Happy Valentine's Day!

A belated Valentine's Day, or Día de Amistad (day of friendship) to all our friends and family. Since February 14 here seems to be geared less to romantic love and more just to friendship, it was a lot of fun to celebrate at school and teachers received all sorts of goodies from their students. Some of the items I received include chocolate/peanut butter bon bons, Ritz crackers, lollipops, and a flower; other professors were even luckier, receiving roses, chocolate, and even a bottle of wine. During receso (students' daily 15-minute break) the teachers' lounge was full of students decorating with streamers and balloons. After the break, all the students were sent home (two hours early) so that the teachers could have their Valentine's Day party. There we ate wonderful chicken tacos, salad with ketchup and mayonnaise, soda, and refrescos in plastic bags. That afternoon, our landlord's granddaughter, whom I help with her English homework, came over and also gave us a dozen bars of soap from her grandpa; I hope they weren't trying to drop any hints, but we probably have enough soap to last us well through the next year and a half. Finally, in the evening the Alcaldía (mayor's office) had a big event in the central park that we attended. There were singers, poets, raffles, and we saw a lot of our students from our Telecentro classes (many of them work in the Mayor's office) and students from my school as well.

More generally, I think the school year is off to a great start for both Paul and me. There have certainly been delays and some frustrations with the scheduling, but it's been nice to actually start the school year here as teachers; last year we came in after second semester had already begun, and by that time all the students already had their routines and their opinions of English class. This year we were introduced at the assemblies on the first day as teachers, and we really feel like actual teachers in the school. We've also been trying extra hard to start off doing lots of fun activities so that kids will be enthusiastic about learning English; today to practice greetings and departures, my class learned and sang "Hello, Goodbye" by the Beatles. The kids have been really excited and friendly, so that has made our jobs much more fun and, except for the days that my classes begin at 7:00, we're both eager to go to school.

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Unwanted T-Shirts

I saw this story on the news earlier and can't wait to get my hands on one. If not, I hope the people that get them realize that the best way to benefit from these t-shirts is to put them on eBay.

Super Bowl's losing Patriots find fans in poor Nicaraguan homes
By Blake Schmidt

Hundreds of T-shirts set to arrive in Nicaragua this week might lead one to believe that the New England Patriots didn't blow their perfect season in Sunday's Super Bowl.

Though the Patriots lost 17-14 to the New York Giants, several hundred poor Nicaraguan kids will be winners thanks to a program to send the Patriots Super Bowl Champs T-shirts to those in need.

The U.S. National Football League (NFL) is teaming up with the Christian group World Vision to distribute millions of dollars worth of the losing Super Bowl team's licensed Reebok apparel in poor parts of Nicaragua and Romania.

“World Vision helps us to ensure that no NFL apparel goes to waste,” David Krichavsky, the league's director of community relations, said. “We are pleased to find a good home for clothing by getting it to those who need it most.

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Eat like a Nica in Ten Easy Steps

Hands down the staple dish in Nicaragua is gallo pinto; it is not an exaggeration to say that most Nicaraguans eat gallo pinto (or a variation thereof, namely rice and beans or beans and rice) three times a day every day. Paul and I eat gallo pinto several times a week and, honestly, it's one of my favorite foods here. Just in case you'd like to cook your own authentic Nicaraguan food or begin preparing for a trip down to visit us, here are step-by-step instructions:

1. First, you need to rinse your rice. Most rice here is sold in huge bins that you scoop from, so lots of people have their hands in there scooping. Additionally, you can usually find lots of little rocks and sticks and things like that, so you should rinse it about 3 times.

2. Go to the pulperia down the street and buy a bag of frijoles cocidos (cooked beans) from the neighborhood lady. This bag cost ten córdobas, or about 50 cents. It's much easier and cheaper to buy your beans pre-cooked because they take several hours to cook and therefore use a lot of gas. The people who make beans and sell them have wood stoves that they use to cook the beans. If your neighborhood does not yet have its own bean lady, I guess you can substitute canned beans, but results may vary.

3. Tear a hole in your bag 'o beans and squeeze all the liquid out. You also need to mush the beans up a bit while they're in the bag. Try not to get any bean juice on your toothbrush.

4. Cook your rice. First, put a little (or a lot if you're Nicaraguan) vegetable oil in your pot then add the rice. Stir it around and when it begins to stick to the sides and bottom, add your water to the top of the rice. Turn the stove on high and let the water boil down until it's down below the level of the rice and your rice is nice and fluffy. Turn the stove on super-low and cover until the rice is cooked, which is about 10 minutes. 5. While you're cooking the rice, cook your beans. Add your vegetable oil again a su gusto (as you like) and cook your chopped up onion. 7. Add your mushed up beans to your almost-cooked onion and cook for about 5 minutes. The rice is currently at the "boiling down" stage.
8. When both are cooked, add two to two and a half scoops big metal spoon scoops of rice to your beans (we have enough leftover rice to make gallo pinto again or fried rice, one of Paul's specialties). Mix them together and let them simmer together for 10-15 minutes.
9. While your gallo pinto is simmering, toast your tortillas. In Nicaragua, corn tortillas are the most common. Every evening, there are grills up and down the streets where people are making and selling their tortillas for a cord each (5 cents). Sometimes we splurge and get flour tortillas from the supermarket, which we then toast ourselves.10. Get your gallo pinto, your tortillas, Tabasco or other salsa, and Coke. ¡Buen provecho -- enjoy!

