It’s officially mango season in Nicaragua. I’ve been waiting, wishing, hoping for mango season since my arrival. Nicaragua is big into nicknames (Ms. Land of Lakes and Volcanos) and thus does every city have a subtitle after it’s name (example: Leon, the university city). What has Rivas been dubbed? The mango city. I was delighted to see them everywhere, bountiful and delicious, as I walked through the Rivas market this morning to the bus stop. They are so plentiful that they even sell them at the bus stop; and beyond that, on the bus! Whereas the chubby woman surging through the aisles usually sell sugary treats and white bread, today (and I suppose all throughout mango season!) they were selling bags of mangos! I had a delightful two hour wait for the bus from Rivas to Granada, and thus did I buy four mangos for 8 cordobas (40 cents) to snack on. They are a disaster to eat, messy, slimy and juicy, dripping everywhere. I concluded my first one and felt like a four year old after eating an ice cream cone in August. But are they delicious. Totally worth standing up against a wall in the Rivas bus stop, keeping my backpack and purse safe whilst dripping orange goo in a foot radius around my person. And then buying a water bottle with sticky change to clean myself up. 

I hopped on the bus, sat down, waited a bit and scooted over to the window seat to make room for a boarding group of gringo dudes. One, clad in a baseball hat and sunglasses, sat down next to me and said hello. Asked where I was coming from and then said… “you went to Flintridge Prep, right?” 

Umm. What? 

Flintridge Prep is the tiny, private high school I graduated from in La Canada, California.

“Yes?” says I, totally confused to hear these words in this place. 

Turns out, this random fellow who randomly sat down next to me on a random bus in Nicaragua graduated two years ahead of me from Prep. He took off his hat and was a total familiar face. (Prep is a really small school. Everyone knows everyone.) I tell ya, life recently has been darned determined to demonstrate to me that randomness doesn’t exist. 

So we had a lovely chat on the hour and a half ride, catching up on life and how we both made it from little ol’ Prep to a bus in Rivas, Nicaragua. He knows my mother, obviously, because she works at the dear Prepstone, so ‘Mrs. Kimble’ came up. It was bizarre/great to be able to use vocabulary I haven’t used in months and months, to hear names I haven’t heard in years, referring to people and things without having to add the compulsory explanatory subtitle. And, as I wander through Nicaragua, it’s always nice to see a familiar face. 

Apart from mangos and coincidences, you may be wondering, why were you in Rivas in the first place? I so rarely leave Gigante… Yet, indeed, right now, I’m sitting in the Hostel Oasis in Granada waiting…

waiting for what?

For friend from college KARA to arrive in NICARAGUA!!! Yay. I’m so excited. She’s on spring break from law school at UC-Boulder and bought a ticket last month looking for an adventure and some good ol’ Nica beach fun. And thus, although I live here and have no reason or need or even rational for a spring break, I’m using her visit as an excuse and dubbing this week sb09. And we shall paint the town red together. I’ve been loving my Megan adventures thus far, but I’m really quite excited to have some non-Megan time, to romp through Granada and Gigante and San Juan del Sur with my buddy. Yay.

Attentive as always, Isolina asked me this morning how my knee was. “It’s getting better,” I said. She looked at it and nodded. 

“Si, esta mejorando.”

But, she continued. “You shouldn’t eat beans when you have a cut.”

Oh?

No. “Or eggs. You shouldn’t eat gallo pinto or eggs.”

Why not, Isolina?

“Because there is too much fat in them and the fat goes to the cut and can cause infection.”

Oh. I pause. One hand on the frying pan, the other holding the two eggs I was about to scramble me-self up for breakfast. I put them away and make myself a much healthier and DELICIOUS banana, peanut butter, and oatmeal smoothie. Mmm. 

Nestor says I drink too much water, that my belly is just going to expand and expand. (He’s right, of course, but not because of the water. Darn you, gallo pinto every morning!). 

Last night, Juan tells me over a Saturday evening liter that Nicas believe eating bread with beer causes you to be more drunk because the yeast in the bread mixes with the beer to make it even more potent. I said that, actually, we believe the opposite, because bread soaks up the beer in your stomach before it arrives to your blood stream. No, he shakes his head, thats not what we believe.

I went north this past weekend. Well… seeing as I left Wednesday and arrived back on Sunday, ‘twas quite the long-weekend getaway. A much needed getaway, as I’m back in Gigante and much satisfied to be here.

I caught a ride to Managua with Lynn, a cute and awesome early 50’s woman, who owns a house in a development up the road called Arenas Tola. She’s around the hotel all the time to use the internet and I love chatting with her—she totally gets the being-a-girl thing here. I was typing away on my computer mid-day last week when several surfers wandered in to use the internet. I helped them and then looked over to see her giving me a knowing wink. “Psssst. Megan! Someone tall enough for you finally, eh,” she says, gesturing to one of the dudes behind his back.

