PCV - BlogPost 2

"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves"

I found this quote on the internet. It is not verbatim for the Leadership quote that is in our Peace Corps training manuals, but the last 5 words does sum up the gist of what we learned in our Peace Corps 3 day orientation in Managua. The philosophy for Peace Corps is to help people help themselves so that those in developing countries can become self-sufficient and our work is sustainble.

Training in St. Teresa is going very well. On Sunday, all 21 trainees went to a fellow trainees host family´s house who hosted a super bowl viewing party. It was very exciting to experience a "taste" of U.S. culutre again, at least for an evening.

Today, at 4 pm my three fellow trainees and I conducted our 2nd Youth Group meeting. About 8 girls and 1 boy was in attendance. All are in the age range from 11 to 20. This training practice is to prepare us for what we will need to do once at our site for 2 years. The Peace Corps emphasizes sustainble education and in our sector (health promotion) by focusing attention on the youth (ideally 15 to 20 years old) so that our work as volunteeers will be maintained and continue for future generations. Today in the youth group meeting we picked a project that we will work on for the next 9 or so weeks. The youth in St. Teresa and we trainees will create and "publish" a community newspaper that will have educational subjects such as on helath promotion in the community and actiivites in the community that support healthy living.

Through a language assignment I also learned how to ask my host family in Spanish about their family and their family tree or geneology, as well as being able to share my family geneology with them. I found out that many Nicaraguan family are extremely large, for example my mother is one of 4 siblings and my father one of 5 sibilings. Also, there are many, many cousins and nieces and nephews since most everyone in Nicaragua gets married and has chilidren before age 20, or so it seems. It also appears that many of the extended relatives live in the same town or very near their close relatives. For example, 3 of the 4 siblings of my mother have many kids and grandkids of their own and all live in St. Teresa.

That´s all for now. I found out that my 25 yr. old brother has a computer and he will let me download my pictures from my digital camera on to his computer so I can subsequently transfer them onto a USB memory stick. I can then plug the USB memory stick into a computer in the cyber cafe and hopefully have pics for you all! I will need to figure out how to upload pics on to this blog site though.

Nicolas