Our thrivin’ Nicaraguan social lives

In our fast three weeks here in Matagalpa, Travis and I have had the pleasure of meeting some pretty special Nicaraguan people who have quickly become our friends. We’ve actually had quite the busy social lives since arriving to this town. Several times already we have enjoyed invites to our friends’ homes, and in return we’ve cooked for and entertained guests as well. What a joy it is to have a home and place to host amongst this year of travel!

Our first houseguest was Marlene, the woman whose home we stayed in during our first week in Matagalpa while we took Spanish classes. Because Marlene was such a fantastic Nicaraguan chef, we invited her to our home and asked her if she’d mind giving us a cooking lesson. She was tickled by the invitation and couldn’t wait to show us how to prepare several traditional dishes. She wrote out the ingredients for us to purchase at the market beforehand, and Travis and I had an interesting time deciphering this Spanish list and figuring out exactly how much and what type of items were needed (we had an especially hard time buying the chicken and figuring out what parts she wanted… plus, the Nica’s measure everything in libras and grams- no pounds and ounces here). Anyway, we did our best and the few things we missed Travis was able to find in our next door Pulperia (tiny convenience store) while Marlene was cooking. We had such a lovely time with her. We shared the cooking duties with plenty of room in our fun kitchen and had a good 3 hours of Spanish practice as we shared in conversation before and during the meal.

It’s a little tricky sometimes learning these recipes in Spanish since everything down to the spices and veggies have different words. For example: onion= cebolla, mint= yerba buena, celery= apio. We’re getting pretty good at recognizing and using all these vocabulary words now… our levels are definitely moving up. As Travis said in his last blog, it is sometimes amazing to us that we can actually spend 3 hours in decent conversation with people totally in Spanish. Marlene is like a little “mom” to us, so sweet and caring… especially with Travis as she was so impressed with his cooking ability and willingness to learn. A week after our Nica cooking lesson, we had Marelene over again and prepared her a typical American, "Trav and Trish meal," for her. We’re not sure she liked it being that it was so far removed from her typical diet, but she made a good attempt at trying!

Last week Saturday we had a very interesting and entertaining evening having dinner at our neighbor Angela’s house. Angela is the former owner of our house, and she’s now our landlord. We couldn’t have asked for someone nicer to rent from; she always greets us with enthusiasm and welcomes any random questions we might have. She runs a botanical naturalistic clinic where she sells herbs, vitamins, and other healthy and somewhat odd things. She’s also an aesthetic medicine consultant and licensed acupuncturist. Every other day she bakes homemade integral bread with her kids’ help, and all the locals know when to come and buy it when it’s warm. Angela has a huge clientele as she’s had this business for 20 years. It used to be run out of our home but she moved it next door to a smaller home because she wanted less space to take care of. Angela is especially popular among the poorer people she helps who live in the mountainside campos (coffee farms) and travel down regularly to see her. She sells her medicines for extremely reasonable prices and has long-lasting friendships with many of her customers. (I took a hefty fall this week and scraped myself up pretty badly… I went to her for some help and she had me hooked up with some interesting healing herbs in no time- just for $1.30!)

So, back to our dinner at her house- we were there for over 3 hours and so much enjoyed getting to know her and her two delightful children (10 & 18 years old). We discovered that she’s had a super interesting life, coming originally from the Catalan region of Spain (of which we knew all about from our time living there) and then moving to Nicaragua during a random, rebellious time in her growing up years. As you might have guessed, Angela is a very natural, hippy-like, whole-grain, no-salt, no-sugar cooking, pure life gal. She served us a scrumptious vegetarian meal- it was fantastic. Angela also recycles everything- in fact, we have a trashcan in our kitchen labeled “organic” where we put all of our food trash, etc… and we give it to her every morning. She cleans it out and uses it for the compost she has in her backyard garden. She has an eclectic and naturalistic style of decorating… and we love what she’s done with our house. It has an "artisanial" flavor with a lot of local Nicaraguan arts and crafts.

With Angela’s wholesome appearance, we were so surprised to find out she’s been married 3 times, used to be a heavy smoker, and more. Fascinating. She’s so, so funny to hear when she tells her stories. (All this in Spanish of course!) Her kids were extremely friendly and they seemed to get a big kick out of Travis and I with our American accents and our rambling Spanish. The cutest thing about this family, and what I have not seen anywhere else in Nica, is that they eat absolutely every meal together. Angela will not serve the food until all her family members are seated. It’s especially sweet to observe this early in the morning when they eat breakfast together at 7:00am. This is extremely impressive being that the kids are on their summer holiday from school yet they’re up at this hour to eat together. All and all, it was a more non-traditional Nicaraguan evening for us when it comes to the type of food and customs, but that’s what made it all the more special. We plan on researching some vegetarian recipes and having them over next week.

