Los Quinchos

Today, Sunday, was quite a busy day. We woke up bright and early at around 7 and sunscreened and bug sprayed ourselves to death, packed water bottles and the food to take to the orphanage in a cooler, and headed downstairs where we met B and M. After waiting for the truck to arrive, we loaded up our stuff and got settled in the truck. Because there were more people than there were seats, Katie, Amara and I sat in the bed of the truck. This freaked me out because I have porcelain skin and freckles and Irish blood in me so I'm pretty sure I'm at least 5000x more prone to skin cancer than normal humans, so I put extra sunscreen on and tried to position myself in such a way that the sun wasn't directly on my face the whole time. After I managed to accept that we weren't gonna fly out of the back of the truck to an untimely demise and that I had sunscreened as much as possible, it was actually quite liberating and felt pretty carefree to be in the bed of the truck observing the scenery. We drove from San Juan del Sur to a Mormon church in Rivas (a town about half an hour outside of SJDS). B and M bring a lot of clothes, hymn books and other things to the church when they come to Nicaragua every year in November, so when they're here in the summer they check to see what the church needs so they can bring it down later in the year. This was an interesting experience, because Amara and I have never really been to a full Sunday service at any type of Christian church, so we didn't really have any idea what was going on, and Amara and Katie couldn't really understand anything because it was all in Spanish. I caught mostly all of it, but it still didn't really mean much to me because I'm not Mormon. During most of the service, I just felt a little odd, because all the other non-Nicaraguans there (about 4 of them) were doing their mission, and all of the preaching and testimonies and whatnot were extremely far from my beliefs as a Unitarian Universalist. However, as my Unitarian Universalist community has taught me, I try to avoid judging people as much as I can, so I left trying to see it from a positive point of view. It's good that the people of that church have such strong faith and their community is very tight-knit, which is also good. That being said, Mormonism is not for me, neither are any of the "traditional" religions, and I realized today just how much I miss my fellow Unitarian Universalists and the people of my church. If any of you are reading this, I hope your lives are all going swimmingly. 

After the whole church experience, we hopped back in the bed of the truck for a solid hour and a half or so and drove to Los Quinchos, which is an orphanage way out in the middle of nowhere. Upon arriving, we were swarmed by a hoard of boys and girls of many ages asking what our names were and where we were from. We ate lunch with the kids (the lunch we made on Saturday night) and chatted with them before getting to work. After lunch, Amara and I taught the kids how to paper quill. This was quite an odd experience. This orphanage was significantly nicer than the ones we went to in India. They had lots of room, several buildings, a few dogs, a decently large kitchen, a TV, a stereo, a living space, mattresses of their own, blankets, etc. And it was interesting to me that these kids have juuust enough that they want tons more. In India, they really have nothing, so anything they received was perceived as amazing and they were extremely thankful. But here, they have just enough stuff that the way they act when you give them something is like it's just not quite enough. Anyways, I thought that was kinda weird, but a few of them caught on to paper quilling pretty quickly and were able to make some flowers and such. One of the girls intentionally broke one of the little tools that you use to quill the paper, and that made me rather angry, because she knew what she was doing, and we only had about 15 of those tools to begin with so now we're down one more. They aren't that expensive, but anyone should know better than to purposefully break someone else's stuff. Other than that, it was a pretty good experience, and the kids seemed to enjoy it for the most part. After about an hour and a half of quilling, we stopped and packed up our stuff before checking out one of the buildings and heading out. 

Before going back to San Juan del Sur, we went to Granada to shop around a bit and because B and M decided to spend a couple days there. Katie bought a couple things in the market at the Central Park in Granada, but Amara and I just looked around. We walked a few blocks around the main area of the city, and I found it pretty interesting that that area of Granada really has not changed at all since when we were last there 3 years ago (we spent about 5 days there the first time we were in Nicaragua). I did notice that at least during the day there seemed to be fewer homeless kids, which I'm assuming is a good thing unless the reason why there weren't as many was because of violence or death or something. In Granada, they have these horse carriage things that they do tours in, and last time we were there the horses were super scrawny and looked really unhealthy. This time, though, they looked like they were actually being fed, and aside from the shmoregusboard of flies circling their twitching ears, they looked pretty healthy. Also, in case you were wondering, I learned the word "shmoregusboard" from Katie. Apparently it's a synonym of plethora, and I'm pretty sure she made it up, but I like how it sounds. 

After B and M checked into their hotel, we loaded ourselves back into the truck (inside it this time) and started the journey back to San Juan del Sur. It was about an hour an a half drive, and the roads are not quite so nicely paved as they are in the States, so it was a rather bumpy ride. They aren't as bad as the roads in India, but they're not as nice and orderly as the ones in America. Once we got back to our hotel, we put in a load of laundry, ate some dinner, and now we're relaxing a bit before we sleep. 

Thanks for reading, more later.

Aneesa