A Word on Words

I've never considered language learning one of my strong points. After I fulfilled my language requirement in college, I was so sick of Spanish that although I felt I should have studied abroad somewhere where I could use it, the thought of speaking more Spanish was absolutely absurd to me. Now that I'm forcing myself back into it, I'm starting to see some of the more interesting points of learning another language.

There are certain words that don't exist in Spanish that we desperately want to be able to translate for our Spanish speaking friends here in Nicaragua. But the theory goes that if there isn't a word for something in a language, that the concept doesn't really exist there. Some of the words we've been unable to translate directly include embarrassed, creepy, nerd/dork, and awkward. If you slip up and tell someone “Estoy embarazada!!” then you've actually just told them that you're pregnant, which obviously just increases your embarrassment. And there's no way to tell someone that awkward is the new cool. I know my friend Allison has tried to explain the concept of creepy to a few Nicaraguans because this is how we feel about the men who spew out pick up lines despite probably not knowing what they're saying (por ejemplo: “I will love you for ember!” is my favorite of late).

As part of our youth group project we are expected to do particular activities that are supposed to help us get better acquainted with our sites and the needs of our future neighbors. This is all well and good in theory, until you're standing in front of a group of 15 to 20 year olds asking them to write a schedule of their daily activities or giving a “charla” (a chat) about the environment. This is when we all feel like huge dorks. However, we haven't yet found a good word of equal meaning in Spanish. Hence, a joke that I made up that made everyone here laugh (will it make you laugh too? I'm not sure):

Q: What do you call a dork in Nicaragua?
A: A Peace Corps Trainee aka an Aspirante

In completely unrelated news, I found the dancers of El Rosario!! I got semi-tricked into teaching a ballet class last Wednesday- my host sister knows this dance group in town and must have mentioned my ballet background so the guy who leads it asked if I would teach them a few steps. Well, they really wanted a whole class which I wasn't prepared for but I did teach them some steps and am coming back prepared with a real class tomorrow night. Their style of dance is called “ritmo” which I consider to be kinda like Latin-influenced jazz. They really are phenomenal dancers in their style and hopefully some ballet classes will just supplement that. They wanted me to teach everyday, but that's clearly impossible with my schedule so I agreed to once a week. Also, they know the choreography to Thriller, which I'm dying to learn! And hopefully I might get some salsa instruction out of this deal.

Our training projects are moving along. We had another youth group meeting last night and will hopefully be going out to clear out brush and weeds in an area that will be a park someday soon (hopefully) later in the week. I also had my first chance at co-teaching and I feel like it went pretty well. We've been struggling to schedule time to plan and teach with the one guy we can work with and it's not a very ideal situation. The class I worked with tonight is only about 20 people and they're adults who work during the day and take class at night (it strikes me as being similar to something like a GED class in the states) whereas most classes volunteers work with are upwards of 30 to 40 students anywhere from age 12 to 20+. But really, who knows what kind of a situation I'll find myself teaching in come August. Next week I'll get my first taste of a real volunteer's life when we all go out on volunteer visits. I'll be spending Sunday through Wednesday with a yet to be determined volunteer somewhere in Nicaragua, going to class and just seeing what day to day life is like. I'm excited and also nervous! I won't find out where I'm going to visit until Friday. And as far as I know, this has no bearing on where I'll be placed for my site- we won't find that out for another couple weeks.

It's warmed back up now that the big storm is gone, and there's another strike happening but this time it's only the truckers who are on strike so while it hopefully won't affect our ability to travel, food and commodity prices will start to go up again depending on how long it lasts. I hear cereal is expensive in the U.S. now. Otherwise, I'm trying to learn to walk slower. One of the host sisters was poking fun at us for how fast we gringos walk. Such is life in Nicaragua.