Micahville

Dear Readers,

I am not dead. Seriously. I know y’all must have thought so. This summer I was in the small Nicaraguan town of El Guabo, Nicaragua. I lived and lived with the Gutierrez’s along with approximately seventy other families. While there, the community, my partners, and I raised money to fund the area’s first local library. Additionally, as a community we came together to construct a floor in the local high school/community center/sometime community fiesta location.

Below is a picture of my host father, Don Alfonso aka “Panchito”, and I on the top of a mountain in the middle of the Nicaraguan rainforest.

We are pretty wet and tired, but the hard won views from the top of the triumphed mountain provided us with a three sixty degree panorama of the surrounding lowlands.

Anyways, I wrote a series of essays upon my return, and I have included one for your reading pleasure.

My Amigos Experience

“What is one thing you did this week that makes you proud or excites you?”
Amigos de las Americas kindly challenged me to complete this task on a brightly colored sheet of paper issued to me by my supervisor. Although it sounds simple enough, it is a task that in reality has a comparable difficulty to describing the color periwinkle in piglatin. This objective was made no easier by my presence in a foreign Latin American country, ingesting foreign foods, and living foreign experiences.

I spent the majority of my summer in a cluster of houses, which straddled the main dirt thoroughfare in the green Nicaraguan countryside. Some of the most amazingly fascinating people I have ever met were a major part of this adventure. And the best was that these people weren’t afraid to talk, be it about themselves, their families, or their histories. Most inhabitants of the small community in which I dwelled loved to placticar — to sit and chat — and to conocer — grow acquainted with. Or there were the people who bonded in other ways. My oldest host brother, Exequiel, turned me into a proverbial Audubon and milkman. And that one and that one, every old Bessie and species of bird had a name, of which I memorized all.

Most inhabitants of the small community in which I dwelled loved to placticar — to sit and chat — and to conocer — grow acquainted with. Or there were the people who bonded in other ways. My oldest host brother, Exequiel, turned me into a proverbial Audubon and milkman. And that one and that one, every old Bessie and species of bird had a name, of which I memorized all.

Make no mistake, true to the Amigos’ credo, we also played an active role in local academics. By cooperating with the local teachers, we incorporated some of our lessons into our community’s primary school curriculum.  My two Amigos partners and I worked as a team to create lesson plans from what we had learned in the prior nine months of training. Additionally, we taught about ourselves, as many of the students had an unquenchable thirst for trivia about me. In the end, I ended up teaching not just what I had learned in the school, about the environment and teeth brushing but about myself: “What is your name? What is your last name? What is your favorite color?” – the list goes on. With this knowledge, our youth group held meetings introducing us to the community, and from these we learned about its makeup, its culture, its customs, and its penchant for being laid back., None of these were bad.

The learning was reciprocal, and just as I had been told, I was able to engage in a cultural exchange that was one of the most rewarding parts of my Amigos experience. This aspect of my summer did not surprise me, in that it was one of the primary reasons for my involvement in the program, that I heard so much about. The tiny moments during which we sat by candlelight playing endless games of every card game every created, while simultaneously bantering about the day’s occurrences, and the progress of our corn field.Amazingly, through out the summer, I never met a single person who expressed anything less than an open-armed friendship and willingness to bond. Frankly, I was astonished at the extent to which people in my host community extended their hospitality, not just to myself, but to others as well. Everyone was treated as family, regardless of whether they were or not.

Because of everyone’s inclusiveness, I found myself wishing at the end that I could have stayed for longer. We accomplished what we had set out to do, both as individuals and as a community, in that we learned much about ourselves and others, while increasing awareness of health and environmental issues

Personally, the most amazing thing that I learned about myself was my inner potential, and how I can stretch myself to absorb new challenges. With a sensational Amigos summer under my belt, I am more independent and confident in my social interactions, in school, and in my English and Spanish speech.

So, what is coming up?

Well, in the future, I plan to start a regular posting schedule of Monday, Wednesday, Friday, on which I will deliver the heavy hitting and in depth posts of the week.

And good news if you like my Science based postings. I will attempt to incorporate more of those into my posting schedule. Other than that, you can look forward to what you had come to expect in Micahville.

Well, with that I am off to continue work on some posts in the tubes.

P.S. What do you think of the new design? Cool, huh?

"Hiatus" was given life on on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 8:21 pm and, I think, categorized Micahville.com. Mentioned in this entry was amigos, hiatus, update, volunteer.