Loading...
Start a new Travel Blog! Blogabond Home Maps People Photos My Stuff

Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua

a travel blog by mls12



Show Oldest First
Show Newest First

Getting started stateside

Palm Harbor, United States

Matt here, trying to figure out this site to hopefully be able to use during my time in Nicaragua. Still here in Florida, leaving next Saturday.

Junine you better leave me comments that make me raff out roud.

permalink written by  mls12 on March 26, 2010 from Palm Harbor, United States
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
tagged FirstPost
Send a Compliment

Happy Easter!

Granada, Nicaragua

So I arrived here in Nicaragua yesterday, specifically in the capital city of Managua. I was picked up by one of the only two people who work for La Esperanza Granada fulltime: Felipe, a jolly, rotund Native Nicaraguan with only half an index finger on his right hand. We booked it out of the rather unsafe city and headed for Granada. Before leaving the city we saw Daniel Ortegas massive and heavily guarded mansion, along with tons of his propoganda buildboards which were all colored pink, as Felipe explained, Ortegas favorite color.

We arrive in Granada about an hour later and I headed to the apartment where Ill (note: there is no apostrophe on a Spanish keyboard. ¿who knew?) be living for the next 9 weeks. There are 15 volunteers total there, all around my age or a little bit older. There is another house of volunteers a few blocks away with a similar number of people, but I have yet to venture over there yet. Of the volunteers in my building, there are 3 from Germany, one from Denmark, one from Holland, two from Sweden, one from switzerland, a brother and sister from Canada, one from Oregon and the others I cant remember. Conversations switch rapidly from Spanish to German to English to Swedish to any mixture of them. Fortunately, everyone does speak English pretty well and, moreover, I have already been deemed the person to go to for English help which is pretty fun.

The city of Granada itself is nice and seems rather laid back. Ive learned to navigate from the house to the grocery store and internet cafe at least already. I went to the Cathedral in the center of town today for Easter Mass. Despite not understanding hardly a word from the priest I could follow along with the mass pretty well as it is the same all over the world. Two noticeable differences though that might speak to the overall idea that Granada and Nicaragua are a little more laid back than the states: the greeting one another with ¨peace be with you¨ part seemed to last about 3 times as long as usual because everyone made sure to shake everybodys hand in the surrounding quarter mile and seemed quite happy to do so. Next, instead of processing in a regimented orderly fashion to receive Communion, everybody walked in an ad hoc mad dash to the altar. All in all, it was an interesting experience.

Tomorrow the schools are still closed due to the Easter holiday but the new volunteers have our orientation. Im sure tomorrow will be just as interesting as this weekend. Hasta luego

permalink written by  mls12 on April 4, 2010 from Granada, Nicaragua
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
tagged Arrival and Easter
Send a Compliment

Florida: The Coconut State

Granada, Nicaragua

The city of Granada is a hectic mixture of young and old, Gringo and native. I live in the heart of the actual city and right next to a ritzy tourist strip of shops and restaurants so our North American and European volunteers are fortunately not so out of place. We are luckily within a walking distance of all the places one might need to go while in the city. Aside from walking, transportation consists of cars, buses, 1-4 people chilling on a bike and horse drawn carriages. The horse drawn carriages produce a signature aroma that, combined with the many meat and fruit market vendors around, keeps one´s nose on its toes.

Two main languages are spoken here: Spanish and car horn honking. The latter is used to express anything and everything by car drivers, though the reasons for doing so remain unclear to this writer. As for the former, being immersed in a Spanish speaking environment has already helped me improve my speaking skills and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

Yesterday, all of the new volunteers (there are about 7) went with our taxista Felipe and saw all 6 of the schools that La Esperanza serves in rural Granada. I have been placed in La Epifania, a primary school serving kindergarten through 5th grade. Its a short walk followed by a 10 minute bus ride away and was quite the adventure for my first day. More on that in the next post!
Ciao!


permalink written by  mls12 on April 6, 2010 from Granada, Nicaragua
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
tagged Granada and 2nd
Send a Compliment

First Week

Granada, Nicaragua

The first week of school has concluded and it has been quite the wild ride. The students are generally enthusiastic and occasionally absolutely insane, like yesterday when the second grade teacher whos class I work in simply did not show up. Oh well. More about this later. Me and about 10 of the volunteers are heading to San Juan del Sur in about an hour. Adios

permalink written by  mls12 on April 9, 2010 from Granada, Nicaragua
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
Send a Compliment