Anyway… she drove her visiting parents to the airport on Wednesday morning, and I got to hop in for an air-conditioned and comfy ride to this great country’s capital. And—I got to leave the country, if only in spirit, for two whole hours and wander around the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport. I bought two Newsweek magazines (in English! And only a week old!) and also a toasted Subway sandwich (!) with lots of veggies (!) and (!) a chocolate chip cookie! My trip was off to a rockin’ start.

I got to Leon late afternoon. From the bus station, I took a mini-city bus into the town center of Leon, to find my hostel. Now, I’ve been to Leon before, so I told the ayudante where I would like to get off, please. “No. That’s not where you want to get off,” he tells me.

“No, really, it is. I’m going to the Lazybones hostel. I’ll just walk a couple of blocks from the cathedral.”

“No,” he says.

The girl next to me chimes in: “Where are you going?”

“Lazybones hostel,” I say. I show her where it is on the Lonely Planet map.

The girl next to her chims in. “Yeah, that’s right.”

The girl next to her grabs the book to look at the map. “No,” she says. The book gets passed around to several more women. My original helper in the seat next to me decides that I will get off with her at her stop. It is discussed. Another girl says she will get off there too. So, the three of us disembark (‘good luck’ the rest of the ladies say with a wave) and we wander off in pursuit of my hostel. I chat merrily with them for about five blocks, happy to follow them around and learn a bit about them. (Leon is a university town, so most of the population are my-age university students. My two friends were twenty and twenty-five. First-year business administration and third-year accounting student.) After two more blocks, they consult the map again and look confused. I take the lead: “I think it’s actually back a block and south two.” So, we wander off again, and sure enough, there it is. And they both walk me right to the front door of my hostel before they head back the way we had come, and presumably, their houses that we had passed six blocks ago.

The best part is that the whole time, I knew exactly where I was and exactly where I was going. But, why not get a little lost along the way? Or in other words—Nicaraguans (especially Nicaraguan women) are so nice!

I walked into my hostel, checked in, and immediately saw a friend. People I know(ish) stationed in the Peace Corps in northern Nicaragua were all in the Leon for the evening, and they invited me out to dinner and a concert with them. The lead singer of Guardabarranco, a famous Nicaraguan folklore band, was in town with two backup singers/guitar players and for a mere 100 cordobas (five dollars) gave an AMAZING concert: amazing voice, but mostly just emotion, pure and unrestrained. I was transfixed.  

Let’s see. The next day, I found a restaurant with a ‘thousand color’ salad of mounds and heaps of colorful, fresh, amazing vegetables, so I ate that for lunch (both days). Twice daily trips to the Eskimo. Back to the amazing art museum I went to in September. I said I was a writer for ‘Between the Waves’ magazine (which, I guess I technically still could be) so I got to interview the curator of the museum as well as one of the managers, and I plan to write an article about it to give to Jesse, my long-lost editor of the magazine.

And then I went volcano boarding!

Not at all like snowboarding. Hard to turn. On a wooden plank. Volcanic ash is heavy. Inertia (you start slow, urge the board along, come on come on come on, and suddenly you’re flying down the mountain ankle deep in ash and it’s too heavy to turn your board through, trying to get from heel side to toe, this is nothing like snowboarding, shifting my weight back so as not to face plant, picking up speed speed, picking up, speed, aaaaah). I fell. Volcanic ash scraps a bit more than snow, incidentally. But… it was AWESOME.

Following the sweltering heat of Leon, I headed inland and further north to mountain-town and cool Matagalpa: the coffee capital of Nicaragua. And, where the coffee grows, so does the cocoa! And thus did I find myself, on a cool breezy Saturday afternoon, hiking up a hill outside of town to the Castillo de Cocoa—The Chocolate Castle. I walked up and was whisked off to tour of this amazing edifice for an amazing afternoon which, in the chapters of my life, shall be dubbed Megan and the Chocolate Factory. It was so neat! I’ve been eating this brand of chocolate since I discovered it in September–it’s the only Nicaraguan chocolate I’ve found–and it is downright fantastic. All organic, the plain chocolate consists of two ingredients…ground cocoa beans and sugar. One of the three ladies that works for the factory took me through the process from start to finish, and I bought a pound of cocoa and plan to make my own homemade chocolate. And, also, that’s right—three ladies make all the chocolate. How much is ‘all the chocolate’? Four to five-hundred bars a day…or, ten thousand a month. So, in the past month I’ve done tours of both coffee and chocolate factories=bliss. All that’s left is a tour of the Kashi cereal factory…

Anyway, I also went for a nice hike up Cerro Apante outside the city; sat in Café Latino and read and ate a chocolate muffin; enjoyed the cool weather and the ability to decide exactly what I wanted to do every moment. I stayed in my own private room for $7/night, complete with a TV and Saturday Night Live in English (!). I wandered around town and bought repollo con tortilla from a street vendor, watched a dance concert in the park, had a wonderful chat with the cute couple that owns the hotel (the lady offered me a job teaching English…) and went to sleep snuggled under a blanket (!). 

