We had our one year workshop last week. It consisted of two and half days of meetings, and trainings, varying from themes such as behavior change, to working with sex workers.
One of the sessions which struck me as the most interesting was the workshop on diversity of sexuality. We talked about GBLTTTI (formerly known as GBLT). I´ll break it down for those of you less versed. G is for Gay, men who exclusively have relations with other men. B is for Bi, which is someone who has sexual relations with both male and female, L is for Lesbian, women who exclusively have relations with other women. The first T is for transsexual, which is an individual who self identifies as the gender opposite of their biology but still maintains their biological parts, aka a female who still has all her reproductive organs and breasts but 24 hours a day identifies as a male. The second T is for transvestite, which is someone biologically of one gender but identifies depending on the setting as the other gender in periods less then 24 hours a day daily. For example a male who when in the house and at work dresses and identifies as male, but when she is with her friends in a more comfortable setting will dress and identify as a female. The last T is for transgender which is where an individual has had one or more operations to remove or add parts from one gender to align themselves more with the gender in which they identify. ¨I¨ is for intersex, or individuals born with reproductive organs of both genders (formerly known as hermaphrodites).
These concepts are misunderstood in the USA, let alone taught here in Nicaragua. Many individuals who are of a non-heterosexual sexuality are often pinned as being sex workers and their reputations in the communities are very negative. The main factor for this reputation is discrimination (duh). These individuals try studying, or applying for jobs and are almost always rejected. Therefore many individuals have low education levels, low self esteem, and no work. Because of these factors amongst others many are forced into becoming sex workers for lack of options.
Another ¨category¨ of sexuality was presented to us. HSH hombres que tengan relaciones sexuales con Hombres, or men who have sex with men. Here this is not considered gay, I´ll explain.
Here if a man is ¨giving¨ he is maintaining the role of a man ¨aka insertion¨ while as the person receiving is assuming the role of the woman therefore is the ¨gay¨ person so to speak. It is almost impossible gather numbers of people who fall into one of the above categories, specifically the ones which can be more hidden such as gay lesbian and HSH. Yet in the information presented to us we were given a case study town, in which the numbers of HSH far out numbered any other GBLTTTI.
Now you might be wondering, wow Hazel way too graphic, or Big Deal but this is all quite relevant to my work. If the culture here is so inflexible as to have men having sex with men but aren´t gay, or makes sexuality so tabooed as to be something no one can talk about in contexts other than abstinence, can we expect people to use the information given to them when we teach about per se HIV, or STDS or Pregnancy? (Ok I´m not trying to say the HIV is gay issues ok so don´t even go there! I’m trying to connect lack of personal sexual understanding to healthy sexual practices)


I was speaking with one of my counterparts about GBLTTTI upon returning to my site and she impressed me with her openness and willingness to learn (She always is impressing me). She asked many pertinent questions and didn’t judge me on my opinions which very likely are different than anything she´d heard before (aka people are born wired one way; this all being something out of our control). I think that the overall population here may be much more receptive and open to the information than I´d expect. While this theme isn´t one of my direct work objectives, we´ll see how and if I can incorporate it into my work.

The newest project in my town is massive improvements to the public water supply. I haven´t been able to find out for sure who is funding it, but it appears to be through public and private funds domestic and abroad.
The idea behind the project is to provide the population with a reliable 16 hour a day water supply from 6 am to 10 pm. It is supposed to be completed in August of this year. Until then our dusty streets have been torn up, and on the right side is a 2.5 foot wide trench (as prone to falling as I’ve become I’ve yet to fall into this!)
But of course with all things there is a catch. Yesterday I was sitting in the muchly appreciate air-conditioned library talking to one of the mayor´s office tech guy. I asked him if they were planning a sewage system to deal with the new influx of water. He stopped what he was doing, calked his head to the side a little contemplating my question and responded almost surprised that they don’t have plans to but perhaps in the future.
While having a reliable and healthy source of water will improve to quality of life for all by reducing water hauling allowing washing to be done when convenient rather than being restricted to 5 am when there is water, it also has a huge potential for hygienic disaster.
As the system is set up currently I have a general idea. People´s toilets and latrines go into personally dug holes, while as dirty wash water for the most part gets thrown out into the street, thrown on patios to keep dust down, or onto plants. Kids play in it, animals walk all through it then traipse the dirt into the house. Already we have dirty water running in the streets, with only 2 hours of water almost daily. Currently residents can be fined if they are caught throwing grey water into the street or other public places, but the residents don’t always have an option depending on their living situation. And with 14 more hours of water daily, I’m concerned that we´ll have more excess water, aka more breeding places for dengue/malaria carrying mosquitoes (I accidently said the other day rather than dengue and malaria I said meringue... see what happens when you don´t speak English for a while!(well I thought it was funny at least)).

