This past week was very busy for me. I moved into my house this past weekend, which was more exhausting work than I thought it would be. Between the moving, cleaning, and arranging all day Saturday and Sunday, I was spent.

Then this past week I was working a couple of projects for the Dia de Solidaridad, or Day of Solidarity. This is an international day of recognition for the rights of people living with HIV and support for a cure. In typical Nicaraguan fashion, there was three different days that this was celebrated because no one was quite sure of the exact date.

I was told by various people that it was this past Wednesday, so I decided to do a red ribbon campaign in the high school. I had some of the neighborhood kids and coworkers help me make about 900 red ribbons. Then on Wednesday I went to every class in the high school to distribute them and give a 3 minute talk on the meaning of the red ribbon and importance of non-discrimination against people living with HIV. It was the first project that I have done here and I was pleased with how it went. The students wore the ribbons and listened to what I had to say. It was the first time that I have worked in the high school but I hope to work with them more in the future.

On Wednesday we also had a meeting with some youth leaders in Corinto about the significance of the Dia de Solidaridad and how they can bring that message to their classmates. During that meeting, a man who works with human rights came and told us that the Commission on AIDS in Corinto was going to start up again (I had been told that it hadn’t functioned for a couple of years) with a meeting on Thursday to plan activities for the Dia de Solidaridad on Sunday. So at the meeting on the Thursday a couple of the community leaders planned a small event in the center of Corinto to promote the Dia de Solidaridad. Then on Friday some of the Doctors were going around to schools saying that day, Friday, was the Dia de Solidaridad. Then yesterday, Sunday, we had the event at the Corinto Museum celebrating the day. Fiestas here are never just one day, and apparently neither are days of remembrance. So in other words I was busy with all of these events. They all turned out really well so I was happy.

This was the event on sunday in front of the Museum in Corinto. It is the nicest building in Corinto so there are a lot of events inside and around the building. We had an information table and some music playing.


These are some of the youth leaders (wearing the red ribbons I made, I might add) working on posters for their schools. Nicaraguan tradition is to never smile in pictures, the youth do sometimes because I think they have caught on from American culture, but still in every picture you get some faces that look angry/awkward.

Living alone is working out fantastically for me. I was worried about being lonely but it turns out that I live next to a great family that is very welcoming and generous so it is almost like I still live with a family, but have all my own space and stuff. The family next door isn´t a traditional family. It’s a 22 yr old mother, her 3 yr old son, their house worker a 40 yr old woman, and her two kids, a 12 yr old boy and 6 yr old girl. The house worker doesn’t technically live there but her and her kids spend the day there every day from 7am – 8pm. The kids will hang out in my house with me a lot and I chat it up with the women often. It’s been a great situation in the short amount of time I’ve been living here. I’ve also met some of the other neighborhood kids who are fun to hang out with. One of them really wants to learn English and he often comes over to do his homework so I can help him with his English. (Quick little story about the 3 yr old next door, he’ll come over to my house and just point and stuff and say “What’s this?”, he’ll point at a chair, then the wall, then my bottle of water, then the floor, always saying very inquisitively “What’s this?”. The best part is that he’ll come over every day asking the same thing about the chair, wall, floor, etc. I’m glad I have a cute Nicaraguan toddler in my life again!)

My ¨house¨is two rooms, one is like a living room and the other my bedroom. This is my living room with my bedroom in the background. I have plastic chairs which is typical of every nicaraguan household. My hammock is the colorful thing there on the right hand side. I love it. Oh, and the best part about my house is whats hanging on the wall next to the doorway, a machete. Another staple of every nicaraguan household.


This is a picture of my ¨kitchen¨. It is outdoor which is common in Nicaraguan households. That door is the door to my bedroom. I have some clothes hanging there because it was threatening to rain so I put them under that roof. The lavandero is the sink thing against the wall which is where I wash my clothes, dishes and hands. The little table in the middle has a stove on it, its like a gas powered hot plate. And the other table with the sheet over it is where I keep my dishes and spices. The sheet protects it from bugs and the ash that fall from the sky here (from the burning of the sugar can fields close by, apparently thats how you harvest sugar cane).


