Si Dios Quiere

One of the dichos (sayings) that we've picked up here in Nicaragua is the ever popular “Si Dios quiere” which translates to “if God wants it.” For example:

Trainee: Bye, Host Family, I'm going to visit my site now. See you on Sunday!
Host Family Member: Si Dios quiere!

It can be a little disconcerting to be told that it depends on if God wants you to come back whether or not you actually will. This saying may be appearing on the t-shirts that may or may not be made for our group. Si Dios quiere.

I am extremely happy to report that it appears God wanted our youth group project to succeed, because it did! You may remember back a couple months when I talked about this youth group thing we were doing. Our group has had its ups and downs, but it largely fell apart right around our site visits when we were out of town and returned about as unmotivated as can be. However, this week we actually finished our project!

We had one last bit to accomplish: planting the trees. It wasn't clear how long this would take, but we scheduled a workday for last Tuesday morning only to find out that they were having a big celebrations to inaugurate the newly blocked road in town (the streets in the pueblos aren't paved like the highways, they're either dirt or covered with concrete blocks and it's a big deal when a street is finished) so we wouldn't be accomplishing anything. So we switched to Thursday. Unfortunately the woman we had been working with in the mayor's office, who really should get most of the credit for our project working out, was out sick so all efforts at communication failed: no trees, no workers, no nothing. We scheduled our last attempt for this past Monday and were able to plant 40 small trees with the help of a couple youth, some workers from the community garden, and our language facilitator who got dragged along in the process.

Here we are with our plants:


and planting:

and the finished product:


The cool thing about this project is that the mayor's office intends to continue working on it throughout the year. The trees we planted ring a basketball court and the plan is to put in some benches as well to make it a gathering place for the community. I hope to come back in a couple months and see all of our trees alive and healthy and hopefully with some shiny (not really, they'll be concrete) new benches around as well.

Si Dios quiere.