So What Are You Guys Doing Here?

Sometimes I'm a little jealous of the worker ants in our back yard. Even at night, you can see this huge long single-file string of them, crawling along in an organized fashion from the anthill next to the latrine and up the mango tree a few feet away. They crawl 10 or 15 feet up the tree, cut these very precise little pieces of leaves and then descend back down the line of ants, delivering the leaf pieces to their hill. They do everything with such precision and purpose. And at the end of the day, I bet they have some pretty cool mango-leaf furniture hidden away in their anthill to show for all their work.

Davie and I, on the other hand, have no mango-leaf furniture. Neither do we have such precise daily goals; and we certainly don't have as much control over our work as our neighboring ants do. Much of that will probably come with time. I know that for now we should just embrace our role as “accompaniers,” worrying less about what we're doing and focusing more on developing relationships with the people of San Nicolas. But it can be difficult to banish the Western to-do list mentality and still feel successful about our work.

The school year here in Nicaragua is drawing to an end in December, so if Davie and I want to start any new classes or clubs, it doesn't make sense to do it until February, when school starts again. In the mean time, we are plugging into a few different projects that are under other people's ownership:

 --  Co-teaching English at the high school. On Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays we put on our high-school-cool faces and help teach three or four English classes a day. Part of this involves going to the front of the class to pronounce vocabulary words like “statisticals” and “hellow” that the teacher has written on the board. The other part involves taming the students, who often leave class after the teacher takes attendance and run around and around the school, chasing each other until they collapse. Davie is beginning to perfect the stern teacherly air; yesterday he confiscated one note and reprimanded a group of girls who were doing each other's makeup during class.

--  Preparing produce for market at an organic farm. On Thursday we take the bus part of the way and then walk the remaining 3 miles to La Garnacha, a village that offers a lot of cool ecotourism activities and also has an organic farm. They make Swiss cheese, coffee and herbal teas as well. We have been helping clean carrots and green onions and package green beans on Thursday mornings. We have a few other ideas for things we could do at Garnacha: teach computer classes or ecotourism English classes, work on their web site or improve trails and trail signage in the area.

 --  Helping sell Garnacha's produce at market. On Friday we've been going to Esteli, the closest big city, to help sell produce at a cool farmers market in the town square. They usually don't need all that much help, so we'll probably start rotating which of us goes to the market on Friday.

- We have also begun to get a few requests for one-on-one English conversation sessions with people in the community. Knowing English really opens up the job market to people (or so we've heard), so we're excited to work with people who are really serious about improving their English.

When the new school year starts, we have a few ideas for projects of our own. Until then, we will continue to invite people over for dinner and talk to people in the streets. Our primary work in the next few months is to make friends.