Rain, rain, go away...

It hasn't stopped raining here for more than a couple hours since Tuesday. I really wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not. I feel like this is the first time that rain has become a MAJOR inconvenience for me in my life. Life here is SO much more dependent on the weather, just due to doing more things outdoors and not having great infrastructure to handle heavy downpours. A few of the reasons why the rain has made daily life a bit harder this week...

- As I think I've mentioned before, the road which leads into where we teach in Cedro Galan is a dirt road which has a tendency to become a river when it rains a lot. On Tuesday morning when we drove by, it was WAY more of a complete river than we had ever seen it - we could literally see no road. I didn't capture a good picture then, so it had drained for a few hours before I took this one, but you can still get the idea. At multiple points throughout the week, it was a fully flowing river with no visible land. Even when land was visible, it was REALLY slippy and difficult to walk down without slipping. We weren't able to have classes Tuesday since no one would be able to get down the road to El Farito.


- The power system here has a lot more power outages than at home, but most are short-lived. With all the rain, we had some long power outages on Thursday and Friday. We weren't able to have classes on Thursday afternoon/evening due to having no power. If you can tell from the theme, it's been a slow week....it's frustratingly hard to have classes here with the weather going crazy.

- Our two poor dogs do NOT like the rain. They have become experts at sneaking into the house if we leave the gate even a little bit open, and we've had to physically push them out of the house multiple times this week. Cola spent a lot of the week standing at the door whining at us (which he is doing as I type this...), and when he and Sydney did get in, they beelined for the bunk room, where our couches are currently living, and made themselves at home.



- I seriously don't own anything dry anymore. The moisture hanging around means everything's wet, even things that never started out wet. I tried to find a laundromat that would also dry clothing, since my clothes were all dirty and wet and i wanted them clean and dry. Turns out that those are hard to find. So, I just used our washer at home, and hung clothes up to dry. I'm hoping they're dry in under 72 hours, but who knows.

In fun news, I took an overnight trip to Granada, a colonial city about an hour south of Managua. It was nice to get away for a night, be a tourist, eat some delicious food, and enjoy some more of Nicaragua's beauty. I also was able to go to adoration and Mass at the Cathedral in town, which was an unexpected treat!! All in all, it was a great trip. I'd have better pictures if it hadn't been raining the whole time....but here are a couple anyways.



Here's hoping for less rain soon! I did see the sun for a few minutes this morning....

Quarterly Review

Last weekend, we had the opportunity to take a few days, get out of the Manna house, and reflect on the past 3 months. It is crazy how quickly the past three months have passed - I still have some days where I feel like I just arrived! Particularly in the past few weeks, I have been very, very busy, and sometimes it's easy to miss the bigger picture when I am so busy with the details. Having a few days to relax as a group, reflect on where we've been and what we've accomplished, and discuss what our goals are for the next few months was both beneficial and enjoyable.

As a group, we made a list of our successes and the things that we are most proud of from the last couple months, and I'd like to share a few of them with you:

• Community relationships - it has been a huge blessing to get the chance to connect with the families who live in Cedro Galan, Chiquilistagua, and La Chureca. I have really enjoyed just having the opportunity to spend time with them, learn more about their daily life, and understand this country and these communities better. I don't have as much time to do this as I wish, but I really enjoy the time I do spend in the community.
• Good transition and continued high attendance in programs - due to the turnover with Manna PDs each year, it's sometimes difficult to have continuity in programs and to maintain attendance as things change. Many people have remarked that we have done a good job picking up where last year's PDs left off and continuing forward with each program. It has been great to see our program attendance remain high, and in some programs even increase.
• Our first milk day without the old PDs, the day where we hand out food for the month to our child sponsorship kiddos, went off incredibly smoothly. A lot of this had to do with two qualities which kept coming up again and again as successes: everyone's ability to be proactive and to be flexible. A combination of these two is definitely needed here - as a group, we've been able to do quite a bit due to everyone being proactive, and have a clean house, a restructured English program, and some new partnerships to show for it. However, as with everything here in Nicaragua, nothing ever goes exactly as planned, and flexibility is key. :)

There's many more, but those are definitely a few of the highlights for me from the past few months.