I thought this was a good picture of my patio. I share the patio with two other houses. I took this on a saturday which is typically the big clothes washing day. Those different colored little towels are my neighbors sweat rags (every single person here carries around a sweat rag to wipe their brow because everyone is constantly sweating!) I have some clothes hanging to the left hand side and in the back. That turquise thing in the back is where the bathroom and shower are. In the bottom left hand corner you can see the little cement block path I have to take to get there. This pic is taken from my ¨kitchen¨.

Thats all for now, keep me updated on how the Chicago spring/summer is going!

Moving Day

In my posts I have talked about my housing prospects. Well, I finally decided on something and am going to move out this weekend! I will be moving about a block and a half away from my host family´s house so I will still be located in the ¨center¨ of Corinto. It is sort of like a townhouse in the sense that I will share some things with my neighbors. It is two small houses attached to each other, sharing a patio and a shower. My house is two small rooms. There are two toliets in the patio (one for me, one for the other family) and one shower that we share. I will also have my own lavandero, or washboard and sink in the patio. Most of the houses here have their toliet, ´kitchen¨ and shower out on their patio with just a roof over it to protect it from the rain. A Nicaraguan kitchen usually consists of a lavandero and a gas powered hot-plate stove. The lavandero serves to both wash the clothes, and also as your only sink and place where you wash your dishes. Sort of hard to explain, so once I move in I´ll take pictures.

Anyways, the finding a house process was annoying to say the least. Basically I just asked every Nicaraguan I knew if they knew of anybody renting a house. Then random people would come up to me and say ¨I hear you´re looking for a house to rent, do you know who´s renting a house? Carla, who lives two blocks down from where Don Julio lives, do you know where Don Julio lives?¨ ¨No.¨ ¨Don Julio lives one block north and two blocks down from the church.¨ Then I would follow those directions to find Carla and ask her about her house. (Quick note about directions here: the streets don´t have names here and people dont have house numbers. Your address here is in relation to a landmark. For example you might live, two blocks west and one block north of the central park. The Peace Corps Office address is ¨Two blocks north of Hotel Brandt¨. Also, sometimes they are in reference to things that don´t exist. Your address might be, two blocks north from where the bank used to be. Basically it just means that you have to be always asking questions as you go to a destination). As you can imagine, I often brought a Nicaraguan with me to help me find the places and also to ask about prices.

The one good thing about the house searching process was that I realized how nice the Nicaraguans are. I told a casual work acquaintance that I was having problems finding houses and on the weekend she came to my house and led me ALL around Corinto to people she knew asking if they knew of houses. She spent 4 hours with my looking for houses. I kept telling her that she didnt have to do this for me, and she said, ¨You would do the same for me if I was in the U.S. looking for houses.´ And no doubt, after this experience I would. But I was thinking, if some random Nicaraguan (or any foreigner) got a job at my office in the States and was complaining about lack of good housing in Chicago, would I spend my saturday afternoon contacting real estate agents and asking friends for available housing? I wish I could say yes, but probably I would just sympathize with them and move on to the next topic of conversation. Not only did this woman help me, but the next day a friend of mine did the same thing, taking me around to people he knew to ask them about housing. I was impressed by the help I was given which really made me feel welcome here. Granted things are a bit different in the States, but try to show hospitality to foreigners living in the U.S. as repayment for them helping me here. A small gesture goes a long way to help someone feel welcome in a strange place where they dont even have addresses!

Anyways, I found the place I´m going to move into through a friend of a friend. I am hoping to only live in this place for a few months while I continue to look for a more private place, where I will have my own shower and own patio. I move into my new place this weekend. I am most excited about being able to cook for myself (this excitement will probably fade immediately after I make myself a huge veggie omelette that I have been craving). I dont have that much stuff so the move shouldn´t be too difficult, I´ll keep you updated on how everything goes. Have a good weekend!

