¡Somos Voluntarios!

We are now officially Peace Corps Volunteers! We've been in Managua this week having our last training sessions, administrative sessions, and preparing ourselves to go off to our sites and no longer be the baby trainees. Today was our juramentación (swearing in) ceremony. We sang the Nicaraguan and US national anthems, swore in in Spanish and English ("to defend the constitution against enemies, foreign and domestic," etc.), said goodbye to all our training families who came in for the ceremony, and took lots of pictures!

First, this is our entire TEFL group of 17 along with our technical trainer and project directors.
This is me shaking the hand of the US Ambassador to Nicaragua, Paul Trivelli. He spoke to us on Wednesday and swore us in today.
Here is Paul with his host mom, Doña Rosita.

This was the fancy (and yummy) cake they had for us.
Finally, they had a traditional Nicaraguan folklórico band come and play for us. Here is a quick video of them playing their super-cool music.

I think we're all going to miss our host families the other trainees in our group since we're all spead out over the country, but I think we're also ready to get to our sites and start working! Wish us luck as Peace Corps Volunteers!

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Animals

It should go without saying that I miss Hector a lot. However, it does help the transition that my training host family has lots of furry friends that are there for me when I need a helping paw, claw, or fin.

Cutest in the whole bunch is probably Lyca and her eight (!) puppies. They were born on June 7 and already there are only 2 left (in Nicaragua puppies are given away a lot earlier than in the US), but I took plenty of pictures of them as tiny little puppies and as rambunctious trouble-makers. Four are black, three are light brown, and one is a chocolate brown.

There are two other dogs, but the Internet is acting up and it's taking forever to upload... you'll just have to imagine Ricky and Muñeco. Ricky is the proud dad of those puppies and is a really cute collie-looking sort of dog. Apparently Ricky is quite a stud and has a lot of "families"around town, but I'm sure he's particularly proud of his eight puppies.

The last canine friend my family has is Muñeco. He isn't really particularly cute or friendly; he just lays around all day and chases bikes, cars, or people who walk by the house. There's also a hierarchy of the family dogs: Lyca lives on the porch and sometimes gets to be inside the house. Ricky lives outside but sometimes gets to be on the porch. And Muñeco always stays outside and never even gets to go on the porch. I don't know how or why this hierarchy was established, but all three dogs seem to accept it so who am I to question their system?

Guido the cat gets to roam freely inside and outside, but mostly he just sleeps in weird places all the time.

Lola the lora (parrot) is certainly one of the most interesting animal family members. After spending the first night with my host family, early in the morning I heard someone screaming "¡Marisol! ¡Ramón!" and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. I later realized it was Lola yelling for them because she was really hungry for her breakfast (usually a mango or a banana). Lola knows a lot of words including "Mi amorrrr," the names of all the family members, and she yells "¿Qué?" quite frequently as well, as if she's having trouble hearing what someone said. Most often of all she yells "Lyca!" because my family members are always yelling Lyca's name when she barks incessantly. When it was pouring two days ago, Lola also left her shelter to sit out on the clothes line to give herself a bath... she was cooing and whistling and was happy as a lark (?) even though she wasn't very pretty with wet feathers for the next 24 hours.

 There's another lora that lives next door; although I have never seen it, I feel like I know him or her very well because he or she is always squawking uncontrollably. In addition to squawking, the other bird also makes other animal noises, so the most irritating thing is that it will bark exactly like a Chihuahua for really long periods of time. At first I thought it was an actual Chihuahua barking wildly until Walter told me it was a bird and distracted it from barking by whistling a tune that the bird then repeated. Since then, I've also heard the lora making sounds like a horse and a rooster... I'm not sure if it's really smart or if it's experiencing some sort of obsessive compulsive or multiple personalities disorder.

The other pets my family has are a tank full of fish (guppies I think) that Walter caught somewhere. I tried to take a picture of them, but it really didn't turn out well and they're just pretty run-of-the-mill fish.

However, there are other honorary animals that make themselves at home in my family's house: salamancas. They love to hang out on the long florescent light bulbs in the living room and they eat the bugs that fly nearby. For this reason, I love salamancas very much. They make a funny squeaking sound that sounds a lot like a mouse; the sound is a little bit irritating, but they're not bad. They also come in a lot of different colors: white (sort of albino), black, and a purplish color. Sometimes they crawl around on the walls in my room at night as well, but I'm never really afraid because I'm in the safe confines of my mosquitero.

