Some more pics for ya...

This first picture was taken a month or so into my time here. We hiked for roughly 3 hours up and down mountains to come to this amazing waterfall. Luckily I am now only 1.5 hrs away from it and my friend lives right next to it, so when anyone comes to visit my site we can definately check it out.
This pic comes from out training days. Eight trainees went to visit a volunteer for three days and when we got their we were greeted by the school children who put on a little play for us.
Another picture from tech days, this is a picture of five of us working on vaccinating chickens. It is a cool thing you can do with a youth group to makes some money and take the group on a trip. Which is an awesome thing as many of the children or adults of out comunities never get to see other parts of Nicaragua.
This is another picture of my sitemate Marlena. During out training days we got into a little mudfight (Yes I won, like always!).
So you wonder what I did for New Years! Here is a little tease, this is sunset on New Years Eve down here in Nicaragua. Ill give you some stories next time...

Hope all is well and Happy New Years!!!

So what does it really mean...

So this is the blog post to clarify some things...What does it really mean. I have realized that as I post stuff I am not clarifying the difference between how it is in the US and how it is Nica style...

Roads- Yes I do have road access to the Pan American Highway, which is quite nice. However no it is not paved and yes it definately has a lot of manure (both cow and horse) guiding the way. A little funny side note is that my town just completed a two week project where EVERYONE in the town helped out to expand it to a 2 lane road. The funny part is that we only have two vehicles in the WHOLE town. Thus it is now safe that if the two vehicles do meet paths they can cross safely.

Water- Yes I have access to safe drinking water, no I do not have sinks or a hot shower still. Instead I have a water spicket in my yard (much like the old time wells) in which I get all my water (shower, cooking and drinking).

Electricity- Yes I have electricity, however it is only two light bulbs and two electrical outlets. Also, while the President here has assured the public no more blackouts this year (yes he said this with only 15 days left in the year) our power already went out again last night. Blackouts are a regular thing here.

Wake up call- Yes I made the mistake of telling my host family that I could sleep through anything. Now i get the delight of a wake up call every morning at 6am. Oh but this is not a normal wakeup call they blast ranchero music (which is a lot like the worst music you could ever think of). They turn their radio as loud as it can go and think that I can hear my little wrist watch alarm. Yeah it wasnt working....but luckily I am living on my own how.

Shower- Yes i get to take wonderful cold bucket baths...but I also never mentioned that my shower is outside and only has 2.5 walls. Yup its a great show for all the little kids playing outside there with me.

Polisima- this is an event held every december for about 15 days in which the community honors Mother Mary. To do this everyone in the community celebrates at one person's house and the house changes every day. Well no families have any money for decorations, instead they tear down all the decorative plants in their front yard to amass a shrine to the Mother Mary. It is quite amazing the shrines they create, however it leaves their yard a complete disaster. Yeah Im thinking this tradition wont be starting anytime soon in the US.

Meat- Yes I get meat about 2-3 times per week, which is most then many families that I live with. However, I have not seen meet thats not attached to the bone. Oh how I crave a filet mignon.

Living Room Furniture- No there are not lazyboys and definately not couches. Instead we use hammocks (yup those are comfortable) but for chairs we get to enjoy those good ole plastic chairs that many people use for deck furniture back in the states.

*A little side note- once again I am still loving it down here. I do not post this as a slam against Nicaragua. However, I am just posting it so you get a more complete picture of what I see everyday.

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Some more pics for you...

This picture shows David, but more importantly what most of the area around me looks like. Like I have mentioned I am surrounded by bean fields but also what you can see better in this picture is I live in the mountains. This is good and bad, first its absolutely beautiful. However it absolutely sucks to walk anywhere. Like I said in the pic below my closest site mate is Marlena, she is only 2 miles away, however there is a huge mountain I have to walk and can take up to an hour and a half walking back from her site.

Here is a picture taken from a project we just completed yesterday. We went to one of my neighboring volunteers sites and built an improved stove that will used less firewood, thus saving the environment and the family money. In this picture is David and Marlena, they are the two closest volunteers from my training group. Marlena is a 2 mile walk while David is only like an hour and half by a bus.

Here is the swearing-in picture I mentioned in the last blog. The joke is that we all greased our hair back for the swearing in ceremony, along with the greased hair many of us decided also to sport various facial hair styles. Well lets just say that the PC thought it was our way of being professional and dressing up and thought we were one of the best mannered ag groups in awhile. Sorry I dont have a picture of the whole group as the picture that I have is quite fuzzy and you cannot tell who each person is.

Here is a picture from my youth group going away party. There were four volunteers that worked with this group: myself, Greg on the upper left, Ivy is in the upper middle with blonde hair and a tiedye shirt and then Sarah is in the lower right with the tiedye shirt. This was the group of volunteers who lived in my training town and had spanish class with me. Unfortunately because of health problems Greg had to terminate his service early and return to the US. He was a great friend and will be missed over here.

This is a picture of my host family. Yes that is my first Nica shirt as they say, first shirt given to me down here in Nicaragua. It was a gift from my sister, Eymy. Eymy is the one on the right, then my host mom Marisol and my little sister Fatimah.

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.

The big update!!!

