Training Site

I found out my training site and host family today!!  I'll be in San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua.  My host family consists of the senora who is 50 years old, her two daughters who are 25 & 27, her son (31) and his wife (24), and their two kids (3yr old girl & 5 yr old boy).  I'm really excited to meet them tomorrow and it seems like I'll have a lot of fun and be able to practice my Spanish with them a lot :)  We were given a picture of our family and a description so it's getting exciting!  It will be nice to finally unpack everything and settle in. 

For training, we will be living with our host families for 11 weeks and taking Spanish classes during the week (Monday through Thursday) 6 hours each day.  We will be organizing a youth group to work with in our community in order to teach them some English and also some life skills.  This should be pretty interesting and I'm sure kind of difficult at first, but hopefully I'll find some willing students to hang out with me and study English during their off time. 

Things have been so good here in Granada and it has been a blessing being with such a great group of people so I'm a little sad to leave this place and of course this nice hotel ;)  I do look forward to living with a family and practicing my Spanish more and immersing myself into the culture and language.  I'm here to learn and share my experience so I'm on the right track...

Tonight our Peace Corps training directors organized a little surprise for us.  We took a lake cruise on small motor boats around Lake Nicaragua, which is a huge lake, so we stayed on one side where the nearest volcano had exploded years before, creating islands near the shore where many wealthy people live or locals have restaurants.  During this boat ride, we found spider monkeys in the trees and as the boats approached the shore, a monkey jumped onto one of the boats and was walking around with everybody.  It was hilarious!  The monkey wanted to come on our boat, but our driver didn't want him to because he said they're too hard to get off the boat once they're on.  I took some pictures of the monkeys because it was too funny so I'll add those onto Facebook.  You should be able to click on the link from my last entry about Nicaragua. 

I'm heading out early tomorrow morning  for my training site to meet my host family so I'll post soon to update.  I'll have to explore and find out where there is an internet cafe.  I heard that in this city the people make beautiful pottery so that will be fun to check out :)  Don't forget to look at my pictures on Facebook!