And then headed back south to sweltering Gigante… rested and a pound of cocoa richer. 

After sitting in front of my computer ALL day long, copy and pasting hyper links onto the Surf Nica website in a numb stupor, I went for an afternoon swim. Right about 4 p.m., the sun pours into the Brio common room, and there is no where to escape it: not behind the bar, not at the front tables or at the back tables…maybe in the kitchen, in the pantry (but that’s an awkward place to be found typing emails).

You start to notice it at about 3:45, when you get unusually sweaty, especially in those plastic chairs; you start squinting at your computer screen and your computer starts to overheat. That’s when you know its time for a FREEZING afternoon swim, to slap you awake and make you remember (it’s so easy to forget in front of the florescent screen) that you live by the beach, in Nicaragua. 

I swam parallel to the coast for twenty minutes or so, or until my muscles started to cramp up from the cold, and then jog/walked along the beach barefoot. I decided to hang around for the sunset, and plopped down in front of the surf to watch it. Turning around to stretch, I noticed the full moon ascending behind me. So: the sun descending directly in front of me, the moon ascending directly behind me, and little ol’ Megan, sitting on the beach and seeing, quite literally, the Earth’s place between the moon and the sun. 

Happy spring forward day, even though we don’t have daylights saving time in Nicaragua, and no hour went missing from my day today. But, I feel that the sentiment is a good one to remember… springing forward (versus falling backwards).

“What if the woman you’re rescuing has really big boobs and you can’t find her sternum or you can’t get to it to give her chest compressions? What do you do then?”

Pantera is asking me this in Spanish. Juan and the two other boat captains start cracking up and joking—in Spanish. I try to take control of the class and explain that if a woman really needs chest compressions, she’s probably dying and they won’t (or shouldn’t) be thinking about her boobs, however big they may be—in Spanish. Jackie starts giggling too and then answers her cell phone.

Two weeks ago (man, I’m behind!) Thursday, Friday, and Saturday mornings I gave two hours of CPR/AED/First Aid training to the Brio crew—Juan, Jackie, and the three boat captains. Five Nicaraguans and me, attempting to teach in Spanish a subject I myself learned only a week hence. Attempting to get these five to take the class seriously (including the funny looking manekins that inflate when you breath into them). Attempting to give a somewhat credible ‘medical’ class in SPANISH.

Ah. I say I’m fluent in Spanish but what I really mean is fluent in Spanish, except for when referring to the pH scale, anaphylactic shock and epi-pens, electric shocks to the heart, symptoms of internal bleeding, and several other areas. Otherwise known as—teaching a CPR class in Spanish is hard.

I awoke every morning at 6 to make my class outline, which consisted of me condensing the over-information provided by the CPR course-book (which I do have in Spanish, quite helpful) and looking up every other word in Jacob’s Spanish-English dictionary. I now know ‘rescue breaths’ are ‘soplos de respiración’ and that teaching your friends is also hard. I think the class went well enough—for my part, I learned quite a bit about teaching and Spanish, and I hope my eager students learned about chest compressions and anaphylactic shock.

Also two weeks ago…we had our first WOO meeting—woohoo!—and have since had two more planning meetings. “We” are Adam, Norma (an awesome Nicaraguan woman set to take over the project in the coming years), Joe and Amie (a young American couple) and myself. Whereas a lot of things were up in the air the past several months, uncertain and unplanned (or so it seemed) now, things are moving.  I’ve been really impressed by Adam’s organization skills, his thoroughness, and general excitement about this after-school program…his excitement is definitely contagious.

So: yesterday we had our first meeting with the kiddos. There are 25 of them enrolled in the after school program, and are split into two groups according to where they live. Although they all go to high school in Tola (and ride the subsidized bus) the first group will hold their afterschool program in Gigante #1 (one of two elementary schools in Gigante) on Monday and Wednesday for 3 hours and the other group in Gigante #2 on Tuesday and Thursday. These three hours are half a study hall, half a group activity. I’ll be teaching Wednesday, Thursday and my activity is… English class! Joe is doing organic gardening on Monday, Tuesday, and Amie will help out at Gigante #2, doing both activities, since 18 kids are enrolled there and only 7 at Gigante #1.

