Giardia

I think I might have giardia. Woke up last night with incredible stomach pains. Sat on the toilet (thank God I have a toilet in my house, that flushes) and hung out. I feel like a science project. I can drink a glass of water and in more or less 2 minutes I´m ready to let it out. My breath smells sulfurous. I´m just pretty lovely right now. Good thing Peace Corps has set us all up with oral rehydration salts. I´m going to need them. And, I guess I´ll need to make a trip to the lab.

Good thing is now I can sit in bed all day and work on med school applications with out feeling guilty about missing work.

Life of a PCV.

Rain Dance

Rainy season has started. I hadn´t remember how hot rainy season can be. It rains during the night and you wake up in a humid mess. All morning it is hot and sticky. Thankfully, it also usually rains in the early afternoon. So, the evenings are amazing. However crazy rainy season may be it is worth it.

A few days ago this was the view from the front of my house.



Can you see the double rainbow?

Torneo de Billares

18 May, 2011
Día de Solidaridad de Personas con VIHsida

In solidarity of those with HIVaids I held my first ever pool tournament.

In Nicaragua over 6,900 people are HIV+, and those are just the people who have recieved the blood test. Over 7% of men are HIV+.

Nicaragua is the size of NY.

That means there are a lot of people in this country with HIVaids. We project that this number will not be decreasing any time soon. There are no national or regional hotlines focusing on HIVaids. Condoms are not necessarily easy to come by. And, the test which is meant to be anonymous it hardly that.

So, with the help of four other volunteers in my department, I held the first ever pool tournament in Jinotega to spread the word. We organized a tournament including 16 men (with over 90 observers), prizes and mini-classes between each round. We taught them about what HIVaids is, how it spreads, how it doesn´t spread and prevention techniques.

World Wise Schools and Jump Ropes . . . Awesome

So, for the past year or so I have been writing to a class in Duluth Minnesota. We were connected through a program called World Wise Schools. Every couple of weeks I write to them about what I´m up to. I write about what my house looks like, cultural differences between the US and Nicaragua, how this one pesky cat crawls into my house at night between my walls and ceiling and scares the you know what out of me. And, this class always writes back- in Spanish. You see, they are a high school intermediate Spanish class. It is pretty awesome.

Anyway, I thought I´d share the last letter I wrote. You can check my grammer!

For those of you who don´t speak semi-campo Spanish I wrote about an activity I did with my youth group.

A new type of environmental clean-up we are promoting as Peace Corps is using trash to construct buildings. The class in Duluth has been reading about this process. They have learned all about Guatemalan PCVs who have basically built walls out of plastic soda bottles filled with other non-degradable trash. This has become a popular project among PCVs and small communities interested in cleaning up their towns.

Although I didn´t build a super cool community house using trash from the streets I did teach my youth group a cool way to help the environment. We learned how to collect used trash bags from neighborhood roads and make them into jump ropes.