Settling in

I have a bunch of things to write about but not enough time (the power went out in the big city, so my hour long internet session got cut down to 15 min).

Here is whats been going on with me in the past week:

Myself and the three other volunteers at my training town formed a youth group in town and had our first meeting yesterday. We were all a little nervous about how things would go and whether our spanish speaking and understanding skills would be able to handle 15 teenagers. Anyways, things ended up going great. We invited about 20 kids in town (went to their houses and personally invited them to come) and 13 showed up. We considered that in itself a big success because if i was 15 and a random foreigner invited me to a youth group, I probably wouldnt have gone. So we introduced ourselves at the meeting and had everyone else introduce themselves. Then we divided the group into girls and guys and had them each make a map of Santa Teresa. Its a really good activity for young people to see the differences in perception of the town between genders (especially in a country with concrete gender divisions like Nicaragua). We kept the first meeting short but have plans to go play soccer with them tomorrow afternoon, should be fun...I hope our group still shows up.

Other than that not much is new. It is fiestas patronales season here which means that each town has a small festival to honor their patron saint. Ours is this weekend which means lots of live music and dancing in the street. I´m excited about it. This past weekend I was at the fiesta patronale of another training town. I was walking with a group of 5 other peace corps volunteers down the street. During these fiestas there are random groups of people with instruments or costumes that make a haphazard sort of parade down the streets. Its sort of spontaneous and the people all get on the sidewalk and watch them go by. Well this particular time while we were walking a ¨parade¨came by. Except this time everyone that was in the parade and was watching the parade just stopped and started staring at us. We were only standing on the corner watching the parade but suddenly we became the entertainment. I thought it was quite amusing. This happens all the time here though. I get tons of stares wherever I go so I make sure that I say hello to everyone that stares at me, because then they realize that I´m a person and become really friendly. It seems to work so far.

Classes are going well so far. They are held at one of the other volunteers host family´s house. This happens to be my next door neighbor so my walk to class is about 14 steps. In the next couple of weeks we are going to be getting more involved with our town health center. In two weeks we will be giving our first ¨charlas¨which are basically health talks in the health center to the people waiting in the waiting room (more of a hallway). Since nicaraguans dont have much access to health education and the doctors are too busy doing the essentials (shots, giving medicine, etc.), a good way for the people to get information regarding preventing diarrhea, breast feeding, malaria and dengue, hand washing, HIV and other STIs is by giving little talks to the people waiting to see the doctor. A main part of my job in PC is to help the health center with these mini education session. When I am in my site I will be able to branch out and do education in schools and other places but talks in the health center will sort of be the bread and butter of my service.

I´m sure I could say more but I have to get home to eat my Gallo Pinto (rice and beans). Although you would think that eating rice and beans every meal since I´ve been here would get old...it hasn´t. I love it. If anyone has questions about anything else I´m doing or about Nicaragua, just email me, I´ll try to write about it next time.