We are spending this week in San Ramon, Matalgalpa for Practicum Week, which means spending time in a casa materna, meeting and talking with some brigadistas, as well as current volunteers in our sector.
On Monday, we left our training towns early in the morning to get a bus to Managua. However, there was a microbus strike due to high gas prices and therefore it took us way longer to get there because there were so few buses running. Finally, we arrived in Managua and received our first visit to the Peace Corps office! It’s really nice and is air conditioned. There is also a fabulous volunteer book exchange and library. I’ve already checked out 2 books. One of them is a Salmon Rushdie book about Nicaragua in the 80s. After receiving a few technical charlas from MINSA staff at the office, we left for San Ramon.
We are staying at a darling little hotel that has beautiful misty mountain views and free wireless. This town is the site of a health volunteer named Cassie. On our first day, she took us to meet one of her most active brigadistas who lives way out in a rural community called Trentino. Eduardo drove us there in the 4-wheel drive official Peace Corps truck. The road was insanely terrible and we had to cross two creeks.
We met with Doña Maria on her farm for a couple hours. She discussed her duties as a brigadista, which included providing health info to her community, acting as a liaison and contact person for her community for health related issues, and performing an annual census of her community for the government just to name a few. She’s also a midwife and her mother was a midwife too. She has given birth to 14 children! However, now advocates family planning to all adolescents in her community.
After our talk, she gave us a tour of her farm! There were a ton of chickens and lots of baby chicks. There were also a couple of noisy roosters that kept interrupting our health chat. There was a crazy looking hybrid duck with darling little yellow ducklings. Then she took us to her fruit tree field, which she informed us would be full of fruit during the month of august. There were orange, papaya, mango, sweet lemon, lemon, banana, and avocado trees. Doesn’t that sound heavenly? There happened to be a few lemons on one tree, so she took it upon herself to beat down a few and hand them out to us. Never have a smelled a lemon so rich in lemon flavor. Later that evening we squeezed them over our dinner.
Instead of hitching a ride back to San Ramon with Eduardo, we decided to hike back which took about an hour. We took a couple of shortcuts, one was through a pasture that had grass ten feet tall on either side of the trail, and another was up a river bed, where we intersected a man traveling on horseback. Living out in a rural community like Trentino, a horse would be great transportation.
The hike was beautiful with lots of expansive vistas of mountains and pastures and super green trees and bright orange flowers. I also encountered lots of trees with Spanish moss and was reminded of home! The tree in the picture above is covered in Spanish moss. So beautiful!
After lunch that afternoon, my group presented a charla on hygiene to the local casa materna which currently has only one pregnant woman staying there. However, last week there were seven pregnant women staying there, but six gave birth in one week. Ha! We are scheduled to give more charlas there tomorrow, but instead we are traveling to another community called La Dalia instead.