And the final category of animals are animals that my family does not own and do not live with my family, but are constantly roaming around the streets in town. With the exception of cows, bulls, oxen, and horses, no one really pins up any sort of animal, so they're always just walking around freely. Somehow they always seem to remember where they live so they go home at night (I think), but from dawn to dusk it's a free-for-all. For example, huge chanchos (pigs) are always rooting around, roosters and chickens run around clucking with a row of chicks in tow, dogs run freely, and several times a day farmers move their herds of cows and bulls from one side of town to the other.

The other day I told Williamcito and Claudia I wanted to take pictures of animals around town, so they were trying to "help" me. This is Williamcito trying to calm down and corral a goat so I could take its picture. The goat definitely wasn't relaxed by Williamcito's herding attempts, but I love the picture even more because of it:

I think that's a pretty good summary of all the wildlife that resides in my town... I needed to get it all chronicled here ASAP because I can guarantee that I'll be missing all the sights and sounds of the free range pigs, horses, and cows when we move to the big city, Masaya, next week!

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¿Qué busca chele?

It’s a given that there’s no Wal-Mart or Target for your convenient shopping needs in Nicaragua, but sometimes finding somewhat mundane things is an all-afternoon task even in the big cities (actually only in the big cities because you can’t really find much in the pueblos). Some things are easy. For example, if you need any pharmaceuticals, you just walk to the nearest farmacía, of which there are plenty, and buy to your heart's content just about anything you need.

For more every day things, however, it can sometimes be more of a scavenger hunt. Today I was looking for some jalapeños to make guacamole, but they aren’t all that popular because Nicaraguans have an unhealthy fear of all foods spicy so I had to walk around the market asking for about 10 minutes until I finally found some in pretty bad shape. To make it even more interesting, one of the supermarkets in town doesn’t even carry vegetables. At all. In the one that does have veggies, you can never really be sure that they’ll have what you need so you can still have time to go to the market before it shuts down for the day. (The reason you don't just go the market first is that the stuff there is a lot dirtier because it just sits out for flies and all kinds of other nastiness to get on it all day.)

Pulperías are another option for all kinds of stuff. There’s never really one set pulpería inventory—in the smaller towns it seems like they try to divide the basic goods between them, so if you need rice, sugar, and beans you’ll get to walk all around town. The pulperías just buy huge 50- or 100-pound sacks of their wares and you usually BYOS (bring your own storage) to buy a bag, a cup, a pound, or a tupperware container full of whatever you need. Other than that, pulperías are sort of like convenience stores--they usually have soda, club social (my favorite) or Ritz crackers, and a decent selection of galletas (cookies). Some of them are really obvious from a big Colgate or Coca-Cola insignia, but others just look like normal houses, and everyone just has to know that it's a store.

I'm a little sad that we'll be leaving our training towns; I'm just now figuring out which market vendors are really nice and helpful and ask ¿Qué busca chele? (whatcha lookin' for whitey?) and I know where I should go if I need to buy a bag of milk or cup of flour from my neighbor. The good news, through, is that there will be a brand new smelly market to explore and get lost in for the next two years, and eventually I can be the one to tell silly gringos where they have to go to buy jalepeños.

A farmacia:

The pulpería close to my house:

Holly's family's pulpería--a little bit of everything is a really accurate description:

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Housekeeping Post

For some reason, a couple of our recent posts weren't included in the nightly e-mail feeds that are sent out... if you subscribe to the blog by e-mail, you might visit the blog to see if you missed anything. We've figured out the glitch now, so there shouldn't be any more missed posts.

For a slightly more interesting update, training is starting to wind down... classes finished on Thursday and we had a free day last Saturday so nearly our entire group went to the beach (on the Pacific side) and had a great time. Sunday we left for our our "site visit" in Masaya to get a taste of what our service will be like. We will be able to find a house in Masaya to live in together, but for the first six weeks we will be living with one of my counterparts (a Nicaraguan English teacher) to help us get acquainted. Our assignments during the site visit are to meet our other counterparts, visit our schools, and try to find our way around.

We'll get back to our training towns on Wednesday, we have our final language interviews on Thursday, then one last weekend with my training family before we all go to Managua for a few days of last-minute sessions to get us ready to be out on our own. Then we swear in on Friday, July 20 and we will officially be Peace Corps Volunteers!

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Thinking in terms of Nicaragua

I was watching the Under-20 World Cup with my host brother last night and I noticed that the field was really well-lit, but I couldn't help wondering what they would do if the power went out. Would they have that many generators for the entire field? Would they stop playing? Would all of the players get headlamps? Then I realized that the game was in Canada. The lights don't go out in Canada like they do here :(.

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