Dec 2 2014 - Almost four months in Nicaragua!

Our family in Jinotega celebrated Thanksgiving dinner with Anita and me.  We provided 2 roasted chickens and the family fixed them up with vegetables and rice.  They were beautiful and tasty and they all made us feel like family.  We are getting to know our community and haven't really decided on how we will work in our schools.  We will cross that bridge in February after we know have more experience and know folks better.

            OUR JINOTEGA, NICARAGUA HOST FAMILY

Sister

Rosa

Mother and brother

Queen, aka Necia

Jose (Warren) "carving" the Pollo

Brother, Jose y Ana

Dessert!

I was dubious about having to attend additional training this week (Dec. 1-3), but we have learned much more than I had expected and the location is beautiful.  We are up in the mountains south of Managua at an ecolodge - learning about building fuel-efficient stoves to help reduce deforestation by decreasing the amount of wood needed for cooking,  We are also exchanging ideas and information among the others in our group (Nica Environment 64) and the group that arrived a year before us (N62).  Lots of great ideas for teaching that will come in handy very soon.  Technical sessions are Monday and Tuesday and then Wednesday we will use what we've learned to build a couple of fuel-efficient wood-burning ovens in a place near where we trained during August - November. 

In addition, I found hornworts - a moss like plant that I have never found on my own (until now) and I haven't seen one for over 40 years. Pretty exciting stuff (for a biologist, others just kind of stare at me).  I also found a kind of liverwort that I had only seen in pictures.  Very cool place with flowers, ponds, waterfalls, and the calls of howler monkeys sending shivers down Anita's spine.

We had left our site in Jinotega early Sunday morning to go to Granada, Nicaragua where  Warren and I spent months in 2011 tutoring math, science, and English.  We got to stay with our former host "mother" Carmen, there, and do a short visit of the city.  We look forward to seeing them more often in the future.

Carmen

Jose Anita and Fatima

More in a future post on our oven-building experiences......

Department of Jinotega, Nicaragua!

We got our site assignment today!  We will be in the Department (like a state) of Jinotega, in the north of Nicaragua.  A big part of our jobs will be co-planning & co-teaching Environmental Education in an elementary school.  We won't decide on which grades until later, but the options are 3rd through 6th grade.

I still have reports to finish, so this again is brief.  We head to our sites for a visit next week, so there will be photos later. 

The climate is cooler there, but not cold, from what I've heard.  We will have a separate space and will probably be able to cook and also have a little garden (likely a good place for growing kale, with its cooler weather.  

Anyway, bye for now.

Here's a link to some brief information:

http://www.nicaragua.com/jinotega-region/





We'll be in the southern part of Jinotega.

Hasta luego!

Anita

EXCITING WEEK!

In a couple of days we will find out our site assignment - where in Nicaragua we will be for the next 2 years starting in November!

Warren and I will be living together on site - we'll have to work to be sure we keep up our Spanish - but will have different schools and teachers that we'll be working with.

Training is the most intense time - 3 months to teach us a ton of stuff about Nicaragua, co-planning and co-teaching, making an organic school garden with our students (and learning what pests we will be battling), integrating into the community, LOTS of Spanish classes of 3-4 students (usually 3 days or more/week, 6 hrs/day), homework, "charlas" (talks), and "practicums" - mostly related to our organic gardens, tree nurseries, and organic composting.  I've got 4th grade kids that I'm co-teaching, and Warren has 6th grade (Natural Sciences).

Anyway, I have reports and a CV (in Spanish) to do, so going to sign off, but will let you know later where we are going.

Next week we will  do a site visit and actually SEE where we'll be - you KNOW I'll take pictures - posting them, of course, is another thing......but things should be less hectic once we're on site - or so we've been told.

I'm going to stop here, because this already froze up on me once...twice, and I want to get something on here to let you know we are still here and fine.

Alive and Well in Nicaragua!

