My Routine

Some people have been wondering what exactly my job or day-to-day life looks like here in Corinto, Nicaragua so I thought I’d share an average week.

Monday and Tuesday are generally what I call my free days. This means that if I need to make any meetings, work on any side projects or plan my classes I do it on Monday and Tuesday. This isn’t to say I do nothing on Mondays and Tuesdays, I just don’t have any consistent obligations on those days. Mondays and Tuesdays I go to the health center in the morning and work in the nurses’ office. Sometimes I’ll have meetings in the mayor’s office or in the schools, so I’ll go there. But my home base for those days is the health center. I hang out, chat it up with the nurses and doctors and do my work. I’ll usually eat at a small café right next to the hospital that serves rice, beans, and some sort of typical Nicaraguan meat dish.

Wednesday’s and Thursday’s are my busiest days. In the mornings of each of these days I go to elementary schools and give health classes to 5^th and sixth graders. Right now I am at the end of a twelve week series in two different schools, so I know the kids decently well. This might be my favorite thing because its fun to hang out with kids of that age. My classes have been topics such as self-esteem, puberty, effective communication, and preventing HIV and teenage pregnancy. I have a good time with the kids but my level of enthusiasm for teaching goes on a week by week basis. Some classes go really well and others not so well. But overall I really enjoy teaching in the schools.

Wednesday and Thursday afternoon I also meet with two separate youth groups. About 3 months ago, my counterpart, Xiomara (in charge of community outreach and education for the health center) and I went around Corinto looking for adolescents in different neighborhoods to form youth groups. Right now we have 3 different functioning youth groups. Sometimes Xiomara and I meet with them together, but since she is busy with other duties, a lot of times I meet with the youth groups alone. I plan ahead of time games and a topic to talk about. The topics are generally the same as the ones I cover in the schools.

Friday’s vary. In the afternoon I meet with the 3^rd youth group. In the mornings sometimes I go to the hospital or have another meeting. But a lot of times I wash clothes Friday mornings. Washing clothes by hand takes time so in order to catch up with my mountain of laundry, I’ll wash on Fridays (to supplement my Saturday and Sunday morning washing).

Weekends also vary. I usually go out for some beers one night of the weekend with my friends Manuel and Vilma. They are two Nicaraguan friends my age who have been great friends to me since I moved to Corinto, they helped me find my house and helped me get acquainted to Corinto so I’m lucky to have them. In the mornings I’ll wash my clothes and in the afternoons I’ll clean my house, go to the beach, go hang out with the other volunteer that lives in Corinto or go into Chinandega (the closest big city) to buy things or meet up with other volunteers. Another things I like to do that surprises people is keep myself up to date on movies. They sell bootleg dvd’s here for $1 (fairly bad quality but still watchable) so I’ll buy them or borrow them and then my neighbors and I will watch them on their dvd player. I have seen The Simpsons, The Departed, and Ocean’s 13 among other in the past couple of months. I’ve probably seen more new releases here than I would have in the U.S. Anyways, I also read a lot to keep myself entertained. I read about a book a week, and Peace Corps provides us free Newsweeks (we can pick them up when we are in the PC office in Managua) to entertain ourselves.

Along with this, I try to go running at least 4 times a week. Now that it’s gotten a bit cooler here in Corinto I run at 5:30pm along the beach and it’s fairly comfortable. Plus I get to watch the sunset every day which is added motivation to go run. All of this routine stuff added in with the random obligations of life keeps me fairly busy.

That’s my week in a nutshell. Any questions?

This is a picture of a couple of the girls in one of the youth groups. This particular youth group is all female. The other two are coed. It wasn´t our intention to have an all female group but they were the only ones that maintained interesting in attending the group meetings. The woman on the right is my counterpart, Xiomara.

Interesting news article

This article was sent to me thanks to my mother. I think it is an interesting article describing the political situation in Nicaragua. It talks about some of the power outages in the capitol city, Managua. These problems are affecting the energy supplies here and causing all areas of the country to ration electricity. Here in Corinto, we don´t have power between 7am and 3pm. Every part of the country has its own schedule of when the power is off. Anyways, here is the Chicago Tribune article, (thanks mom!)

Chicago Tribune Article 8-13-2007



Everyone have a good weekend!

for the record...

My family that just came and visited me and saw me in person say this after reading my blog:
¨I don´t know why people say you´re fat, you didnt look fatter to us when we saw you.¨

Regardless, i do need to cut back on that delicious fritanga...

Bats and fat.

I thought I would share two quick stories about adapting to life in Nicaragua.

The other day I was working on some of the materials for a youth workshop in one of the offices of the health center and was really hot. I ride my bike to the health center so often times I arrive and I am hot. It doesnt help that the offices are small and usually have only one small window to fresh (hot) air. So I´m sitting, sweating, making these materials in the office, when something big flies past my face. A bat. My reaction should have been, ¨Holy crap, a bat!¨ But instead my reaction was, ¨That little breeze felt soooo gooood!¨

I´m being a good adapted Peace Corps volunteer by using local resources (a bat) to make up for what I lack (electrical fan)!

My other story is in regards to food and my weight. When I first got to Corinto and showed some of my new friends pictures of me and my family people would always tell me that I ¨looked much skinnier in person than in the pictures¨. I thought that this was a good thing, perhaps I would return to the States skinnier just as my friends had predicted. But then came the reality of living and eating in Nicaragua. Let me explain.

In training, we were fed 3 small meals a day and didn´t know many Nicas outside of our host families. So fast forward to me arriving in Corinto after training (skinnier because of three meals a day in small portions) and discovering the amazing world of fritanga! Fritanga are little stands that women have in front of their houses where they sell all the fried delicacies of the Nicaraguan diet. I´m not going to lie, I became addicted. I craved Dona Blanca´s fried enchilada and gallo pinto every night. So from eating dinner most nights at a fritanga I put on a lot of the weight I had lost. And when I walked into rooms people would say, ¨Hola Pablo, you look fat today!¨ (Oh thank you! Good day to you too ma´am!) Anyways, the fritanga alone didn´t beef me up.
I found myself eating 4 or 5 meals a day because people kept giving me meals. I would eat a sizable lunch and then about 30 minutes later someone would come stop by with a plate of food and say ¨here we made this for you!¨ and I would say to them, ¨oh thank you so much but I just ate!¨ But then they would get a really sad look in their eyes and just kind of stand there with the plate not knowing what to do, so finally I´d say, ¨but I guess I can eat more...¨ So then I would dutifully eat a second lunch. Then dinner time would come around and the same thing would happen. Thus, two dinners and two lunches. This didnt happen all the time, but once or twice a week is enough to beef me up.

Anyways I have a few strategies to combat this:

1. Running

2. I bought a fridge. This way when I have gifted food or leftover food I can put it in the fridge and save it for another day.

3. Stop buying from fritanga.

In the past week I have implemented all of these strategies and we´ll see what happens. I dont mind having a gut, I´ve had it my whole life (it seems). But I would like to avoid people greeting me with ¨Wow you´re fat!¨ We´ll see what happens...

Pictures of the trip...

Here are some pictures from my family´s trip to visit me that I should have put up weeks ago.

This is us hiking through a cloud forest in Selva Negra.




This is a great picture taken by my sister. It captures the beautiful church in Granada with one of the painted school busese in front which is a primary mode of transportation here in Nicaragua.


This is my host family´s house from training when I brought my family there to meet them.


A picture of my family with my host Aunt and two cousins.


Here is my Nica family and family family all together at my host family´s house.