Alrighty! Time to give my readers a quick run-down of all the projects that we're working on right now. I was going to try and include pictures, but that just takes so long that I'll just do a pure picture post next time!
English classes:
We teach beginning, intermediate, and advanced English classes. Beginning is by far our biggest class (around 50 people) so after I lecture for the first 20 mins or so, they divide into smaller groups of 12-15 with individual teachers and then I wander around asking any questions that they have that they don't know how to ask in English. This happens Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights for an hour. Sometimes it can be really frustrating, and sometimes I find myself teaching English with a Spanish accent, but it's also really awesome when we see our students out around town and they can yell, "Good afternoon!" to us.
Nuns:
Alright, I'll confess... I haven't been back to see those kids since Mother's day. But it's been super busy! Our plan is still to give some drug/tobacco awareness lessons and also give them some books to read for fun, not for school.
Soilets:
I think I've mentioned this before on the blog. But a soilet is basically a latinre, only unlike a latrine, it doesn't fill up. It's specifically engineered so that there's a little chamber filled with worms that eat all the human waste and turn it into dirt. So we're building one for a school in the community of Los Alpes. The only problem is that it's kind of complicated, and the instructions we have were written for engineers. But, we are still moving forward, and we think we'll be done sometime next week.
Hospital:
We're painting/patching up holes the pediatric wing of a local hospital. It's already painted, but it's painted really nasty colors and a lot of the paint has chipped off and there are holes in the walls, and where they have tile on the walls the tile is super dirty. So we started painting in one room today, and our plan is to knock out a room per week, and eventually they'll have a freshly painted 4th floor Pediatric wing!
Soccer Tournament:
We are running a little soccer tournament for two local communities: La Ceiba vs. El Tamarindo. The idea is that the kids can sign up to play in this tournament, but in order to play in the game, they have to attend a couple workshops on self-esteem, sex ed, domestic violence, etc. The preliminaries in La Ceiba start on Tuesday! The parents are a lot more competitive about this than we imagined. Our idea was just a couple little scrimmages, but they want us to measure out the field to official regulations. Are you serious? I just walked past three of them playing in the street with a bottle half filled with dirt for a ball. We will be fine if our field is a few feet shorter than international rules. Either way, we're excited! Oh! And the project is called G.O.L which stands for Ganar Otros Logros, which means something along the lines of "winning other achievements" because we'll be talking about not only success in soccer, but success in life. Deep, huh?
Tamarindo H2O:
Tamarindo, right on the edge of the river. A salt manufacturing rural town of Nicaragua... With no clean water source. They have two rivers, one that comes from the ocean, so it's way salty, and another "sweet water" river that is contaminated by the feces of the town upstream. They also have a well... but their so close to the ocean that the well water is also salty. So most people have to buy water every day from a giant truck that comes. It expensive, oh ya, and the inside of the truck is contaminated. Everyone who can't afford the water (about 20% of the population according to the local nurse) has to drink the salty well water. We're going to be holding a fundraiser to buy water filters for the families who can't afford to buy the contaminated truck water.
Orphanage:
There's a little orphanage-thing here in Leon that's run by a lady from Tennesse. They're all going through major medical problems or suffer from mental disabilities. The lady tries to do as much rehab with them as she can. We're going to try something called communication boards that worked pretty well for a team in El Salvador last year. It's basically a piece of paper with words written on it, but they found out that some of the kids that they thought were completely unaware of what was happening around them were not only able to understand, but they could also read and could point to words that they wanted to say.
Business Classes:
A guy from our team is going to start teaching basic business classes! And that's basically all I know about that project so far...
Ceiba school:
I saved this project for last, because it's the project that's stressing me out the most. The ninth grade of a rural school in La Ceiba meets outside because they don't have a classroom. So we're going to build them one. And to reduce costs and teach about recycling, we're going to build it out of plastic bottles. Ya. Its a really cool plan, actually. I'm still researching it, but basically you compact as much inorganic trash as you can into a bunch of plastic bottles. Then you take your cement frame, put chicken wire on either side, and fill the middle with all your bottles. Then you plaster cement over it and viola! A wall. So ya, the students at Ceiba are starting to gather all the trash and plastic bottles that they can find (there's a lot here in Nicaragua..)
So ya, that's a quick run down of all the projects that our team of 10 people is working on! So we stay pretty busy!
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