Week Five:
Casa Verde

September 7, 2015

Health:

I am feeling okay, I have had a few problems every once and a while, but I have started taking antibiotics to get rid of any parasites, and it appears to be working. The bites from the bed bugs I talked about last week are still around, and are driving me crazy though! I have been taking anti-itch cream, and Benadryl, and this has helped a lot.

Homestay:

My family has been fine. Not much has been going on. My host brother Luis is starting to get bored because school has not been in session for weeks, and hanging around at the house can only keep him occupied for so long. My host mom is getting ready to sell pastries at the annual Tola county fair next week, and has asked if I can help her man our table, but the fair takes place on the exact same day that I get back from the Fenix retreat, so I might get back too late to be much use.

Happiness:

I am increasingly worried about the service learning packet I am working on. I had little time to work on this project during my first four weeks since other tasks took a priority, and this week, preparing for the Fenix retreat has also started to get in the way. This will leave me with roughly 2 weeks to complete a 50 page booklet! I am getting done what I can, but this is still winding me up quite a bit. Other than feeling a little stressed from this, I am doing great.

After coming back home from my trip, I have been assisting with the orientation of a new group of interns that arrived in Limón on the weekend. Just like when I arrived 5 weeks ago, orientation for the new interns has been complicated by the need to prepare to accommodate a new service learning team that arrived in the middle of week 4. Members from this service learning team are part of an educational support organization from Oakland, California. They all go to college, and show a lot more maturity than the middle schoolers we hosted two weeks ago.

My work with this team has involved more of the same, for the most part. I continue to run the leader of the day activity, but I am no longer responsible for helping to manage a service learning project because I need more time to both make some serious progress on my packet, and to continue planning the retreat.

The wonky trip to San Carlos has made it quite clear that we need to change the location of the retreat. We would waste far too much time and money just getting to and from San Carlos to make the trip worth it for everyone who came along, not to mention going down the river to El Castillo. Now, Lidieth and I have decided that we will take members of Fenix to an island in Lake Nicaragua called Ometepe. I went to Ometepe on my vacation weekend last year, and fully support this change of location. Not only will going to Ometepe result in fewer transportation based headaches, but the island offers far more activities and attractions for us to enjoy than San Carlos, or El Castillo do.

Unfortunately, changing our destination has also made it more difficult to find food, and housing within our price range. Unlike the more isolated Rio San Juan region, the island of Ometepe draws thousands of international tourists with plenty of money to spend each year. As one would expect, local businesses have learned to inflate their prices in order to better provide for the growing pool of international tourists, and to maximize the profitability of providing these service. When I say that prices have inflated, I am not talking about increases of any small amount. I am talking about prices that are double, or even triple what they are elsewhere in the country! For example, I spent around 300 cordobas ($11.00) in San Carlos for a hotel room that would easily cost 30 dollars or more in the city of Moyogalpa on Ometepe. These higher prices have pushed most hotels outside of our price range, and after calling a few different locations, I can already tell that we are really going to need to struggle to keep our budget balanced.

Along with making several phone calls to hotel owners on Ometepe, I also rode a bus to Rivas in order to figure out how much it costs to take a public ferry to Ometepe from the nearby docks at San Jorge. To help me to assess how to best use the money I have for the Retreat, I want to get as much information about the expense of the trip as I can, and one of the costs I know I will need to pay for passage by boat to and from the island. I also wanted to gauge how plausible it was for our group to save money by using public transport to get to San Jorge. In an attempt to gather this information, and to carry out other small errands, I took the early morning bus to the central bus stop in Rivas, and then took a taxi to the docks at San Jorge.

I found that using the bus can be a difficult affair for even a single person because the bus often completely fills up before anyone in Limon who wants to get to Rivas can get on. As for the taxi ride, the driver spent the entire trip trying to convince me that I should pay him to provide my group with private transport for the retreat once he found out why I had come to Rivas. This guy even went so far as to follow me around at the docks selling his case! When I finally made it back to the bus stop, the trip proved to be a major headache for me, but I still accomplished my two original goals for the trip. Since I don’t want to try and squeeze over 20 kids into a packed bus, I see that I have no choice but to ask someone with a truck, or a microbus in Limon if they can give us a ride at least to San Jorge. Additionally, my questions at the San Jorge ticket book gave me the financial information that I needed.

That’s all for now!