Patience

My North American patience definitely got the best of me yesterday.  I was waiting to leave Rancho Ebenezer after lunch and waited for over an hour for a moto-taxi to come by.  One never did, and finally Don Francisco, the director, said he was going into town so I could go with him.  I was very thankful for his offer, but already frustrated that I was an hour and a half behind my schedule.  Going with Don Francisco, I ended up backtracking a little, putting me back a little more.  By the time I finally got to Managua, I should have been in Leon already, but I wasn’t so I just had to remind myself to be flexible and patient with others and myself.

Other than that, I had a very good but unexciting week.  As promised, I won’t write too much this week, but I’ll give a short summary.  Monday we had 2 really interesting classes in Managua.   For our history class in the morning, we had 3 different speakers on different topics.  The one, Daniel, had talked to us the week before and has a very interesting life with heavy involvement in many recent Nicaraguan history events, without even trying.  He was really interesting to listen to and made us feel like we were talking with a celebrity with all the things he had done.  The second part of class we had a North American Jesuit priest and a Nicaraguan Baptist pastor (who happens to be my friend Wendy’s dad!) tell us about the differences and similarities in their churches and how the people have reacted to recent historic events.  For our Worldview class in the afternoon, we went to a school/church and talked with the pastor about how his church has helped in their community over the last 10 years.  There were lots of kids there doing an afterschool Compassion program, and they were super cute.  They all wanted to touch us and say hi to us, so they followed us around everywhere. 

This week at Rancho Ebenezer, I got to help a little bit in a different area with lots of goats.  I watched and even tried my hand at trimming hooves, which is a lot harder than it looks.  I also got to try milking a goat again.  I even got to go one afternoon and help cut sugar cane with a machete.  For the rest of my time there, I was working with Carlos again doing many different things in the “Mitpa” area.  That area is supposed to be a model for the farmers that come in, and what they teach the farmers to imitate.  I helped deworm the goats again and helped get some gardens in tires set up.  I am really learning lots there and hope that it will help me decide more of what I want to do when I graduate.

OK, I hope I didn’t ramble too much this time, and here are some promised pictures.

There are many street "parades" during the day here in Leon.  Most of them are linked to Catholic or indigenous traditions.  These two pictures show "The bulls" tradition.  Many people flood the streets and there are always drums accompanying the parade.  For this one, several people have shell-like things on their backs and get beat with sticks.  It's hard to explain, so I have a little video to show what it's like.

Unfortunately, my internet is slow and takes a long time to load videos...so hopefully I can get the video on some other time.