December-January update

So the glory days of orientation are over, and I am now officially a working Jesuit Volunteer. A quick summary of the end of my orientation phase: Being outside of the U.S. during Christmas for the first time was a little harder than I thought, mainly due to the cultural differences surrounding the holidays. In Nicaragua the 24th is celebrated way more than the 25th. The whole day of the 24th is spent visiting family and friends; everyone’s doors are open and people just walk up and down the street and stop in to visit neighbors and loved ones. I feel like Christmas in the states is much more geared towards only spending time with family. Anyway, Christmas Eve here is celebrated with fancy dress and makeup for the girls, a feast at around 10 or 11pm, and then dancing until at least 2am. We were over at a neighbor’s house for this celebration, and I definitely felt nostalgic of the peace and calm of Christmas Eves in the U.S.

Between Christmas and January 10 we were lucky to have both Margaret and Josh’s families visit from the U.S. It was really amazing to see my two housemates interact with their families for the first time in a year, and we all had a blast hanging out with them, taking adventures with them, and occasionally being spoiled by them! During those few weeks after Christmas I also spent most of my time making endless trips around the city and painfully wading through government bureaucracy to apply for my residency visa.

On January 10 I had my first day of work at Proyecto Generando Vida in Barrio El Recreo. The first week and a half of work was spent cleaning and painting the project, holding staff meetings and workshops, and going door to door in the neighborhood spreading information about the programs. I was very nervous going in to my first few days of work, but my nerves were calmed a little once I got to know the setting and coworkers. It has been very difficult conversing in Spanish all day, and the language barrier has slowed the process of making friends with my coworkers. Almost all of my coworkers are women; I am one of two men at the project in a staff of almost twenty. Where are all the men? In Barrio El Recreo (and much of Nicaragua for that matter) fathers and husbands are a very rare sighting. Many men start families and then bail, leaving young mothers to care for a herd of children. The rest are working all day. So in Barrio El Recreo you have women more or less running the show, and a lot of kids with no father figure. Most of my coworkers are my age or a little older with a few kids and a divorce under their belt.

Proyecto Generando Vida is really an amazing project that offers comprehensive services to people in the neighborhood. I spent a few days last week trying to convince both receptive and skeptical mothers, aunts, and grandmas to pay 10-50 cents a week to sign their kids up for the “comedor” and “nivelación” programs that I will help lead. I also encouraged them to take advantage of computer classes, our discounted pharmacy, the visual health program, the cancer prevention program, the gym, painting and drawing classes, and the library. The project also has a micro-lending bank for about 150 women in the neighborhood. Walking through the entire Barrio without a doubt emotionally challenging, as El Recreo is in all actuality a squatter settlement in the middle of the city. The poverty did not phase me until we went door to door along the causeways that border the neighborhood. The “causes” (cow- say) are cement ditches filled with a lot of trash and some water, with tin shacks precariously built along their edges. I kept getting lost because there are no roads or consistent flow of houses; it’s just a bunch of dirt paths and randomly placed dwellings. The causes were suffocating due to their claustrophobic nature and overwhelming and blatant poverty. This was where most people were discouraged by the symbolic fee of 10 cents a week to send their children to classes, activities, and lunch every morning. The Project does wave the fee, and I expect that most of the people at the comedor in the morning will be from the causes.

Tomorrow I will start my work with the kids. In the morning I will work in the comedor program. I will take 20-30 kids, ages 7-11, and lead them for two hours in games, activities, and help with homework. The 50-60 kids at the Project in the morning along with around 50 more from the neighborhood, will then eat lunch and then go home or go to school (Nicaraguans go to school in the morning or in the afternoon). In the afternoon I will help lead the nivelación (roughly translated at getting back up to grade level) program and have a class of 4th graders who go to school in the morning. I will primarily teach them Math and Spanish according to what they need the most reinforcement in and what they are learning in school at the time. Thankfully, for at least the first week I will be co-teaching in the afternoon with the nivelación program coordinator. This is reassuring, as I feel immensely unprepared to teach Nicaraguan 4th graders. So that’s what I’ve been up to, and I plan to do another update a week or two after I start teaching!

Peace,
Michael (Miguel) Marchesini