Warren (Jose) and I are very busy here, and also healthy and doing fine.  There is SO much to learn before we get assigned to our official sites in about 2 months. 

 

Warren (Jose) and I are currently (during the 3-month training) living in separate sites, which really helps our Spanish proficiency.  We visit each other's site every other weekend - I guess you could call them conjugal visits ;-)  We have completed one of the 3 months now.  We have Spanish classes for about 6 hours per day around 2 - 3 days per week, and then also attend "Charlas" (talks) and trainings on various subjects for the other days, including many on Saturdays.  We have homework and also various projects to complete, including creating and practicing a community survey on an environmental issue, co-planning and co-teaching Natural Science classes with a Nicaraguan teacher (4th grade for me and 6th grade for Jose), and creating a school vegetable garden (un huerto) at our school.  We have planted ayote (a squash), chiltoma (red and green peppers), rabano (radishes), and pepinos (cucumbers), all of which have come up now.



SEPTEMBER 6, 2014, SETTING UP OUR VEGETABLE GARDEN (HUERTO)


Tara, an experienced volunteer, helping with our huerto 

David, one of our cohorts at "our" school, helping lay out a seed bed of peppers.

 



Felix, our Nicaraguan PCT (Peace Corps Training) Fearless Leader

 

Jose & Cohorts' Huerto, just after creation



 

SEPT. 16, TEN DAYS LATER, some of our results

Our Ayote

Our seedbed of sweet peppers

One of our cucumbers



One of our "rabanos" - radishes

One of our garden challenges will be zompopos (leaf-cutter ants) - they are amazing critters, but not something you want in your garden.  They can wipe it out in no time!  Right now they seem to be VERY busy cutting up and moving leaves from a cut limb...to their nest, which is WAY too close for comfort to our garden.  We will try making and applying natural pesticides, but I'm thinking maybe keeping them busy with trimmed limbs is a good stop-gap measure!  Anyone else out there have experience with organic gardening near a nest of zompopos?



Entrance to "Zompopo" nest near our garden - just a few of the leaf-cutter ants bringing leaf pieces to the nest



This last weekend I went with a few Peace Corps trainees to a reserve (La Makina) not far from where I'm living. 

 

 

 

Not much time for more writing now (I have a Spanish Proficiency test tomorrow), so I'll post a few pictures here.  Also, this Sunday we leave our training sites to visit another volunteer somewhere in Nicaragua (we won't know until Friday where).

 Hasta luego (until later).

 

Anita (Ana)

We're in the Carson City news!

Warren & I have been living with our host families a week now in the Department (like a state) of Carazo.  This is my first weekend joining him at his host site - he will come to my site next week and then we will rotate each weekend.  His is more rural than my site and we both have great host families and food (I don't think I'll be losing weight in these first 3 months). 

 

Next week we start meeting up with the teachers we will co-teach with...Warren for 6th graders, and me with 4th graders.  I got a chance to briefly observe "my" class Thursday and got pretty excited about it.  The teacher is enthusiastic and welcoming and there are about 20-25 in the class, more boys than girls.  We are there for the Natural Science classes and will work with them on a school garden, a compost pile, and little tree nursery (I don't know what trees yet).

 

We've got lots of stuff to read up on, so we're "doing our homework" today.

 

A Facebook friend posted an article there that she saw in an online Carson City news site that talks a bit about our Peace Corps thing.  Here's the link:

 

http://www.carsonnow.org/story/08/22/2014/carson-city-couple-picked-peace-corps-assignment-nicaragua

 

See you later!

 

Anita

Starting with Our Host Families in Nicaragua!

Have to leave soon, but we are heading off to our host families.  Our group of volunteers (41 of us!) is great and I'm really feeling excited about this!   Probably no internet for at least a week now, and probably only once per week in general.

Ana  and Jose

Heading to Nicaragua via Washington DC!!!! Finally

We are waiting in the Salt Lake City airport for our flight to Washington DC. 

