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the wonderful kids

i have been anxiously waiting to write this post for months now!

it is my huge pleasure to introduce to you all, the wonderful kids with etfl! for the past while, i have been working with a team of incredible volunteers to bring in this new group of liberian children into the etfl family.

http://eattofeedliberians.com/wonderful_kids.html

they are a group of kids affected and infected by hiv/aids. since 2007, two very good liberian friends have been working to support these children through micro businesses and spare change. these kids lacked the necessary nutritional, medical and emotional support needed for children living in the shadow of a difficult illness that is heavily stigmatized in buduburam. they worked their hardest to provide for them but at times, the resources just simply are not there.

this year, etfl realized that they were in a spot where they could commit to these kids and women with financial support. a few volunteers headed over this summer to help develop this program and a lot of stress and hard work later, we're off! it is exciting, challenging, nerve wracking and bitter sweet.

when starting this program, we had hoped to be able to put the hiv+ kids on ARVs. we thought there were only a couple of them and that we would be able to match them with locals who could ensure adherence and internationals who could provide financial support. it is so so so so so important that once kids get on arvs, they do not stop. if they stop, the medications are not only ineffective but the kids can build up a resistance to them.

mid summer, i got a phone call from one of the volunteers in camp letting me know that they had finished testing the kids and that the majority of them were positive. it was too many kids to be able to manage. while we could probably get the financial support, administration and supervision is so far beyond our capacity and the capacities of the women in ghana who care for them. with a group that has such a flexible future, putting the kids on medications without knowing where they will be in a few months, how serious their parents are and so many other things could make it worse more than better.

i struggled with this decision, but not nearly as much as the volunteers in ghana did... and probably still are. i wish i could be in so many places at once.

at the end of the day though, i think we have made the responsible choice. it is so important not to overstretch yourself in this situation, and to promise only what you know you can deliver. we will now devote so much time to finding organizations who have the capacities and resources that we do not, to hopefully care for as many of these kids as possible.

i hate that this job has me make these decisions between impossible A and impossible B. i mean, i love it, but howwww is that a discussion that even has to happen. it makes me particularly sick that i had to think about that decision while sitting in cottage country with friends and beer, a trip to central america on the horizon and - relatively speaking - all the opportunity in the world.

ARG.

prime real estate

today (and tomorrow), i have the best office in the world... or at least, its up there. my office in san jose closed for the rest of the week and, realizing how much i'd be wasting my time in an apparently fantastic country, i decided to relocate to the west coast for a few days. with wifi and my laptop, i'm pretty portable.

so. i'm in manuel antonio. its touristy but, you can see why. its where jungle meets beach over giant cliffs. who wouldn't want to come? who wouldn't want to develop fabulous real estate that i want to buy? who wouldn't want to tempt me with fantastic hotels that jet out openly over cliffs? san jose and kitchener will be tough after this. people at the hostel keep saying how crappy it is that i have to be tied to my laptop here but, not so bad. at this point, i'm feeling somewhat at capacity for tourist activities. i'm pretty thrilled if i can have really good espresso.

last week was when i realized how down i'd let myself get in san jose. working 9-5 was good, but not exciting. missing home and friends, i found myself with a pre-bisco style countdown to sept 30th... dumb. a month is no time and i'm going to be tied to all of that forever. so, i headed off to a volcano.

volcano was pretty but, lacked lava. well, apparently we saw lava but honestly, more like a rock slide. i guess at night it is more impressive but of course, we only saw fireflies by the hundred (arguably prettier than red hot lava... but not as impressive to talk about). met an australian guy who was hitting a similar point of being tired of traveling. not an easy thing to own up to when its been such a huge and defining point of your life but... it was good to talk about. and gave me that final gust to really take advantage of my last little while. so, i went and belayed myself down some waterfalls before my busride back to the city. it is about as beautiful as you could dream belaying down tropical wateralls could be. pictures with a crappy waterproof camera don't come close to capturing it. sad.