Like I promised last week, here are some pics. I will post an udate next week with how my site visit went...
First pictures is of all the Nica 45 volunteers. This is the all the volunteers that I came with and comprise 21 ag volunteers and 19 environmental ed volunteers...
This is my amazingly cute little sister. This picture was taken when she was about 1.5 months old and she is now around 2.5 months. She is my amigita which translates to little friend...
This is a picture of my sister... and I know she would kill me if I put this picture up here but the thing is Nicaraguans are not big fans of pictures unless they have time to get all done up for them. Well I didnt feel like waiting... Anyways this is taken in a cave we visited with our youth group.
This is another pictures from the youth group hike... In Nicaragua a youth group generally includes ages from 15-25, so yes some members of youth group are older then me!


Here is another pictures from the trip looking out from the caves...

Anyways expect some more pics shortly as I only have one more week here in my training town and then head to Managua for two weeks and I should be able to get more pics and an update of my site visit on here.

Oh what a week it was...

Maybe it has actually been two weeks or more since I have last posted. Sorry but it has been extremely busy, this blog will be quite long to make up for it. So there are going to be three parts to the blog...

Tech Days- this is where I went to visit a volunteer for four days and learned what I will be doing as a volunteer.

Flooding in Nicaragua- this is where we got evacuated from Esteli and got hooked up in a nice hotel in Managua for four days.

Site Assignment- Yes I know where I will be living for the next two years...read below to find out.

TECH DAYS
So tech days is an opportunity that we have to go visit a volunteer for four days and we get to actually participate in stuff we will be doing as volunteers. For my tech days I went in a group of eight people to a town called La Chinea. The rumor that I heard is that it gets its name because some farmers were plowing a field and the found some old China handmade plates hidden in the soil. Thus, when other people were saying where they were going it was the place they found the China, which in spanish is La Chinea.

So during these tech days the volunteers site is right near a twenty foot wide stream that we got the joy of crossing atleast four times per day. This was not funny as I did not have good footwear for this and as it rained everyday the river got higher and more rapid as the days went on. To top it off six out of the eight of us came down with some bacteria, and yes I was one of the lucky six. So I had the joy of 4 days of diaharria. Luckily it is all better now and I am back to 100% healthwise.

So back to the tech days, during these days I learned a lot of useful information for my job. Including how to build ovens (yes oven that use wood not electrical) that use less wood. One oven we made cost a whole $20 and the other we just used dirt, thus it was free. Both oven took a full day to build and were quite interesting structures. (If you want more information most a comment and I will add more detail next time.) After that we worked with some youth groups and made some organic insecticides and fertilizers.

FLOODING IN NICARAGUA
As some of you are starting to hear on the news Nicaragua is having some SEVERE flooding. It literally has rained here for the past two weeks or more. Included in these rains were two tropical storms. Thus all PC personnel in the north were evactuated for four days to the capital Managua. It was actually kind of funny because all four days we were in Managua it was sunny, however up here in the north it continued to rain. Well we returned to Esteli on Thursday and are back living with our families. However it continues to rain here everyday and like I said there is severe flooding, mudslides and lots of roads have been washed out.

How does this affect me? It really hasnt effected me much except the sky is always gray, I always have my rain jacket and my shoes are always muddy. Where we are in Esteli there hasnt been much damage per say. Most of the damage and true flooding is still to the north of us in Chinendaga and other cities. The sad part is that three out of the four hats I brought with me have started to mold, yes it is truly a sad day. Luckily my Nica mom is coming to the rescue and has washed them to get rid of the mold. They should be back in business once they dry...which could be another month.

So now to the exciting part....

MY SITE ASSIGNMENT!!!
Before I say my site I want to go into the process a little. First what happens is we have a meeting where we learn of all the possible sites. We get to see pictures of all the sites and get a page on each site describing the site, weather, projects and etc. We then list our top three and have an interview with the person in charge of all the Ag Volunteers in Nica. At this meeting we talk about our qualification and previous experience. This is also where we lobby for the site we really want. Well there were 21 sites and 21 volunteers (however we have one married couple so only 20 sites are going to be used). Thus after the interview the Ag Director goes back and puts all the puzzle pieces together and 3 days later we know where we will be living for the next two years.

So without further a do....I will be spending the next two years in La Trinidad, Nicaragua. La Trinidad was my number one choice for many reasons. First, it is only 10-15 minutes from where I am living now. Thus I can visit my host family whenever I want and I am also only 30 minutes away from the city of Esteli. While the city of Esteli isnt the prettiest city, I have become very well acquainted with it and I like spending some time here. It is where I use the internet and also have a PC office so I can meet other volunteers here. I am also excited because I have another person in my training group who will be only 2 kilometer or 1.5 miles from where I am living.

Second reason while my site is perfect is that there is currently a volunteer at the site. There were only five sites to choose from where we will be immediately replacing a volunteer and La Trinidad is one of them. Thus I have some projects already set up for me and also more importantly I have a house set up for me. This is awesome because I can buy the bed and all that other stuff off the current volunteer and not worry about having to haul new stuff to my site. (Did I mention that the method to haul stuff is on top of a school bus?) Another nice thing is that the house has fruit trees and other amenities already growing so I will get the fruit of others labor. Third reason, the projects that are set up involve agribusiness which is right down my alley. The major project right now is exporting red beans to Costa Rica or the US. Now that doesnt seem like much but right now the process involves around 4 middle men and the community wants to eliminate all four of these middle men. So needless to say it should be interesting.

So yeah it has been an exciting two weeks and on top of that I have realized that I can hold conversations in Spanish, so it has been productive too. I will try to update this blog more frequently from now on but no promises. And remember if you have any questions you can always email me (hollinsj@gmail.com).

In closing a little something to think about...Payless Shoes Store is expensive down here!