The big update!!!

Well its been a little while since I last posted so I will try to update you with as much as I can. Ill apologize in advance because it will definately ramble and it will definately have bad english. Sorry!

Anyways in the last three weeks I have sworn in as an official Peace Corps Volunteers, went to a conference of all volunteers in Nicaragua and have now moved into my permenant site for the next two years. Yes, I am now officially a resident of Nicaragua, how crazy is that. Only two years ago I didnt want to speak spanish for the rest of my entire life, only four months ago I couldn't even ask a question in spanish but now I am sitting in the middle of nowhere in Nicaragua and relying on spanish to survive....its quite startling at times.

Anyways its been a great three weeks, during the swearing in I got to hang out with all my friends down here for a week in Managua. It was good having everyone together but we had meetings everyday from 7am until almost 7pm at night when you include dinner. Also our hotel was near the airport which means that we were near no places to do anything fun. So most of the time we hung out at the pool, which was fun but when you have been out in the country for the past three months you just want to get out to a bar once in awhile. I got some nice pictures from the swearing in ceremony though as we all had to get dressed up and the ambassador from USA was there and spoke. All in all it was a pretty cool event. I will explain some more when I post some pictures of the event.

The all volunteer conference was fun meeting other volunteers. I acutally have a friend that is down here from UNC so it was good to see a friend from back in the states. But also it was a cool event because we could see projects that other people are working on that we can do in our site. Also people were selling things that they made in their villages so that was a good chance to pick up some small things for the new site.

So now the important stuff....THE NEW SITE!!!
My new site is really awesome. For the most it is really well organized which is great because lots of groups want to work with us. Thus I already have two projects set up..

Bean Project
My town is a bean town, they grow red beans. Thus they got a group to come in and support the building of a bodega, spanish for essential a building of silos, thus the town formed a cooporative and has began buying and selling beans. This is a great practice as during parts of the year the price of beans can triple. For example right now the price of beans is 15 cordobas per pound, while only 2 months ago the price was 3-5 cordobas per pound. (A side note the exchange rate is 18.5 cordobas per dollar) So with silos the group can buy beans when they are really cheap and then sell them once the price goes up. The bad part of this project is that only one person has a truck to transport the beans, thus he is the person in charge of making the sales. Now the only way to make sure he is not keeping the money for himself is to get a bill of sales, pretty simple and logical. Well the problem is that the town trusted him so much that they havent ever asked for these bill of sales. Also, when your tripling your investment most people are just happy to have the money and dont ask questions. Well the town noticed that he has accumulated quite a bit of wealth (which I think most of this wealth is because he has a brother in the US that is sending him money), but anyway the town decided they wanted to see the bill of sales for the last month. Well lucky me he doesnt have any and all hell broke loose. My first week here I am going to a meeting and there is all this yelling back and forth and my spanish is not good enough to understand all that is going on. So the gist that I get is that they questioned the guy and he said he has never received bill of sales, he then questioned the group who could make a bigger profit then he has been making, which of course no one can because no one has a truck to sell the beans. So the way I am taking it is that they just wanted to call him out and he will have to get bill of sales from now on. Anyway this meeting was like four days ago and everyone is all friendly so I dont think anything major is going to come out of it. I guess when you live in a town of 400 people you cant be mad at people for too long!
So my part of this project is to work with them on business projects and for the long term they want to export the beans so I will be working on figuring out how to do this.

Pig Project.
This will be more of my project that I will work on. Essentially the town was given money to start a project of reproducing pigs. There will be 55 families in the community divided into 11 groups, 5 families per group. Each group will be given funds to build a pig pen and also be given a pig. There will be 10 female pigs and 1 male pigs. Right now the breed of pig in my town is not very good. On average they have between 4-6 babies per litter. The new pig that we will be getting (Yorkshire for you piggy fans out there) has 10-12 babies per litter. Thus over the years we will have quite an influx of pigs that we will then sell or eat.

So those will be my two main projects, on top of these I will be working on making new stoves that use less firewood, painting world and Nicaragua maps on the local school, working on gardens and etc.

Other updates:

Horse update- I think I have mentioned before that the best transport in my town is by horse, thus I have started talking to a couple people in the town and told them I want a horse. They said they will start looking but I told them to hold off until January. My month of December is extremely busy and I also dont want to give off an impression of a rich american.

Cat- I was given the cutest little cat by the volunteer before me. She keeps my house free of rats, scorpions, snakes and all the other fun stuff. The only problem is she has like 9-12 babies a year. So I will be giving out a lot of free gifts to the community.

Two funny stories....
Beans, beans and more beans.
So like I said before I live in a bean town. This is good because beans are expensive and thus if I didnt live in a bean town I probably wouldnt be eatting beans right now. But with that said I am at the other extreme. I have beans and coffee for breakfast, I have beans and a tortilla for lunch, and I have beans and chicken for dinner. At times I feel like Im on Survivor for how many beans can I eat in a week. I have scientific proof that I can eat over 21 lbs of red beans in a week (7 days a week, 1 lb of beans per meal, 3 meals per day). Anyway the bad part of this is that I am pooping a lot like a deer now, except its not pebbles is beans coming out. The good part is beans are selling for a lot now so it is an extra source of income.

A little roll in the carpet...
So I know my family is really big in weekend projects but my new family beats any project I have ever seen done. See the the families are really poor down here, thus many have dirt floors. Well my new family that I am staying in has a dirt floor, and well I am not quite sure why (Perhaps there was a little hill forming that I didnt notice, or they wanted to creat a put-put golf course in living room, not quite sure) but this weekend my mom broke out a bucket of water and the machete and went to town on the living room floor. For over an hour she was rearranging the dirt and what not and when I returned home an hour later there was a "new floor" in the living room.