We´ll see how this all turns out, if anything it will give me a new branch of work in the up coming months.

Well, I haven´t written in a while, nor do I have a decent excuse, other than overall general laziness.
Hmm what to update, art classes are starting to taper out, I think the boys have decided they´d rather play soccer than paint, which is fine, it gives me time to start working with a girls group. I´m still trying to get the soccer league up and running. I´ve been begging the mayor´s office since February to help me, but everything is terribly disorganized, they want an NGO to donate everything so they have resources before they start, whereas the NGO wants there to be an actual league to donate the materials to before they´ll give us anything. So we´ll see how I tackle this seemingly-simple-soon-to-be-complicated road block. Also today I’m going to price house paints, because I want for my youth group to paint world maps on a few of the community schools.
Hopefully next month I will be having a HIV/AIDS billiards tournament. This is run like any old tournament, but between rounds, I´ll be giving mini-lessons about VIH/SIDA to the participants. In the final round, every time a ball is put into the hole, the shooter has to answer a question about VIH/SIDA. If they answer incorrectly, they either loose a turn, or the ball is taken out and placed back on the table. This means that everyone has to be paying attention to the lessons in order to answer to the questions.
I recently participated in a 3 day workshop building improved stoves in a neighboring department with some friends of mine who are serving in the agriculture sector.
Many people here cook in stoves constructed out of half barrels with a grill. They are extremely inefficient because they loose a lot of heat, and unhealthy because the smoke stays either in the house, or at face level, therefore the women and children are breathing this smoke all day long. Sometimes trash is used to cook with rather than wood because wood can be very expensive. These improved stoves are made out of brick, horse poop, and water in which a plant called pitayah has been soaked. This plant is a cactus of sorts that crawls up trees and has a wonderful bright pink fruit that makes you pee pink (which is kinda cool, its brighter than beet pee!) anyway this cactus once chopped up, soaked, and squeezed makes kind of a modge-podge type glue which is used in the adobe. Rebar is used to maintain the holes in which the pans and pots will sit. Aluminum sheeting is used to build the chimney, and ya, tada you have a stove. It’s a rather simple process that can save families money from wood and health bills and in the long run save lives
(something like 1.6 million people die each year from smoke induced respiratory problems, aka 1 person every 20 seconds).


old stove

I´d post the after photos, but I didn´t take any oops!
So my friend invited 60 families to participate. Part of the commitment of the participants was to attend 3 or 4 meetings in which she taught them about the environment, benefits of the stoves, waste disposal, and maintenance. To conclude the classes, all were expected to attend a two day workshop in which on the first day they would participate and observe the building of the stove, and on day two they would each build their chimney and rebar frame so they would be prepared to build their own stove in the following months. The supplies were all donated by friends, and family through an online site that Peace Corps maintains. (If you´re interested, here´s the link, you can browse current projects and donate money to volunteers around the world. http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors)