wouldn't you know it that the australian guy saw real lava the night i left.

went reluctantly back to san jose and my host-mom's strange dependency on hotdogs and bologna in meals for two days... work still good, and is getting hectic. with such little time left i'm feeling a bit pressed and seem to be working stupidly long hours to make the most of it all. it will be nice to have this project wrapped up so i can turn my head to new ones.

anyway. on tuesday as i frantically typed and multitasked with facebook chat, skype, and 5 billion word and outlook documents, evelyn mentioned that we'd be closed. one more thing to think about. the beach, recommended by other travelers, was an obvious choice. today was just as productive but i managed to get in a walk through the jungle and a (delicious) local espresso. and a few bags of coffee to bring home.

this weekend... apparently its whale season so i'll try to see some of those. or maybe just sprawling on the beach trying to get a final bit of sun before a long canadian winter. oh the choices.

two weeks til home (i have a less aggressive countdown still going...). i wonder if my sheets at home will smell as aggressively of bounce sheets as my ones at this hostel do. if this place has bedbugs they've certainly fooled me with super potent cleaning products. and i'm spreading all my too-traveled clothes out on them so that they smell as nice too.

subwaycostarica.com

i have been meaning to write this post for a week now. my second SOS outreach trip wrapped up last weekend and ive spent the past week working in san jose at our costa rican partner's office (reto juvenil internacional). its felt a lot like how i remember coming off canoe trip did... so many things you want to do but somehow its been a week and ive only just now made my way down to subway (to find they offer avocados as a sandwich topping!!!). that is to say nothing of the more productive things on my to do list. anyway. hopefully with a few more cups of folgers coffee (a crime that a costa rican house has folgers coffee, i know), that pattern will change.

but. backtrack to namaldi, costa rica. after leaving the laurier sos nicaragua trip, i made my way down to costa rica (while watching porn on a very public bus. google benny benassi's unedited satisfaction and picture watching that on an 8 hour greyhound trip). i was met at the bus by padre fabio who goes down in the books as one of the strangest characters ive ever met. while my drive from san jose to namaldi with could probably get an entire blog, it was a lot like taking a namibian train. a 200km drive took us 6 hours. luckily, its well documented because we stopped the car at every opportunity for a picture ever. even better was that since we took the back roads rather than the straight highway, we had a lot of awkward stand alone photo ops. we did make it eventually though, and i certainly know costa rica, including its agricultural university, better because of it. every cloud?

finally reached namaldi to find an entirely different trip than the one i left in nicaragua. this trip - an open trip - was subscribed to by a big range of people with some connection or support for sos, plus greg. the community itself had a lot more going on as well... including a bar with an alleged swimming pool, that was never actually full, running water and, if you could hold it, a flush toilet. a few nights before i got there the group and the community had also held a bingo fundraiser that lasted 6 hours in a packed classroom to fundraise for the school. oh and, apparently some chinese church donated a kareoke machine? ohhhhh foreign aid.

my gut reactions to this community were a good reminder of how desensitized i think i've come to "this part" of the world. also a reminder of how i set priorities and define 'poverty'... and, upon further thought... how wrong i can be. reminded me a lot of my initial reaction to people having cell phones and how i immediately thought, oh. you're fine. tvs now illicit that same reaction, and i'm not sure its fair. there are a lot of tvs in this country. i think it might be a sign of value more than wealth...

but tvs aside, this community, the school in particular, is a blend of indigenous and non-indigenous populations. the school offers a bilingual education so it means that kids from surrounding communities walk really far to take advantage. apparently the government formed curriculum does an alright job of preserving indigenous culture while embracing modernity (... english). id be curious to see what that blend looks like. after two years in buduburam, where government doesn't exist, its a funny transition/lesson in social services. its nice working where teachers are standardized and paid by the government. and where if you have a dining centre, you get government funds to sustain it. and more buildings can mean more grants.