We got up at 4 am to be on time for our 6:30 flight out of Reno - when our shuttle was just a minute away I got a call that our plane was delayed, too late to turn back for a little more shut-eye; we'd already checked out.

Our flight was changed to around noon, and our arrival in DC was changed from 4 pm to after 11 pm.  We're continuing to get patience and flexibility training as we continue our Peace Corps journey.

Tomorrow we have training in DC from noon to 7 pm tomorrow, after having breakfast with my second cousin Nicole, who recently served in Peace Corps (PC) in Ghana.

Not much time here and have been having trouble getting internet with any speed to it, so that's all for now.

We will be picked up at 2:30 am on Wednesday from our DC hotel, along with the rest of the folks in our PC Nicaragua group - at least 23 folks, maybe more.

More later....not sure how much later....depends on internet access and time.

Anita

Belize and Back

We needed to renew our visas and decided to make a little trip out of it - so we took the long and winding road to Belize came back to Guatemala (Flores) yesterday evening, and will go to Guatemala City by bus early in the morning, and on to Antigua.  Overnight, then return to Quetzaltenango on a shuttle bus.

Loooong time since the last post.  Sorry.  We've mostly gotten into a routine in Quetzaltenango (Xela) Guatemala.  I've posted more often on Facebook, but I realize some of you aren't on Facebook, so here's a brief update of our activities:

Warren & I were some of the first to be nominated for Peace Corps Nicaragua August 2014 but now we have a Facebook group of 25!  Not all are scheduled to go then - a few are currently there, or are returned volunteers.  The group is split between Environment Education folks (which we are) and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), with the majority being TEFL.  Looks like a great bunch of people - we are by far the elders of the group....  We won't know until around mid-July where we will meet for a day in the U.S. for "staging" - and the date isn't fixed until then, either, but it will probably be August 12 and may be in Miami or Washington D.C.  That's when we get our Peace Corps passports and briefings and get to meet our group in person.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to volunteer as tutors in Xela - English, Science, and Math (including the Mayan numbering system, which is based on 20 instead of 10 - they apparently used their fingers AND their toes.)  I love it!  Always good to learn new things.

The kids we tutor asked Angie, the non-profit director and mi hermanita,  if I would be around for Mother's Day - they said that I am like a caring mother to them and they wanted to recognize me on Mother's Day.  How sweet!  We were on our Belize trip at the time, but we will probably do something when we return, plus go out with Angie's mom to celebrate with her.

I will put a few photos on this post - hope,to post more in the fairly near future.  It's easier for me to do on Facebook or Google+, so if you want more frequent updates and are on one of those, let me know.

Here are a few of many photos from Belize.  The snorkeling ones need to be processed because of the difficulty with the reds, so those will mostly come later.

Some from our kayaking adventures on the Sittee River - Hopkins, Belize - Hopkins is on the coast, south of Doringa, which is south of Belize City:

Warren, aka Jose, aka Chepe

View from Curve Bar, Sittee River

Patrick - hangs out near the Curve Bar

Sherese, Curve Bar, who provided us refreshing drinks, like this lemon grass one

Mangos hanging over the river

Blue Land Crab (Cardisoma guanhum)? burrows - this is the "left side" of the "crab condo"

Blue Land Crab (Cardisoma guanhum)? burrows - this is the "right side" of the "crab condo"

Ringed Kingfisher (about 15 inches long beak tip to tail tip) - showing the tail

Ringed Kingfisher - showing the breast

Pygmy kingfisher - about 5 inches long (beak tip to tail tip)

Great Blue Heron

Great Blue Heron

Great Blue Heron

 I had to put a spider in - don't know what it is yet.....but it's a beauty  - look at the fuzzy parts on the legs!  ~2.5"

OKAY, THAT'S ALL FOR NOW - don't know how long my internet connection will hold...