Billiards Tournament!

Yesterday, I organized a billiards tournament in my site. Not just any old billiards tournament, but one with an HIV/AIDS theme. There were four rounds of the tournament, and in between each round, my friends and I gave lectures on HIV/AIDS, methods of transmission, methods of prevention and correct way to use a condom. The health center staff was also there to give the HIV test to all the participants and audience. Here are some pictures from my camera.

Here's Lenka warming up with the boys.

Here's me waiting restlessly for people to arrive.

 And we start.

To demonstrate how HIV attacks the body, we did a human demonstration. The guy standing in the middle of the circle is the "human body." The guys linking their arms in a circle are the immune system protecting the body. The guy with his arms raised is the flu trying to attack the body. Then someone pretends to be HIV and comes in to attack the immune system. We show that without the immune system, simple illnesses easily reach the body.

Lenka explains how HIV is transmitted, and how it is not transmitted. Thanks for coming to help me out pal. 

 Here's Robyn, showing everyone what a condom is.

 

And she puts it on the dildo. This was the standard condom demonstration. Next, Robyn proceeded to debunk several myths about condoms...

 If a man ever claims that his penis is too big to fit in a condom, tell him that if an arm can fit, so can his dick.

And if putting on a condom the standard way just isn't sexy enough for you, Robyn can give you lessons on how to do it better. 

She put that on with her mouth.

There's our champeon. He won a free coupon to eat at a fancy restaurant with a date. At the end of the event, all the participants took a quiz on HIV/AIDS and entered their names in a raffle. The guy who scored a perfect 10 on the quiz also got a coupon, and that same guy won the raffle so he got two coupons in one day.

So this event turned out so well. Robyn and Lenka are awesome for coming down to my site to help me organize the event. The health center staff was also really supportive and almost everyone there at the event did an HIV test. The people in my site are also really chill and polite. The men didn't get drunk and act inappropriately, and they were all really motivated and into the activity. The restaurants in town are also really generous for donating so many coupons and a delicious CAKE, which we cut up and ate.All in all, this was one of the best billiards tournaments ever.

My site: La Concordia, Jinotega, Nicaragua

Hi all,
I finally got a working camera, so I will finally post some pictures up of my site. My site is in the mountainous region of Nicaragua, in a department called Jinotega. The town is called La Concordia, which means harmony. The climate in this region is cooler than most parts of Nicaragua. During the coldest months (November - February) the temperature range is 50-70 *F, and during the warmest months (April - May) the temperature ranges is 60s - 80s *F. La Concordia is surrounded by mountains, which all turn green after the rainy season. It's a beautiful part of the country. I have visited tourist resorts and miradors in Nicaragua that people pay $100 to stay in each night and really did not consider them any more beautiful than my site. Here's some pictures of La Concordia to prove it.

And here's my room

Here's the washboard that we use to wash clothes

Nicaraguans love music. Many homes in Nicaragua have giant speakers that people use to blast music on the weekends.

We recently had our one-year-in country celebration. Each of us wrote a line for a poem that we composed to describe our experience

So that's all for now. I'll post up more pictures later.

Life in Training

Giving a charla at the Casa Materna

All the trainees who went to Esteli and the pregnant ladies

 Baby!!!

 My second bday party. =)

 We celebrated for the four of us who have birthdays in February.

Puppy! She was so small when she was a month old. I only needed one hand to hold her.

...two weeks later

She's still really tiny

awwww

Funny incidents in Nicaragua

• I learned how to wash clothes the first week I got here. After we rinsed one of my underwear, my host mom told me to hang it up, but I noticed that there was still soap. I knew that soap in Spanish is "jabon", but I wasn´t thinking and just said, "todavia hay sopa!" which means "there´s still soup!" So my host family made fun of me the rest of the day about having soup in my underwear.
• In class one day, Sarah asked our facilitator what "underwear" is in Spanish. The facilitator thought she was asking what the word for "diaper" is, which she told us is "pañales." After that, we all though pañales means diapers. So as I was telling the story about the soup in my underwear, I said, "Estaba lavando mis pañales" ("I was washing my diapers"). The facilitator cracked up and asked, "You wear diapers?" I still though "pañales" meant "diapers", so I replied, "Of course I wear diapers."

