One Month In!

Hi, friends and family! After some technical difficulties, I´ve been able to post this reflection from last week. I hope to post around every 2 weeks on a regular basis!

09 Jan 2015

Can't believe it's 2015 and that it's been a full three weeks since my last post. Life here during our in-country orientation has been stressful, fun, exciting, doubtful... a mixed bag of feelings; especially because we've been through both Christmas and New Year's away from home. It's also hard to believe that it's been a full month this week... I can and can't believe where the time has gone. We're back home now, settling down more which has been a big relief.

Since my first in-country post a few weeks ago, we've done a number of things:

A second home-stay in our town, Ciudad Sandino; a talk on gender, women, and family here in Nica; a tour of a coffee farm owned by a former Jesuit volunteer; a tour of Managua with our in-country coordinator, Fr. Joe; Christmas mass, dinner, and festivities; a home-stay in the countryside with a small community of 139 people and a Spanish lanuage school for foreigners; goodbyes to outgoing volunteers; lunch with a student delegation from Boston College; and some time spent with my community-mate Rose's family.

Phew! It's been a lot! Definitely a lot of fun thrown in there, even when it felt like I was always living out of a bag! It's been nice to see, learn, and experience new parts of Nicaragua from the touristy excursion into Managua to the day-to-day life of families who hosted us. I'm still doing a lot of processing as our itinerary slows down a bit, but I can say that despite how chaotic the last few weeks have been, they have helped me contextualize the “deep end of the pool” we just jumped into.

Community life is slowly taking shape as we move into a more regular schedule and summer vacation comes to a close for some of us. (Summer vacation in Nica is usually sometime between Nov. and Jan. with flexible dates on either end, it seems.) Along with my fellow 1^st years in the house, Colleen and Katie, I will be starting work with the Fe y Alegria school system sometime on February 2. We will be meeting with our individual schools, our in-country coordinator, and our program coordinator visiting from the U.S. in the coming weeks. Back in March when I said 'Yes' to JVC, I was told I would be “teaching English, possibly religion, at a K-12 school with opportunity for extracurricular and pastoral work.” Broad, right? But with this, I was also asked to be adaptable as to how the position might be different when I arrived in-country. I believe it relates to one of the program's tenets of apostolic availability, being available to serve where called after some discussion and discernment. For this reason, I'm hoping our meetings in the coming weeks will be fruitful.

Aside from the work anticipation, life is calming down from the holiday season, as I would guess it is back in the States. Hopefully, once our community adopts a more regular schedule, life will be a bit smoother. We're making chore charts and other community-related charts in the house this week, including a dinner-making schedule (I have Friday) and a schedule for one-with-ones - or what we're going to call “encounters” where once a week each of us is paired up with a community-mate to spend some one-with-one time together. It's pretty funny because our house-dog Muñeco is also on the list: when you're paired up with him, you give him his weekly bath!

My spanish has been improving little by little; I felt pretty rusty when we first arrived. Thankfully the home-stays gave me some space to gain some traction; however, many Nicaraguans speak too quickly for me to catch every word. Hopefully some day I can understand it all! We have been learning a lot about Nica slang, as well as the 'vos' form which is used very often in Central American countries. It's another way of using the second personal or 'tu' form that suggests a certain level of familiarity and confidence when used between two people. I'm guessing we'll use it more as time goes on. Some fun slang and other commonly used words/phrases have been:

chunche: a thing

chocho: wow!

Chele/chela: a lighter-skinned person

bacanal: a big party

chancho: pig

dale pues: alright then / go for it then

adios: goodbye, but which here you use in passing to say hello and goodbye at once; it's pretty funny because it feels like I'm just telling people bye as I see them in passing.

Buenas: you shout this when you arrive to someone's door or a little convenience store window to let the person know you have arrived

gallo pinto: a rice-bean mixture (you'll find similar dishes in other countries, but they usually have different names, like “casamiento” or “marriage” for a similar dish in El Salvador)

fresco: a  usually-sweet drink you can buy in the streets or at little stores (a lot of drinks here, including water while you're on the go, are sold in plastic bags; sometimes the bags have a straw or you bite off a corner of the bag to make a hole for drinking. I remember first seeing this in El Salvador. I'm guessing it uses less plastic than other plastic containers or cups, and likely less expensive.)

I hope to share more words as the days go by!

I finally have some pictures to share from our first month in-country! The first picture is of me and my fellow first years, Katie in the middle and Colleen on her left. The second picture is from the coffee farm we visited; it includes one of the first Jesuit Volunteers in Nicaragua along with his wife, as well as nearly all of the other Jesuit Volunteers living in Nica. Rose and Edwin the 2nd years of our community are on the left and right of the photo in the back row. (There are two JV communities in Nica, one in Managua and one in Ciudad Sandino, with 5 volunteers each. This year, there are three 1^st years and two 2^nd years in each.) The bottom three are pictures of picking coffee, Christmas decorating (the chicken is one of our pets), and a waterfall from one of our homestays in the campo (you can slide down the center of the fall!)

Tonight, we'll be having dinner with a delegation of students from John Carroll University, tomorrow we'll have talks on education and ecclesiology & the church in Nicaragua, and Sunday we have our first group trip to the beach!

Hope everyone had a happy and healthy holiday season! Happy New Year! And here begins Year 1 of my time with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Nica!

Alex