Buenos días todos!
Espero que todos ustedes se sientan bien donde están en el mundo. Or for those that don't understand Spanish, I hope you are doing well wherever you are in the world. I realized that it has been a really long time since I have written a blog post so I figured I should write one just to give an update on what has been happening in the wonderful land of Nicaragua. I've finally decided that for one, five months is not enough time for sustainable development to happen. You really need a number of months first to get to know people in the community to learn about what the real community needs are as well build trust with the local people and then start the projects that make real impacts. Five months is not enough time to do this. Five months is enough time to do something small but not enough time to do something large. My biggest ideas for the community are building a cinema and a windmill. I can accomplish both of those projects with a lot more time, which I don't have. Money, as it turns out, is not as hard as I thought it would be to receive. The other intern in my program raised more than 2,500 dollars in two weeks so I know that I will be able to raise the money necessary for these projects. Who knows, I may end up coming back to the community after I graduate from college so that I can do these two projects.
Anyways, moving on to what's going on in the community, there's a significant amount to say. I'm just about done with a business plan for my pastry shop I'm making in the community. This project has evolved so much I barely even know where it's at anymore, but I guess I have an idea. haha. What was originally going to be a bakery café with twenty women working in it with month long shifts has now become a small bakery cafe with three women working on it full time, while other women will have the chance to come to the bakery kitchen to make pastries and sell them throughout the community. So I guess in other words, it is more or less a collective pastry shop and with a small restaurant alongside. It didn't really make much sense to have twenty women working in such a small business as this one. The money for this project will potentially come from donors through the internet, when I start my online fundraising campaign this weekend. Overall, while it feels good to have accomplished so much with this project, I also feel disappointed that I know that I'm not going to get to see the final product, which will come a few weeks after I leave the community.
Alongside this project, I have also been working on installing three enormous trash cans in the community. These three trash cans are elevated so that pigs won't get in and have roofs to protect them from rain, which has already begun to come in torrential downpours. It will be a great addition to the community that doesn't have any trash cans of any type at the moment. However, the real work I've accomplished in the community doesn't really come from the projects I've accomplished but rather from the relationships I've made in the community.
I must say that I have learned more than I learned in the last two and half years of college from the relationships I have made in the community. The funny thing about all of this stuff that I feel I have learned is that it is really made up of a bunch of jumbled facts, all of which signify something on a much larger scale. For example, I was talking to my host brother one day about why my host mother's father never comes over to our house even though he lives about two minutes away. My host brother told me that his grandfather doesn't come over that much because he really didn't take care of my host mother, but rather just impregnated her mother and left her a little while later. I soon found out that this is what he's done with basically every woman he's been with, which can testify to the fact that he has 20 children that are almost all from different marriages. Although this is an extreme example because I've never heard of a family that big before, it represents something that seems to occur often throughout the community. The men work and make money to do nothing other than get drunk afterwards while the women work hard to feed their families. On the other hand, a lot of the women are not completely without fault either. I've learned from people in the community that many of them have married foreigners who live on the beach nearby not because they love them or have anything in common with them, but simply because they want to have a better life. Then again I don't know if I can really blame them because I think that it's a fault of society.
One of the girls I met who is in this situation is only a year older than me, but already has a three year-old daughter and is married to a 46 year-old surfer from France. I also met another girl who is 19 and married to a 60 year-old American. I don't think that I would ever be able to live with myself if I ever found myself in this situation: marrying a girl that's more than 40 years younger than me with whom I have not one thing in common, but as I said before I think that it's a failure of society. Foreigners know that they have so much money that any girl will flock to them for a better life, regardless of how much they love them, and so they marry girls who are generations younger than them. The girls often insist that they have kids so that the men will never leave them, and so that they can basically control the men, but I think that they think that this is a better option than marrying a man who only has limited money and will just get drunk with whatever he does have. I mean after all, it does give them power and we all know how much people like power.
Anyways, I think I should stop ranting and talk about some less controversial topics such as my trip with my dad. Last week was Semana Santa, which is the week long vacation that everybody has throughout Nicaragua and one day in this week also happened to be my dad's 60th birthday, so he came to visit me here in Nicaragua for the week. On our trip, we went to Granada, Lake Nicaragua, and la Isla de Ometepe. I've already talked about Ometepe so I'll talk a bit about Granada. I had heard that Granada had way too many tourists, especially on Semana Santa, but I didn't find it to be that at all. I think that it was actually a lot more authentically Nicaraguan than San Juan del Sur, which really does feel like a foreign city in the middle of Nicaragua. I wonder if that's how Alexandria felt when it was a giant Greek city in the middle of Egypt. Haha I think that's kind of an exaggeration. Granada is right alongside Lake Nicaragua, is filled with extremely colorful buildings, and sits in the shadow of the enormous volcano Mombacho. The nightlife there is also wonderful, as you can sit on any table in the middle of the city, feel the wind pass by, and order a two dollar beer. I'm going back there with my mom and my brother in about a month, which I'm so excited for. After my dad and I went to those places, he came with me to visit my community of Las Salinas and the beach nearby, which he said really seems like one of the last beautiful and enormous beaches in the world that is still mostly untouched. He stayed with my host family as well, which I thought was going to be really awkward, but turned out to be fine. Also, a friend of mine from college came to visit, which was awesome as well. I frequently tell people in my community who complain about having not very to do in Las Salinas, that they should appreciate the beautiful beach, which has hardly anybody on it for the majority of the year, because there aren't as many beaches like that in the world as there used to be.
One last thing, throughout the month of May, my community holds a rodeo every weekend that I've now gone to once. I enjoyed going to it just to talk to the other people in the community, but not to see the way in which the treat the bulls, which is so terrible. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a bull and have my horns tied up to a pole, and be let free with people on my back. Or what it would be like to be taunted by a bunch of drunks with pants falling down in the corral. Well anyways, I hope this blog post didn't seem too negative, because I am definitely having a great time here, I just like to think about things and like to use this blog as a way of expressing my thoughts on everything.
Paz y Saludos a todos!
Zack
