¡AMIGOS! This past week was one of the longest, hardest, and hands-down most amazing of my last 996 (special thanks to Google Calculator on that one).
The five of us showed up to Staff House in Matagalpa on the 16th…or, at least, to the old Staff House. Senior Staff (our bosses) finally made the call that our house was in too much of a rough part of town, and they moved out in a day. So I dropped my bags, saw the kitchen and living room of where I would have been living, and booked it out the door to a taxi to a bus to Managua to pick up our last supervisor in a grinning sweaty mess, arriving back in Matagalpa five hours later to find my bags moved in to Staff House #2.
It’s a posh establishment we’ve got here: half of us actually get beds, all of us get a kitchen twice the size of mine back home, and the cute little lizards who scamper around our walls get an equally cute little courtyard (complete with lots of potted plants) to sunbathe in. You can see it on this blog’s background :)
The first few days were spent getting up to speed on what our Senior Staff has been doing, and learning what we’re going to be doing. It was very helpful, very packed, and generally a blast to hang out with a terrific team of enthused AMIGOS-ers.
It’s time to take another break now…last time I gave you a history lesson, and this time it’s AMIGOS 101:
AMIGOS de las Américas: an absolutely amazing organization founded in 1965 when a few idealistic Texans from one church hopped in a bunch of trucks with boxes full of polio vaccines to go inoculate rural Honduras. The organization has evolved a lot since then, and in 2011 it’s sending about 700 volunteers off from chapters around the United States (and abroad—about 20 from the Dominican Republic!) to live with host families in rural communities all over Latin America to run educational summer camps with kids, to work alongside community members on development projects ranging from latrines and aqueducts to community centers and gardens and murals, and to generally have a spectacularly challenging once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get to know an entirely new place and its people.
I was a vol in Mexico and then in Panama during high school…I might go into more detail at some point about how amazing my experiences were, and how much I absolutely fell madly in love my two communities, and how much I got out of it. But long story short, I thought it was great, and so I’m back as a Supervisor this year.
The first major thing you do as an AMIGOS Sup is…survey. This is when you tromp around your “route” of the four communities you’ve been assigned so that you can introduce community members to yourself and to AMIGOS, in addition to finding housing and food for the volunteers and getting the ball rolling on the projects that the community wants to work on. It sounds pretty simple, right?
We’ll call my first community “F.” It’s a new community for AMIGOS, and I’m basically going to skip over the important details to just tell you about the absolutely adorable three-week-old dog that got cold in the middle of the night, and so he crawled over towards my cot on the dirt floor in the main room of the host family’s house, ducked under the mosquito net, and managed to pull about half of the net over onto his side to make himself a soft bed and a warm blanket and keep my company all night. I was 10% freaked out that I was going to roll over and squash the little guy with the metal frame of my cot, but 90% content to have some company as I tried to fall asleep at the universal bedtime of rural Nicaragua: 8 o’clock, two hours after the sun goes down. The dog still wasn’t as cute, though, as the two-year-old kid who was fascinated by clicking my flashlight on and off and on and off and on and off over and over and over and over again…for about two hours.
Next up was “M,” another new community. Now, in these rural communities, sometimes people can be incredibly shy and reserved. Once those people get to feeling comfortable with the strange gringo/chele who’s wandering around their community, though, their honesty and openness and eagerness to get to know you can be extremely impressive. But it was a little easier here in M: it only took about five minutes of [massively failing at] playing soccer with the jóvenes, and about five seconds of Simon Says with the niños, for them to open up. They were endlessly cheerful, receptive, and interested in learning about my life—and sharing theirs—from the get-go. The kids even left me with a dozen really really sweet letters with drawings. Things got a little rougher at 7 p.m. when I threw up, and continued to do so every hour on the hour until 3 in the morning…but the old host father was miraculously able to find me Ritz crackers, and luckily I had a big Ziploc bag readily available, and really luckily it was gone by the next morning.
So it was with a kind of achy stomach and tired body that I trekked on to “Q.” Q is basically the dream AMIGOS community. I’d had contact with one person in the community and told her to expect me around 3:30…but because of the rain, I got a little held up and arrived at 4:00 instead. As it turns out, the community had set up a meeting and been waiting for me since 1:00. And they were still waiting for me when I got there three hours later. About 80 of them. In a community of only 200 people. I literally walked into a room full of strangers at the community center (which they had built last year with the AMIGOS vols) to a standing ovation. Everybody is brimming with energy and joy and excitement, and the community is a total machine that seems to accomplish whatever it sets its mind to: organic fertilizer…monthly trash cleanups…a palatial community center constructed for $1,000 in four weeks last year. This place is simply awesome.
Finally, “C.” This might be a rough one. A two-and-a-half-hour hike up the muddy mountain from Q, C was not nearly as bright. AMIGOS was there the last two years, but classes with kids kind of didn’t happen, and the main project kind of didn’t happen, and the youth group kind of fell apart, and unlike other communities that arranged meetings in 12 hours, here everybody told me it would be absolutely impossible to arrange a meeting 36 hours in advance, even if I spent two nights there to make it happen. Allow me to read a little much into it: I got this strange vibe from many people in the community, as though life had slowed and saddened from the crushing poverty, the endless rain, the reams of latrines that have long since filled past capacity. Even the kids. It’s a stark contrast to all the communities I’ve had the honor of knowing where people seem to find a simple and raw sense of joy from out of a simple and poor life.
But, I was actually really pleased with how much I was able to gather information and talk about how AMIGOS can work successfully with communities and get to know community members in the few hours I had before the one daily bus left at 6 a.m. It’s a community to put things in perspective. And I do love a challenge :P
So I came home to Staff House—kind of surreal to suddenly find myself in a city, standing in front of our colorful comfortable home—in love with three of my communities, happy with the week, and exhausted as it sank in just how intense survey had been. You never quite realize that while you’re in the throws of it.
The last few days were a little rough. Filling out the post-survey paperwork took about 20 hours, and yesterday I worked on it from 8 in the morning until midnight. My dinner break was marked by a few dozen children coming begging to the table; one of them asked for my chicken bones to suck them dry, and I let him take them off my plate. Today, diarrhea and a fever set in. And we lost one of our Supervisors, so for now I’m taking on a fifth community. But I’m extremely grateful to be doing all of this with such a great team on Staff, I keep on racking up the good stories, and honestly I’ve been enjoying almost all of this immensely. And now I’m extremely jazzed up to meet all the vols and do the “supervising” part of being a Supervisor.
So rather than finish on a somber note, I close with a funnier story about my two favorite walks of the week:
Second place: I found two host families in M. That would mean that one volunteer would live in each house, and they’d have to walk to meet up each day. The community didn’t seem to think it’d be a problem. So when I asked to be taken to the house to see it, I was surprised when I was met with wide eyes asking if I really wanted to take that hike. Turns out, the house is actually a fifty-minute hike down a steep mountain into a different community altogether, past the roaring river that during the rainy season ( = now) sometimes is impassible even by cars and horses, meaning that the volunteer would occasionally walk 50 minutes home at night, only to find that river and then have to turn around and climb 50 minutes back up to sleep for the night. No vols there, it seems.
First place: There’s one place to find cell phone reception in Q. Where, you might ask? Well, all you have to do is…walk past Teliofila’s house up the hill until you come to a footpath to your left. Walk up that footpath for as long as there’s corn growing to your right and beans to your left. Once the field on your left switches to corn, that’s when you duck through the barbed wire fence and walk diagonally left and up the hill through the field until you get to the fourth big pile of rocks. That’s where.
Love from Mata-G,
