Richard’s Reckless Travels

July 24th

More charlas. More waiting. That much closer.

Had to get up at around 6 today to, you know, keep a rhythm. IPADE gave us a breakfast that was the fulfilling but not entirely exciting gallo pinto, white bread, and salty omelet, and it left me wanting more – more vitamins that is.  I found Sonia, Danica, and Dianne and we all decided we yearned for something a bit more…exciting for breakfast. After settling on a plan, we headed to La Colonia, the grocery store right next to the mall where we went and saw Batman last night.

However, all too often you plan something here that doesn’t go according to plan – and that happened again. We had a charla at 8, but figured we could get to the store and back before all was said and done. The microbus rolled up to the store at 7:30…but the store didn’t open until 8. With everything starting on Nica time, we weren’t overly concerned with being late to the charla since they never start on time anyway.

Waiting seemed like the best idea since we’d just paid a quarter to get over to the store, so we parked ourselves in front of the door and chatted for a while. Unfortunately, the grocery store was operating on Nica time as well, and opened 10 minutes late – as if we weren’t in a big enough hurry already. We figured devising an excuse as to why we were late would be a good idea, and coincidentally, things unfolded exactly the way we were going to say it did. The store itself had next to nothing to offer, then we ended up getting called by PC staff 3 times asking us where we were, when we were going to get back, and reminding us we were late.

Ultimately we ended up stumbling into our first session 30 minutes late, quite terrified, but without the scolding we thought we’d receive.

Our first session was a simple, but long handbook review with the country director. Following this, we met the former U.S. ambassador (his service ended Saturday), who told us how the embassy worked, programs the embassy is involved in, then just broke down how we can get support from them in the future.

It was pretty interesting, but we were all beat from charlas, and this feeling carried over into the afternoon sessions where we barely were able to listen to a presentation about USAID, before finally being sent off for the day. And that’s where we are now. Time will tell what we do tonight. I think we’re heading to the mall to buy the rest of the basics (yoga mat, maybe another pair of dress shoes?), before heading off to our sites on Sunday. Exciting!