We also took the opportunity to make some goals for the next few months. They ranged from small things, like trying every flavor of ice cream at the store next to Farito and keeping the house clean, to bigger goals like reaching out to more families in the communities, saying thank you more often, and planning ahead more for our programs. I hope that, in a few more months when we have our second retreat, we're able to look back on these goals and count them as our successes.

I also took the time to reflect and make some personal goals for myself, which I'm still working on follow-through for. My main goal for myself for the next few months is to stay present in Nicaragua and make sure I'm mentally here all the time. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, it's been a balancing act to determine how much to keep in touch with friends from home. It continues to be a balancing act, and is easier some days than others. This past week, I have done a pretty good job of being present here regardless of things happening at home - probably due to being so busy that I didn't have time to think about home much even if I wanted to. As the next few months pass, I hope to fall into a natural rhythm of continuing friendships at home, but also deepening relationships here and making sure that my focus stays here in Nicaragua with me.

Here are a few pictures from the retreat - a group dinner at a real table (which we are lacking in our house), and a Pacific ocean sunset.

Getting ready for a delicious meal of lasagna

I had some fun playing with photography on the beach - the sunset was gorgeous!

A (slighty crazy) Wednesday in the Life

Hello all! First of all, thanks for your support of Manna in the Chase Community Giving competition. We didn't end up winning, but we got an incredible number of votes given how small the organization is. I appreciate your support, as well as your tolerance of my spamming. Now that that's done, we'll go back to normally scheduled blog posts!

I still plan to write a blog about the group retreat we had last week, but today was such a ridiculous day that I feel like it merits a day-in-the-life post. While life here does tend to be crazy in general, this happened to be a particularly crazy Wednesday, so don't consider this a typical day by any means. I figure it's fun to share about the ridiculousness of Nica life as well sometimes!

7:00am: Wake up and eat some delicious French Toast while getting some papers ready for the day and checking in on e-mail (which I'm WAY behind on - sorry if I owe you an e-mail!) Also finish hand-writing all our milk day forms, since I realized last night that our printer was out of ink.
8:00am: Do some final Facebook spamming for Chase Community Giving competition.
8:10am: Pack up the car. It's milk day, one of the days where we pass out milk, cereal/oatmeal/beans, and vitamins to the kiddos in our Child Sponsorship program.
8:20am: Leave the house to drive to Chureca. On the way, pick up the nurse who works with us, who is waiting on the side of the road with 100+ lb of cereal.
8:50am: Arrive at Chureca. We can't drive in the front entrance today for some reason, which we normally do for milk days. So, we park at the back entrance, and wait for the father of a former Child Sponsorship kiddo, who has agreed to meet us with his horse and buggy to carry our stuff in down a path which isn't drivable with a car. Between the hand-written milk day forms and the horse and buggy entrance, we seem to have regressed technologically as far as milk days go.
9:05am: Horse and buggy arrive and we load up all our stuff and then, after a short chat with a passing policeman who seems kind of confused by us, walk behind the horse and buggy to the clinic.

9:15am: Arrive at clinic, set up for milk day, get jumped on by Esteven and later by Douglas, two of my favorite child sponsorship kids. Look how cute Esteven is...he's also a little monkey and loves to climb on us all the time.