where i have questions is around the transition from us to government. does this mean that once x amount of projects are built, projects that the government hasn't got the capacity to do, we're done and its the community/governments responsibility? it feels too tidy to be true. has my degree and time in ghana made me too paranoid to believe in something simple? what about what gets taught? how it gets taught? who teaches it? why they teach it? what materials are used? don't people want my (completely) unqualified and idealistic opinion on those things? doesn't every one want to sit and circles and discuss? i feel like ive been taught to micromanage and, in thinking about it, it makes such little sense. is building the schools and leaving the blend between local and international collaboration? i have anxiety just thinking about that.

why hasn't someone written a manual. shame a manual could never exist.

while im in san jose, im working with reto to figure out what a long term commitment looks like. to them, they see it as working with a bunch of different but connected communities to build up education in the region. the indigenous population in this area is huge, and lacks access to education. most kids won't attend because it could mean up to 3 hours of walking, one way... river crossings not included. plus, this area sees a seasonal migration of workers across the panama border. build up services too much on one side, and everyone floods over/doesn't leave. thus, our project in silico creek, panama with mcgill in august. as i sat in the office looking at what different indigenous communities had, and where projects could go, i felt a lot like i was playing a version of risk or monopoly.

anyway. as i reread this i feel like i sound to skeptical about the work i/we do. to be clear... i do. a lot. as much as any jaded skeptic can. what i love most is that in the communities we work with with reto, the teaching foundations are there first. the communities have government-certified teachers who move from urban areas to help with these kids. they're teaching outside, in chicken coops, or wherever. they've shown that the infrastructure isn't the most important part but of course, a roof and blackboard always helps... not just logistically but for building a sense of pride and respect for the emerging education system.

greg and i did a bunch of interviews for this informational outreach video that we're building for SOS and i got the chance to sit down with one of the teachers (for too short a time... damn reoccurring theme in my life) and talk about why he travels so far from his home and comforts to teach in some pretty difficult conditions. his answers (you'll have to watch the video!) and other comments while making that video keep me inspired to do this work.

its just that this month in san jose i'm picking apart each community, what we've done there, why, how it could continue, and what could be next. i'm also navigating some particularly tricky buduburam mazes which as some friends, family and spanish teachers will know, keep me perpetually on the edge of nervous breakdowns. all of this completely chips away at my confidence in asking the 'right' questions, making the 'right' decisions and starting the 'right' paths. as someone who loves shades of grey and veers away from right or wrong questions, decisions and paths, this is a very... intimidating? exciting? nerve racking? challenging? so many adjectives.... environment to be in.

but. its a fun one. and its one that pushes me to learn more (including spanish), talk more, explore more and all those other things. with a sister starting university, a dog turning one and friends having ridiculous bar nights at home, it gets really annoying to be constantly away. its pretty excellent that i can be excited about monday morning and work starting up for the week again. lame? workaholic?

i don't feel like i ever paint a very good picture of what i'm actually doing here. so.. to quickly sum up. i'm in san jose until the end of september, learning about reto, partner communities, and learning about the central american university atmosphere. im also going to visit a few of the communities we have/might work in over the next while which i'm really excited for. and then, come sept 30, its back to canada for me. for real this time. holy smokes. SOS is working to get a big blog thing going and i'll be writing there as well... probably more tied to what i'm doing, than the random thoughts that pass through my head.

oh and. this is my 100th blog post. do bloggers get a present for that?

and. happy birthday mom. outlook just notified me that i was 15 minutes overdue in that task.

rocks.

i can now confirm that there are many rocks in the community of san marcos, nicaragua. i feel as thought i have seen, hit and ate a lot of them. there are also a few that will stay with me probably for awhile, since they're permanently lodged in my skin.

