Volando vengo, volando voy

I have had a pretty great day, a pretty great weekend and a pretty great week. On Sunday I went to Matagalpa, Matagalpa for my volunteer visit. The premise of the volunteer visit is that each aspirante (trainee) goes to a different site to shadow a volunteer in their everyday lives. Matagalpa is a fairly large city with about 90,000 people. It’s a couple hours north of Managua in the mountains (ie coffee and chocolate) and the drive is quite beautiful. I stayed in a hostel (Buena Onda) that an ex-Peace Corps volunteer set up and I had hot water (yeah!) I had originally thought that I wanted to be placed in a small town but after visiting a city I’m having second thoughts. Matagalpa has tons of NGOs which, from what I can tell, is both good and bad. It’s good because, obviously, it’s helping towards the development of the country, but it’s bad because many of the NGOs give out money and then people expect PC to also give out money, which isn’t how PC works. I did get a chance to meet with a really cool NGO called FUMDEC; they work primarily with women on a variety of development projects. The principle is that by educating and training women in different arenas, for example agriculture or health, then the whole family base will be lifted up since the women take care of the household. I would love to work in this area and, based on the needs of the community in which I’m placed, I’d like to set up a similar project.

On Saturday we had a group outing to the Volcan de Masaya (it was a diversity charla, good work PC on picking a rad venue!) The volcano is still active and fuming with sulfur-smelling smoke. Garry, I thought of you, and even remembered aa and pahoihoi (spelling?) I read somewhere that Somoza used to throw people in the volcano (alive) as to dispose of any evidence. Aside from that creepy fact, it was beautiful. Also, PC brought peanut butter for a snack, so that was diacachimba (flippin awesome)! I came home afterwards to take a nap and my host town buddy, Jonathan,’s host mom came and yelled in my window leading me to believe that Jonathan was on his death bed and I was the only person in the world with the ability to save him. So, I went up to his house and he ended up being pretty sick with a high fever. We called the medical office but of course the labs and farmacias were closed so we had to wait until the morning to take any action.

Jonathan was sicker on Sunday morning that he had been the night before so I went on an expedition (with a bag of his poo) to the closest laboratory that would be open on a Sunday. I borrowed a bicycle and rode through rutted, dirt roads to Masatepe, about 20 minutes away, to a sketchy lab run by a maje (dude) out of his house. I waited an hour and a half for the results (which proved he had a bacterial infection) rode over to the farmacia, and then rushed home with his meds, pretty much saving the day. Kinda super-heroine status. At the moment he is still in bed, but I’m pretty sure he’ll live.

In the afternoon on Sunday my family had been planning to go to the Laguna de Apoyo to hang out on the beach for a bit. They warned me that we wouldn’t go if it was raining but when it ended up raining we went anyways. I think they didn’t want to let me down because I was super excited all weekend about swimming. I swam in the rain, alone, but I had a really nice time. It’s my favorite place in Nicaragua, so far.

This coming weekend is the site fair, so we’ll get to see all of the sites that are available to us and a week and a half after that we’ll get our site assignments. There is a ton of excitement surrounding our site assignments and it’s the main topic of conversation among the trainees. We’re half-way done with training and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel! I’m bracing for INTENSIVE training for the next 6 weeks. ¡Tengo que hablar solamente en español si quiero mejorar!