10:30ish: About halfway through milk day, realize that there had been a misunderstanding between me and the nurse who works with us, likely due to my far-from-perfect Spanish ability. This led to me giving some families too much food...so we had to retrieve some. Slightly awkward. Note to self: ask for clarification a lot of times to make sure Spanish isn't a failure in the future.
11:00ish: Walk out of Chureca, stop by the ink store to refill our printer cartridge (which doesn't work for some reason....boo), and stop by the grocery store to buy some snacks for a kid's English pool party!
12:00pm: Arrive home and eat lunch while working on some finance stuff and lesson planning for my math and literacy classes.
1:15pm: Head out for math and literacy, with two copies of my worksheets since I've only had two students for the past couple weeks. Drive to the place we park our car during programs, and then walk the 1km to El Farito for class.
1:30pm: Math and literacy starts. Our attendance has doubled for some reason today, and we had 3 less PDs to run the program than usual...so we improvised! I will say that one skill that I'm getting very good at here is reacting to changes on-the-fly, since things rarely go as planned in Nica. I worked on letters/the alphabet with one of the preschool students, and simple words with a low-level first grader. Then, during math, I had four students instead of my normal two, so I very quickly made two more worksheets, and I think they learned at least SOMETHING about inequalities with fractions!
3:00pm: Leave math and literacy as soon as it ends to walk back to the car, and drive to pick up 16 kids and 3 adults to come to a pool party - an attendance prize for one of our kid's English classes. It was our class with our youngest students, so we stuck to the shallow end of the pool. They were pretty cute!

4:40pm: Herd all the kiddos back into the car to drive them home and make two trips to get all of our teen English students to class. A bunch of our kids decided to help me out by walking partway so I didn't have to return as far on my 2nd trip. Have I mentioned that I LOVE our teen English students?
5pm: Help out with teen English. I don't actually teach this class, just help with classroom control, attendance, sharpening pencils, etc - basically whatever I can do to help it run smoothly for Sam and Maggie. I LOVE this class and it's usually a highlight of my Mondays and Wednesdays. :)
6pm: Class ends, and I do two trips to drive students and fellow PDs home before heading to El Farito for an extra beginner's English class Sam and I are teaching. We weren't able to have class yesterday due to no electricity and our students being unable to read their papers without light, but we have a placement exam tomorrow and they wanted a review day. About 20-25 students show up to a weirdly-scheduled class to review - I was so excited they all came! And, on the whole, they knew most of what we were reviewing, which is good news.
7pm: Leave El Farito, pick up some friends who are coming to meet with us about the nonprofit they run, and head home.
7:20pm: Eat some dinner while meeting with Fabricio, Norman, and Gabe about the work that they do with preschools in the area. They are doing some great things and it was a lot of fun to learn more about what they do!
8:30pm: Realize I've been working for 12 hours straight and am exhausted - time to be unproductive!
9pm: Almost fall asleep while drinking coffee sitting at the table in the office. Ooooops.
9:15pm: Catch up with a few friends from home online, and write this blog.

As crazy as the day was, I was incredibly joyful for most of it, even when exhausted. I always prefer being too busy to not busy enough, and having so much to do here helps me stay present. I also just have to laugh at the randomness of life here sometimes - it definitely keeps me on my toes!

Lastly, I mentioned earlier how we don't take many pictures of La Chureca, since we want to build trust with the families and not be "slum tourists" (which there are a ridiculous number of - groups of Americans who come into Chureca with police escorts and walk around and take pictures from their cushy air conditioned bus). However, I do want to share Chureca with you, and today I snapped a picture of the trash workers from a distance as we walked in. As new trash is dumped, many of the people who live in Chureca dig through it to find recyclables or things they can sell. Many, many people work in the trash each day, as vultures circle around overhead. As you'll see, the view is actually beautiful around Chureca, other than the piles of trash. Hopefully this will help start to paint a picture for you in your head, even though it still doesn't show you anything about the homes or lifestyles of our families - that will come in time. Click on the picture (and any other picture I post) to see a bigger version - I know this one is super small here, but click and then you'll be able to check it out!



Although we didn't win the Chase competition this week, it made me realize how large Manna's support system is, and how large my personal support system is. To each of you, thank you so much for your support - whether it be prayers, financial support, encouraging words, or just a quick e-mail to say hi. I have been incredibly blessed by each of you, and I only hope that I can also be a blessing in your life.

Five more days to vote!

If you haven't already taken 30 seconds to help Manna Project win $1 million, please go to http://www.facebook.com/ChaseCommunityGiving?sk=app_123284047772276 and do it now!! Then, tell all your friends about it....we're in third place now, so need a big push to move up!

