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.

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.

As I dab at my never ending snuffles, I am thankful I didn´t get them last week. After spending a couple of days I should have just taken as vacation days, I left on the grandest adventure of my Peace Corps career. We got down to Granada by evening and escaped to the volcano Island of Ometepe be noon the next day. Contending for a position as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, our brief stay on the island was an important part of the Peace Corps Nicaragua experience.

We stayed with a friend and made a sprint attempt to the top of the smaller of two volcanoes, Maderas. Turning the four hour hike into a two hour jaunt, we all felt deserving of the five pounds of rice we brought to the top--we no where near finished it. Within fifteen minutes of reaching the crater lake at the summit, two of us were swimming across. We got to the other end to find one of the most spectacular views I´ve been privy to see. We slowly made our way back, tighting with every stroke. Turning to each other half way back we said what we had avoided admitting: our legs were starting to cramp up. We stopped talking and just kept trucking, using mostly our arms. Making it back to shore--ten yards of mud and partially decomposed detritus--was painful. But we did it alive. By the time I got back, though, my legs had cramped up so bad, I had to crawl through the mud in front of a group of twenty canadian super-hippy med students. They proved to be some odd-balls, but at the time it was embarassing.

The ultra-hippy vibe is marvellous, and I hadn´t been called Conservative in years. The narrow-minds of the extreme Left have found a haven on Ometepe. I´m happy they can find peace hiding away from the rest of the world: the literature, the research, the anecdotes that describe the world progressing because of capitalism. I´ve researched the etimology of words looking for a good combination. After already applying it to a scholarship application, I´m ready to say I support Regulated Capitalism. I believe in it, and I believe it works. Weather it come from the Left (opening and reforming socialist ideals to realities of free markets) or from the Right (responsible taxation and limited distribution of basic needs) I think it works.

The rest of the political discussion on the trip was dictated by a German companion whose uniquie view on Northern European Socialism was eye-opening. We were all interested and had our own swists on the story. We cruised in a private whip, a rare experience in Peace Corps, up North. We hiked around Estelí, and finally made it to Canyon Somoto. It was beautiful, filled with people because of Semana Santa (Holy Week) but Beautiful none the less. I got dropped of in Condega just in time to get my last bus back, and found myself home for a very late dinner.

Since then, I´ve been preparing for a training session my sector has with our teacher counterparts. We´ve also been inundated by a plague of large insects called the chicharra. If I hadn´t been convinced they were an annual epidemic, I would have sworn we harboring Jewish slaves in town. Their humming sound is so intense, it disrupts class in periodic bursts. They are beautiful in their all encompassing presence. I´ve never heald an exoskeletal creature of such girth. They are about two and half inches long, and longer in circumfrance. Their long, fine, paper-thin wings barely look like they are strong enough to support them in aerial transport. This could explain their frequent landings in inauspicious spots. Like my bed. It reminds me more of a mutant locust plague than a yearly occurance.

I´m also suffereing from some combination of allergies and a cold. They all tell me I´ve got gripe, which is a cover-all, non-specific set of symptoms I don´t believe in. I´ve spent more time in bed than I should have after a week of vacations. Cést la vie.

Happy Easter and Much Love