Vaccination Campaign and Fiesta

So I guess the fact that I haven’t posted in a while shows that I am settling into normalcy here in Corinto because I don’t have something new and exciting to post every other day. Anyways, the last two weeks have been pretty interesting and exhausting.

As far as work goes, last week was the National Vaccination Campaign in Nicaragua. This means that the health workers all throughout Nicaragua go door to door through their communities vaccinating children under 5 against polio and any other vaccines they still need. Also, they vaccinate kids and adults against tetanus. So, since I am now a health worker here in Nicaragua I went out with a team of nurses to give these vaccines. Mostly I just did some of the paperwork involved and carried around the cooler of the vaccines. Although they would have let me, I did not inject anyone because it is against Peace Corps rules and I’m pretty sure that would break some sort of medical moral codes. The polio vaccine is actually just droplets that you put into the baby or child’s mouth, so I did helped administer those.

Overall it was a very interesting experience because I got to go door to door and see a lot of different parts of Corinto. Everyone of course was really nice and invited us inside so I got to see the range of houses here from shacks made out of tin to big super nice houses (probably paid for by a relative working in the U.S., or at least that’s what a Nicaraguan friend told me). All the little kids were really cute and it was amazing how some kids took it with a smile, and then some kids would try to run away screaming and crying. I’d say the crying was much more common.

An interesting cultural thing was a belief about the relation between bathing and vaccines. Most of the mothers would say, “But my child hasn’t bathed yet today, won’t the vaccine cause damage because of that?” Most of the mothers believed that if later in the day the child bathed after the vaccine it would somehow cause harm to the child. But Nicaraguans have a lot of interesting beliefs in regards to hot and cold liquids. For example, you shouldn’t take a cold shower when you’re really hot because it will cause harm. And you shouldn’t drink a really cold drink when you are really hot because it will cause harm. As a result sometimes they will serve you coffee on a really hot afternoon. I haven’t experienced the coffee one much in Corinto because it is a bigger city and these beliefs are generally much stronger in the rural areas. Anyways, it’s easy to think these beliefs are stupid, but us Americans also have our own beliefs that are based on no scientific fact…it’s just another one of those fascinating cultural differences.

The vaccination campaign was really cool to participate in but exhausting! Walking from door to door all day in 100 degree heat was a bit tiring. I’m glad I participated in it but I also glad its over (well almost, we are going to the high school to vaccinate on Wednesday).

This past weekend was a Seafood Festival to benefit the Old Folk’s Home here in Corinto. It was delicious! It worked sort of like the Taste of Chicago where you bought tickets and then went to booths that were selling all sorts of different types of seafood dishes. For example, fish tacos, shrimp pancake type things (sounds gross but delicious), shrimp cocktail, fried fish, shrimp paella….and much more. I was really impressed by the organization of this fiesta. I’ve been to a couple other fiestas in other cities in Nicaragua and they seemed to be haphazardly put together, but this was very well run. Congrats Corinto! The fiesta is continuing all week which means that Tuesday and Thursday no one has to work which is nice. There is a concert this Friday and other activities throughout the week…should be a good time.

The final news I have to share is that I’m almost positive that I found a house to move into! I am required by Peace Corps to stay with my current host family until May 12 and then after that I can choose my own housing situation. I am anxious to live on my own after almost 4 months of host family living. The house I found would be far away from the center of town so it would be a smaller neighborhood feel, which is what I was looking for. I want to live in an area where I can really get to know my neighborhood; the center of town just doesn’t have that super friendly feel like the smaller neighborhoods have. I’m going to decide for sure where I’m living tomorrow so I’ll keep you updated.

That’s all for now. Hope everything is good with everyone at home. Its graduation season and the weather is probably nice, enjoy it!