Between Little Girls Playing and Bats Screeching
It is hard to truly view all of the tradegy and extreme problems of Nicaragua, and I came to this realization when I accompanied 15 of the Yahoska girls on vacation to a northern town called Posletega. For two weeks the girls school had vacation, and about half of the girls went home to their families to visit. The interesting part of the trip started with a bumpy ride to the North of Managua, which eventually caused the old, rickety bus to break down. The Yahoska workers played this off well and pretended it was merely a stop for lunch. After the bus cooled down, we chugged on to our destination.
The Quincho program doesn’t have exuberant amounts of money, so they travel to places where they can sleep for free. About eight years ago a volcano erupted and killed thousands of people in and around the town of Posletega. The Quinchos reached out to the devastated place and built a school about three kilometers from the main town. This was where we stayed.
The first day was full of Frisbee, soccer, a piñata, and story telling. Before bed I read the girls a meditation from a book I was so lucky to find on our latest trip to Managua. It was so exciting because this book was one that was read to me when I was little, so it was crazy to be able to find it in Spanish (it was found in the used books section). Despite the older girls listening to their Reggeton music not a 100 meters away, the younger girls enjoyed the story and were intent to have it read to them every night they were on vacation.
We all slept in the two roomed school, the girls and their teachers in one room and the volunteers in the other. The rooms were divided by what seemed like a cardboard, wood collection. We slept on the Nicaraugan version of sleeping bags, which were merely cotton filled mats for the floor. Right as I was about to fall asleep the bats came to life and began to swoop in and around our room from the storage room to our left. Between the girls talking in their sleep in the next room and the “murciélagos” yapping, I slept very little the first and second nights.