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400 Kids Carrying Desks on Their Heads

Today was the first day of classes for Nicaraguan schools and it was pretty easy to tell this morning. For the first time in a couple of months, everyone under 18 was wearing blue pants and a white shirt (nationwide uniforms--even for private schools) and Holly and I had stuff to do in the morning.

When I got to school in the afternoon the corridors were completely packed with students and parents. Why weren't they all in their classrooms? Well, it's because classes weren't assigned yet. There was a brief assembly where people half-heartedly mumbled the national anthem and then everyone tried to find their classrooms. For the first year students this was really confusing because none of them had any idea which of the five sections was theirs. A teacher would read the list of names to the few students gathered around and everyone who wasn't on that list had to go find another teacher to see if their name was on that list. What's more, even though students weren't assigned classrooms yet, they all got very territorial about the best desks. Rather than first find their classroom and then find a place to sit, everyone got a desk first and just carried it from room to room on their heads. This definitely didn't help the congestion in the hallways.

Needless to say we didn't do much teaching today. We might begin tomorrow, but the schedules still haven't been finished. Our school is short about 3 teachers so right now 220+ students are going to be crammed into three first'year classrooms. I'm ready to start teaching, but 73.3 students in each class might make things a little tougher.

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More 80's Music References

There's a really great article in Time Magazine about Nicaragua and I suggest everyone check it out. It even mentions Masaya, so it's almost like we were mentioned in Time.

Tuesday, Jan. 08, 2008
'How Far Are You From the Place Bono Sang About?'
By Tim Rogers/Managua

A year after Irish rocker Bono visited Nicaragua in 1986 in an effort to raise awareness about Central American war refugees, U2 released its smash-hit album The Joshua Tree and Nicaraguans immediately recognized that one of the songs was written about their country. Twenty years later, most people here still hold as fact that "Where the Streets Have No Name" was written about Managua, a squat and sprawling capital city where... well, the streets are unnamed.

The Managua of today still has the feeling of a rural backwater that hopes to one day grow up to be a capital city. No building is taller than 10 stories. There are still more trees than buildings, and going "downtown" means going to the Metrocentro shopping mall.

Finding one's way around Nicaragua means developing an intimate understanding of the spatial relations between current and past landmarks, some of which were destroyed more than 30 years ago in the 1972 earthquake. Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times bureau chief based in Managua in the 1980s, accurately describes the fine art of giving directions in Managua as a "Socratic" technique, based on first determining what the direction-asker knows, then working backward from there.

For example, if a foreigner were to ask, "how do you get to the Nicaraguan Tourism Institute?," the conversation might go something like this:

"Well, do you know where Casa de Los Mejia Godoy is? Where Antojitos Restaurant used to be?"
"No."
"Do you know where the former Lips strip club was?"
"No."
"The Hotel Crowne Plaza, which used to be the Hotel Inter-Continental?"
"Bingo."
"From there, it's one block south, one block down."

One block "down," of course, is Managua code for "one block west." And, in the case of the Tourism Institute, west is literally downhill, so you can't get lost. In other cases, however, "one block down" really means one block uphill, adding a new level of adventure to the game. To further confuse things, directions are also given in an anachronistic unit of measurement known as a "vara," which is apparently based on the arm-length of a former nobleman from sometime and someplace in the distant past.

Outside of the capital, giving directions is an equally colorful experience. My girlfriend's college friend lives in Jinotepe, "half a block north from where the Indian died." Even on the Caribbean coast, which was settled by the British rather than the Spaniards, things are equally relative. British expatriate Louise Calder lives in the Caribbean city of Bluefields, "in front of Francisco Herrera's house." Her neighbor, Mr. Herrera, in return, lists his address as "in front of Louise Calder's house."

My favorite address story, however, comes from neighboring Costa Rica, where I lived for several years before moving to Nicaragua. Six years ago, my friend Blake Tenore sent out an e-mail to a list of old college friends, asking for people's addresses to send out Christmas cards. Since I lived in a house without a street address, I jokingly e-mailed him back with the directions that I used in Spanish to tell people how to get to my house: "From the Lourdes Church in Montes de Oca, two blocks west, past the Pali supermarket, take a right at the next corner where an old woman sells fruit, past the Bar Maguey and go to the end of the dead end street, where there's a two-story white house with a black gate, where the gringos live. Costa Rica, Central America." To my surprise, a Christmas card arrived three weeks later, with the smallest and most careful handwriting I have ever seen printed on an envelope.

The funniest part about giving directions in this corner of the world is that some streets actually do have names, but no one knows what they are. My girlfriend, by chance, recently saw an official government map of her hometown, Masaya, Nicaragua, and discovered that the street where she had grown up in fact has a name: Calle Palo Blanco.

Now, as a joke, sometimes when we get into a taxi, we tell the cab driver to take us to "Calle Palo Blanco," to which he invariably responds by staring at us blankly in the rearview mirror. Then we give the more common address, "From the San Jeronimo Shell Station, two and a half blocks down." And off we go without further question.

So perhaps Bono did in fact write a song inspired by his trip to Nicaragua, but my guess is that it was "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."

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