First Weekend

Granada, Nicaragua

Our group of 10 or so heading to San Juan eventually grew to a boisterous 19. After school on Friday afternoon we took an hour and a half bus ride to Rivas and then a second shorter ride to our final destination, San Juan del Sur. Our group was too big to stay in one place so we broke up and found ourselves hostels all a couple blocks away. Ours was a big pink eye sore right on the main tourist strip that costs a lovely $10 per night. Despite the buildings ugly outside it was decent lodging with a balcony and a view of the pacific for only ten bucks a night. Pretty cool. On Saturday we went to the nearby beach of Remanso and surfed for almost 5 hours. the waves were beginner sized, which was fine for me. While there, I had some incredibly good fish tacos for a delicious 3 dollars. After that we had a dinner of either pollo or carne on top of Nicaragua's classic dish, gaya Pinto (sp?), which is a mixture of rice, beans and a bunch of spices. We stayed for Saturday night and embarked and the long sweaty ride back this morning.

Already I feel like I have a ton of stuff to write about, but for now I'll mention just a few universal truths for living in Nicaragua that I've picked up already.
1. Everything is ridiculously cheap.
2. All the food is ridiculously delicious.
3. Absolutely nothing starts on time.

As for 1 and 2, they are closely related, as one can get a filling and tasty dinner here for consistently less than 2 dollars (which perhaps enhances the taste).
And for number 3, we call that Nica time, meaning, for example, our one o clock bus from Rivas to Granada today arrived at the bus station at 1:10 or so and left at 1:45. Its not a bad thing, just something to get used to.

Much more in the days and weeks to come. Thanks for reading everybody!

peace

permalink written by  mls12 on April 11, 2010 from Granada, Nicaragua
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
tagged SanJuan
Send a Compliment

Day to day

Granada, Nicaragua

A typical day volunteering for La Esperanza Granada is as follows. Everybody in our house, Libertad as it´s known, gets up around 7:30 has some breakfast and leaves around 8:20 or 8:30 for our various schools. (We work in six different schools on the rural outskirts of Granada with around 4-6 volunteers per school.) We walk about 10 minutes to the bus depot and take a 15 or 20 minute ride to directly outside of the school that I work at, La Epifania. We start our day at 9 by planning whatever activities we are going to do that day. At 9:30, the kids have recess and they are free to come into the volunteer office and draw or read or whatever or go outside and play. My Swedish roommate Calle and I usually stay outside playing basketball or soccer in the dusty courtyard. Then at 10, the kids scramble back to class and then the volunteers work one on one with as many students as is reasonable for the remaining two hours. (School for the kids starts at 7 and ends at noon.)

Then, our ayudante, a college student named Vanessa who pays for her education by working with our program, walks us over a few blocks to her house where her mother cooks all the volunteers a delicious lunch. As always, the staples are rice and beans, the cabbage based concoction that they call salad and then a surprise, potatoes or eggs, that changes from day to day.

At one o´clock, the volunteers split up and either go into the houses in the community and read and play with the kids or do deportes, or sports. I do sports every afternoon, spefically basketball Monday and Wednesday and baseball Tuesday and Thursday. The kids are too crazed on Friday morning to be expected to do anything in the afternoon, so we don´t do anything then and our week work ends at noon on Friday. We have a baseball game today against Juan Diego, another one of the schools we work with, and La Epifania Tiburones (Sharks) are set to crush the other guys. Or at least complete a few innings.

I guess that´s it for the logistics and I´ll save my impressions of the educational system and my experience so far for another post.

permalink written by  mls12 on April 13, 2010 from Granada, Nicaragua
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
tagged Schedule
Send a Compliment

Its not the best system, but its our system

Granada, Nicaragua

I´ve now completed two weeks of school down here in Granada and can mention some of my impressions. School here is quite unlike elementary school in the United States. All the five classrooms in my school have open doors that are connected by a courtyard area through which the kids are seemingly free to roam at any time. If kids feel like walking out of class, to play games, beat up their friends or even walk home, there is little that the teachers can or are willing to do to stop them. When the kids stay in the classroom they are a more well behaved but only slightly more well focused on schoolwork. That is, there really isn´t much learning happening. The schools strive for attendance and not much further. Its impossible to blame the kids for the state of affairs when they have gone to school with low expectations their whole life.

From what I have heard, those families with even a small amount of wealth will do whatever they can to send their kids to a private school. Those who cannot go to puclic school where only 30% of Nicaraguan students complete elementary school. Our program works in 6 public schools in a rural area making some families´ situations even worse. But that is why we are there. When we arrive each morning and ask our respective teachers who we can work with for the next half hour or so all the kids in class scream and beg to work with the gringo ¨Profe¨s. The kids want to learn, they are just hindered by their school and its administrators. For example, on Tuesday, school ended at 10 a.m. because teachers came from a number of surrouding school to, drumroll please, plan mother´s day festivities! It was april 13th, mother´s day is may 13th and they cancelled school for half the day to plan what the kids might do that day a month in advance. Not to take away from mother´s day but that seems a bit excessive.