So let’s see, who else is in our current social circle? Well, we’ve also really enjoyed getting to know Carleck and Mario, the pair of friends we do our twice-weekly language intercambios with. We met Mario through our prior language school as he’s a tour guide there, and he brought Carleck on board because he wanted a comrade to share with him in the English side of the exchange. Now we meet in our homes every Monday and Wednesday afternoon for 2 hours- 1 hour speaking in Spanish for our practice, and 1 hour speaking in English for their practice. It’s a very, very good way to tune up our skills. These two college-aged students are interesting people too … it’s fun to chat about their lives here in Matagalpa, their childhoods and their goals. It is just so different than LA life. Because Mario and Carleck are both studying ecotourism and tour guiding in school, they are also able to offer us wonderful tips on local places to visit, as well as good hikes to try out. In fact, we’re planning on having our next few intercambios in museums, on the city streets and beyond as they have plans to lead us on mini-tour outings while we chat together.

So, is that it? Actually no…. we have several more people here that we’d call friends as well. These relationships are composed of our new fellow colleagues at the Language Academy where we teach, and the adults with disabilities who we volunteer with at Familias Especial. As far as the teachers at Academia Europea, there are about 8 of us in all, and everyone is very unique and different. However, Travis and I have clicked with almost all of them and have had some really interesting conversations. We especially got to know them well during our 2 weeks of training while we role-played student/class situations daily for each other to practice. Although we are the only mother-tongue English speakers, several of them have very good English as they’ve spent a majority of their lives in the states. Douglas even has a very southern US accent because he lived in the south. Merci happens to have a house in Mission Viejo California, where her husband currently resides. She remains here to run her coffee and cattle farms. They hope to eventually rejoin and retire together- although can’t decide on which country. Very interesting stories here. Gerardo and Rainer are from Nicaragua, but both speak fluent German (and decent English). They were hired at the academy to teach German but not enough students signed up- therefore, they are also teaching English. Gerardo is going to be our Spanish teacher beginning this week, giving us a few lessons a week before our evening classes.

It’s been helpful to have some Matagalpa natives, who speak English, to give us a more in-depth cultural knowledge. Up until this point, all of the facts we’ve acquired about Nicaragua have been in Spanish… so we’ve no doubt missed some important things in translation. These teachers love to speak about their city and country, so we’re never at a lack of things to talk about.

Finally, we have our friends at Familias Especial. This is an adult workplace/workshop for individuals with disabilities. We volunteer here weekly mainly to provide friendship (and probably entertainment with our US accents) to the adults as they work. We accompany them with a variety of tasks- but mainly are stationed with the recycle team, where Travis and I dive right in a rip up paper in small pieces and separate it by color and texture (they don’t have electrical shredding machines here, it’s all done by hand day in and day out). They love to have our company, and we make all attempts to communicate with them to the best of our abilities. No doubt this is very challenging… depending on the severity of their disabilities. But for several of them, we’ve become quite friendly exchanging conversation about everything from the people in their families, their favorite foods, colors, activities and more. In return, we provide them with stories about our lives in the United States.

This time in Matagalpa is such a rich experience- we really feel like we’re living life here to the fullest. It’s just so interesting to not only be living in a place (like we did in Spain), but to really be connecting here socially this time. We’ve pondered why it is so easy here to make friends, in contrast to Spain or other places we’ve been (even the states for that matter!). Our guess is that it has a lot to do with the friendliness of the people, the culture, the smallness of the town, and most importantly the lack of them and us having busy schedules. Anytime we get an invite- we’re free! It’s not like at home where we have to first check our calendars and then pick a date two or three weeks into the future. Here we can make plans for the next day, the same day, or even the next hour. Without a jam-packed schedule, we can take up all offers because, why not? It’s great fun. There’s a lot to be learned here about the value of not letting your life get too cluttered with busyness. The ability to be more available for socially enriching experiences with people sure can outweigh many of the aspects of those all too busy lives we had in the past. Hmmm…. This is surely something to think about when we re-establish ourselves in the states….