Weekend Excitement

Karol wins the prize! We got our first real paper letter from her! It was super fun to get it. Just for future reference. If you send us anything besides a letter it is best to put it in a manilla envelope (with bubble pack inside) and write our name as brother or sister heather/kory and draw crosses on it and stickers of Jesus or Mary. This helps to ensure we get the package. Karols letter made it in like 12 days FYI.

Well Kory and I both well. No diarrhea. The only thing is kory gets a little nausea from the chloroquin (malaria meds). Our families really are great. This weekend kory is sitting here with me in my town and we are updating the blog together... :) The Festivales Patronales are this weekend. Its kind of like the fourth of july for us. It is to honor the patron saint of the town. There are dance presentations every night and today a rodeo. Last night was very exciting. The miss nicaragua pagent (but for this department or state if you will). We were all packed in watching the lovely and nubile scantily clad dancers when all the sudden someone let off a tear gas grenade. So the whole crowd took off running. Of course it didnt take more than 3 mins before we went back. The election of the queen is very important. Anyhow, it was quite interesting. Right now all the past volunteers who have lived with my family are visiting from their sites for the festivities. It is fun. We are all brothers and sisters.... :)

Mom asked to have some more details about life here.
First of all it is the dry season. So it is dry and windy and dusty and hot. THough not unbearably hot. We are told that it gets a lot greener in the rainy season, but it looks pretty green to us now. It is somewhat tropical looking here. There are some palm trees and lots of other big trees and vines. We are told there are monkeys around but we havnt seen them.

Training is called experiential or participatory which means that it takes place in small groups in the setting and is completely practical. The groups are 4 or less per town. We take turns having spanish class in each others houses on mondays, tuesdays and thursdays. We meet from 8 am until noon and then 1-3. The spanish training is completly applied. We learn something and then have to use it immediatley using tools and doing things that are health related. We both have youth groups started that we will be doing a community project with and we will both have to give lots of little presentations at the health centers here, and to the youth during training.

On wednesdays and fridays and some saturday mornings we have technical training. We all get together as a large group somewhere near the training towns and learn about how to be health volunteers and how to stay safe and healthy. We learned about malaria and dengue yesterday. Sounds like we will probably all get dengue while we are here at least once, and it sounds like the worst sickness ever! Fun fun! So if we write saying that we think we are dying, we probably aren´t. We are getting pretty excited thinking about having our own place. We go on volunteer visits at the end of next week. This is where we go and stay with a health volunteer somewhere in nicaragua and see how they live and work. We will be excited for this.

Well, we are sort of sluffing a rodeo right now. Looks sad for me. But we love and miss allayall!