Well I’ve finally moved in with my host
family, and now live in a pueblo (small village) with three other volunteers
about an hour southwest of Managua called Santa Teresa. It’s very pretty and has a beautiful church
and park at its center. It was definitely
a bit nerve wracking leaving the bus of English speaking volunteers when I was
dropped off at my new house for the next 11 weeks. My host family is very friendly and does not
speak any English. Even if they did, I’m
pretty sure they were told not to speak any around the house to help me get
used to the language. The front of my
house also has a little storefront, know as a pulpeía. As of now, I probably understand a max of 15-20% of a conversation, and can
speak enough to get to the point where my utterances probably make a bit of
sense…maybe? Either that or my host mom
is just being nice and nodding her head to things she doesn’t understand (kind
of like I’ve been doing). It is nice
though that one of the other volunteers lives right next door to me and our
host mothers are related.
My
first night here was a bit strange. I
was asleep by about 8 pm, and woke up at about 3 am, (still 7 hours of sleep)
to a chorus of stray dogs barking, my 8 month old host niece (who is adorable
by the way) crying, and roosters going crazy.
I’m not sure what exactly the roosters find so appealing about the 3-6am
timeframe, but they definitely were excited to tell the whole world they were
awake and ready to go. They pretty much
slowed down at dawn, leading me to believe these roosters aren’t very good at
telling time. That being said, I still
did get a bit more sleep, and recognize the fact that I’ll definitely get used
to the endless nightly chorus of animals, or will just wear earplugs when I
sleep.
I’m
definitely not used to seeing horse and cattle pulling carts down the streets in
my neighborhood in the US, and will have to get used to the dogs and cats that
roam the streets. I’ve already started
to get used to cold buckets showers in the morning, and also had my first
experience with cramming into a bus (well, it was a van, but served the same
purpose) with Alex (another volunteer) and her host mom to head to the market 15-minutes
away in Jinotepe to buy food. The market
was unlike anything I’ve ever seen to before.
There were many vendors selling everything from fruit and veggies to
jeans. I saw someone wearing a Chicago
White Sox shirt, and someone else wearing a Chicago Bulls shirt. There were men carrying live chickens and
vendors selling soda and drinks in bags (which is apparently a big thing
here). It was definitely an interesting
cultural experience in which I was happy to be a part of.
There are plenty of things that will
take some getting used to, but overall I’m very excited for this new step in my
life, and am hoping that I will be more able to communicate with Nicaraguans in
a few months, at least past nodding to things I don’t understand and uttering
grammatically incorrect words and phrases here and there. Hopefully this will be one of my longer posts
as I don’t want to bore you, but here are a couple of pictures as a reward to
those of you who made it this far! |
| A look down my street |
 |
| My new enemy...the rooster |
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