Our team here in Nicaragua had our first retreat these past 2 days, and it was a great time to get away, refocus, and look back on what we've accomplished in our first two months and what we hope to accomplish in the future. It is quite amazing, to say the least, to think about everything that has happened since arriving! The money we could win from the Chase competition would allow us to continue doing what we do, and to do even more - we'd have more resources to provide for our students, more ability to provide loans for our microfinancing, and the chance to expand our work in La Chureca - among many other things.

Please help us do this and so much more by voting and sharing the link with your friends! I appreciate your help!

Help Manna win $1 milllion!!!

I have some very exciting news to share! Two year ago, Manna Project participated in the Chase Community Giving competition, and won $25,000. This year, we’ve been invited to participate again, and we have the chance to win up to $1 million!! We are extremely grateful for the chance to compete, and excited about all the ways that the money could help the communities we work with in Nicaragua, Ecuador and Guatemala. Here in Nicaragua, the money would allow us to provide more financial support to the clinic in La Chureca, more microfinance loans to start-up businesses in Cedro Galan, and much more.

We need your help to win! Do you have a Facebook account? The competition takes place on Facebook, and voting starts today and goes for a week – can you take 30 seconds to help us? All you have to do is go to this link and cast a vote for Manna Project under the "youth developers" tab. If you have 30 more seconds to spare, can you help us even more and send this information to your contacts to encourage them to vote, as well?

Thank you again for all your support of my work here in Nicaragua and of Manna Project in general. I am incredibly appreciative, and feel blessed to have the opportunity to be here in Nicaragua for the year. I truly believe in the work Manna Project is doing here, and am excited about the additional possibilities we would have with this additional funding. Thanks for your vote, and please ask your friends to vote too! Let me know if you have any questions.

So close, but so far

First of all, I owe you all an apology for not posting in over two weeks. It's amazing how quickly I get busy here, and I am starting to make a better effort to schedule my time better - let's hope this leads to more blog posts and quicker e-mail response times!

A lot has happened in the past two weeks, and I may double up on blog entries this weekend to catch you all up, but the biggest occurence in my life was a 4.5 day trip back to Houston last week! For those of you who don't know, one of the major things I did during my two years in Houston was help run the high school youth ministry program at my church, which consisted of general high school youth ministry and Confirmation preparation. Even before getting to Nicaragua, I had decided that I was going to fly home to be there for my kids' Confirmation, which was September 17. As luck would have it, the 14th-16th of September is a big Nicaraguan holiday, so I was able to fly home on Wednesday and not miss any days of work here! It was an extra blessing to have a few more days to spend with friends and family in Houston.

I won't lie - I was VERY ready for a short break and some time away from the ins and outs of daily life here. The break was well-timed, I think - I had been in Nicaragua long enough to be settled and feel at home here, and I was ready for a few days away from rice and beans, cold showers with no shower heads, and communal living. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE life here, and most days don't mind any of the things I just listed, but a break was good for my sanity.

The flight from Managua to Houston is a direct, 3 hour flight - a fact that many people were very surprised by. It's no longer than it was for me to fly from Houston home to see my parents in Michigan. In some ways, I am so close to Houston and to the USA - after all, I can leave Managua in the early morning and be in Houston by noon. I can get on a computer and chat with or e-mail a friend in the USA at almost any time I want (as long as the internet is cooperating), and I can pick up my phone and call someone in the US whenever. I can get on Facebook and feel fairly caught up on people lives via posts and pictures, or read other friend's blogs and know what's going on with them. The world is so connected that, in many ways, I'm always so close.

