I finally finished my proposal for a project I´ve been working on for about three months. The Mayor´s Office, and a small community two hours north of my town and I are working to rebuild a once-dirt floored, open aired class room. The walls, and most of the corrugated zinc roof is up. Still, there is no floor, gaping holes in the corrugation, no windows, doors, or floors, much less chalk boards. Hopefully USAID will help us out with paying for all the rest.

Between getting that application in and working towards the first annual business competition, I´ve been quite busy. This October 2nd, all of my four classes of high school students will gather in the park to compete for the best business innovation and planificaiton. They have spent the better part of the year working on creative businesses that fill specific needs pertaining to the community. We´ve spent the last month writing the business plans. I´m actually quite proud of the majority, and can´t wait for the regional competition.

This week was also Central America´s 188th year of liberty from Spain (September 15th). There were a lot of college age kids and recent grads around hanging out at the pool, and staying out until all hours of the night. Except for the fact that I live with small children and have to be extremely quite entering at early hours of the morning, I almost felt like I too was back in college. Except that my host brother playfully pointed a gun to my face the following morning interacting what would have gone down had I not been me. The gun fight in the mountains last night that kept me up until 5 in the morning didn´t help to calm my nerves. No one else has mentioned it, but it was the first time I had ever heard anything like that. Ever.

I hadn´t remembered for a while how different here is from there until I saw some of my sister´s reactions to Nicaragua. She took pictures of things I consider normal here, and somethings that weren´t shocking in a good or bad way. But even the roadside stands are of particular interest, and the bare-dirt floors, and the weak hand shakes. I´ll try better next time to warn and prepare. But to any visitors, expect things to be different.

I am really happy, though, that there is now one person who can prove that I was here, that I do work, that I really live in Nicaragua. Excuse my desire for validation. I´m not sure so many people remember I exist, including myself. And there is certaily no one but myself and my boss, and one or two other volunteers who know exaclty what I do. My host family doesn´t even care to ask.

After a marvellous visit by the Bean (whose bank account we drained--sorry!) I found myself drowning in responsibility. Living with the paranoia that things won´t be done the way I want them to be done, I find it hard to delegate. This means that if I´m not around, nothing gets done. When I got back, my director was angry, my classes were behind, and I had missed my deadline for my grant through USAID. I forgot to mention that I had a mysterious illness the week before the Bean arrived, and was incapable of getting anything done; there went my month.

Since then, I haven´t had reason to leave Yalí. I´m trying to get everything back on track before I have to justify it to my bosses during an in-service-training this weekend. That doesn´t mean I haven´t had time to enjoy myself, though. This weekend, the boys and I built a mini-mini-golf course in the front patio. We made flags and everything, and used a baseball and bat. There were more than a few hole-in-ones. Afterwards we all sat down to listen to Vivaldi´s Four Seasons and I read East of the Sun and West of the Moon--all thanks to Lena and her intellectual goody bag.

I never did extrapolate on my adventure to Colombia, an inability I attribute to extreme culture shock. Imagine if I had gone back home. My trip was great and even more meaningful because I got to see Rabe and because it will be my only out of country vacation for my two years in the Peace Corps. On arrival, there were some initial errands that had to be attended to , my favorite of which involved being pinched, pricked, and winked in a two minutes flat. I had to convince the Red Cross at the airport to give me a free yellow fever shot AND change the date to a week before. Thank God they were all girls, and I could charm them with my passable though accented Spanish, oh yeah, and blue eyes. Although to keep quiet in front of the boss, one of the ladies did pinch me, shortly before giving me the shot.

After said incident we were free to wander the streets of Bogotá. We site-saw during the day and hung out at Chris´s apartment listening to salsa music with his girlfriend Lorena at night. It is a beautiful city of 8-10 million people. Latin American cities have a knack for being ¨Big, but to an Uncertain Degree.¨ The huge metropolitan plain at 2640 meters above sea level bunches up into a cluster of skyscrapers before slamming headlong into impecably forested moutains which dwarf the city. The cordillera is gently crowned by a monastery on one side and a Mother Mary on the other.

Perhaps after being in Nicaragua for a year, any city could have brought me to tears. Saying that, the city is World Class, with restaurants of every style, ornate parks competing for space with Blackberry festooned suits, and enough museums that we had to cut not a few visits short. My next trip there will theoretically not be so rushed. It may be slightly more dangerous than Nicaragua, but it is a city; Jekel and Hyde in full gear.

