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Well, here i am in Nicaragua: I can barely belive it! What´s strange is how at HOME I feel, and Í only just got here. Maybe it will hit me later... But all the stressing about the trip b4 I left, and the hours sitting on the plane and worrying myself to the point that I felt like I was going to throw up (but fortunately didn´t!) must have used up my worry-quota for at LEAST a year. So when I finally arrived, I wasn´t worried at all. I was barely even looking out of the cab windows, it was just like¨"O, OK, here I am¨. It feels like home already. Strange, eh?
Juliana (my hostess) and I hit it off right away. I think we´re going to get along really well. I can already tell that it´s going to be very different for me than it was for Jamilah (last year´s intern, who had quite a negative experience of racism, sexism, and general exclusion)-- people are already coming up to me and assuming that I´m from here. It´s so nice to look around and just see a sea of people who LOOK LIKE ME. It´s wierd, I know, but
its not something I´ve ever experienced b4, even in Mexico.´
Things ARE very different though, don´t get me wrong. For example, we don´t have running water most days (apparently) so we have to bathe and wash our hands etc. in one big bucket of water that has to last for everyone for the entire day. (I think I´ll try and avoid being the last person to "shower"!)The house itself has a corrugated tin-roof and plywood walls, much like camp cabins up here. That
actually is quite comforting for me: it´s somehow familiar. Also, there´s an Evangelical church across the¨"street" (more like what we´d call an ally, as each neighborhood is a complcated network of allyways that then links on to the main road through a common entrance) from which the sounds of loud singing and a lot of preaching (read "yelling at", with "padre dios" insterted every-other
word!) echo across the entire neighborhood. I came outside to see what all the commotion was when the service first started, cuz I thought maybe a parade was going by or something. But no, appartenly that´s just every-day Church!
One last thing: Jamilah had described to me the "lush greenery", so
I was a little surprisee when I was looking out of the plane window down onto miles and miles of what appeared to just be dusty fields and hills/mountains. But it´s wierd, cuz when I landed i finally understood what she meant: all of the trees and plants are a kind of luminous, bright green that u just don´t see in Canada, but stranegly the "grass" is just totally dry, shrub-like patches and
dust/dirt. I get the impression that the trees have quite literally SUCKED the water out of the ground to feed their lush vegetation, leaving the grass to wither and scorch. I found that interesting.
Well, that´s all for me for now. I´m going to go back and watch telenovelas (Mexican soaps that look like they were filmed on a home-video camera, with equally-dreadful romantic/emotional skripts and acting that seems like they just pulled joe-blow off the street and gave him a role!)with juliana. They are SO terrible, it´s really entertaining. But I have to contain my amusement, as they take their telenovelas really seriously down here!lol. I find it an interesting cultural lesson: particularly the gender-relations are quite
telling. Tommorrow I´m going to the immigration office,
and then Juliana might take me on a day-trip to Masaya (the artisans
quater, where I´ve begged her to take me at somepoint!) Then we´ll take the 5 hour bus ride to nueva Guinea on either Saturday or Sunday.
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