Anyway, the kids are awesome for the most part. A few bad additudes here and there, but that happens everywhere. More later about the futbol league that we are trying to start!
Peace!

permalink written by  mls12 on April 16, 2010 from Granada, Nicaragua
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
Send a Compliment

Futbol!

Granada, Spain

As I briefly mentioned earlier, each afternoon I coach sports with the children while some others do extra reading and tutoring. Yesterday we had our first, and hopefully weekly, soccer game day with all 6 schools we work in. It was a raging success. The children numbered more than one hundred all told, and I think a total of 8 games were played on two adjacent fields, one a concrete basketball court and one an empty lot owned by an orphanage. As blase as the children might be about school, they are equally ecstatic to play soccer, represent their school and above all ¨ganar¨- to win. (I might add both teams from La Epifania, los pequeños and los grandes, won convincingly) Some of the volunteers who don´t even work with sports came out for the games and even lead some teams in chants for their schools. After the last game, everyone was zapped of energy from the long day and the hot sun but had a small problem. The transportation that had been arranged for the last two schools, about 30 children, wasn´t there! Therefore an impromptu game of keep-away then basketball then soccer emerged between the remaining 8 volunteers and the rest of the kids. Our doubling them in height was quite handy for the first two iterations of the game and perhaps precipitated their demands to return to soccer where their numbers mattered more than our height. The pickup truck arrived around sunset to find everybody truly exhausted from 4 hours or so of soccer. Most of the volunteers piled in the cab and all the kids, yes about 25 of them, climbed into the bed and held on for the ride back to their neighborhoods.

Staying in Granda this weekend, although we might go hike the nearby Volcano tomorrow. I´ll let you know

permalink written by  mls12 on April 23, 2010 from Granada, Spain
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
Send a Compliment

Quuickly

Granada, Nicaragua

Just got back from a long weekend on Ometepe Island in the middle of lake Nicaragua. I´ll write a full post perhaps tomorrow but for now I need to take a shower. And call my mother.

permalink written by  mls12 on May 3, 2010 from Granada, Nicaragua
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
Send a Compliment

Long Weekend in Ometepe

Granada, Nicaragua

We had a long weekend for the past 4 days as school was canceled on Friday and Monday due to Labor day which was over the weekend. (My school in particular had no classes today either because... 4 days wasn´t long enough?) For our time off, many of the volunteers decided to head to one of the best destinations in Nicaragua: Ometepe. Ometepe is an island formed by two large volcanoes jutting out of the middle of Lake Nicaragua.

On Friday morning we took a bus to Rivas, quick taxi to the port at San Jorge and then about an hour long ferry ride to Moyogalpa, the port town on the island of Ometepe. There is not much to see in the town itself so we took a bus to Playa Santo Domingo, the best beach on the island. The bus ride itself might merit its own post given the lack of paved road, the excess of people on board and the torrential downpour outside that combined to make me question what shape we´d arrive at our hostel in. Alas, we did arrive safely albeit soaking wet. We stayed the next two nights there in the Buena Vista hostel. During the days we went to the beach and a really cool water hole called Ojo de Agua. NExt we took a ¨taxi¨, that is a local guy with a pick up that could fit all 9 of us in the cab or in the back, for 3 dollars across the island to Merida. There we found a hostel that offered kayaking and buffets for dinner and breakfast. We took them up on all three services.

After breakfast the next morning, we embarked on the 6 hours or so of travel back to Granada, perhaps begrudgingly so. In Ometepe, the atmosphere was calm and slow, a stark contrast to the hectic pace here in Granada. I loved the beachy and relaxed setting there; it was closer to what I had imagined Nicaragua to be like before I arrived here. Despite that, being back in Granada is nice and a 3 day week at school is nothing to complain about. As an interesting aside, tomorrow marks the half way point in my stay. Time sure has flown.

permalink written by  mls12 on May 4, 2010 from Granada, Nicaragua
from the travel blog: Volunteering with La Esperanza Granada in Granada, Nicaragua
Send a Compliment
Viewing 1 - 10 of 14 Entries
first | previous | next | last

View as Map View as Satellite Imagery View as Map with Satellite Imagery Show/Hide Info Labels Zoom Out Zoom In Zoom Out Zoom In
find city:
trip feed
 author feed
 trip kml
 author kml

   

Blogabond v2.40.58.80 © 2024 Expat Software Consulting Services about : press : rss : privacy