking was the only way he can get to work in Masaya that late at night, but it’s far more efficient than any other form of transportation, and he does it every night.

We arrived in Catarina where we met up with Kat and Andrea to talk a bit. This meeting lasted only a bit before we headed to the Mirador to hang out with Bobby for the last night. Our rendezvous lasted a couple of hours but was a good time overall. The trip home ended up being more entertaining as I had to deal with some amiable drunk guy for 20 minutes. A cab ended up being the only car on the highway, magically, and we caught that home, putting an successful end to our not so great day.