Off to the coast

Ok, so I've been pretty busy this week, but I'm going to the coast tomorrow morning at 5 am, so I better write something now. Hopefully I'll get around to all those questions later, since right now it's midnight and I should probably get some sleep. And pack.

So, about the coast. It's the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, which is both gorgeous and impoverished. Narcotrafficking is big here as well, so the communities aren't all that healthy. We'll be there for a week, split up between Orinoco and Pearl Lagoon (I'm in Lagoon).

As for recent events, you will all be pleased to know I prepared wild rice soup (which actually thickened into something more like a casserole) for my mom and some friends. Huge success. It will probably be the next big phenomenon of Maximo Jerez. So when I get back from the coast, we'll all cook ethnic dishes--I'll learn how to cook something along the lines of indigena viego, but I think that's wrong.

My mom here has been telling me some more stories about herself as well. Apparently she was a Spanish teacher a while back for high school. So I asked why she left, and there are three reasons. One, the students were coming in with not even a basic education. Some couldn't even spell their own name correctly, which made teaching a secondary level spanish class very difficult. Two, the schools are autonomous, so students whose parents couldn't pay were asked to leave, and those who could were passed regardless of actual aptitude. Third, oone of her students had been approached by her boss (he had stayed behind with her in between periods and dropped his pants. She ran off and told Edu, my mom). So when she reported him, she was fired. And she hasn't been able to get a job in education since. And this is one top of the fact she was a teacher in the literacy crusade, headed up the youth organization of the revolutionaries, picked coffee (more or less voluntarily) for the revolutionary cause, and runs her on business. And worked in a womens NGO in Matagalpa. She's my hero.

Other than that, I'll just say life is wonderful here. It's cheesy, but whatever. I'm good.