i'm back in a city (granada... the spanish colonialist turned tourist dream destination) to regroup quickly after the past few days in the mountains with the outreach SOS trip from laurier. the past few days, capped off with a final night out with the group, has left me zombie like today. but, i'll try to figure out what has happened.

these outreach trips brought up a surprising amount of skepticism with friends when i started talking about this job with SOS. people wondered why foreign students with no building experience were spending money to go down and do a job that a local could probably do better. i completely saw where they were coming from and agreed on some of the arguments, which left me nervous for what i'd find when i actually went on one of these trips. however, after a few days, i have (almost) nothing but positive things to say.

first. they're no party or picnic. the work was hard! and maybe harder than some of the trip participants thought they were signing on for. we had to dig the foundation of the school so that in the event of another earthquake hitting this community, our work won't be undone. fun part was discovering that the land we were building on was made up of a lot of really unbreakable rock that we had to chip away at, bit by bit for days. its almost finished. anyone who knows me, and my athletic abilities, can imagine how hilarious it would have been to watch me heave this giant metal pole up and down at a rock willing it to break. other tasks, like moving thousands of rocks from point a to point b, weren't any more physically relaxing.

another big concern was that this would be the worst example of development tourism i'd seen yet. again, happily surprised. the guys on the trip really impressed me with how thoughtful and aware they were of their role in the community. they didn't barge in waving answers and judgements about rural life. they made the best effort they could to interact with the community and to go above and beyond the building of the school with english classes, constructive and sustainable projects etc. don't know what kind of monsters i was bracing myself for but i didn't find them...

as for locals, and taking work they could do and benefit from. i think/hope i'll always be a skeptic on this one. but, i'm a more optimistic skeptic right now.

first and most simply, its a shit ton of work that extra hands certainly won't hurt. and, there is also the argument that its not like if the volunteers didn't come, that their $1500 would go to paying locals and the projects. it would probably just stay in canada, with them.

then, there is the lack of local availability. they may not be living the life of excessive luxury, but they certainly work hard each day. after the initial thrill of us being there wore off, the "crowds" (pretty small community) went away and people went back to their daily grind. i'm not sure that people had the spare time to come and put up a school...

there is of course also the learning that comes for both the volunteers coming in and the community that lives there. i hoep that this is an overarching positive learning experience for everyone. i hope that its true that our presence helps inspire people about a world they don't know exists (many have never left this really tiny mountain community). i hope that even though there are language barriers, business students from laurier are able to see alternative forms of knowledge and recognize the value in them. i think many did. listening to them describe the locals changed so dramatically over 5 days. but i guess only time will tell. time, revisits and of course, more spanish. i can't even begin to describe how badly i wish i was not only 200% fluent in spanish but was also from central america. interacting with a community that hasn't seen canadians before is tough to do. there is a lot of hesitation on both our parts and after these first few days, we were finally getting somewhere. then of course, i had to leave. storrryyy of my life.

that defense being said, i hope that peopel continue to challenge me. i've really valued those conversations so far.....

what else. i got to do a few community visits to potential and past SOS projects with our partner organizations. a few big (a high school for a region that doesn't have school past gr. 5 at this point) and a few small (bridges so that kids attending a school don't get washed away by a river or stuck at school/home when it rises). they all need to be explored more before we figure out if they're the right fits for all the players but, there are a lot of really excellent people weighing in on the development an execution of hte projects, so i'm excited to have those conversations.

annnd final thought on the trip. it was interesting looking at the perceptions that people come into these trips with.. about rural life... about where things might go with a school... and generally how people adapt to a really rural community (like, no water, electricity or cell reception rural). this group of volunteers came from really different backgrounds and views than i've been used to (didn't go through the global development studies conditioning) and how that changes responses and approaches from what i would do was cool - and at times frustrating and hilarious - to see. i can't help but realize how low a priority hand sanitizer is for me relative to others.