Well being the nature of the culture here, only about 35 of the participants had sufficient attendance to receive the materials, and 5 others were border line. Still, the participants are expected to help in the building of 1 stove other than their own, and if they don´t my friend will be taking the materials back. Because of the nature of foreign aid here, and remittances being sent from the states, there is a sense of entitlement which for the most part tints the culture here. One thing we try to do is give ¨hand ups¨not ¨hand outs¨. So by requiring the participants to actually participate, means they have to be held accountable, and if they don´t there are actual repercussions. Many times NGO´s or missionary groups come in, do all the work, and leave, removing any necessity for the community to participate. This in turn creates a culture of dependence on the foreign aid. Instead of the people looking for opportunities or even better creating them, they wait until someone comes in and does it for them. This as far as I can tell is fairly common throughout Central America. It may seem harsh, taking someone´s stove from them, but unless people are willing to contribute and be held accountable, then no long term meaningful change can occur. Until the people can re-learn to help themselves and become independent, there is little hope for growth and development. (In my opinion).
My reading list is slowly growing I’m up to 50 books (more or less I wasn’t keeping count at the beginning) since January 2009. Any one read any good books lately?

Last week was the week of Semana Santa, which starts Palm Sunday, and ends on Easter. No on works and the streets become a open party zone. So rather than enduring the constant, somewhat socially acceptable sexual harassment by drunken machismos, myself and a few other volunteers headed down south to the jungle. It was intended to be a 4 day kayak trip down the river, but lo and behold a majority of my group after the first day decided that paddling was too hard and quit. Only myself and another female volunteer wanted to continue, which as single women is quite unsafe (people in groups up to 6 can stay in the ranger stations along the river for free, but they´re manned by men who only leave the station once every 6 weeks, and are very isolated). So we convinced two of the guys to stay in with us for a couple days and hang out around the ranger station we were staying in as a compromise between quitting and continuing.


Crocodile



Instead of using school buses (they don´t float!) on the river they use these modified boats. Cram as many people in as humanly possible, chickens and probably other small livestock. On school buses vendors will run to the windows to sell food, water, or anything else, this too happens on the boats. At one point a smaller boat pulled up alongside and ta-da tajadas and bags of water were being sold. (Tajadas are platanos cut lengthwise in thin strips and fried much like plantain chips just longer)


Ranger station/miliatary post we stayed in



The Rio San Juan



Headed into the jungle on a little side river with the intent to catch some fish, we only managed a couple small ones and a turtle.



its quite a different world down in the south. It rains pretty much daily, its humid but not terribly hot (in contrast to my little town)where as where I live its hot, dusty, and only rains in the rainy season (which we will be entering at the end of this month).I´ve been surprised by the ecological diversity of the country. We have the coffee and chocolate cool mountainous regions of the north, the jungle to the south, cloud forests in the north/middle of the country, the bread basket of the country in the south west, the hot desert lowlands with a ridge of active volcanoes running through it (That's where I live!) and then the flat cheese region of the east, I'm not sure exactly what the Atlantic coast is like, but I´m under the impression its mangroves and fishing communities. We have beaches with nesting sea turtles, and lagoons which have taken over extinct volcano craters. We have two huge inland lakes which, if you look at Nicaragua on a map, is quite a domineering feature.

After the long trip (it took 14 hours just to get across lake Nicaragua on the way down excluding bus time and other boat time) I´m ready to get back to work.

