EZ goes to Nicaragua: Goodbye spanish class!

Sorry for skipping yesterday’s blog post; I have good reason for not being able to complete it. After completing all my work, I met up with a few friends to watch a movie at Encuentros, a restaurant/bar/popular gathering place. It’s owned by this bizarre Dutch guy (most of the nicer, tourist-y attractions are all owned by foreigners) who’s extremely personable. I say bizarre because a six foot blonde guy looks really out of place in Nicaragua, and I’m not sure what he’s doing here if he’s originally from Holland. Anyways, he watched a movie with us, gave us free refreshments and invited us back for Saturday. So far, so good. About five seconds after leaving the place, I realized I hadn’t brought my keys; soon after, I found out I had no minutes left on my phone, making it effectively useless; and on top of all that, in the thirty seconds that had passed between these two realizations, the people I had come with had also walked far enough to disappear from sight. Not knowing where they lived exactly, I was stranded. Luckily, I ran into some people I was familiar with due to hanging around the same places (read: Internet cafes) all day, borrowed a few phones, and found myself a place to sleep with a friend, rather than having to wake up my home stay family at 10:30 PM (they go to bed at 8 PM). All was good in the hood.

While I was gone, Voltio stole a pair of my underwear (now he’s starting to get kinky) and Edgar was the one to finally track him down. I laugh whenever I imagine little Edgar holding my underwear after wresting it from the dog.

Today we had a big presentation (or charla, chat, as we called it) about how to make and administer surveys...important but supremely boring stuff. I think we did a very thorough job, though I felt at some points during the preparation and presentation that I could have contributed more. We have a prototype survey ready to go for our campaign tomorrow morning. After only getting a few hours of sleep these past few days, I sense that waking up tomorrow at 4:30 AM is going to be a little difficult. We’ll be heading to another small village (that however, is much larger than the village we went to last time) and selling our normal goods and supporting the local entrepreneurial assesoras in the field. We are also going to focus on solar energy products and water filtration devices for the next six weeks: the specific needs, demand and feasibility for mounting campaigns for selling goods related to these two areas. Another group will be staying behind and testing out a new stove we just bought, so that we’ll have some field experience with a pretty sophisticated good that we might be selling in the near future. Sometimes I feel like we’re splitting hairs on certain issues, like whether we should light the stove at campaigns or leave it on the table. We actually had a debate on this issue, and the issue was something that had to be considered. Yet sometimes, once again, the work feels a bit trivial. I highly admire Tim, Tess and Santa, especially Tim who has been here for more than five years and wants to stay here “long term,” for the obvious passion and dedication they bring to their work. I can’t imagine being able to keep my spirits up, working this hard, in a strange land for so long.

I took some time to take a picture with this clown I found, marketing telephone cards. Not the most flattering picture of me, but the clown looks good.

A crazy back porch. You can't really see the depth of the gorge, but it went down for about fifty meters and ended in a river. After taking the picture the guy stopped and waved; Nicaraguans seem to love having their pictures taken.

Today was also the last day of Spanish classes. Barney took us to the market, where I bought a few DVDs that I can watch in Spanish. I love the market, even if it’s crazy and chaotic and smelly. There’s so much human drama going on in one narrow street. Everyone’s going in all different directions, yelling different things, trying to fulfill different desires, while huge buses and taxis slowly make their way through crowds, passing only a few inches from my head. I’m going to miss Granada...Our next assignment is in Matagalpa where we’ll be consulting a local artisan’s group composed entirely of women who make paper goods. On the weekends we’ll be running campaigns. The work should be challenging, but hopefully satisfying.