One Month!!

Well, I made it a month so far, which is pretty awesome! I’ve gone through a lot and I’m getting itchy legs from the recent weather changes, but besides that, I’m excited to reach the one month mark. It seems like it was only yesterday when we were staying at the hotel in Granada and enjoying the air conditioning in this new, tropical place. Now, I have a mini fan in my room that I bought for almost $10 at the market in Masaya. Things are actually pretty expensive here, at least things in the market. Food is pretty cheap. I’ve noticed though, the things that I want to buy such as mouthwash, body wash, a fan, etc. are things that are not in very high demand here, so that’s why they’re more expensive, which is unfortunate. Instead of body wash, they use bar soap here, which I have gotten some, but I don’t really like using bar soap because I’m afraid I’ll drop it in the shower and then I wouldn’t want to use it again after that. Who knows what on the floor and walls of the showers here, and that’s why I wear flip flops in the shower.


Reflecting back on my time here so far, I really have learned a lot and gone through many interesting experiences. I’m enjoying training and getting to know my group better, but I’m really looking forward to finding out where I’ll be for the two year stint. We are having a site fair in a week and a half which I’m not exactly sure what that consists of, but I’m assuming they’ll explain the different areas available for us to live and then we get to put in our preferences. That will be exciting, but then we don’t find out our sites until 3 weeks after that I think. So, I’ll keep you posted.

I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but we changed language professors this past week because we do 3 week rotations, and we were not getting along well with our professor. I won’t go into too many details, but we just weren’t feeling like he cared much about us and our learning. After having a great language professor, this was very discouraging. We discussed this with our PC staff and our class had been observed by his coordinator, and well today we found out that he’s no longer our professor. We kind of felt bad for him, but we were also relieved because we would leave class feeling discouraged. I guess it’s good to know that PC really takes our feelings into consideration and they do care about our language learning. (This professor did get complaints from the previous group as well)

Anyway, we went to TEPCE today, which I can’t remember what it stands for, but it’s a monthly meeting where all of the high school teachers get together and then break into their subject groups and share experiences, strategies, ideas, etc. with the others and then plan the curriculum for the month. We decided to go with our counterpart to see what it was all about and try to learn something. She warned us that they can be really boring, but we went anyway. There were about 10 PC trainees there from the 3 or 4 surrounding towns and we had pretty good discussions with the language teachers. For the most part, they were really excited for us to be there and expressed their gratitude for our help so far. Most of the teachers seemed really open to trying new things and really enjoyed hearing our suggestions. There were some quiet teachers, and I think this was mainly because they didn’t speak as much English. We heard that the meetings are usually all in Spanish, but since we were there, they decided to practice their English, which is great for them! I thought it was really brave of them and they very humbly expressed their need to improve their language skills. I was really encouraged when I heard them saying these things. I hope that when I’m in my site that I’ll have eager teachers to work with. That makes it so much easier when the teachers are willing to try new things and are excited to have PCVs. But for now, I just have to keep working hard and trying my best in the given situation.

Here’s to another month full of adventures!