Grabbing it by the Horns

Life here is as exciting as always. A lot has happen so I'll try my best to condense it to something digestible.

This past weekend, we had plans to leave Granada to visit some place else in Nicaragua. I've been in the same place for over a month and it would be nice to get out and see a bit of the country. However, on Thursday and Friday a lot of us got rather sick. Nothing too serious. More like there was something in the food which our bodies rejected. Friday was a big recovery day so our hopes of escaping were lost. Nonetheless, some of us who were feeling better snuck a short afternoon trip to Masaya. Just a 30 minute bus ride away, Masaya is a mecca of commerce for Nicaragua. You can find and buy practically anything you need, either for tourists or for locals. There are many markets there, all densly packed and intertwining. It reminded me a lot of the fish market in Tokyo, where there is barely enough room to breath let alone let a cart of produce go by. Some old lady, who was on the bus with us, led us to an interesting part of the market to find nice hammocks. Masaya is famous for making them and you can get them very cheap there. They will even personalize it for you, with the exact colors, density, and even put your name on in it if you want. Just give them two days to start one for you and you're all set. Guess what everyone is getting for Christmas?

Sunday, there was a massive festival in Granada. The big attraction for the fiesta was the running of the bulls. Yes that's right, Nicaragua has it's very own running of the bulls through its public streets. However, Nicaraguans run the drill a little different than the Spaniards run theirs. The streets are lined with people and are filled with even more. But the streets are not guarded by any railing or obstructions. Everyone just stays as close to the buildings as they can and hope the wild bull doesn't head in their direction. Men, women, children all line up to see the extravaganza. I still don't know the Spanish word for "safety" yet, but I can't imagine it would be helpful anyway. Now I'm not sure how this whole event was supposed to go down, but here is what it looked like. Two wranglers would have a bull tied to their horses and then they would run the bull down the street. However, the bulls were both very angry and scared, so they were very aggressive coming down the street. Almost every time, and there were six times, the bull escaped the wrangler's hold and ran wild down the street chasing anyone who ran from it. Namely everybody. Now I did see one person get railed by a bull. I have no idea how serious a blow it was, but I saw a body fly up in the air down the street. Alcohol, massive crowds and stupidity were all key ingredients for this incident. Oh and when a bull screams by you, the fun isn't over yet. Many people harass the bulls to the point they stop running down the street and come blazing up it. Now you have to keep an eye out in both directions to make sure you don't get the horn. Luckily, I don't think as many people were hurt this year as last, if you count that as a positive standard of measure. Overall it was an adrenaline filled day and nice taste of culture.

For the past month, many volunteers, myself included, have not been entirely happy with how the Project is being run. The volunteers are not given any direction and we can only count on ourselves for organization. There are two owners of the organization, Angel and Judit, and they are the only other people involved. Judit has been here for the past two or three weeks and we were hoping she would bring the group together for some organization. If anything, she made things work. She was a very nice person and does a lot for the organization, but being organized and being a leader was not her stronger aspects. That being said, the volunteers have been becoming more and more frustrated with the direction we are going. There would be lapses of communication between volunteers and La Prusians and between other volunteers. Work just sort of happened if the conditions just happen to be in place, unless you had something periodic like a class.

With all that being the case, two other volunteers and I decided to attack the communication issue with the volunteers. I was going to have a team building exercise (Hooray for Team Challenge, Stefani!) and they would elaborate on the different ways and types of communication. We executed it Tuesday night and it was a big hit. It was especially interesting at some points since we have many Spaniards with no English and a couple English with no Spanish. We played a game where someone was blindfolded and a person of another language had to tell them where to go. As humorous a situation it was, we were able to point out how we could improve on certain points of communication. Everyone had a lot of fun and we got down to physically working out some of the problems we were having. Now we have meetings everyday for an hour instead of once a week for 30 minutes. We are going to have more intercambio between the Spaniards and the English speakers, as it was very easy to separate to our main language. Finally, we picked someone to be in charge of facilitating meetings and everything else. For some reason they thought I would be good at it because they liked how I facilitated that particular meeting. So now I get to try and keep the group running as smoothly as possible. It's extremely easy to get off topic and to leave the meeting with something concrete. Hopefully I can help drag them back on topic to get things done that need to be done. I can't wait for another 2 weeks when all but one volunteer will be Spanish. An American running a bunch of Spaniards in a Spanish organization. Maybe I could change the official language to English while I'm in power. Hmm...

One last thing of serious interest with the project is a free trade school option we are working on. There's a group here or some governmental program around here that will take teenagers and older into trade school for free. The big requirement is that they past primary school. There are many teenagers in la Prusia that really need this program. All during the day they are bored and idle. Sometimes they help with the project, but there is just nothing for them to do. They aren't skilled and can't get a job. They don't have a family to look over yet, so they just hang out and drink and create trouble. Well, not too much trouble. They are all actually really timid. But three volunteers and myself are going to run up something to get them all involved. It's really essential for getting them a job and being successful. If you look at my photos of the fiesta in Granada you can see a big group of them coming with us everywhere.

Today, my English student, Rosario, cooked and sold a whole mess of nacatamales. These are Nicaraguan versions of tamales. The picture is of her mother helping cook them. They showed us how they make them and what work goes into it. The most best ingredient, I thought, was "cal" which mixed with water is used to make paint. Really ties the tamale together.

My Spanish is still coming along. I'm done with my 10 classes of Spanish and now I just study on my own and talk as much as I can. Sometimes I feel like I'm to the point where I can talk more than I can understand. But I'm sure my learning process will accelerate after more English speakers leave. Until then, Adios!

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