dead things

This week we spend a lot of time looking for a REALLY stinky dead mouse in our house, and it turned out to be a dead baby pigeon on the roof, so I had to get on the shoddy tin roof with barely any two by fours beneath it and scoop it off into the ditch. It was sssuuuuper gross with maggots and everything. I felt kind of bad for the brother that had to think the whole new world it lived in stunk like ..... dead brother! Sad.

I would like to take a moment to talk about lizards. There are lizards all over here in our house. Those of you who know me, know that this is ALWAYS very exciting for me, even after seeing like thirty a day. They are very cute, even when they watch you in the bathroom! I thought that the little tirds that were EVERYWHERE in the house were only from mice, until I got pooed on one day sitting under the eves at the Casa Materna. I looked up to see one LIFTING ITS TAIL!! I mean, have you ever seen a lizard lift its freakin tail. I have to admit that even that was cute. There is some disagreement about what they are called. Some people call them Escorpios, not to be confused with the english word scorpion, and some people call them, perozampopos. I call them escorpios because that seems to be the most agreed on name, and its easier to say. Anyway, we had this special guy, one different than any we had EVER seen. Here is a picture of him. As you can see, he was not just grey, but black and white and with the craziest frog like back legs you have ever seen! He showed up occasionally in our house. He came yesterday and I was very excited to see him again. We named him the dragon because of the way he hopped. I took this picture and then not an hour later, we accidentally killed him. We shut him in the window when we closed it and ..... that was the saddest thing almost, that I have ever seen. SO, this is a tribute to the dragon lizard that lived in our home sometimes. We really admired your legs.

We have done quite a bit of cooking as usual, we made real pesto with our basil and some pinenuts that someone brought our sitemate. I assure you it was exquisite. Also I made some bbq from my home processed soya which was really good. Its hard to see that that is what this is, but ... its bbq!

Also this is a painting I finished a few weeks ago. Its my first in a really long time. I know it isnt a kory fluckiger orginal, but its cute. (Wow I say cute a lot.)

If any of you are wondering.. hmm, what can I send those crazy kids? Well, you can send us used young reader books in spanish. (The kind that are stories, like harry potter, but we already have harry potter number one and moby dick.) We plan to read them to better our spanish, and leave them at the library here. There are almost no books in Nicaragua. They are really expensive here. Sooooo. thats all. We love you all!

Well, we finally got back on the blog. This is a very hot internet cafe too. Hot.

What is new... for starters, I (Kory) am going to come home in November for a short visit. Very short. Something about my little sister getting married, or, Thanksgiving, or, I dont know, just for fun. Saddly, I will be leaving Heather behind since it is really expensive to go home for us lowly volunteers. She might go on turtle patrol without me during that time though, which is also very sad. But these are sad times and this is all just talk right now.

As for work, things are really moving along. We are working better with our counter-parts than we ever have, meaning that they are actually making an effort to include us in their activities instead of us doing all of the coordinating. This is a huge step as many of the volunteers are never fortunate enough to develope a real working relationship with their colleagues. We are very lucky. We helped out with a Health Fair at one of the outlying communities. I gave some "charlas" about AIDS and higiene while heather helped one of the nurses with the pap tests. I think I definitely got the better deal.

We helped Agustín (my colleague) with the Ministry of Health radio program this past week. MINSA has a half hour twice a week to give an educational talk. We took over on Thursday because he was in a community. We talked about ITS (STD´s) since Heather and the nurse noticed a pattern during the Health Fair. We are starting to work with our youth health promotor group on forming our own radio program that the youth can run once a week. I hope it works out.

The Hacky-sac project is slow-going, but I´m getting better. I promote playing hacky-sac like a fat man promotes home-fitness equipment.

We are a little short on time today because Heather has been changing her email and I have been looking at flights from managua during the busiest travel week of the year (thanks a lot Karol). Ouch! So forgive the brevity of this entry.

Art club is fun. We have given an assignment this week to construct a piece of art from garbage.

I hope we will have some photos of them to post next week. We have to come into town Saturday for a meeting so we should have more time to write more of our zainy antics.

Thanks again for all of the support. Srishti, we got your spices!!! Yum! Thank you so much. We were very excited and hopefully soon we will have some pictures of their use.

Congratulations Karol on your engagement and to Zak for being smart enough to propose to a Fluckiger!! ha!

Congratulations to Jason and Jessica too! and welcome to earth Miles!!

Sometimes trees are big here. That little bug at the bottom is actually Heather!

Celebration!

Well we finished our map project with the kids. We had a ¨Nica¨style party, that is to say, that the band never showed up, the mayer barely made it and the refreshement was quite strange. We asked for 5 two liter bottles of Big Cola, and some cakes. We got 70 glass bottles of soda and 70 sandwiches. Plus, true to nica style, you cant just set food out. Everyone has to sign for it and write there name. Here is a picture of that. Also, the other volunteer here in our site organized for the library to recieve all kinds of new books through some third organization so they were presented as well and they were gorgeous and rich in information. Some textbooks and kids books of lots of kinds. Good Job Sarah!
Well, the new ¨plague¨is upon us. (I say this because its like one kind of bug hatches and is all over the place, then they disappear and a new one comes along... not because they actually plague us). In this case it is giant moths, the kind uncle don used to raise when we were little, only now they dont scare me. This one was HUGE! Almost 8 1/2 inches!
This weekend was the aniversury of our municipality and all the organizations had booths out. We were at the casa materna booth all day..It was in my opinion sort of ¨slow¨ but kory enjoyed the day. I liked being out. I realized how many people we know. We went to a boxing match in the stadium we have. (Which is actually a huge stadium, but with very little seating) It was quite interesting as for one it was my first live boxing match, and two because it was interesting to watch how people bring this sort of event together with so little resources. We knew lots of people at the boxing match with was fun. Its very gratifying to walk around town and know the butcher the baker AND the candlestickmaker.. and the vegetable man. and everyone in between. I really like this about living here, the sense of connection to this community. I feel it much more so than I ever did in the states, but I think I will be much more involved in my community when I return.

