Mother's Day, Interviews, Constipation, oh my!

Days 17-23

What a week! Last Friday seems like forever ago, I really need to keep up with this more. I was totally going to take pictures of my town on the way over here, but it’s raining, of course, since it rains for at least 2 hours a day, every day. At night it seems to rain even more. It rains crazy hard too, so the streets basically turn into these mini-rivers, and everyone in town loves just standing at their doors and windows watching it. Or maybe they just love the priceless entertainment of silly gringos sloshing around in thigh high water wearing completely rain-inappropriate attire. Anyways, so last Friday night me and Peter from San Juan were supposed to meet some of the trainees from Catarina to travel to Nicinomo for a party at this restaurant one of the trainee’s families owns. If that sounds complicated, it’s way worse when you consider that at the time only one of us had a cell phone. How did people get things done before cell phones? Pre-planning? Land lines? Physically looking for people? Who knows, I can’t even wrap my head around it. Long story short, communication issues occurred, half us didn’t know where to go, so a few of us just ended up drinking some beers in Catarina. Oh well, it was still fun, but the restaurant we were in kept playing obnoxious American rap music and like Kenny Rodgers so…I don’t even want to talk about it.

Saturday was a off day for us last week, what what! So all of us San Juan volunteers decided to go shopping in Masaya with this volunteer we had met earlier in the week. She’s been here for 9 months so it was the perfect opportunity to shop in a big town with someone who had some experience. The main market there is crazy, I felt like we were in Aladdin or something. We also walked around the more touristy part of town and got some American style pizza (or is it Italian style?) either way it was delicious! I also purchased a cell phone! My number is 505-861-75589 (I don’t really know where to put the dashes, telephone numbers here have a different number of digits). If you want to text me, I can receive them for frizzle, but don’t always expect a reply, this boy is on a budget. I also got a big fat sunburn from the Masaya trip since I forgot to wear sunscreen. God, I hate being pale. When is that coming back in style?

Sunday was Mothers’ Day, and that is a huge deal here. Kids had school off Friday and Monday in celebration and the churches do all these activities. I kind of had a headache though Sunday afternoon and my host mom told me they were going to be at church for at least 3 hours, so I quite literally told her I couldn’t do it. Afterwards, she kept going on about how she saw one of the other trainees there, and I was like, thanks, I get it, I’m an awful son for not going to church on Mothers’ Day. Then, we had pizza from Catarina. I’m starting to think pizza is kind of the go to food for classy occasions.

Monday feels insignificant, so I will not discuss it, except to say there was this crazy woman in the street who set up some speakers and decided to scream incoherent things for at least an hour. I don’t want to talk about what I wanted to do to this woman, but it involves the tennis racquet I own, yet currently have no use for. Thanks, mom.

Tuesday, my bowels said, I’m not done with you yet! Except this time I was super constipated. I blame the plantains. We’re not really supposed to self-medicate, but I told my sister I needed some damn laxatives. Those cramps were not playing around. The next day, Wednesday, I felt highly unstable, so of course we had to travel a bunch. \I found out I’m giving a class with a partner…for 45 minutes…in Spanish…next week…awesome. That has disaster written all over it. So we went to the school we are teaching at in Masaya for a little pre-teaching visit. We have to give our classes at private schools during training, because apparently the new minister of education here isn’t a huge fan of gringo organizations and won’t let trainees give classes in public institutions. This is a new policy. We also walked to Catarina for a technical training session. So I put in a Med-Kit request there that said “something for constipation”, I almost put laxatives, but I didn’t want them thinking I was one of those laxative bulimics. Is that a real thing? I don’t know, I’m sure some people try it.

Today was a pretty full day too. This morning the San Juan and Catarina volunteers had to travel to Masaya to observe a PC volunteer teaching in the classroom. The volunteer was really nice and answered a lot of our questions. The students though, seemed to spend most of class staring at us and laughing, so I’m not too sure of what they got out of it. In the afternoon we had a little interview with the woman in charge of training, Naomi, and also got our evaluations from our professor. My evaluation with my professor was kind of stressful, it was all in Spanish, and she kept going on about me needing to ask more questions during class, so of course during the evaluation I started asking all these questions that really had nothing to do with the evaluation itself. She brought it on herself. I think my interview with Naomi went really well, though. I felt extremely enthusiastic, but for some reason started to veer towards crazy town, yet kept it in check. Like at one point I did this crazy laugh, and went “oh, lord!” With a kind of southern black woman inflection. I have no idea why. I never say that. Also, maybe it was her bubbly personality, but I felt the strange urge to tell her things I knew I shouldn’t. For instance, I almost went on this bizarre tangent about animal abusers and how sometimes I have these intricate fantasies where I torture them dramatically, then thought, “wait, this is both unrelated to the current topic, and bat shit crazy.” So I didn’t. To wrap it up, I pinky promise I’m going to post twice next week, that way these posts won’t be unmanageably long. Like this one. That I’m pretty sure no one will make it through. I mean, it’s like a short story. Sorry to the two of you who made it this far.