My first year in Nicaragua has now officially come and gone. I´ve had my official One-Year medical visit with nothing to report other than a wart that had to be brutally burnt off. My palm is still sporting an inch long whole, the depth of which I´ve never had on my body.

I´m currently typing in my Institute where I give class. We have a great set of computers where the internet has recently been reinstalled. The first year (7th grade class) is doing work, but not even pretending to behave by our standards. They are screaming, fighting, yelling, but somehow getting their assignment done. Our sence of workspace solitude does not exist here. I´ve just given an Excel class to teach all my classes to write professional surveys and market studies. Some of my sixteen year old students did not know how to click and drag. There is a huge gap between those who grew up in town and those who did not.


As I was walking from a planning session the other day, the lights went out. This is nothing out of the ordinary, and my cell phone is always enough to light the path. I quickly realized though that my cell phone drowned out a cacophony of flashing lights. There were thousands, no, millions of fireflies exploding sporatically their eerie greenish light. It looked like the grandstands of the olympics but without another light around. Occassionaly lightening in the background would drown out th stadium sensation, only to return it within seconds. Besutiful.

Simultaneously knocking on hard wood to evade the dreaded jinx, I whole-heartedly claim things are stellar. I have spent half of April out of Yalí. After a fantastic vacation, and two weeks of trainings and meetings, I´m finally ready to get back to work. I´m just not sure I´m needed. Empty Nesters around the world, I feel your paigns to care for and reprimand self-sufficient children realizing all too late that they were quite capable of solo success for some time. My business class miraculously went on in my absence. I´ve returned to hear some fantastically creative ideas for entrepreneurship here. I´ve come to the realization that after three months of not working with the coffee exporter, I don´t have a place. They simply hired a technician who outshines the old Starsky and Hutch of my counterpart and me.

I am happy to get back into the institute with newly invigorated teachers and students. The competitions for the students entreprenurial projects is arriving, and we´re all getting excited. Even my first english class to my coffee cooperatives in over a month was great. I felt it was so long over due, the phrase of the day was ¨It´s About Time!¨

There´s also been a decent amount of rain lately, which means Reading Weather for me. We´re actually in a great saddle between two climatic peaks. With the dry season waning, and rains a´comin´, there´s enough water to do laundry and still enough sun to dry it! After a long, and completely drenched hike the other day, I was very happy to have dry towels, boxers AND sweatpants. Hot coffee didn´t hurt either.


P.S. I´ve become so proficient at clothes washing, I broke chunks off of the cement washboard the other day! Too much stress, or Old Abe? You be the judge.