so. next game plan. tonight i continue to eat all the foods i've been missing... i think i've had my pizza and ice cream fill so its onto something new. food in the community was good but basic and a bit of variety today has been fun. then, a big sleep, and another big sleep on a giant bus ride down to costa rica. tomorrow night i seem to be checked into a nunnery (not my doing..) and then its off to namaldi, costa rica to meet up with another SOS trip that is wrapping up their second week, and then to FINALLY start work! its been pretty much a year of traveling for me as of this month (this time last year i was ending my adventure in east africa... crazy). i had no idea what i was going to do next week, let alone post backpacking or in the next year. i don't think i saw anything about the past year coming. the surprised and questioning faces of the guys on the laurier trip made me see just how much literal and figurative ground i've covered. it makes my head hurt.

the rural move

tonight i say goodbye to spanish verbs, shakira and cobblestone roads.

the laurier outreach trip is currently en route to managua and late tonight, we make a hilarious mountain drive to a village called ocalca to start building a school and vegetable garden for the community. yet another change of pace for me.

will be sad to leave matagalpa. the past 10 days have been calmer than usual for me. i haven't packed a bag or ran once. i think its been like 4 months since that last happened.

i'm hardly fluent at this point but, poco a poco. ive really enjoyed the lessons so far and today, understood a full story read outloud start to finish. when we did this last week and i was supposed to retell the story, i told a completely different one. my host family and i can actually have conversations as well. and, best of all, i can speak in more than one tense (mas o menos).

i'll be doing this rural learning thing for the next while. will be so nice to be removed from internet and life. i feel like a cop out traveler when i go on wifi at spanish school and like things on facebook.

sorry about a dull post. expecting a bit more excitement when i finish these building projects end of august.

shakira.

the past month has had a lot of travel in it and, especially because i'm totally surrounded in spanish, i find myself looking for any kind of similarity. somehow, the biggest constant in my life right now is......... shakira. who would have thought that waka waka would be the most familiar thing in my life.

i have yet to meet a kid that doesn't know all the moves and most of the lyrics to waka waka. i'm betting adults, myself included, don't let on to as much as they know.

right now i'm living in matagalpa, nicaragua where torrential downpours (3 today) compete with shakira (1 play today) in frequency.... its also the coffee capital of the country (hooray!). i'm trying desperately to learn spanish this week before my actual job in central america starts. so far, ive surprised myself with how much french i remember, and have surprised nicaraguans with my english/french/spanish accent. esta es muy curioso.

its frustrating as hell not speaking the language. i am staying with a grandmother and grand daughter and take spanish lessons all day so i'm pretty much entirely immersed. cool experience and what not... lots of learning... but really frustrating. i came down here with pretty generic knowledge of nicaraguan history and politics and already am being bombarded with new perspectives and details. it drives me nuts that i can't absorb more, and that classes haven't made me fluent overnight. thankfully there is an american girl who has been here twice now and can fill me in on what i'd miss out on otherwise. there are so many spanish lessons in my future..........

howweeevvver. poco a poco. managed to hold up (understand? not really contribute) a conversation about homosexuality in nicaragua which was pretty interesting, especially given how psychotically catholic this country is. still wish i could contribute more than basic statements about homosexuality and the gay pride week in toronto.

nice thing about being 95% surrounded in spanish is that i don't have the opportunity to rely on the translator. despite being a mute, i still get to (have to?) maintain a lot of independence. as much as i look forward to my days of having a woman work with me in part as a translator, having to figure this all out on my own is... an experience...?

anyway. this coming weekend my spanish days end when the laurier outreach trip gets to nicaragua. we move to a really small village to build a school... they'll be there for 2 weeks, i'll be there for a week before i move to meet up with another SOS trip in costa rica. excited for english conversation again but its really good to have such a huge challenge that i can focus all of my energy on.

oh, and an aside? nicaraguan food is fantastic. big staples include cheese, beans and coffee... and a bit of chocolate and cinnamon.