I got back this afternoon from 12 days of no internet and it’s great to be back and connected once again! Ah I love the internet. The strange thing though is that I didn’t really miss it much when I was away from it. Except for night 10 when I dreamt I checked my email and had no messages, there was no obvious sign of internet withdrawal.
The reason for my absence was another feeble attempt at studying Spanish. This time I jumped right in and landed in a tiny rural community called El Lagartillo about four hours north of Managua at a language school called Hijos Del Maiz. The whole community seems to be in on the Spanish teaching thing and it acts as a full immersion into both the language and life in rural Nicaragua. This meant homemade tortillas, rice and beans for every meal and it also meant composting toilets, getting up with the roosters, and no electricity. It was very cool.
The problem for me was that my Spanish is so crap that communicating was really difficult for me and I didn’t really feel like I connected with the people there. That sucks because they are all very interesting. There are no TVs which means the kids all seem to play instruments, draw and find other creative ways to entertain themselves which seems very foreign in itself these days. The adults are very focused on education and the arts as well which my teacher says is unusual for rural Nicaragua.
The community is hugely pro Sandinista and it was targeted during the Contra War. In 1984 the Contras came into the village and murdered 6 people, women and children among them. 1984! That’s so recent and so mind-boggling to me. I’ve spent a lot of time in communities ripped apart by natural disaster but never in one affected by war and it was eye opening. As a result, the community in El Lagartillio is really tight, very political and just a very interesting place to be. I want to go back when my Spanish is better so I can have conversations that go beyond ‘I like cats, do you like cats?’
Spending nearly a couple of weeks without internet left me with a lot of time to think and I’ve got a lot of new ideas in the pipeline that I will post about soon. I seem to get a lot of ideas when I’m away from the net and alone with my notebook which is a good thing to know.
So hello again, thanks for commenting and I am back!
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