Still enamored by both sides, I made the return trip. I had bought a flight out of San Jose, Costa Rica for half the price as a Managua ticket. Although, my lack of fine-tuned planning nearly put me on the streets on my way there and back. Leaving Nicaragua I hadn´t thought about where I was going to stay until I was on the bus to San Jose. I wandered the rainy streets long past sunset looking for any hostel with room. My return trip was marginally smoother, despite the fact that I hadn´t anticipated staying there another night. To my chagrin (though not surprise) the bus I intended taking home doesn´t run this year. Sorry.

This amongst other hang ups made my return trip lonely, sad, and inspiration for my last blog post. Bogotá is a beautiful, metropolitan hub, finely cultured, and stacked with gorgeous people. My flight to San Jose reminded me I was going back to Central America by sitting me next to an older lady who kept staring at me and invited me several times to stay the night at her house through sparsely teethed cackles. Crossing into Nicaragua was worse. Everyone seemed to have poorly capped teeth, words were increasingly swallowed, women stopped shaving there legs, people were generally less hygenic and in worse shape for their age, and trash was indsicriminantly tossed from any window.

But I suppose that is why I´m here. Less to shave peoples´ legs than to help plant the seeds of wealth building, and global integration (to a point). In a backwater country, breaking cultural barriers to market entry might be difficult, but that´s why I took this job in the first place.

I didn't realize what a shit hole Nicaragua was until I left it. As I write this there are students staring, and I think they might have understood the last sentence I wrote.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY USA!!!

Last night many of the volunteers scammed our way into an embassy party. There were little American flags everywhere, including inbetween our hotdogs, hamburgers, and potato salad. Fireworks were lit off over the embassy softball field to crown the evening. With the embassador to my left, and someone special to my right, it will be a while before I forget it.

Although...
In Niacaragua, where ¨There is more time than life,¨ I still manage to find myself wishing for more of it. Without my admition that it may be my essence to scramble for time, I emplore you all to lengthen both the day and the week. 36 hours. 9 days. Please. I ran out of an entire month to write a proposal for Peace Corps money to fix up a school in my municipality. My high school business classes are farther behind than any one else in my group.

Instead of working diligently to rectify the situations at hand, I´m instead on vacation. I´m preparing for my first and probably last time out of Nicaragua in my service. I will be in León srfing by this afternoon, and leaving for Costa Rica tomorrow. From San José, I´ll be flying to Bogotá, Colombia for the week to visit Rabe. I´m exciting about visiting my old college buddy, it´s been a long time and I can´t wait to see what kind of shenannigan´s have been undertaken. I also need to see some museums, galleries, culture, etc. Niacaragua, although beautiful, is lacking in certain fields of interest.

Even before this vacation, though, i´ve been on mini-vacation here in Managua. I have been helping with some of the new business volunteers´ training--although I almost missed it completely despite having them switch the entire training schedule to accomodate my trip to Colombia. No harm, no foul.

Back in Granada, I always seem to find a slow moment and free internet access: required ingredients for written word. The hot humid "winter" months (so named for the rains) have recently set the pace for work. Sticky. Slow. Exasperating. Fortunately, my breezy mountains are slightly cooler than Dante's Nicaragua. Sitting near sea level, I'm not sure how volunteers--or anyone for that matter--gets anything done.

Despite my relative climactic mollification, each one of my projects hangs by a thread. My business classes are a month behind at best. We have a parent/teacher meeting planned for this Monday. Perhaps together we can mitigate the homework strikes. At least I'll have a volunteer from the next small business development group in Yali to offer a hand. Most of my counterparts are less than interested in the prospect of more homework to grade, but I kept mixing it up and disorganizing the little organization we had. My job is not to teach the class, just to make sure it's technically sound. The necessity for a four section parent/teacher should be indicative of the level of impassability we've reached.

My secondary coffee project is once again on hold due to a pending change in counterparts. This will be my third. I've also taken so long working with my mayor's office, that I'm not sure we can get anything done before the end of my service next year.

At the same time, I'm completing my first year here in Nicaragua. I've been "In-Country" over a year and in Yali for over ten months. This tends to be the time most volunteers requestion their commitment. I didn't have any initial doubts, so I'm double loaded this time. I'm positive I want to stay here until the end of my service. I just wonder if I'm doing any good.

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.