Never mind about the rain.

So Mother Nature loves to prove me wrong. Since the blog about how much its been raining here, it hasn´t rained. It has been hot and sunny here in the past two weeks with clear skies. Now I´ve recently been told that the rainy season means its rains for spurts then doesn't rain for a while. So really, its just kind of like spring time in the U.S.? I´ve been told that August and September are really wet months here but I´ve also been told the rainy season (right now) cools down Corinto and, in reality, it is still 95 degrees at 9am everyday.

Anyways, I actually have grown accustomed to the weather here and have lost the ability to imagine what ¨cold¨feels like. This means its perfect timing for me to take a brief vacation to the cold region of the country. This coming Friday I will be travelling to Esteli which is in the northern mountainous regionof the country. I´ve been told that its gets cold there during the night and sometimes you even need a sweatshirt! I´m going there to meet up with the majority of my training group to celebrate two girls´ birthdays. Our training group (20 of us) spent 2.5 months together in classes and living together in training towns. But, since we swore in as volunteers on March 30th and all left for our sites in different parts of Nicaragua, we haven´t seen each other. We are all going to meet up at a nature reserve that has cabins, hiking trails and lakes so it should be a great time to catch up with everyone, hear funny stories and speak english!

In Peace Corps they talk about the 3 month hump. This is the first three months at your site when you are still adjusting to the new people, the language, the work, living situation and the culture. Most volunteers say that this is the hardest part of their service, and since it is almost June 30th, everyone in my training group is about to pass the three month hump. So in a way this get together will also we to celebrate that. I´m sure there will be difficult times in our future, but by now most of us at least feel at home in our sites and settled into our jobs.

This will be my first time away from my site in the 3 months that I´ve been here and I´ve been looking forward to it for a couple of weeks now. It will be nice to see a different part of the country and hang out with Americans (especially so close to the 4th of July). Anyways, I hope all is well with everyone else...

Have a good 4th of July and eat lots of BBQ for me!

Rain....

(My rainy patio)

So the rainy season has started here in Corinto. I also used to be confused to exactly what the rainy season is so let me explain. Simply enough, it means it rains. Usually every day. It will rain once or twice a day for about an hour each time. We still have days of sun, but they are interrupted by an hour of rain. I actually kind of enjoy it but it has thrown some complications into my life...

First, if its raining kids don´t go to school. I feel this can be problematic for an education system when there is a 6 month long RAINY SEASON! I´ve learned that there is a system to this madness. The kids start school at 7am. So the rule is that if its raining past any time past 6:30am, school is cancelled, at least for the kids anyways. The teachers still go so they can get their full government paycheck. So for example, last week, it rained in the early morning every day. So the students didn´t go to class for an entire week. Usually, at around 7:30am (or earlier) the sky would clear and the rest of the day was sunny and beautiful. But since it was raining at 6:30am, there wasn´t class. I blame this mostly on kids laziness and parents willingness to allow it, but there are actually some good reasons why. Most importantly, most of the schools have holes in their roofs, therefore if its raining, they can´t hold class. This ncludes two high school classrooms thats don´t have a roof at all. Legitimate excuse. Also, most kids and parents think that if they get wet, they will get sick. Understandable although I have gotten very wet from the rain many times here and have yet to get sick (its hot here, even during the rain so I personally believe it is impossible to catch a cold). Anyways, since half my job is teaching classes to 6th graders here in Corinto, if it rains...I have nothing to do.




Another result of the rainy season. Bugs. I´m not sure if this picture does justice but my feet have been covered with bug bites ever since the rainy season started. And of course they itch a lot. Its mostly just flies and mosquitos, but they really eat away at my ugly feet. All the Nicas tell me its because I have ¨sweet¨ gringo/American blood. That could be because Nicas don´t seem to have a problem with the bug bites. (For all of you that thought you would get two years without seeing my beautiful feet, no worries, here they are!)

Another problem I have with the rainy season involved my leaky roof. Luckily my landlord lives next door to me and is a super nice guy. He fixed the roof as soon as he could so I only had to deal with a couple of days of leaky roof.

The other inconvenience that the rainy season brings is getting my clothes to dry. Since I line dry all my clothes, unexpected rain makes it difficult to have clean, dry, good smelling clothes. For example, this morning I washed some clothes because it was super sunny. Depending on the item, it usually takes the whole day for clothes to line dry. Three hours after I washed, a big downpour came. Luckily I was at home this time, and I quickly tranferred my clothes to a line underneath my patio roof. Sometimes it starts raining unexpectedly when I´m at work and then my half dry clothes soak with rain water, which is usually less than clean. Sometimes my neighbors are nice enough to bring in my clothes, but sometimes they forget.

Anyways, thats how the rainy season has been affecting me in the 2 or 3 weeks since its started. In the past two weeks I have had two other changes that have nothing to do with the rain. I talked about my neighbors before, but now I have more. The brother of my neighbor and his wife just moved in next door with their newborn baby. Which makes, a 22 yr old woman with a 3 yr old, 24 yr old guy and 23 yr old woman with a 14 day old baby in the house on the left of me. Then on the right of me which was vacant before moved in a 25 year old guy by himself (it´s really rare to live alone, but his mother lives elsewhere and is planning to move to that house in a couple of weeks). It sort of feels like college but with babies and without all the beer. OK, maybe not college, but I´m living with young people again instead of middle-aged families and in that sense if feels like college.

Here is a picture of me and the new baby in my house. The baby boy´s name is Casey, and I was in charge of correctly spelling the name for the official documents. They wanted the correct english spelling but thought that it was spelled Keysi. You´ll notice that the baby is wearing a red bracelet. Nicaraguans put this bracelet on their newborns to protect them from drunks. Or at least thats what the mother told me. But all the babies I´ve seen in Nicaragua have this bracelet to protect them from harm (from drunks).

I think I´ve exhausted myself talking about rain and babies. Congrats to everyone that just finished school! Someone write me an email on how the new sunny weather in Chicago (or wherever) is affecting your life...