January 7th
After waking up early, heading to the gym, and unsuccessfully trying to get a haircut, I headed to Malpaisillo to hang out for half the day. The next day I’ll head to León for a meeting with all the volunteers of León. Essentially it’s a meeting for us all to complain about stuff we don’t like about Peace Corps (think policies). From what I hear, we make a bunch of suggestions, then the staff shoots down everyone of them. For this reason alone, I want to be the representative for our department. She might actually hand off the position to me too. Must be that Colorado connection.
Another reason I went early was that my buddy Luis randomly decided he would show up too – giving me even more reason to go. On that note, it’d probably turn into some kind of disaster.
The ride took way longer than it should have (cows were passing us on the highway going down from El Sauce to the main highway) but eventually I showed up (but got off on the highway because the bus drive told me they wouldn’t be going in town). As my luck would have it, they did drive into town, and I was left to walk to long road into town. On the long walk, I ran into none other than Brie, Luis, and Brie’s friend Karla:
“We’re going to the bar, do you have money?”
“Yea…”
“Good, then you can cover us.”
And so began my Malpaisillo escapades – not even 10 minutes after being there, we were in a bar. To make matters…more interesting…Luis convinced us (god knows how) that beer had too many calories, “You have to take care of yourself.” he repeated. So out came the rum and so began the end of the night.
Upon getting back to Brie’s house, Luis and I had a craving for coconut milk that needed to be satisfied. Phil can attest to what happens when I had a craving (he’s the same) – I need to fulfill that craving. There’s no ‘if’ – I have to do it. Fortunately for everybody involved, Brie had a coconut tree in her backyard – a 20 foot one. Not to be deterred I attempted to climb it, but I am not a very good climber – especially after a couple tragos of rum. But damn my skill, I wanted coconuts. Brie hooked me up with a ladder that appeared to be made out aluminum edging. Unfortunately, it was as flexible as a ladder made out of aluminum edging – which is not a characteristic one looks for in a ladder. Scenarios like this generally end up with a “Remember when I fell off the ladder” story. Not looking for a story like that, not now anyway. So up the wobbly ladder I went which to my dismay left me a good 10 feet short of the coconut treasure that laid above. I tried summoning my Fantastic Four stretch arms, and even tried “Go go Goggins arms” but alas, they remained out of my reach. As I’d already discovered my climbing skills were well below par, I decided against scaling the rest of the tree – so we got some random guy to do it. In all honestly, I don’t have the slightest clue where this guy came from, but it’s a good thing he did. So we gave Mr. Random Guy a machete and said, “Ok, we want coconuts, climb the tree.” Mr. Random Monkey-esque man (you should’ve seen how easy he got to the top!) climbed the tree and cut us off 5 coconuts.
We ate some dinner and then after skinning the coconuts (I don’t know who did it, but they magically appeared ready to stick a straw in them) we enjoyed a nice coconut drink, well that was the plan anyway. A couple seconds later, I realised that in fact I hate coconut milk, it’s crap. It didn’t help that my coconut milk was a bit rancid, so I tried another one with pretty much the same result. At least that craving is finally over and done with, I now know why coconut has always tasted so good – sugar.
We all then sat around and played cards for the rest of the night while we emptied bottles of rum (bohužel). Luis and I pretty much tackled the bottles ourselves so the night, hence the night ending as follows:
“Brie.”
“Brie.”
“Brie.”
“The light’s on.”
“Brie. Turn off the light.”
“The light’s on.”
“Brie…”
Eventually she turned off the light and we fell unconscious.
January 8th
The day started much like the yesterday ended:
“Brie.”
“Brie, we’re hungry”
“Brie, make us eggs.”
“Brie.”
“Brie.”
“Brie.”
“Brie.”
“Brie. We want juice too.”
“Pancakes too.”
“We want homefries.”
“Waffles would be nice.”
“Brie.”
“Brie.”
Brie who’d been out on her patio thought we were still passed out from the night before until her friend Karla (who lives next door) told Brie we were up, “Listen.” She told her. Sure enough, we were calling her name as well as making our demands. For some reason, she actually yielded to our demands and we got pancakes, eggs, and fresh squeezed orange juice. Good way to start the day.
We caught the bus to León (where the cobrador of the bus asked me to give him my hat) and hung out at the gas station a bit (we needed our electrolytes apparently). We wasted a bit of time in León checking our mail (I got 5 packages! – Thanks Mom, Gram, Heather) before Luis headed back to Chinandega and Brie and I went to our meeting.
The meeting itself was more of a social gathering for us to meet the new volunteers in our department (there were 10 new ones – that’s a 66% increase!) and I swapped some music and movies with some volunteers (400 new songs – awesome!).
Then it was just the busride back to the campo with Irene.
January 9th
Not entirely sure if I did anything productive today aside from planning an English class (which never happened since my student didn’t show up). I did peel a couple of oranges, but really I sat around the whole day waiting for the world to come to me – and it didn’t.
January 10th
I was more productive this time around – I did a bunch of errands during the morning (I need to clean this house before my parents come) and visited with a few friends.
