Blogs from Nueva Guinea, Caribbean Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Central America Caribbean

My last visit was to the Southern section of the country. I also had a new translator join me this week so it was nice to have a new perspective. He only recently joined CEPAD after working with medical missions for many years. While he has not been to the US he had better conversational English and a greater understanding of the culture/way of life so we were able to have many interesting conversations. The first village we visited was El Nispero. This town has no electricity. So some of the women, if they are lucky, have a basic solar panel and battery. Depending on how much sunlight they get it is enough to turn on the lights at night, charge phones, and maybe a small TV in the summer. Greta: She is a single mom ... read more

Something that has been an ongoing preoccupation/interest to me is the FOOD here. Or, more precisely, the UNPROCESSED food-stuffs. I mean, we never get to see what our food looks like before it arrives pre-packaged on our grocery store shelves: pre-cooked beans, corn, and peas are to us available in tins, ready-to-eat; vanilla comes in liquid-form in a pretty little bottle, ready to be used in various baking recipies; our coffee is already roasted and ground; our rice shucked and bagged-- even "instant" if we so desire. But what did these products look like BEFORE all of the processing, I have often wondered? Does anyone even KNOW how pineapples and papyas grow (hanging from trees? on a vine on the ground, like a pumpkin?); or what black pepper looks like before it is conveniently ground and ... read more

I have had some interesting expereinces at the various Churches of Nueva Guinea. Nueva Guinea was founded by a Baptist pastor in the 1970´s, so it has highly Evangelical roots-- apparently one of the only cities in the country that is predominantly Evangelical, as opposed to Catholic. Although I have noted the predominance of the Evangelical church in the Nicaraguan culture here in general; as opposed to the highly Catholicized society of Mexico, where the Catholic Church reigns supreme. I shall begin by describing my trips to the Evangelical Churches... I have attended two different Evangelical churches: the Baptist church, and "La Profecía" (apparently a version of Baptist). La profecía can best be described as "HIGHLY Evangelical". The first service I attended was complete with a teenage boy jumping around and screaming nonsense,crashing into ppl and ... read more

Well, today is officially the ONE MONTH mark of my arrival in Nicaragua. Things have started to normalize a bit for me, so that I no longer feel the need to write a blog every 2 seconds about all of the "new and exciting" things that are happening. "New and exciting" has given way to "regular and routine", which I have to admit I prefer! Looking back, I can see that each week here has corresponded with a phase of "culture shock", as taught to me before I left for Mexico last year. Week 1 was the "honeymoon phase", where everything was different, exciting, (and scary). Week 2 was the "hostility phase", when things started to get to me and really bother me. The unknown bugs and noises, irregular schedule, language issues, and terrible telenovelas all ... read more

Since the last journal entry concerning Puerto Cabesas, we then proceeded to travel to a small town called El Ayote. Actually, I don´t even know that Ayote should qualify as a "town": it´s a tiny, hole-in-the-wall, out-of-the-way place in the middle of the mountains in Nicaragua´s Southern Atlantic Region (RAAS). It consists of a few muddy roads, lined with sagging little buildings that look like they can barely support their own weight, let alone the weight of the heavy rain that purpetually pounds down on them, turning the "streets" into muddy cess pools. It´s the kind of place that if you blink twice, you would miss it. Thus, you can understand my shock when I was informed that El Ayote has recently been classified as an "urban" area by the Nicaraguan government. "It´s a city," I ... read more