Nicaragua: What a Strange Life We Live

• I’m now totally used to sleeping in the same room as multiple lizards. I only slightly cringe when they make that awful smacking noise.
• I’m quite tired of lizards, spiders, ants, bats, and scorpions. I have a feeling it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better though. The worst was two bats falling on my teammate Bethany in the middle of the night.
• I would be perfectly happy if I never had to eat rice and beans again.
• There was no such thing as a balanced meal. We usually had a big fat plate of starches, and a bit of mystery meat if we were lucky.
• I’ll never complain about public transportation in the U.S. again. In Nicaragua it’s either crowded school buses, or even more crowded microbuses. The microbuses are 15 passenger vans and it’s typical to squeeze 25 or 30 people into them. There’s zero sense of personal space.
• Very few people drive cars in Nicaragua. It’s much more normal to see oxen or horse pulled wooden carts.
• There are dogs everywhere in Latin America. One Sunday we had to stop church in the middle of the service to get all the dogs out that had wandered in. Once while walking through the barrios we witnessed a dog eating part of another dog.
• I was not so fond of my Spanish name, ‘Betania.’ It doesn’t help that there are two of us on my team, so all we ever heard was “Betania, Betania, Betania” from little voices outside our window until we let them in.
• One Saturday afternoon we spent a few hours at the beach. Not only were there stray pigs walking around the beach, but we rode horses for less than $1.

• One night a strange man showed up outside our door asking if we wanted to buy a log from him. Naturally Katie bought it, and then proceeded to pray for salvation for him before our host Erika came and told us he was a thief and kicked him off the property.
• The police appear to do very little here. Our only real encounter with them so far is that our tuk tuk driver had to pay one off with a 2L of Pepsi since we had 4 people in the back.
• Most of the “stores” here are really just people’s homes. Totally normal to set up a stand of chips and sodas and leave your door open all day, or to make your living by setting up a table of fruit out front of your house, lemonade stand style.
• We regularly walked for an hour to get Internet and ice cream.
• Laundry is washed by hand in the sink, then hung over the barbed wire to dry. I highly dislike this entire process, so this month I resorted to just paying our cook to do mine for me. Unfortunately this ended with my favorite pair of shorts going missing.
• The things we count as blessings would have seemed real strange to me a few months ago. This month we had plastic chairs to sit on. Huge upgrade from having to sit on the hard floor all last month. We also had a mattress, nevermind that it was just stuffed with old rags.
• Taking a shower was an accomplishment. When you’re thankful that the water is actually on at the moment, it helps you forget that it’s freezing cold water.
• Napkins and ice are luxuries reserved for nice restaurants.

Here's a peek at some of the randomness of our month in Nica…(apologies that the sound is messed up)