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| Welcome-sign in the Spanish school |
"Apertura de la puerta"- opening the door, probably summarizes best this third day in Granada. Today, I had to open many doors, figuratively as well as literally. Every moment in this new environment calls for new opportunities to open doors to a completely unfamiliar and astonishing culture. Additionally, today also involved trying to open the door to my room that for some mysterious reason locked itself. This experience definitely showed just how resourceful Nicaraguans are and how willing they are to help each other out. Although I felt extremely bad about the incident, Martha assured me that it wasn't a problem and after failing to open the lock with a knife, asked a neighbor for help who kindly managed to open the door for us.
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| Apertura de la puerta... |
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| Sarah, Sophia, Janvi, Sam and Peter from our Duke-Engage Team! |
Furthermore, today gave us more occasions to widen the opening to the Nicaraguan culture. Even-though some customs are quite different from our western habits, such as putting toilet paper in a basket next to the toilet instead of flushing it, eating on large banana-leaves or eating rice and beans at practically every meal... , others are more universal such as watching TV. I tried to understand with my very limited Spanish the couple Mexican soap-operas that my family watches, one of which,"Por ella soy Eva", is about a man who everyone thinks has been murdered, who then disguises himself as a women to protect his love "Helena". Although the guy looks like a drag queen, they all think he's a woman- not a very realistic scenario but, oh well- and has to investigate who has commanded his execution etc... It's, well, a soap-opera in all it's splendor and bad musical cues. Yet it has the merit to train my ear to recognize words in Spanish. While watching the show, loud music suddenly blasted in the street and I got to witness a typical Nicaraguan procession in honor of a saint who's name I didn't completely get. According to Martha, these types of processions happen a lot and are occasions for families (mainly children) and neighbors to come together and celebrate while walking through the streets of Granada.
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| Our Spanish School, "Nicaragua Mia" |
Moreover, today gave us more opportunities to open wider the door to the Spanish language. Our first four-hour-long Spanish session meant more vocabulary to learn, more verbs to conjugate and finally more ways to make fools of ourselves while playing a game in which the goal was to guess what word had been stuck on our forehead by making the others answer our questions by "Si" or "No"- not so easy when you don't know how to formulate these questions nor have enough vocabulary to actually guess the word... To my surprise however, it worked out fairly well.
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| Our "classrooms" |
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| Participant observer |
Finally, we got a chance to open the door to a clearer definition of our mission in Nicaragua and the work we will be doing throughout the next seven weeks. "Create first-time access to life-changing technologies, products and services for isolated villagers by empowering first-time entrepreneurs as 'community advisers'" and "change obstacles into opportunities". The term "access" in this case not only refers to physical access to our products, but also economical access and access in terms of knowledge. After learning some key statistics and learning more about the tormented History of Nicaragua and once each VNGO had accessed it's strengths and weaknesses (which will undoubtedly come in handy when we're in the field), most of us headed to the "Euro Cafe". We sat down on the couches and chairs disposed around the atrium that is hidden in the backyard of the cafe and used free wifi while chatting and sipping iced Nicaraguan coffee. A nice way to end the day, cradled by the falling night in this cute little oasis.
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| Cafe Euro |
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| The atrium |
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| Iced latte at el Euro cafe |
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| Our hang-out space |
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| Our Oasis |
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