And a HUGE thank you to Jocelyn (above!), who I met way back in high school in Livonia and stayed friends with through college and beyond, who came down and spent a week and a half with me at the beginning of July! She not only answered that blog, but one from the beginning of my service, bringing me things she had put together for a care package, including markers, colored pencils, a globe-shaped pencil sharpener (!!!) and tea! I was overwhelmed with gratitude!
It’s hard to express how much I appreciate the effort she made to see me. I’m kind of used to all the delays, long waits and headaches involved with traveling down here, but having someone else come and visit definitely reminded me of just how far removed from the air-conditioned comfort and control of a car you almost always are when traveling down here. Joce’s trip started off with being told that her flight was cancelled when she got to the airport in Miami, randomly getting put onto a flight to San Salvador after much confusion, and getting into Managua about 5 hours after she was supposed to, after a full day of traveling. Luckily, she’d been able to let me know, and I waited at the airport for her, listening to podcasts and drinking coffee to pass the time, and called a taxi that was waiting to take us to Hotel Los Pinos, one of the hotels the PC routinely puts volunteers up at in Managua (and one of my favorites), when she finally landed.
Things after that went smoother, though as is almost guaranteed when traveling in this country, were not without annoyances both small and big.
But! I got to show her the PC office in Managua, take her out for veggie Nacatamales in Estelí, and...
(From left to right: Jocelyn, Me, Laura, Donna, and Claire celebrating Freedom and America!)
... go to a grand Fourth of July party in Ocotal with about 30 other volunteers, including some of my closest friends that first day alone.
Next, we went up to Jalapa to meet my host family, see the maps I’ve worked on, meet the teachers I work with and look in on a couple classes, and (the coolest part for me) watch the installation of my school’s two brand new solar panels! We also got to cook and enjoy my teriyaki stir-fry together, and rest up before heading back down south to Masaya, where we saw the market, the volcano and the view from the nearby mountains before heading to the Island.
We spent three days on Ometepe, and spent most of them painting a world map in Donna’s community’s preschool with her, Laura (who used to live in Ocotal, and came back to visit us!), and other people from her community! With all the help, in two days we managed to paint all the water and all the countries apart from tiny island chains! It was really cool to see it come together so quickly, after mine took months to get that far, and are still not quite done. We stayed at the Cornerhouse, a relatively new hostel curated by an awesome British ex-pat named Gary the first night, and Finca Venecia the second, where we got to take a horse riding tour of the nearby land, before taking off that afternoon to stay in Masaya one more night en route to the supposedly-fabulous all-inclusive resort Barceló Montelimar the next day, Joce’s last day in Nicaragua.
And it was fabulous… after we spent the first hour we were there in a line waiting to check in, then trying to prove to the hotel staff that we had in fact made a reservation (which they had lost), then waiting in yet another long line for lunch, which ended up having pretty slim pickings for vegetarians. These were small things, but really, you would think an all-inclusive resort would think to prevent them.
Nonetheless, afterwards we laid out by the pool reading and sunbathing, and took full advantage of the all-inclusiveness of the drinks the rest of the afternoon, and had an altogether delicious last dinner together. I saw her off to the airport the next morning.
I was impressed through it all at how easy-going and positive Joce was able to remain despite those annoyances I mentioned earlier, including but not limited to some pretty awful long and/or crowded bus rides (especially the ride from Montelimar to Managua, in a bus where we were packed like sardines early in the morning when neither of us was feeling particularly great, which upon reflection ranks as the worst bus ride I’ve taken in my entire life), being sick with a cold for most of the trip, taking a slow-motion tumble off the horse she was riding when it slipped on a wet rock on its way up a hill, and getting bit up by mosquitoes in Ocotal.
It was not just surviving these annoyances but managing to have a good time in spite of them that made me think Joce could have thrived as a PCV if she had chosen to be one (as she was once thinking of doing) instead of working at a nuclear power plant. She insisted that she was fine with living the lifestyle for a week, but wasn't sure she could do it for two years. Which is fair enough; but I’ve found that for me, service has gone by getting from one day to the next, and I've rarely stopped to think about what being here for two whole years is like. As the White Stripes (and Mort Crim) once said, it is wise to “be like the squirrel” and take things a little at a time. I’ve found that in so doing, the 23 months (!!!) I’ve spent down here have blinked by, but through them I’ve made slow, steady progress with my teachers and on the projects I’ve worked on, and have had nothing short of an incredible time doing it, in spite of the myriad petty little annoyances that crop up every day.
So! Thank you for coming Joce! It fulfilled a wish I’d had since the beginning of service to get to show a friend from home the country I’ve spent so long getting to know! I appreciated all you brought me (just yesterday I used the markers in class and had a cup of tea to unwind at the end of the day!), but most of all appreciated that you came all the way down here and spent time with me! Hopefully I’ll end up somewhere near you after service, and will get to see you sooner rather than later! :)
***
Going to Big Corn Island
After Joce left, I spent the day working on my end-of-semester report for work, before heading up to León to spend the night with Donna, Laura, and Chris. Afterwards, Donna and Laura and I came back down to Managua and hopped on a plane with our friends Liz and Claire for the Corn Islands, two islands off of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, where we spent our week that we got off for the semester break from school. It was relaxing! Mostly! Even though it rained every day, and never stopped being cloudy the whole four days we were there. We still went to the beach a couple times, played lots of card games, and enjoyed each other’s company, in spite of a somewhat subpar hotel experience and quite subpar weather.
Oh! Which leads me to the most blogworthy part of the trip. Before going, I had tried to make a reservation with Anastasia’s on the Sea, the hotel purportedly owned by Robert, the guy I met in the Houston airport on my way back to the States for Spring Break last year. But, after calling every permutation of the phone numbers provided on the website, and emailing them with no response, we decided to get reservations at another hotel, which ended up being Hotel Morgan (don’t go! The owner-lady’s mean, and the food’s too expensive and only ok quality! I ended up feeling this way about most of the places on Big Corn Island we saw, though; perhaps Little Corn is better, especially in the dry season!).
On our last full day on the island, we decided to take a walk up to the northern shore of Big Corn, which we hadn’t previously explored. On our way, we found out why Anastasia’s hadn’t returned my phone calls and emails: It was abandoned! And not doing too well without upkeep. Its windows were broken, a shuttle/conversion van and golf cart on the front lawn had been raided for parts, everything looked wet and sagging and peeling. By the looks of it, it had been left for dead not long after I talked to Robert last year. We all wondered what could have gone so wrong to cause the place to be abandoned in such haste. When we got back to the hotel, we asked, and found out that the owner was apparently wanted by INTERPOL for fraud, having sold the place to four different owners and making off like a bandit (!!!). I’d like to think that Robert wasn’t the thief, that he was one of the people who got swindled by the crook instead (not that that’s a whole lot better position to be in). So that was the only genuinely sad part of the trip. Since I was there with four other people who were documenting the experience, I decided not to take any pictures; I'm sure theirs will soon be up on facebook.
After getting back, rushing off to see Harry Potter in Managua (which was Excellent!!!), and staying a night in Masaya after getting together in Diriá for Liz’s birthday, I came back home to Jalapa last Sunday. It’s been a slow few days, but I’ve been glad for them after so much travel! More updates to come!
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