New Adventures Down Every Dirt Road!

Well, it's been just about two weeks here, and I'm finally starting to adjust to and almost like my site. The first week was really hard, what with having to adjust to a completely new house all over again, with new family members and new personalities. Then of course there was the fact that I'm the first volunteer to live here for the past five years, so we'll just say I get audibly noticed everywhere I go. Before getting placed, I thought this “stand out factor” would make my job much easier, and I'm sure it will eventually, but right now it just makes it impossible to walk down the street without bracing myself for stares and comments (even though most of them are friendly and harmless.) On top of all of that, my site is much different than my training town. My training town was a tiny 3 block by 3 block community made up of mostly farming families. There were only two buses and a handful of taxis in and out, and there wasn't even a secondary school. My new site however, is huge compared to there. I live in the “centro urbana” which means I have to walk pretty far to find the farming families with kids that will be willing to get dirty with me in my gardens. There's a Mayor's Office, a police station, two secondary schools and two primary schools, a huge church, a health center, a bunch of little commedors (smaller than restaurants, but places to eat) and even bars! Not to mention more buses and taxis than I've been able to keep track of thus far. Many families in the centro have motorcycles and some even own cars. There are still obviously tons of bicycles, and even a few horse or cow drawn carts, but far fewer than in Guisquiliapa.

I think some of my problem the first week was that I was resenting Belen for being so different than the other home I had come to love so much, but now that I'm adjusting and getting to meet some more people, I like it more and more everyday. There are tons of little towns on the outskirts of the centro that I've recently found out about. These “comarcas” have tons of awesome adventures to offer, such as rivers to swim in and mountains to climb! Yesterday for example, one of the professoras from one of my schools called me up to invite me over for lunch at her house. She came to my house to get me beforehand and told me to pack something to swim in because we were going to head to the river after lunch! So, we did just that. After the biggest bowl of soup I've ever had, she and I and two other guys from her part of town headed out to the river with her adorable five year old son. We walked a few kilometers out of the centro and followed a very hilly dirt road all the way to the river. It was just as beautiful as the other river I blogged about, but nowhere near as peaceful lol. There were a bunch of boys playing in the part that we arrived at, so we went a little farther until we found an awesome place to swim under a little waterfall! It was a perfect swimming hole (and yes, to those of you PCVs reading this, I realize I risked getting leptospirosis by swimming in a river that I saw a horse chilling in. I even went under! I was living on the edge haha).

After swimming for hours (with the younger boys that followed us from the other part of the river because there was “una gringa en el rio!!!”), we headed back to town. On the way though, we decided to take a detour because one of the guys said there was a sight that I just had to see. So in flip flops, wet shorts, and all – not great hiking attire, but who cares? – we hiked up a huge knoll (this is the direct translation of “loma” which is what we scaled.) It was super steep and covered in tall grasses and awesome wild flowers (some with thorns), but the view at the top was worth every single cut and scrape. From the top we could see all the way to Ometepe, the volcanic island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua that will get it's own blog, and all the way to Mombacho, the volcano in Granada. In the other direction, we could see the church in the middle of Belen, and all the way to the city of Rivas. It was gorgeous! AND the sun was setting! All in all, it was the perfect day...lunch with someone that reached out to me, swimming under a waterfall, hiking a (small) mountain, returning home that good kind of tired with Professora Francis who insisted that I stay for dinner as well.

A bonus? I had my first youth group meeting today and 12 kids showed up! They were great and are so enthusiastic that we have a whole schedule mapped out for their summer vacation.

Yeah, it's going to be a great two years.