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Published: March 12th 2010
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09 March 2010
Tuesday 3pm
It’s too damn hot. My father taught Lenin “It’s too damn cold,” over Christmas, and now we’ve taken to repeating how it’s too damn hot on a daily basis.
The strange thing is that it is searingly hot in the sun and downright chilly in the shade. We woke up seeing our breath in the air this morning and the water that came out of the community spigot was steaming. My body steamed clouds worth as I showered at seven in the morning. But now, at 3:00pm, it’s so hot that my legs have rivulets of sweat streaming down from where I sit on a plastic lawn chair.
These are the hot, dry summer months in Nicaragua. March and April reach the dry dry hot hot stages and then sometime in May the rains will start.
When I came in my room there was a house lizard on my window. Technically I think they are geckos. I hear them chirping sometimes at night, and I always hope they are feasting on the multitudes of mosquitoes that populate my room. Same goes for the bat that I vaguely hear flying around my room
a few times a month. I usually just kind of hear it flapping around as in a dream, and I always hope he is ridding my room of the malaria ridden bugs as I drift back to sleep.
Being an agricultural society, there are people who own livestock. Cows are herded back and forth several times a day, usually by boys on horses or donkeys or bicycles. There are a few families who have six or seven cows, some have more than a dozen. Every time they pass our crossroads and get close to the gate, the dogs all go berserk and make sure the cows won’t enter the yard.
There are also several sets of bulls that are yoked together and usually used for hauling carts, hauling logs out of the mountains that will be made into fence posts or roof beams, and during the rainy season, they are used to plow fields.
The mango trees are in blossom and have baby hard green mangos hanging. People from the south of Nicaragua come to the north and are already selling huge mangos in Somoto. There are pineapples and cantaloupes and mandarins and oranges and watermelons and
playing in the mud AKA making adobe
it's mamita's brother in the cowboy hat. lenin and i went to visit his great grandmother, whose house is the little one on the right, and one of her sons, mamita's brother, lives next door and was busy making adobe for a small house for a son of his there are allllways bananas and platanos… and they are all so cheap. There’s a seed called tamarindo that makes for awesome fruit juices, as does my all time favorite, maracuya - passion fruit.
But oh, what I wouldn’t give for some berries. Some strawberry shortcake. Blueberry muffins. Raspberries. Cherry pie. Fresh blackberries. The rare huckleberries. And oh, for a peach! Or a plum or a pear. They import Washington apples down here, so I can buy an apple. But I usually don’t, because there are all the other fruits that are grown in backyards here, like passion fruits.
I was thinking about going running last night as I was falling asleep, but schedule wise, it’s a hard thing to get done.
I wake up between 5:30 -6:00 am. I go to the latrine, put in my contacts, wash my face, throw on a sweatshirt and baseball cap and shorts and go get coffee and bread and wait for the water to come. It usually starts at around 6:15 and I can usually haul five trips, or 50 gallons, before it shuts off after 7am.
Then I shower and go teach English class. Get back, do
laundry, and go hang out at Mamita’s and help her take care of the kitchen and sell things from the store and read on the porch until the kids get out of school, which is sometime between 10:30 - 12:30 usually.
And by that time it is too damn hot to do any kind of running. The afternoon is hot hot and then about 5pm it starts getting cold again, and by 5:30pm it’s nearly dark. Nicaragua operates on about a 12 hour light, 12 hour dark day. Also, 6 months of dry season, 6 months of rainy season.
There are like a million boys in Moropoto and the surrounding communities and last week our boys, specifically one cousin, decided to organize a soccer tournament. Moropoto has 3 different teams and there's Coyolito's, Rio Arriba's, Chichicaste's and two more teams... for a total of 8 teams. They started playing last week. The mayor's office got wind (since the mayor, the vice mayor, and the head of children's rights all have lived or taught in Moropoto) and a police truck full of diplomats showed up, gave a speech, gave every team a new soccer ball, and my host mom,
the vice mayor, made the first kick.
Anyway, it's kind of an awesome thing. They play every Wednesday, starting at 8am and usually ending at around 4pm. So an all day event. Anyone who makes food is there selling popsicles and fried things and all kinds of fruit drinks. It's great because all of these boys are thinking more about the games and teams and sports than they are about getting drunk and smoking and causing trouble.
On Sunday 14 March Lenin and Ozmancito and I will head out to Wiwili, Jinotega, to visit his family for the week. We have a bag full of things we brought from the States for Christmas presents, including Missouri baseball caps, used purses for the girls, two WalMart reusable bags for my mother in law and a nonstick skillet, too, and a new waterproof watch for my father in law. Oh, and some used shoes and long sleeved shirts for Lenin's neice and nephew, Asly and Alan. Asly is over a year old and Alan is like 5 months old.
They had a solar panel, but lightning struck very close by and fried the panel, so I will be without
electricity or cell service all next week. I'll be bathing in the rivers and milking cows and making cheese and experiencing a different part of volunteer life. I love going to visit his family because, once again, I am a guest. In Moropoto the people have all gotten used to me and I am no longer a guest, I'm just another person. It's nice to get away from that and go somewhere where they respect me again.
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Cassi
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Great post. That photo of you standing with the big stick should totally be on a Peace Corps brochure or something!