Connected to the world

I finally was able to buy a cell phone on Friday!!! Yeah, so now you all can call me by using an international phone card or plan. Shoot me an email to get my number and you can call me anytime, we are on the same time zone!

Well, we finally got our site assignments and had the opportunity to visit them all last week. I will be living the next two years of my life in the department of León, which is one of the Spanish colonial departments in Nicaragua. This town is also only a 2-hour bus ride from the Pacific Ocean (hint: for those coming to visit me)! It’s a very small farming community, only 38 houses with a total of about 200 people. So I will fortunately have the opportunity to get to know every member of this town and hopefully be able to form good working relationships with everyone! Almost everyone has cows, pigs and chickens, so there is an abundance of fresh milk…delicious! The town is surrounded by multiple acres of corn, sesame, millet and peanut fields. Yes, I will definitely be making my own peanut butter!

It’s much hotter is this part of Nicaragua, as it’s located not far from the pacific. There are three different massive volcanoes that can be seen from any front or backyard in my town! So we have a gorgeous sight! It’s really sizzling and dry in this volcano alley, so even in the shade your dripping with sweat. However, there is a great quantity of fruit trees and large shade trees. It’s not desert like, just a lot hotter than other regions in Nicaragua, word on the street is that it gets up to 110° in the summer months (January-May). One good thing about being in the hotter region is that the bucket baths are much more tolerable! I didn’t shiver once in León, compared with the ice-cold bucket baths in Estelí.

The closest volunteer is only a 25-minute bus ride and then 2-mile hike away. But there are a total of four of us in a 12-mile radius, so we will be in good contact over the next two years. We’ll also have the opportunity to collaborate on a couple projects as one of those volunteers has a lot of experience to livestock/animal care. That’s extremely important for me, as I don’t have a clue how to improve the milk productivity of a cow!

My site visit of five days was an interesting one! I slept on a bed made of wicker, woke up at 5:30 a.m. every morning to snorting pigs outside my window, got eaten by hundreds of mosquitoes, discovered who the new president of the U.S. is from a Nicaraguan on the 5^th, got attacked in the middle of the night by a scorpion on my middle finger (yes it stung me, it was a pain like no other! Don´t worry their not poisonous here), and got to check the market in Leon!