New Years Vacation

I just got back from a vacation celebrating the new years with fellow volunteers.  The first part of the trip was a stay at a volunteer’s house in San Marcos, where 4 of us went to a beach and passed the time in his city, enjoying some of the sites and hanging out at his house.  His family is fairly well to do and politically elite and his parents were on vacation in Costa Rica when we came.  His grandmother was around and made sure to attempt to clean up after our every move, and also approved our cooking methods of scrambled eggs and pasta.  The day on the beach was marked by a bottle of rum being cracked at about 11 am, and we only just dipped in the water a few minutes to cool off. 

The next leg of the journey was up to Leon, a vibrant and wealthy city that frankly did not look or feel like any other part of Nicaragua.  For starters, there were tons of gringos around and they were all strolling around, some were even getting in and out of giant tour buses.  Granted we went on an especially busy time for gringos to travel, but the rest of Nicaragua is full of Nicaraguans so the population of white people seems out of place.  Also, although it does not appear that many people on the Pacific coast are in desperate need of food to survive, there is abject poverty in the area, but it is entirely masked in Leon.  From our hostel-going, shwarma-eating, beer-drinking vantage point, it was the first time I felt masked from some of the problems plaguing the country.  It is hard to think of desperate poverty while seeing a Hummer to pull out of the American style grocery. 

Our next destination was the beaches of Las Penitas, which is a small resort community, founded about 40 years ago with the creation of a nature reserve to the south along the ocean.  We stayed at a small hotel owned by a French Canadian woman.  The hotel was really just a couple of cabanas and a dorm style room on the beach with a spacious restaurant under a thatched roof and pool.  The ocean in front of the hotel was immensely powerful and had fairly contestant 6 foot waves and a strong undertow.  Swimming was certainly possible, but it was necessary to take precautions and always be aware of your surroundings in order to avert being swept away.  I was able to body surf quite a few of these waves and cruised upwards of 200 feet on a few of them.  On the last day, I even was able to surf at an angle on a few of them, which is a pretty big rush!  We spent New Year’s Eve at the pool, and then took a boat ride into the nature reserve led by a father-son team pointing out wildlife and telling a few stories about the area.  We saw some crocs and even a sea turtle trying to lay her eggs on the ocean side of the island.  Her problem was that there were many people around (us) disturbing her, and there was a guy with a sack ready to take the eggs to market when they were laid.  That night we went from restaurant area to the pool to the beach, and finally a few of us went to a small bar a few hundred yards down the beach to have a few more rounds.  A good NYE indeed.

Overall, it was a really good time and I was able to interact in meaningful ways with many of my new friends dispersed throughout the country.  The Peace Corps is in some manners a pressure cooker of for our relationships because of the long lulls between seeing each other, isolation of sites, and relief to have native speakers around.  Relationships congeal, undergo metamorphosis and are redefined through the intense to lonely spectrum of service.  My time with the gringos seems to be spent dissecting what makes us strong and weak, defining emotions and personality traits and deciding how or why an experience in service makes us more unique or similar.  If it sounds exhausting, that’s because it is!

It is such a pleasure to see the changes in others and I hope that the changes I am going through are recognized in others, too.  I am figuring out what it means to be away from many of the normal things I have learned to take for granted while also living under the microscope of being a foreigner.  It is impossible to integrate, even in 2 years, to everything.  I will always be the tall guy with a funny accent that probably has some money and a potential ticket to the US.  I will fight a bit of an uphill battle to change behaviors that as an outsider seem inefficient or destructive, but I am also fighting “development battles” with myself.  For example, I can tell someone that it probably is not a great idea to consistently throw trash out of a moving bus, but I can’t provide the resources to build the infrastructure to collect it from trash cans in the countryside.  The Peace Corps preaches sustainability, and I think we all get the message that if a program or project that we start cannot be continued without us, it is not worth much.  This may even prevent some of us from attempting some big things in preference to staying safe and easy.  I feel at this point that as a person that gets the sustainability message, the ability to act on our intuition and make a larger difference is a little lacking.  From my weeks in service, the PC to me right now seems more about the cultural interaction than anything else.  I am relived to be back at my sight and try to figure out my summer camp schedule which starts in 2 weeks.