Diriomito

I had a busy day yesterday, so I didn’t get a chance to blog. Or should I say, it’s so much harder to be efficient in a rural setting like this. I always have to walk from place to place to meet people, pick up things, etc, the sky darkens completely at around 6 o clock and there is constantly noise in the background, such as dogs, telenovelas, roosters confused about the time of day...

Speaking of noises, I’m woken up a good three or five times a night by noises. The dogs have this caterwauling session for about half an hour every night, where all the neighborhood dogs begin barking louder and louder, seemingly feeding off of each other’s barks so the noise increases exponentially. I imagine that they’re shouting insults to one another. Either way, I have to put on my sound-canceling headphones and listen to some calming nocturnes ironically at high volume to overcome the barking noises, and drift off which isn’t difficult because I’m oddly exhausted every day despite the fact that the air is much cooler and fresher up here in the hills around the laguna. 

Because we live on the elevated ridge around the Laguna, the town is essentially located on a huge hill that is one side of a larger hill surrounding the laguna. To go anywhere, one much traverse the one, main road, which runs either uphill or downhill depending on your direction. My backside and hamstrings have gotten their fair share of exercise from walking up and down the hill everyday. 

Yesterday for example, we walked up the hill, up and up and up until we reached the outskirts of Diriomito and reached the neighboring town of Pacaya. From there, we worked backwards, administering surveys about filters, stoves and solar lamps to every house on the road. We collected almost 70 in total between the eight of us, which beats Iniciativa’s record of 40 between two occasions, by a wide margin. What can I say? We’re kind of a big deal.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again, but I love doing surveys! It’s a great way to improve your Spanish, and I love experiencing the warmth and generosity of Nicaraguans. We had some good conversations and more than one family had us stay longer to ask us about where we were from and our lifestyles in the United States. While I’d say Americans are on a whole nicer than average, especially to foreigners and those of different cultures, they aren’t as willing to open their homes immediately to strangers and give them their time. Then again, there’s much more of a culture of keeping the door open for neighborhood guests and way less commitments that fill up or lives with meaningless busywork here. 

At night, I read my new book by Salmon Rushdie, wrote a bit for some assignments we have for the internship, and talked with the family. One of the daughters, Carla, has the cutest baby (almost one year old) named Juliana. The little kids here are absolutely gorgeous and Juliana is no exception. She’s cherubic, with dark curls, large eyes, and tiny little gold studs. Out of her little puckered mouth can come surprisingly loud shrieks, but her capricious affection makes up for her misbehavior. Because it was one of the group’s birthday, we went over to her house and watched Anchorman, which was the first time I had seen that movie. 

In addition to the dogs, an extremely loud rain, which sounds like drums being beaten on a tin roof, woke me up, in addition to the fear that the ants would appear again right after it rained. Finally, because there is no insulation between the rooms whatsoever, as soon as people got up and began to move, I woke up as well. 

The excessive amount of television my home stay family watches has helped me immensely in my Spanish, which I’ve found has grown by leaps and bounds since I first got here in Nicaragua, but has also noticeably improved in terms of fluency and comprehension since I got here to Diriomito two days ago. I’ve resolved to watch more TV in spanish when I get home to keep up my Spanish. We’ve watched the Discovery Channel, makeover shows, I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant, My Strange Addiction and many, many other shows together, all in Spanish. 

Today, we traveled to Güisquiliapa, a town about an hour away that is the hometown of four of our asesoras. We’ll be having a campaign for the first time in their hometown. Because the asesoras knew about half the people in the town, they did an excellent job doing publicity, having in depth, personalized conversations to each of the people about the campaign this Saturday. Finally, they went the extra step of making a map of the town and planning, down to the last detail, who was responsible for each section, making this one of the best-run publicity campaigns I had been to. 

We’re already starting to talk about what we need to do our last week here, which is a substantial amount of work. Our final report and product recommendations are due by the end of the week, which entails going through our hundreds of surveys, entering them into a spreadsheet and analyzing all the data, and then extracting conclusions. We also need to use this data to come up with recommendations and next steps for SolCom and our asesoras in the future. Also on the agenda is a reasoned conclusions of what to do with the money with which we’ve been entrusted; who do we invest a couple of hundred dollars in, and why? In addition to all this, we’ll be planning a national conference for all SolCom employees and affiliates in Nicaragua for next Friday and coming up with workshops and presentations. Finally, there are the sundry small things to do, like finishing our how-to article, writing my essay, coming up with charla scripts, etc. The work never stops. 

Luckily tomorrow we’ll be having our free day. In the morning we’ll be heading to the Laguna to a place called Monkey hut that has swimming, kayaking, tubing, etc. In the afternoon, we’ll be going back to Masaya where we’ll have a chance to use the internet (at last! Though my hiatus from the internet week to week has barely been noticeable) and go back to the markets to buy my hammock! 

Goodnight.