low-town...

that´s what we call ourselves...because we can´t speak spanish...

i can´t get the videos to upload (the connection is too slow), but here´s a picture of the bull penis fighting - interesting, eh? these fights break out absolutely anywhere within a crowd of people, and many innocent bystanders get whipped with a long piece of leather. i´m really glad i never got in the way.


ouch.

so, ocotal, nueva segovia. i visited my new home a couple of weeks ago, and i really do love it. my counterparts are relatively apathetic and don´t really care about my business curriculum, so that will definitely be a challenge, but check out the view from my town. as you can see, i´m situated in a sort of valley. we´re pretty much protected from the rain (unless there´s a hurricane), and it´s generally fairly hot...good thing there are three eskimo stores.

while visiting my new home, i stopped by all 3 of my schools - two of which are in ocotal and the third is in totogalpa (south of ocotal in the department of madriz). the directora in my school in totogalpa is AMAZING. she´s super excited to have a volunteer working in her institute and with her staff, but she was even more excited to introduce me to the single teachers at the school...probably the most embarrassing moment so far in nicaragua.

i´m also going to be working with a women´s solar panel group, as i mentioned before. i visited their "offices" too, and it seems like a really successful operation so far - i´m ready to get involved. my only fear is that i´m going to dedicate way too much time to this group a.k.a. not having time to sleep. the schools are my first priority, so i need to keep that in mind when working with them, as hard as that may be.

there´s a few really cool restaurants in ocotal as well, and an amazing central park. mom - you´d totally dig all of the different species of plants, trees, viney things, etc.

a little piece of history - ocotal was the first place to get bombed in the western hemisphere. and guess by who..? yeah, the US. unfortunately, given the nature of this blog, i need to stay away from political commentary...so i´m just going to post another picture of ocotal:

pretty, eh?

love you all! miss you!