Esteli - Week Two

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  Esteli, Nicaragua
Monday, July 28, 2008

Monday morning started in the same way that every morning here starts, with a 6:45am alarm and a cold shower. Sometimes there is no running water here so the cold shower is actually buckets of cold water from a barrell inside the shower - it´s not a nice experience! However after a shower you can always be sure that a plate of fresh fruit is waiting for you for breakfast courtesy of Esperanza, it´s some small form of compensation. The walk to university takes about half an hour, across the river (via a bridge built with hurricane relief funds) and through the shanty town just the other side of the river, in the area most affected by hurricane Mitch. It is in this area that the poverty of Esteli is most apparent as living conditions are basic, and although we stand out we haven´t had any problems apart from being called ´Gringos´ a couple of times!
Once we had all arrived at the university, Israel gave us our class lists and showed us to our classrooms. The classrooms are of a fairly good standard, with a whiteboard and electric sockets (although only the sockets in my classroom actually work!), and not too different from an English classroom apart from the chair and desk all-in-ones that the students sit on. I´m teaching a class of 17 students which is a nice size because activites aren´t affected if people are away and there is still a certain intimacy about things. After a few simple introductory tasks that allowed me to judge their English (actually pretty good) and a game - they go crazy about the simplest of games here with 20+ year olds cheating, shouting at each other, trying to score points with me, all over a simple game of boys vs. girls nought and crosses (or cero y equis as they taught me!) - my first day of teaching was over.
A particularly nice moment was when, at the end of the lesson, having come late, one of my students told me that I was the first foreigner he had ever spoken to and that he was really nervous about being late but had really enjoyed the class. Being late here is not an issue, there is normal time and ´Nicaraguan time´ which means that students still wander in up to an hour after the beginning of the lesson - however the plus is that if you´re late no-one cares, you´re on Nicaraguan time! In the afternoon we arranged the cultural exchange classes and I will be taking sports, Rachael and Ellie are doing theatre and Oli and Natasha are doing painting.
The rest of the teaching week has passed really well and I´m trying to help them with the simple mistakes they make, although sometimes it´s hard when they ask me about something that I know instinctively but have to read about to explain to them. I made one mistake in one my lessons when we were studying adjectives as I printed off three famous faces that as a class they had to agree on four adjectives for. The three faces were David Beckham, Mother Teresa and Daniel Ortega - the president who is turning into a bit of a dictator and who managed to spark quite a heated debate, but it was in English so I was happy enough! As a fun lesson on Friday we did some English music, I played them The Streets, Oasis, Robbie Williams, Arctic Monkeys and Lethal Bizzle (just for a laugh!), and I think Arctic Monkeys have 17 new Nicaraguan fans! The cultural exchange activites have been a bit disorganised because of poor communication from the university, but I have had the opportunity to kick a football for the first time in five weeks and have learnt a little bit of salsa so am now ready to grace any Latin American dancefloor, well more so than the rest of the group who share eight left feet between them!
As a celebration for the end of our first week teaching me, Ellie and Rachael went for a nice pizza before heading to Bar Titanic with the students from our classes that had accepted our invitations and Oli and Natasha. Rachael was feeling ill so she headed home before the rest of us moved onto a rubbish karaoke bar that was made by a couple of the students we were with, Christian (Rachael´s class clown) and Fran (in Oli´s class) who sang lots of karaoke. Despite the advice of Felipe (an 18 year old, American-Nicaraguan "assistant" who tried to teach a class that the plural pronoun of ´you´ was ´y´all´ and who is full of bright teaching ideas for classes he doesn´t teach!) to slow down on the drink, Fran got smashed and after telling Oli that he loved him and appreciated it, time after time, he asked me to nominate a karaoke song for him! Delighted to, I chose ´Smells Like Teen Spirit´ as Fran was a bit of a rocker - the doormen confiscated his spiky leather gloves on our way in! What followed was the funniest karaoke effort I have ever witnessed. He wouldn´t even give the bar staff the mic back when they tried to confiscate it! Getting into the spirit of things, me, Oli and Ellie did half of ´It Wasn´t Me´ by Shaggy - only half because Felipe wanted to do the rapping but was awful so I grabbed the mic off him and we finished things English-style! Meanwhile, Natasha was being boring and was scared that she´d change any ´the´ in the song into ´t´ in her broad Sheffield accent, so she stayed sat down.
We had arranged a trip to Miraflor for the weekend so at noon on Saturday we boarded a bus for the one and a half hour ride. This bus soon became the most packed bus I have ever been on, we were like sardines and at any one time I was in contact with three other bodies! More often than not at least one of these bodies belonged to a fat, hairy Nicaraguan man as there was one behind and one infront so the chances of not being crushed weren´t in my favour. After the ordeal was over I got off the bus feeling violated and we headed for our planned accomodation, with Peter Clarke´s (from Third World House) mother in-law. When we finally arrived the lady was very nice and she showed us to the cabin that we would share and cooked us some nice lunch.
Miraflor is very, very, very rural and there was no electricity other than thiry minutes of solar-powered light in our cabin and there were chickens, pigs, ducks and dogs just mooching about around the place! Our walk to find alcohol at the local pulperia was a bit of an adventure as we first headed off in the wrong direction but after asking a cowboy we found the hut that sold some juice, sweets but no alcohol. After a siesta that was interuptted several times by hungry mosquitos and other hungry insects, we had some dinner and retired to the cabin to play a game of ´Who Am I?´ which I dominated, winning four games out of five! Unfortunately, the game severely tested Ellie´s thought power and imagination, so we had to help her to the answer several times, ensuring that we didn´t just give her the answer so she still felt some small sense of achievement!
We spent Sunday on another horse treck, similar to the one we did in Monteverde however this time I had a horse with some balls who dared step foward to the front of the pack and lead rather than cower at the back and we were accompanied by three Americans that were staying at the same place as us; Leslie, Has and Megan. We began with some gentle walking during which Ellie felt brave, telling me that she´d beat me this time after her embarassing last placed finished in Costa Rica, simply because her horse would occassionally trot to the front of the pack - I told her it was a marathon, not a sprint.
As we progressed it became apparent that my horse ´Negro´ and Megan´s horse liked to race each other and pull away from the pack. At first I was clinging on for life everytime he trotted and then cantered but Megan gave me some tips on how to hang on and control him a little more. After a couple of little breaks at a waterfall, which we practically had to swim to, and a beautiful view where Ellie decided to show her farming background by jumping in horse shit in her flip flops, it was back onto the horses. Refreshed from the break, ´Negro´ was full of energy and soon me and Megan were cantering away and even breaking into a gallop every so often as our horses tried to out-do each other. The further we went, the harder they got to control but it was still really good fun, even if it does kill your bum and your balls!
A quick dash to get the last bus back to Esteli at 4:00 followed, but it didn´t even arrive until 4:30, and when it did it was packed again, with some of our students who had also spent the weekend in Miraflor. Tonight, Oli is moving house because despite us having the perfect host family he has decided that he wants to live with Natasha, who is leaving the house that she currently lives in with Rachael and Ellie, so the accomodation situation is changing slightly for our remaining two weeks in Esteli!

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