Route!

After two days spent mostly sleeping, I’m updating this blog about an awesome first week on route. It was a full week, a fun week, an exciting week, a calming week…and an exhausting one too.

OFFICIAL AMIGOS SIDENOTE: From here on out, I’ll be telling you about some of my adventures in vague and obscure ways for the sake of my vols’ privacy and confidentiality. So for whatever gossiping I do on this blog, all subjects will remain anonymous and asexual.

It was so heartwarming to return to all of my communities for the second time, this time to see my volunteers in action: working with community members to fill out solicitudes (applications for funds) for the main projects, starting their summer camps with the kids, and generally adjusting to a very new lifestyle. I was—for no apparent reason—a rock star on route, the center of attention as both the only AMIGOS authority figure, and the funny new chele who’d passed through town once before but been gone for a whole two weeks (see pic of welcoming dance party!). So the communities loved having me there (sometimes embarrassingly so in front of the less rock-star vols), and the vols did even more: somebody who speaks English? A familiar face? Somebody with answers to my questions? Somebody with good Spanish? Hooray!

Four times, I went through the pretty intense experience of showing up to a community with no idea of what to expect, and then acting with limited time to sort out whatever I found. I had to be the one to stay calm through whatever happened, and so I actually felt very calm and at peace all week. The same goes for trying to be being, and supportive, and willing to listen, and endlessly energetic and enthusiastic…for when my vols maybe weren’t. A few choice stories:

1. One host mom cooks delicious food…with about a pound of salt a day. The food’s good, but it’s also really really hard to finish when a single egg has about 500% of your daily sodium. So what do I do? I tell her that we received calls at Staff House this week from both of her volunteers’ doctors in the Estados Unidos to warn us that they have high blood pressure and should limit their intake of salt. So por favor, a little less salt from here on out.

2. A vol addresses a community on the first day, at a big community meeting. This vol intends to say he/she is extremely gracious to be there. But what words come out of this vol’s mouth? “I am extremely generous to be here.” Woops.

3. But the Spanish adventures continue: there’s an unfortunate little coincidence that the word “nudo” in Spanish means both “knot” and “naked.” So, when one volunteer is trying to explain how to untangle a “human knot” of interlocked and overlapping hands, he/she shouts excitely, “Ahora, ¡nos desnudamos!” Does this mean “Let’s de-knot ourselves?” Sorry, but no…it actually means: “Let’s get naked!”

There’s a great mix of vols on my route. It’s been fun to build up in my head my dreams of how AMIGOS can be an amazing and unique experience for each of them, how I can try to lead them towards all those wonderfully cheesy but real realizations of perspective and confidence and maturity and the amazingness of people that this organization has to offer…

I loved being back in the communities, dealing directly will all that makes AMIGOS what it is. I got to comfort vols, and encourage them, and generally rant to them about all that I love about AMIGOS and life. It was absorbing and non-stop, leaving me totally focused and alert during the day, and ready to fall asleep the instant my head hit the cot at night.

But I just about ran out of steam by the end: the hike to the last community is a two-and-a-half-hour monstrosity uphill through the mud. Luckily, I was able to leave early in the day and hitch a ride halfway, reaching community before the rains come and make the rivers impassible. But I’d had diarrhea for a day, I was sweating buckets, and the three barefoot kids who were showing me the way didn’t quite understand that I was about to pass out. So I convinced them to grab a seat on a log while we exchanged songs, me singing “American Pie” and “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” them reciting hilarious little ditties about drunk grandmas and smelly horses and of course, love.

It’s been a really useful experience to deal with a wide variety of vols’ issues, and to get more and more comfortable moving between the world of AMIGOS communities and the world of posh city living, fighting off reverse culture shock more easily every time, and to get a sense of how sometimes I just spew out inefficient endless reams of advice as I try to guide vols towards what’s actually very concise truth: you will be less homesick—and you will get more out of this experience—if you push yourself outside your comfort zone to actually get to know people and try to take advantage of every last little awesome opportunity here that will evaporate when you leave August 8^th.

Back in Matagalpa, Staff has been having a great time napping, watching Mean Girls, hiking up to the top of the city (see below), and buying up the whole city's stock of peanut butter for our vols.

It’s their experience to make of it what they want; I’m excited for them, yeah I’m still a little jealous of them, and I’m happy to be munching on the chocolate chip cookies that Kayleigh and Caitlin just brought out of the oven as I head off to bed.