These are some random pics of our town center. Dont you just love the GIANT Daniel Ortega sign next to the mayors office. They are all over the country so dont think our town is any more phenatical. Anyway, I think, as with all of Daniels photos, its rather flattering and handsome. Dont you?....
Here are the neighborhood kids peeking in our fence. I made granola this week and gave them a taste. They were very enamoured with it. Since here the only way they use oats is to make a drink like horchata, they really though thought it was grand. They kept saying, ¨¡Que rico, ud es buena cocinera, que rico!¨ Anyway, we quite enjoy them sometimes. Kory sewed a hacky sack out of beans and has decided to try to make the sport popular here so that our youth group can make them and sell them for funds. Its humorous to think we are trying to popularize a sport that we cannot play hardly at all, but kory went out and tryed to get it going. This was phase one. We started with these kids. I played for a while too, but they were very tiring. When you come from a culture where its dog eat dog, especially for children, its very hard to have them try a game where there are sooo many rules. (all 4 of them). They kept stomping on each others feet when it fell by them so they could be the one to kick it, and fell in the dirty water ditch at least 4 times. But it was a good time.

Well all, thats about it. we are pretty good here. besides kory having a little flu, we have been quite healthy this month. Im even ¨echando carnita¨or in english.. getting fat again. bummer.

You will all notice that I have added a section about the casa matera. Instead of sending packages to us, maybe you can get a group of people together to do a collection for this cause. IOf you have interest in doing this, please contact one of us first and we can coordinate with you for how much and what. Well. Keep writing to us and commenting on the blog. We love you and appre

Stupid technology!

We have not been able to enter blogger for 2 weeks now and we are having trouble today. This is a test. If there is not another post today its because we had trouble. We are still alive and kickin, and doing GREAT! So no worries! We love you all and thank those of you (especially the ¨strangers¨or people we havnt seen for a long time that take the time and money to send us packages. It is so incredibly sweet that you cant believe it. Christina H, I have been wanting to write you back, but havnt been able to check to see if you had a blog too because of this situation. If you read this will you get my email address from your mom and write me? I would really love to see how you are!

testing testing 123

Here we are and another couple of weeks are over. My turn on blog writing. Heather is on another computer. She is feeling much better now. Thanks for all of the advice. Thanks for the lovely packages too. Thanks Jean, and Don and Liz, and of course Michele for all of the lovely candy and markers and such. The Nicaraguan people also thank you all from the bottoms of their hearts for helping to keep us in good spirits and therefore, enabling us to better serve them. Unfortunately, however, I am going to have to put a stop to the chocolate. While I thought that we could behave ourselves like reasonable adults, some of us cannot. To be specific, well, Heather has a problem. Apparently the mere presence of chocolate causes her to lose all reasoning faculties. The parts of her brain that are supposed to instruct her body to stop eating chocolate, for example, are overridden by a, well..., barbaric impulse to consume all chocolate everywhere.

In fact, we have had to arrange for her to travel to a place called Mahanaim Centro de Rehabilitacion, or "El Centro." It is an addiction recovery camp just outside of La Dalia. Mostly alcoholics and glue sniffing 8-year-olds, but she will find her place there.

Actually, the truth is, while Heather does have a problem and I in no way exagerate the degree to which it would, if left unchecked, become the controlling factor in our marriage, she has started going out to "El Centro" to help with counselling the addicts and talk to the hombres about sexual health and HIV etc. It is a great facility and she will do great work out there.

Art club has been a big success. In fact, this Friday we will be presenting the 4 murals to the community. The music class from the art school will be coming to play a few little numbers on their keyboard, guitar, shakers, or recorders. It should be a blast...that is...if anybody remembers it or comes or if the library is even open that night, etc. You see, the way things work here, or don´t work, is a little different than home. Things don´t quite come together the way they are planned. It takes some getting used to, but, we are getting closer.

The rain has been a little bit out of control. Here is a photo from hiding under a building (the only one on the street at the time with light since the power was out and they must have a generator or something.) We waited it out. Really, I would have just walked through the rain, ´cause I´m tough, but I was waiting for one of the motorcycles to wash away. It was actually kind of pretty when the buses would come by with their headlight turning the road into a million points of light, some drops falling, and some shooting up out of the street like they are trying to get back to the cloud. (separation anxiety).

There are these wonderful flowers hanging around in the campo. We heard that they are used to make some sort of halucinagenic drug. We haven´t found out if it´s true or not.

The stove-top oven is treating us well. Heather made a yummy Mexican pizza.

Recently we were able to help out with a Health Fair at the Health Center. Basically, it was all the same services that they always offer, except, well, no everything was the same. The called it a fair and had a piñata and we gave a VIH/SIDA charla (HIV/AIDS) and had prizes for correct answers to our questions. It was at least something exciting to happen. I got a picture of Heather with a group of her girls from the Casa Materna. (Heather´s the one who is not pregnant. ...or Nicaraguan.) The two on the ground and the one in the green on the left, hiding, (she´s the boss) all work with her at the Casa Materna. The others are just embarazadas (pregnants). I wish we had a word for pregnant person. Everything´s a trade off. So many times I wish there was a word in spanish for something.

The red beans that we planted are beginning to bear fruit. Yes we grow red beans. Did I mention that we live in Nicaragua. That´s what one does here. Grow beans.

Oh yes, and happy birthday to Jason today, and Ben on the 31st.

What?...

Oh, the toad! yeah, that. well... um...