Yesterday’s meeting was technically an orientation to the after-school ‘club’, where we introduced ourselves and laid out ground rules for the program. (We decided to call it a club instead of a class, injecting the program with just a touch of semantically-based fun.) I know about two-thirds of the kids already, and it was just really great to see them all again, in a somewhat formal setting (instead of awkwardly waving at them on my runs). Having just come from school in the morning, they were all decked out in their uniforms—white button down tops and navy bottoms—and were all squirmy and chattery. I gave Leana a hug and said hi to Ana and Nancy… who said…vamos a tener ingles de nuevo con Megan! 

And thus, I’m very excited to dive back into ingles con los niños next week. 

***

Last Thursday, during my evening English class sheltered behind the Brio guest rooms (the only place lit at night), we heard, all the way from the town, a car driving along the road through Gigante with a loudspeaker attached to its roof. The car informed us in rapid, unintelligible Spanish, about a party, some party, and something about beer, maybe free. I asked Jackie and Ernesto what it was all about (this after the car had passed by Brio and we had to stop all activity because it was blaring so loudly). Apparently, someone was throwing a party in Gigante that weekend at the discoteca. Gigante doesn’t have a discoteca, at least to my knowledge, so I continued my questions. But where? For what? For who? Jackie gave me her ‘you seriously don’t know that’ look and informed me that someone who wanted to make money was throwing it. Oh. But where? Gigante is not a place that can just hide a discoteca and bar.

I found out on Saturday when the Brio crew trapsed down to town. Someone had fenced off a dusty expanse between two buildings, built a mini-stage with a DJ booth, in front of said expanse that served as a dance floor; transformed the open side of the building into a car, and constructed two primitive outhouses. And we had our discoteca! So, I danced the night away in Gigante’s makeshift discoteca, which disappeared the following day.

I’m getting along really well with all the Brio folk. There was a hazy weirdness surrounding our interactions when I got back, which has disappeared. I’m now actually working a lot more with Juan and Jackie, and generally for Brio. I help coordinate breakfast and greet guests and be a perky receptionist and show rooms and tend bar when there are people around in the evenings. There apparently was some miscommunication here (and between here and the States) about what actually I was doing (or supposed to be doing) and that caused some tension and distress in my life last weekend. Things are much better and I’ve jumped into my tasks, but I’m still a little worse for the wear. It’s nice to work so closely with my friends, and speak more Spanish, but… I’m not sure this is why I am came back. I certainly am invested in Brio’s success, but I find myself much more willing to devote an afternoon to discussing whether or not we should call WOO’s after school program a class or a club than talking to really very nice and friendly Canadian clients about who I am and why again I’m here. 

As you may notice by the date gaps between posts, I have not been writing and this saddens me (so do something about it! you may say). Two posts in a month is pretty abysmal, and although I began writing a bit of fiction, that’s dwindled into in the background as well. My excuse? I spend so much time in front of my computer as is, making signs for Brio and working on the Surf Nica website and keeping in touch on emails, that by the time the afternoon rolls around and I have time to write, my computer is overheating and my eyes are blurry. This is a horrible excuse I do realize, as there are always going to be obstacles in front of writing and no amount of ‘perfect time, perfect place’ (and a not-overheating computer) is going to make those go away.

I’ve been running almost every day; long runs along the beach when the tides are in my favor, enjoying the shadows of the early morning or the coolness that comes right after the sunset—and of course, the very running along a beach at sunset. I’ve made it a priority to get in the water every day—so even though it’s freezing (about high 60’s), I’ve almost made it in every day. I haven’t had the desire to go surfing—at all. I’m using as an excuse that we’ve had the longboards rented out to clients for most of the time that I’ve been here. But I’m sort of complacent or over it, once I realized that I could get up and could probably make it work if I really wanted to. Do I really want to? Or maybe that’s the issue. I swim out past the breakers, long swims along the shoreline—and that’s much more peaceful and rejuvenating than being pummeled. Mostly, all I know is that I prefer to be running at sunset than under waves, so… that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’m getting a much better workout on my runs than I would usually due to the gale-force winds that have been blowing since I arrived. The past several days have been especially bad. I literally flew north along the coast yesterday, finishing the first 5K to the end of the beach in no time; the way back, however, I couldn’t. get. anywhere., grinding against the force of the wind impeding my progress and whipping sand into my face. 

But, I must remind you–I’m still running along the pacific ocean at sunset. Standing on a rock jetty and the half-orb disappears into the sea and I get blown over by that and the wind.