daily life

Granada first impressions

As usual, I am hot, tired and sticky by the end of another Nicaraguan volunteer day (and considering how best to put across the simple but extreme pleasure of washing your hands at a moment like this!). But happy because I got what I needed to buy at the market this afternoon.

Most days I wake up around 7am because that's when it gets hot and light, plus noisy from the workmen building things next door. To be honest it gets so hot in the day that actually it's good to get going by 8am before it's too much to take. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I walk up to one of our schools (called Las Camelias) which is just outside Granada. Then at 8.30am I help bring a group of kids preparing for high school back down into Granada for their 30 mins of computer "class" at the internet cafe. We're then taking them to the market to help buy the school uniforms (it was girls on yesterday's trip, so quite different again to the boys). As everything here is rather chaotic it's hard to describe what this can entail - for instance we only found out yesterday that the high school will only accept students wearing exactly one sort of uniform so some of the kit we've bought isn't right. And then you've got the kids wanting to swap the style of socks they've each got or running off to buy refrescos or something from other stalls, or us having to find and pay people to mind the kids' bicycles... Mayhem just isn't the word. But the children are nice, if quite lively! In fact it's interesting to see the difference between the "rougher" urban kids and the country ones from a village further out. Anyway, there's just two more sessions like that to go before school starts.

By noon you're tired and hungry and so we often stop off for a fantastic second breakfast. As Granada is a small town you very often bump into the other volunteers (or hangers on that we get to know from other projects or just passing through) several times a day at one of the many spots where people pass by, eat or watch the world go by. There are two particular breakfast spots that everyone goes to too. Then afternoons could involve tutoring training, inventory of schools materials, or my seemingly interminable search for the kind of room fans that are missing in two of the rooms in our house. On Monday and Thursday afternoons we have the women's group meetings (held at the community centre - a concrete hut up a hill out of Granada where mosquito repellent is essential and you either bus, walk or hitch a lift in the back of a truck back down afterwards), so Tuesday and Thursday mornings involve work for those sessions as well, checking inverntory, doing accounts and trying to expand things (like me talking to a Nica lady today who is interested in teaching the women to weave bags, but first we have to set up a meeting to see samples and work out the cost effectiveness plus whether the possible markets are there. But everything always takes a very long time compared to how long you think it might. The women often bring their children with them, so part of the job (which I leave to the other two volunteers) is to play with the little kids and keep them out of trouble. You could say we're keeping pretty busy.

Then there are house things and shopping and washing (you have to wash your clothes pretty much every day because they get sweaty and dusty so quickly, so it's a good job we have a decent washing machine at the house) and so on to fit in around the day as well. But it's so social at home and out and about that actually it's fun too. I normally take a (cold, becasue that's all there is, but actually it's fine) shower in the evening since that's when there's water pressure. And given that we haven't been getting the same number of power cuts as were happening last year you can do that too (showering in the dark might be a step too far!)