Hey Everyone
Happy late Mother’s. I hope everyone had a good one. I have been super busy this past month and I am doing great.
Mom and Wayne came to visit for Easter, and it was so nice to see family again, and also for them to see the family I have come into here. Unfortunately, they chose the hottest week of the entire year to come to visit. It got up to 114 degrees while they were in my site, so we sat in the house and drank a lot of Cokes. For Easter we went to the morning mass and then went to my host family’s house for an Easter Egg hunt. They had never heard of such a thing and it really didn’t make sense to me either when I tried to explain that every year to remember the resurrection of Jesus we search for candy filled eggs, supposedly hidden by a giant rabbit. Nevertheless, the family got really into it, especially my host mom, Doña Marcos, who I had to repeatedly remind that it would be good if she hid the eggs so that the kids could find them. When the hunt actually began the my host sisters were so excited they would just run and grab the eggs and give them to their kids. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it was perfect.
Other than sweating a lot, Mom and Wayne also got to milk cows, make tortillas and drink freshly pressed sugar cane juice. We also spent two nights at the tiny beach town of Las Peñitas. It was a wonderful trip overall.
The week after Mom and Wayne left we had our first In Service Training, focusing on animal husbandry. We stayed at this little ranchero and worked everyday with animals. It was great, because most of the instruction was hands on and I feel like very applicable to our work in site. During the week I milked goats, tattooed bunnies, gutted a rabbit, saw a piglets being born and pig castrated. Some of it kind of gross, but overall very useful. The week after that was a Spanish workshop, which was pretty uneventful.
I finally made it back to site about a week and a half ago and my work here has just taken off. I don’t know if it’s that my community really missed me (doubtful) or if it’s the coming rains, but people are ready to get to work and so am I. This past week the committee of the silo fund that was started by the previous volunteer finally agreed to start funding silos again, and the guys who make them are ready to go as well. The community banks are still chugging along and there seems to be a lot of excitement for the raffles we are going to do for el día de las madres here on the 30th of May. I have been talking with my community leader about possible big projects and we have been coming up with a couple of possibilities. I also found out that the goats that ate every single thing in my yard belong to him and that he doesn’t milk them so we have a date with the goats this weekend to see what we can figure out.
Probably my favorite thing I am doing right now is working with one of the high school students and a group from his English class. Their semester exam is to perform a song in English in front of the class. I let him borrow a bunch of Cds to find something suitable, and he came back and said he picked Backstreet Boys “I Want it That Way,” which for the record was not in my collection. This guy is a really big guy for a Nicaraguan and pretty tough looking, already has a kid and wears cowboy boots and everything, so I was kind of shocked at his choice. Anyways, today I spent about three hours trying to teach this group of guys how to sing this song in English. It was fantastic, and this weekend I am working with another group who chose “Eternal Flame” by the Bengals. Should be a hoot.
Alright I hope every is doing great, and congratulations to everyone who just graduated. I miss yall a lot, but am doing great here, loving it.

austin