2 weeks in Nicaragua

I have loved doing all this traveling and learning through experience, but I wasn’t expecting to experience such different levels of culture shock within one country like I did in Nicaragua.

Our entire group of students spent 3 days in Managua( the capital city) and toured around on a school bus. We saw the remains of what an earthquake had done to this city and learned about the reality that not much work has been to improve things, met with one of the Nicaraguan president’s right hand men in the newly renovated Assemblea, drove our school bus through a dump where people work and live, and that afternoon went to a big fancy mall and had milk shakes. These were days of complete contrasts.

After getting a feel for what Nicaragua was like, all 42 of us students headed to a different host families house in different pueblos, barrios and provinces across the country. I arrived in Ocotal with the other 5 students who were placed around that area and that afternoon my 18 year old host sister Maria Jose picked me up at a private school and we walked the 30 minute walk that I would be walking every day for the next 6 days. In the hours that came after we got to the house I gradually met my new host family. I had 5 sisters and 3 brothers( between the ages of 15 and 30), a mom, dad , aunt, 73 year old Grandma, and 5 nephews( my favorite was 3 year old Kenny Rogers… try to pronounce that in spanish=)) and 2 nieces( both 8 months old) that all lived in my house. I barely slept every night because I was either sick from all the food that my host mom would prepare for me, or the noises of the babies, a snoring grandma, and dogs and chickens. But I actually though to myself, I’d rather not be sleeping, because I am actually in Nicaragua!

Every day I would have to leave this family that I began to love so quickly to go to the private school where we would meet up with one of the professors there who would take my group on little tours of the northern part of Nicaragua. We went to a pottery plant, an indigenous community, the antique city, and although I didn’t get a stamp on my passport… we to cross the border into Honduras for about 15 minutes in the pouring rain. One day I got to stay at the school and teach handwriting to about 10 3^rd grade students and it was so much fun to get to teach and do it in spanish.

Because there were so many kids always running around back at my house I also used my spanish a lot with them. I did a lot of playing UNO with my nephews Edson and Zair, and coloring ambulances, helicopters, avions, perros, gatos y arbols with Kenny. One day Kenny and I played in the water that my sister Alexandra was using to water the plants with and when Kenny had gotten all his clothes soaked, he just stripped them all off and continued playing. I would also talk a lot with my host siblings . My youngest brother Pablo and I took a walk around the city one day and we put some spanish music on our MP3 at a local libreria. My 21 year old brother Efren was quite a flirt, and so when he left to go back to school in the middle of the week, I wasn’t too disappointed. Maria Jose gave up her room for the week but we would sit on the bed and talk and look at her pictures and watch spanish tv.

Each day I began to love this family more and more and I was so humbled with every meal that they would serve me and by my host mom waking up in the middle of the night when I was vomiting, and also by the ‘monton’ of gifts that I received the day that I left. I while other students lived in the campo with extreme poverty, I lived in a city where pretty much no one made over 2 dollars a day( so still pretty poor). However, my family survived and happily and por su puesto,( of course) ….I’m trying to figure out how they can be so content, but as my host dad reminded me, the relationships and love that he has in his home is all that he really needs. I left that home on Friday thanking God for giving me eyes to see that true love in that week of living with the Guerrero Family.