Blogs from Northern Highlands, Nicaragua, Central America Caribbean - page 22

Our agreement with Grupo Fenix is that we have all our meals catered for. This is the standard setup for volunteers with the programme and makes keeping fed more straightforward than fending for yourself. Breakfast and dinner is always with our host family including lunch on the weekends. Our weekday lunches happen together with the rest of the volunteers (currently three others) and rotate between the women of the community. Through our payments for bed and board as volunteers the families get paid an amount for each meal that they cater. It’s a pretty well thought through arrangement and on the face of it straightforward. We’ve only thrown the system into chaos once. Last week we decide to extend a trip to Managua so we could spend sometime with other cooperative based programmes in search of ... read more

Thank you all for the warm birthday wishes! Mi madre gave me roses from her garden in the morning and made me traditional Nican birthday food, or chopsue. Yeah, actually, it really is traditional birthday food here... and, as usual, it rocked. The 3.5 month old baby, JJ, is just so damn cute and soooo incredibly tranquil and happy that he makes the whole house happy. Actually, my family is usually happy. They joke around with each other all the time, especially my 17 year old brother, Isaac, and nuestra madre. He keeps arm wrestling our 49 year old mom.... and she wins everytime! Man, doing laundry by hand will give you some fuerte arms. I need to get photos with my family so you all can see them... life is getting into a routine... Iowa, ... read more

Buenas from the wilds of Nicaragua! Although I blog all the time at mytb.org/mbaade, figured I would send out one of my mass emails after my first three weeks of living and training in Nicaragua with the Peace Corps. So with the Peace Corps service is for 27 months, which includes 3 months of in country training and 24 months of service. The PC is divided up into 5 different sectors: TESOL, Environmental Education, Small Business, Health, and Agriculture. I am part of the Agriculture sector in Nicaragua and am 3 weeks into my 11 week training period and I AM LOVING IT! We have Spanish classes every Mon-Tues-Thursday at least, from 8am-12 and then applied Spanish from 1-3pm. Most Wednesdays and all Fridays we have technical sessions and tech training... which includes EVERYTHING from how ... read more

Having discovered that the weekend buses to Somoto were far less busy than the student laden buses to Ocotal (our two nearby city options for entertainment) we decided Somoto would be the better spot to enjoy our Sunday. Being catered for fantastically by the family we stay with and our weekday lunches rotated between the Mujeres Solares (solar women) we had not yet needed to navigate the local market for eateries. However, so we could take a more leisurely approach to our Sunday trip to Somoto and give our family some space from their two guests we elected to seek alternative lunch arrangements. Somoto, especially on a Sunday, is every bit the tranquilo capital of Madriz this region of Nicaragua. It’s fair to say there’s not really much in the way of things to see and ... read more

Once we decided to undertake our year of exploration much fruitless Goolging ensued in the pursuit of a suitable volunteer experience in the Spanish speaking world. Grupo Fenix (www.grupofenix.org) was the shining light amongst many organisations that could do little to conceal that fact that they cared a lot about volunteers paying exorbitant fees and very little about what their volunteers might actually achieve. The enthusiasm and vision that Susan Kinne, a sixty year old American, the Programme Director communicated during our several months of email exchange about Grupo Fenix drew us in. An opportunity to be effective contributors to a project blending renewable energy technologies with the sustainable development of a rural community far removed from the fortunate wealth we enjoyed at home was irresistible. However, when we made the decision to leap off of ... read more