I chatted with my neighbor a bit about how Nicaragua was during the war. He told me that you couldn’t even be friends with your neighbor because any argument ended with somebody taking our a machine gun and just killing the other person. Not only that, but everybody had 4 to 5 machine guns in their house (a fact that was confirmed by about 10 passerbyers). You didn’t go anywhere without your machine gun – not even when you went to take a bath in the river. Everybody 10 and up never went around in the streets without a gun. I also learned that my neighbor’s house was used to shoot at the Somoza base that was located at the end of the block (where the Ministry of Education building now is), and the park across from my street was used as a helicopter landing area for the government military. Furthermore, most houses have evidence of machine gun fire – I’d just never bothered to look. My other neighbor walks with a limp because he was shot through the leg during the war.
All food was rationed with a coupon – hell, all of anything was rationed by the government with a coupon. People were given a couple of pounds of rice and beans to hold them over for a couple of weeks. There were no stores like there are now – money was worthless. I can’t even picture the aforementioned without it permanently being cloudy (even though I know it was probably sunny all the time). It leaves a very Hemingway-esque feel to it – and here it was raining.
The entire afternoon I tackled the book my mom sent me (inadverntently – I just meant to skim it real quick). I bought a hammock earlier in the day, so I got to lounge around in it the rest of the afternoon while I read. God knows why I never got one earlier because they’re amazing.
January 11th
I finished the rest of my book:
Starbucked: A double tall tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture – A
A great book. It’s a shame I had to wait over a year to read it! I don’t even drink coffee and I had a hankering to start drinking some immediately after reading it. It dispels myths and lays out the entire formula Starbucks went through to go from small time independent chain to the megacorporation it is now.
Since that took most of the morning, I hung out on my porch for a bit eating an orange. Since our patron saints festival is this weekend, this yielded many a drunk person coming up to me:
“Hey chele. Give me 10 pesos.”
“No.”
“Ok. Give me 2 pesos.”
“No.”
“But I just want a little beer. A nice cold beer.”
“No.”
“Ok. Give me one peso. I really want that little beer.”
“No.”
“Ok. Well take it easy chele.”
I grew tired of this drunk babble as well as the fireworks (that were set off every 10 seconds) so I headed to Johanni’s house for a couple of hours. There I had a couple of oranges and hung out with Johanni and her family a bit. I also learned that her parents are counting down the days until my parents get here. According to Johanni, they’re “desperately counting the days until they come.” She says they keep asking her questions, “Do you think they’ll like Achuapa?” “When are they coming to the house?” “How much Spanish do they know?”
I hope my parents are ready.
I hung out with Yordanka a bit afterwards on my porch before heading to my counterparts house for dinner. There I saw a typical Univision TV show with scantily clad women doing very little/very bad acting (but that’s not really why you watch Univision). While this did not surprise me, the next commercial break did. Apparently there is a show that debuts tomorrow that is called “Sin senos, no hay paraíso.” For those of you that aren’t Spanish speakers, the translation is “Without breasts, there is no paradise.” I can only imagine what this show could be about, but I’ll definitely be tuning in.
January 12th
Today began with my normal routine of going to a gym. I did a couple of visits (and made it a point to actually learn the names of some of the people I’ve been talking to for months) and made some of the daily purchases before heading back home and filling the rest of the morning with a movie.
The afternoon rolled around and I had an English class with Johanni until 3:30. For some reason Johanni and Yordanka both struggle with directions (things like Northwest, Southeast, etc) are damn near impossible for them to understand. So we spent most of the class discussing directions like that. When the class ended, Rafa, my counterpart’s son, showed up and said there was somebody from Peace Corps who was lost. Kind of confused, I came out on my porch and met a girl named Kat. She was heading to Largartillo (the Spanish school 10 km west of Achuapa) and had missed the bus that goes that way. So on top of knowing no Spanish, she had no way of getting to the place where she could learn Spanish. So I set out to find a ride for her, which was a lot easier than it I initially thought it would. My counterpart that I eat dinner with everyday said he’d give her a ride there at 4:30. That gave us half an hour to kill, so I gave her some food and water (you have to dehydrate yourself on that bus ride so you don’t have to go to the bathroom in the middle of it) and we chatted about Peace Corps and I gave her a run down on Nicaragua. Turns out she was a volunteer in Senegal a couple years and a month ago up and decided to come to Nicaragua to learn Spanish (sounds like a sporadic idea I’d come up with). I also found out that she got paid the same thing that I do now – after I got my raise. She also mentioned that she spent next to nothing of her paycheck (and didn’t have to pay rent!) so her paycheck went real far. She was surprised to hear we had soymilk here, so I brought her over to the biggest pulperia in the world to buy some before she headed to Largartillo (which renders you pretty isolated). My counterpart showed up at 4:30, and off she went – no longer totally screwed. Definitely a cool “Peace Corps” experience.
Posted by thegoggins 
Posted by thegoggins 
Posted by thegoggins 
