Liora is in Nicaragua

Thursday, May 31, 2007

I'm writing this from a place called Cafemail, an internet cafe right off of Parque Central. At any given time there are three other volunteers here, and you can hear motown or extroardinarily sappy slow Latin rock songs are playing in the background. I can hear birds and traffic outside and, lately, buckets and buckets of rain pounding against the pavement. I've been in Granada since Sunday, so the end of my first week is fast approaching, and I haven't even written a real entry. I'm not sure where to start, but I guess I should explain what I'm doing here.

The organization is called La Esperanza Granada, and it was founded by a Nicaraguan and a couple of backpackers who decided that they could help out the local schools. The idea is that we work with the school system, and provide one on one tutoring to students in classes. I'm at a school in a town on the outskirts of Granada in a town called La Prusia. I'm going to be with the pre-schoolers, and the other volunteers at the school are amazing with the kids.

I haven't had a full day of school, yet. The rain has prevented most kids from going to class. When you have to trek an hour through the mud, and you don't really have a change of clothes or a good place to dry off, most kids end up staying home. Attendance is pretty spotty anyway. It's amazing who does show up. There is one girl with cerebral palsy whose mother carries her on her back an hour to and from school who braves the rain, and one tiny tiny boy showed up on the top of horse. School was canceled, though, so we went home. Mother's day celebrations where on Monday. These involved dance competitions with the moms who were coaxed into performing for the whole school. The competitions turned into blasting reaggaeton, and two moms, no joke, grinding up against each other- that was my introduction to the school at La Prusia.

Today will be my first attempt to take the bus by myself. Basically, you head down to the bus station, which is on a corner by the market, and you push past these guys that actually grab you to try to get you to ride the buses that they work on. They are privately owned, and so they have some incentive to try to get your 5 cords (that's about 30 cents). Anyway, you have to push past them and shove onto the most crowded bus, because that's the one that is leaving first. If you are lucky you get a party bus. Those blast music down the street, starting at 6 in the morning, and frequently drive past our house. After about a ten minute ride, you get off by an a police station, and walk up a path which gets pretty mucky in the rain, and up to the school.

What else...Wednesday was a beautiful day. After a meeting to plan parties for international children's day, we had the day off for the official mother's day holiday. We walked up to this lagoon, Laguna Apoyo, which was made out of the inside of an old volcano. There is a touristy side also, where Nicas sit around drinking beer, but we hiked up this secluded path, through La Prusia actually. It was gorgeous, and I felt so grateful to be here. We swam out into the lagoon and floated on driftwood. Some of the volunteers played cricket on the beach with sticks, and we headed back when it got dark. The buses stopped running, so we ended up getting a ride with a Canadian couple living down here, and the woman handed us her card. Apparently, she's the ambassador to Nicaragua from Canada. Or so the card said. Crazy.

There's a lot of expats around here. They own a fair share of restaurants, hotels, bars, etc. There's a man named Jimmy that owns a bar called Jimmy Three Fingers, basically living out some kind of fantasy of his. Every night he sits at the bar with his guitar and plays Van Morrison and Johnny Cash, makes himself the star of his own show.

Random place to stop, but I have to go to school now.

I am loving this so far.