So today I gave another art class, and in the afternoon went to the Casa Materna sat around for an hour waiting with a psychologist for a meeting to start, only one participant arrived so it was a no go. The art class was a blast. The previous one hadn’t gone so well. Trying to get 11 year old boys to sit down and paint shades and tones.
Yesterday was much more interesting. I was in one of the rural communities, where I have the only remnants of a functioning youth group. Myself and the five girls met to plan a class about “How to make a good decision” which we were going to give in the high school.
I’m not going to lie, I was highly skeptical. I thought it was a highly condescending topic, and to compound the problem I have absolutely no Spanish vocabulary to tackle the topic. I can talk all day about pregnancy, the stages of pregnancy, warning signs of complications, HIV/AIDS, the importance off vaccinations, and nutrition all day long, but this topic. Na-uh.
We had the class in second year in the high school, the students aged from 14 to 15. In the main activity we had the class of 45 students break into 6 groups. Each group was given a scenario to think about, come up with your options, and choose one. For example one card said something like “you and your friends are out at a fiesta. They are drinking beers, but you don’t want to because they always make you feel sick. Your friends insist that you drink, otherwise you’re not a ¨Real Man¨ what do you do?” Maybe the students didn’t understand the assignment, but none of the groups seemed able to complete the assignment.
In this specific scenario the boys decided that they needed to drink because they didn’t want to loose their friends. That was it. End of discussion. Not one of the 8 kids in the group could come up with a single other option. It took a lot of poking on the teachers’ part to get any conversation going. It seemed that one person would come up with one option, and that’s as far as they got.
I think the problem was that I took for granted that A. I’m older and with things like problem solving I’ve had more experience than your normal high school sophomore B. In school here its copy- paste- regurgitates- repeat; creative problem solving has no space or funding in the schools. C. I have minimally functioning Spanish. I’ve gotten really accustomed to the deer in the headlights look that I get all the time. The combination of the three, my arrogance in assuming (what’s the saying, when you assume you make and an ASS of U and ME) that this was easy, and my lack of real understanding of their understanding, pretty much hindered the activity. I caught up after class with one of the teachers who was participating, and she said it went really well, that I just need to learn the vocab (damn Spanish! You think after a year I’d have this figured out). So maybe if I can organize, and maybe learn to break the steps down into more basic steps I can maybe reach at least a couple of the 45 students, and that alone I feel, could give me some more meaning to my being here.

Food.

My body seems to have pretty much adjusted to the food here. I will get cravings for beans and rice, and my body doesn’t crave as much as it used to the fruits and vegetables that were readily available back home. There has only been really on food that didn’t sit with me well. It’s called Mondongo.
In my first few months in site, I went to visit a nurse that I work with. They were eating Mondongo soup. I had a hard time with its smell let alone even eating it. It was this stinky tough oddly colored meat floating in a sparse broth accompanied by a couple vegetables. Trying to be polite I quietly gagged the hard rubbery/sponge like substance down. I swore to myself that I would never again put my self in a Mondongo-eating-situation ever again.
Well yesterday I went to visit with my old host family, and to my great disappointment, they were eating, ta-da, Mondongo soup. I had forewarned my host mother that I previously had a traumatizing experience with the said soup. She informed me, that this soup had been properly prepared and that ¨you don’t eat Mondongo soup from just anyone.¨ We had walked a few blocks across town in the blazing heat (we’re getting into summer here high 80s 90s at night) to the mother in law of her daughter who cooks and sells beans, cheese, tortillas and on this specific day, mondongo soup.
So there I was sitting terrified at the table (Apparently I wasn’t doing such a great job at hiding my contempt for the soup) sipping at the broth. When people make soup here, they keep the vegetables and meats in large pieces that are taken out of the soup and placed on a plate to cut up and eat. The first thing out the broth was the Mondongo. It sat there squishy and white doing everything but tempt me. I finally worked up the courage to try the meat once it´d cooled down and assumed a more solid form, and to my surprise, hey it wasn’t so bad! The soft squishy brownish-purple part isn’t the best, but the white rubbery bit actually tastes kind of like chicken. So I guess the take away lesson from Mondongo is that hey, sometimes you just get a bad first impression, and it never hurts to give it a second chance.

Oh I didn’t mention; Mondongo is the stomach of a cow. It has to be prepared and cleaned properly or else it comes out hard and stinky, when you want it to not smell and be nice and soft. I’m not going to order it when I go to a restaurant, but if it’s offered up as a free lunch, I now know that I’ve got at least a 50/50 chance I can stomach it (no pun intended).

This week I started giving art classes to a small group of kids in a friend’s house. I originally wanted to have 2 girls and 2 boys, but unfortunately the mothers of the little girls’ wouldn´t let them leave the house. Boys here really have a lot more freedom, girls are taught at a very young age that their role in the world is really cooking, cleaning, and making and taking care of babies. I´ll have to swing by the houses today and talk with the mothers again. The class though, went well. The boys were pretty punctual even! We learned color theory, and practiced mixing colors and making color wheels.










last week my counterparts and I celebrated the Febuary birthdays (Meaning Mine! and one of our work friends Juanita) I like food. I like sharing food, so heres a photo of the food we ate.Beef, rice, plantains, and a small tomatoe salad.