Once I arrived in Houston, though, it was also clear that my life in Nicaragua is so far from my life in Houston. In some ways, the fact that it's a quick three hour flight made it more difficult emotionally to deal with the fact that I had literally gone from a dump to a fairly upper-class Houston suburb within 24 hours. The first day or so that I was home, I was overwhelmed by almost everything around me, whether it be people or material things or infrastructure. It was a very interesting feeling to feel like I was "back home" in many ways, but also to recognize that Houston isn't my home for this year, and isn't supposed to be my home for this year - day-to-day life there is so far from day-to-day life for me right now. I struggled to put my thoughts and feelings into words, even with the people I'm closest to, which was probably equally frustrating for me and for them.

I stopped feeling as overwhelmed once I has been home for a day or two (and had gotten some more sleep), and the visit turned out to be a huge blessing for me. It was amazing to have a chance to reconnect with friends who I had only talked to via internet and a tiny bit on the phone for two months - even when I was struggling to express myself in words, there's something about being in the same place as someone which transcends words. I also did have some great conversations, and I was challenged in different ways than I am usually am here in Nicaragua. Daily life here challenges me in ways that I'm definitely not challenged in the USA, but I hadn't been challenged spiritually by anyone in quite a while. It's definitely been a transition for me to go from a super strong Catholic community in Houston to not having that community around here, and the lack of community makes it much easier to get sloppy about prayer and spiritual life in general. I had the chance to go to a newly formed women's group with friends, a prayer brunch, and daily mass. Having a few days to recharge and refocus was definitely beneficial to me, and I've implemented some changes in what my prayer life looks like here to help keep that momentum going. In doing that, I've made some other changes as well - scheduling in more time for myself, whether it be to read a book or just hang out with a housemate; playing my guitar more; sleeping 8 hours a night. Even just in this first week of my new "schedule", I've seen the difference it has made for my happiness and energy level.

I am happily back in Nicaragua after my short trip home, and coming back here felt like home as well. I am where I'm meant to be - I see that more clearly now after my trip home than I did before. And where I'm meant to be, though it may sometimes seem so far, can also be so close - the trick is finding the balance between the two.

Things that made me smile this week

One thing that I am loving about life here is that, even though I have a routine, it's much more varied that my 7:30am-4pm work routine in the States. It's not only that I have more varied tasks to do here - it's also that life here is just more spontaneous, more random, and less planned. This week, I started making a list of some of the things that made me smile throughout the week, and hopefully something on my list can make you smile today too. :)

• Marcos (7-ish years old) making car noises as he ran from the classroom to the bathroom during his English class. Don't worry, the noises included a shift once he got too fast for his first gear.
• 14 year old Jorge randomly showing up at our house since he left his backpack in our car after class. We're still not 100% sure how he knows where we live...
• Randomly running into our of our teen English students, Francisco, at the market on my way to catch a bus, and him actually being excited to see us.
• An amazing mother helping her three year old daughter start learning English, by attending class with her and practicing outside of class as well.
• Going to Mass with a bunch of the community members on Sunday at a newly-discovered (by me) Catholic church. I had missed knowing people at Mass...enough to wake up early and go to a 7am Mass!
• Randomly running into the one other American I know who lives near Managua at the mall. Apparently Nica is a smaller country than I realized. :)
• Having a ridiculous 20 minute conversation with 5 of our teen English girls before class. I had almost forgotten how silly 8th/9th grade girls are...don't worry, I've been reminded now. One of the best parts of the conversation:
  Teen: Where's your boyfriend?
  Me: I don't have one.
  Teen: Oh, okay. I have three....one here, and two at school.
  
• Hearing Lesther, a two year old in our child sponsorship program in La Chureca, laugh for the first time.
• Douglas' (another one of our child sponsorship kiddos) laugh as I catch him and spin him around.
• Good conversations with my fellow PDs - which I've had many of the past two weeks, and am extremely grateful for.
• Jose Raul, one of my math students, understanding equivalent fractions!
• Delicious ice cream that costs 1 cordoba (slightly less than $0.05)
• Using the emergency exit on a bus (most of the buses here are old school buses from the US) as a legitimate way to exit when the bus reaches my stop.
• Passionfruit and mamones, two of my favorite fruits here.
  
• E-mails/phone calls with friends from home.
• A feeling of peace, most of the time. :-)