Q & A
Martin: I finished my lesson planning for next week early so I though I’d take the time to answer some of the questions that my grandmother put to me in a recent email and sprinkle in some pictures that I and my photo/video youth group (explained later) have been taking around town.
Gran: Your world is so unfamiliar to me right now. Some time, send the schedule of your days – when you get up? When/where do your eat breakfast and what do you eat? Also, how’s the rest of the day, hour by hour?
Martin: I wake up at 5:30 am most weekday mornings. School starts at 7:00 am giving just enough time to exercise, shower, eat breakfast, review my lesson plans and pack my things for class, and walk the half-block to the school before the hand bell is rung. For breakfast I usually eat a traditionally Nicaraguan dish called Gallo Pinto. It’s a combination of rice and beans that have been lightly pan-fried with onions, peppers, and sometimes other things. (A delicious Caribbean Coast variety on this is Gallo Pinto with coconut milk—it comes out with just the right amount of sweet!). Eggs scrambled with tomato and onion, fresh corn tortillas, a couple of slices of coconut bread alternate in accompanying the Gallo Pinto and so does a hot cup of coffee, tea (typically Chamomile), or warm and sweetened milk.
The eating is done in the family room of the house that I live in. Along with the kitchen, the family room opens on to the three bedrooms in which I, my host brother, and my host parents sleep, as well as letting out on our front porch (where Odie the dog sleeps). The family room is where the TV is set up with four sturdy, handcrafted and huge rocking chairs lined up facing it and around the walls of the room are framed portraits of the children of my host parents (at graduations, birthdays, weddings) and flowers of all colors and plastics.
In the back of the room there is a table where dining, studying, and card-playing take place and where I sit in the mornings to review my lesson plans, eat breakfast, and otherwise prepare against the day.
6:45 am I leave the house and walk the ½ block to school greeting students (‘good morning’ or ‘what’s up?’) along the way. 
7:00 am The bell rings and classes begin (45 minute periods with class sizes ranging from twenty to 45 students). Remember that my Peace Corps assignment is as a teacher-trainer which means that I never give classes on my own. Rather, I co-plan, co-teach, and co-reflect with three Nicaraguan/Kukra Hillian ‘counterpart’ teachers to teach students from 7th to 11th grades (with 11th as the highest grade in high school). Where my free periods overlap with the free periods of my counterparts, all of whom teach more subjects than just English, we take advantage of this time to plan classes for the up-coming week (but more often to catch up with planning or material preparation for the current week since we’re still trying to get our planning schedule together). 11:50 am The bell is rung sounding the end of the school day and after chatting a bit with other teachers and/or the director of the school, I walk home for lunch.
Briefly, lunch is usually comprised of white rice and red beans (separate for now but to be combined in order to make Gallo Pinto for dinner and for the following day’s breakfast), a meat dish (fried fish, stewed beef in a tomatoey sauce, grilled chicken, noodles with a tomatoey sauce and hot dogs, or turtle stew on occasion), and a starchy side-dish (a boiled plantain, a corn tortilla, a boiled banana—yum!—, or a hunk of crumbly, salty cheese). This is served with a juice/sugar-drink of some kind, Tang is a favorite.
Up until recently, my routine has been to come home from school, eat, take a nap, and then move on. Still, lately I have been forcing myself to run before eating lunch in spite of the sun and the heat because I’ve found that I don’t have time in the morning and I don’t have energy in the evening. (On days where I go running lunch should be pushed back until 12:45 pm).
2:00 pm At around this time on weekdays I do one of a number of things depending on the day: on Mondays, I go to the Casa de Cultura and work with a group of youth taking pictures and making videos of and around the community; on Tuesdays, the same; on Wednesdays, I teach in a school in a nearby community (which actually means that I have to catch a bus at 12:30pm and find some lunch on the way); on Thursdays, I plan with my counterparts; and on Fridays, I’m back at the Casa de Cultura with the youths.
6:00 pm Around this time on most days, I’m returning home from wherever I’ve been all afternoon, sitting down to watch a soap-opera or two with my family, eating dinner, and getting ready for the next day. Dinner is similar to breakfast except usually smaller and sometimes the breads and things are sweeter. The popular soap operas currently running are Salomé (of Mexican production about a burlesque dancer turned lover of a university professor from a rich family turned respectable mother of three but still in love with the professor—reviled by his mother—, but separated form him by unfortunate happenstance and the meddling of others) and Triunfo del Amor, of a not too dissimilar plot line.
By 9:00 pm most days I’m tucking myself into bed, and I haven’t seen 10:00 pm since I was in training at least. 
Gran: Do the parents of your students read and write Spanish?
Martin: Yes. The predominant language in Kukra Hill is Spanish and all classes in the Instituto Justo Pastor Castillo, the high school where I teach, are taught in Spanish (with the exception of English). In this, Kukra Hill is an outlier in the region where most communities are of Creole ethnicity, a blend Afro-Caribbean and pre-Columbian indigenous origin.
The surrounding communities are not only endowed with English names (Big Lagoon, Pearl Lagoon, Manhattan, Monkey Point), but also speak a ‘dialect’ of English called Creole that I think of as a mix of Olde Tyme English, Spanish, Caribbean culture, and a couple of hundred of years of oral tradition.
Gran: Do they speak any English? Do they want to learn English?
Martin: Some, kind of… Traditionally the population of Kukra Hill has been of Creole ethnicity. The language of this group of people is also called Creole and is considered (by Wikipedia) to be a ‘dialect’ of English. Spoken Creole sounds very similar to ‘Standard English’ when it is spoken although the grammar structures appear to be simplified and there is a different prevailing set of commonly used vocabulary. (One example is that the word ‘pending’ is very common to hear in situations ranging from how we might use it in the United States to mean ‘in anticipation of’ to replacing the word ‘wait’ or ‘waiting’; the difference is that of “I am pending him come” instead of “I am waiting for him”).
At some point since I’ve been here, I was told that English classes in high schools in Nicaragua are largely seen as a formality, requirements to be met if only in order to graduate. That said, I have never entered a classroom and found the students unwilling to learn. Perhaps it has dawned on some of the students that fluent English cannot be learned in five years, three hours a week, but others will recognize that a solid base of knowledge can be formed. Especially among those of Creole origin, whose vocabulary, grammar, and confidence are already well developed, I see that students can recognize the tangible outcomes of ‘refining’ their English and therefore apply themselves diligently. What are the tangible outcomes of students’ refining their English? These seem to amount to obtaining work on an international cruise line or in a call-center in Managua.
Gran: Did you celebrate your birthday in some special way?
I did. On Sundays, it is the tradition of my adoptive family to cook food and bake goodies and take them to the house of a daughter of one of my host parents in a neighborhood not too far away from here but far enough to provide a change of setting for a few hours in the mid-afternoon. On the Sunday following my birthday, we repeated this tradition but took along with us cakes and chop siu (a take on what we know as ‘chop suey’), a dish served for special occasions. The whole gang sang ‘Happy Birthday’ (in English) and we sat around chatting and cracking-wise until night set in. Here are a few pictures of the celebration featuring my host family and my Peace Corps site-mate.
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Hey this is a great account of your day-to-day! Thanks primo!
great job marty! i love the details!