Other interesting stuff about Nicaragua:

• Time is only a rough estimate in Nicaragua. I f someone tells you it takes 10 minutes to walk somewhere, give yourself 30 minutes. This becomes a problem for me when I need to pee and someone tells me it only takes 20 minutes to get to the next bathroom (which will usually be cleaner). I figure I can wait 20 minutes, and I´m about to die by the time we reach the bathroom 1 hour later.
• There are so many bananas here. Well they´re not all bananas, but they´re all part of the banana family. There are the regular bananas, mini-bananas called manzanos, and plantains. We eat these raw, we eat them cooked, we eat them boiled, we eat them fried. We eat them for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack. I love bananas and potassium is good, but bananas are slowly creeping into my list of least favorite foods.
• Everything here is fried. Last night for dinner at the hotel we had fried chicken, fried rice, fried plantains, and refried beans. 
• Catcalling sometimes comes from the least expected directions. A large proportion of them come from 12 or 14-year-old boys, and once, and 11-year-old girl also blew us a kiss and said "mi amor" (my love). As we were discussing this at one of the training sessions, one girl said, "With all this fried rice and beans that I eat, I´m putting on more weight everyday, but the Nicaraguan men still think I´m sexy."
• And more on machismo: Some parents are proud when their son gets a girl pregnant when he´s 15. It proves he´s a man. And he´s even more of a man if he gets 5 girls pregnant.
• One day, Lindsey saw someone walking their chickens. One of them was on a leash, which makes sense if we think that he´s afraid his chicken will run away. But this is a country where dogs usually don´t have leashes, and the other chicken that was walking with them wasn´t on a leash. So I don´t know what that chicken did to deserve such punishment.
• In Nicaragua, when you sneeze once, people say "salud" (health). The second time, they say "dinero" (money). The third time, it´s "amor" (love). The fourth time varies. Some people say "tiempo para disfrutar" (time to enjoy), "sexo" (sex), "gripe" (cold), "enfermedad" (illness), and there are probably more. I don´t sneeze a lot, so I´ve only gotten "salud". Lindsey sneezes a lot, so everyday, she gets "salud", "dinero", and "amor".

Training

So, here in our training town, we mostly give talks (charlas) to patients at the health center, or to women's groups, on health topics such as diarrea, hygene, STD, etc. Here are some pictures of us giving charlas to our women's group. They are devouted evangelicals, so at our first meeting, there was a loud, intense group prayer for us. 

Here's us talking, asking them what topics they might want to talk about at future meetings.

Here's the four of us at our second charla. We love to wake up early on Sunday mornings, the only day we have off, to hold a meeting. We're dedicated PCTs.

We gave a charla on hygene, basically telling them they must wash their hands with soap and clean their kitchens.

We also made crepes for them so they could sample a popular American food. Yes we chose crepes to represent America.

Here are some of their kids. The one in his diapers is the most adorable thing.

They like to play with bicycle tires.

I came home one Saturday to find that my family killed our pig!!

And they fried the skin to make chicharron. Chicharron just tastes like chips, but they didn't fry this pig all the way so there was still some mushy stuff in the middle. It was kind of nasty.

Funny incidents in Nicaragua

So some of my embarrassing moments in Nicaragua:

A few Saturdays back, I was learning to wash clothes with my host mom, and we just finished rinsing my underwear. She told me she was done rinsing them, so I could hang them up, but there was still a little bit of soap left in them. Now, I knew that the word for soap in Spanish is "jabon", but I wasn´t thinking and I just said, "pero todavia hay sopa!" which literally means "there's still soup in my underwear!" Everyone laughed about that for a few days.

Then another day, one of my friends, Sarah, asked our facilitator what the word for underwear is in Spanish. She misunderstood and thought Sarah was asking for the word for diapers, which is "pañales". So for a while, we thought that pañales meant underwear. Then I told my story about the sopa in my underwear, and I said, "So I was washing my pañales..." The facilitator bursts out laughing and asks me, "Llevas pañales?" ("you wear diapers?"). And I was like, "Yes, of course." Then for the rest of the day everyone made fun of me for having soup in my diapers.

Well my Spanish is slowly improving. What we're doing now basically is giving talks (charlas) to patients at the health center and meeting every week with a women's group. We've been busy.

That's us at our first meeting with the women's group

The four of us at the second meeting. It was lovely how we had to meet with them on Sunday, the only day we have off.

We gave a charla about hygene...

...and we made them crepes so they could sample American food. Yea we chose crepes to represent America. They were supposed to make us a Nicaraguan dish, but a lot of promises made in this country are just suggestions.

Some of their boys. My favorite is that one who's in his diapers.

O yea, and I was out one Saturday, and I come back to find that they killed our pig!!