The Aged P's Visit San Nicolas

We can write blog after blog and email after email. We can see your faces on skype and tell you the names of our students and how cows wander the streets of San Nicolas. But until you have walked those cobblestone streets yourself and talked to those students, we can't fully express to you what San Nicolas is like.

This past week we got to fully express that to my (Sarah's) parents, who were here visiting us. They told us that instead of traveling further afield to beaches and other tourist attractions, they just wanted to see our daily life, and we took them at their word.

When my parents got here on Tuesday, we took them on the tour of San Nicolas, which lasts all of ten minutes. We stepped over cow pies, visited the baseball field (the largest space in town), and said “adios” to the students we passed.

On Wednesday we would usually have co-taught with the high school English teacher, but there was a fair going on in the community of La Laguna and we wanted to show my parents the sights. So we hitchhiked in the back of a pickup truck heading that way and got off in time to witness a baptismal mass and a cockfight. We also met my friend Nidia, who is studying English and was thrilled to practice saying “Oh, wow!” with my mom.

In our after-school English class at our house, we just happened to be studying family vocabulary, so my parents helped us out with some live demonstrations of family relationships, while our students got into a heated debate about which of my brothers and cousins is the hottest.

That night we went to visit our friends Jarol and Eliza and their daughter Jaraeli. (I just discovered that her name is actually a combination of her parents' names). Eliza whipped out a bag full of artisan jewelry, most of which my mom ended up buying to sell with her fair-trade business in the US. We played hangman with Jaraeli and Jarol taught my dad a more complicated Nicaraguan version of tic-tac-toe.

On Thursday, we showed my parents the school, impressing them with the fairly nice school building and unimpressing them with the rowdy students and row of broken latrines. Then we caught the bus up the hill and got off to walk three miles through chamomile and potato fields to La Garnacha, the organic farm where we work on Thursdays. We showed them the lookout over hills of farmland towards distant volcanoes and the building where the La Garnacha goats live. We introduced them to Padre Patricio, the Italian priest, and other La Garnacha friends. And then we hitched another pickup truck ride back to San Nicolas.

On Friday we all crammed into the old American school bus and chugged up the hill again to Esteli, the closest city, where David works at the market on Fridays. We stopped by the La Garnacha stand, too late to catch the man who sells “pan de coco” (coconut bread) from the trunk of his little red car on Friday mornings. Instead, we settled on lunch at our favorite Cuban restaurant in Esteli. Then we visited the house of a woman who makes paper from recycled materials. We each made a few sheets of paper with old screens attached to picture frames, and my mom bought some recycled-paper cards to take back to the US to sell.

Our primary school students had planned a surprise party for my parents, so at our Saturday-morning class they made an early appearance (for the first time ever) so that they could jump out and say “Surprise!” when we arrived with my parents. Then they drank five liters of pop and continued jumping.

Later that day, we made a steep, hilly trek to my friend Maria's house out in the campo. I tutor Maria in English and she had invited us to her house to learn how to make chicken soup. I made orange juice from oranges from their trees and threw little cheesy corn dumplings into the soup boiling over their wood-fired stove. Hansel, Maria's 3-year-old son, showed my mom random items from their house (pencils, oranges, eggs) and ran off laughing uncontrollably when she said their names in English. Later, he grabbed a machete and ran outside to swing it at a tree – no big deal, just a three-year-old wielding a machete.

We have fallen into a good routine here in San Nicolas, but it was cool to lift ourselves out of that routine for a week and, in showing my parents what has become our normal life, see it through their eyes as new and exciting once again. It was a good reminder too that we're not isolated from our friends and family here – that even though you are all far away, you are thinking of us and supporting us in different ways. And if any of you want to come visit us too, we would love to host you!