Repeta por favor

Greetings from a cold and wet Jinotega.

Being here is incredible if not extremely challenging.

From day one when I was greeted in the office I struggle to comprehend what was being said to me. I was really dissapointed of how limited my Spanish was and the fact that it is very basic for real life situations. I can ask for many thinks, get from A to B and complain when the hot shower isn´t hot (tough luck) but when it comes to talking and understanding in an office with several people I´m lost.

But, I´ll allow myself one excuse - the dialect is so different to what I have ever heard before. There are is so much slang, letters are dropped off words and verbs are conjugated in ways I never thought possible. I imagine it´s like an English language student volunteering with a bunch of jordies.

What it is doing though is really helping me to practice what I´ve learnt. As before, in León, everything I want has to be done in Spanish. So I´m begining to think in Spanish again. Also, because there are so few foreigners here, people in the shops and bars are really keen to talk which again is a help.

The other slight problem is, there´s not actaully anything to do at the moment. As mentioned in the last post, the cooperative works with young children, but because the countryside is so vast they don´t see them every day, they select a group of them and bring them in to town for a few weeks where they´re taught about coffee production, organic farming as well as information such as alcohol and drugs awareness and social responsibility. There is a class being taught next week so I look forward to seeing how it goes down.

And to make this volunteering worthwhile I´ve decided to interview as many people as possible in order to write and article, or more, when I return the UK in an effort to promote and stress just how much of a difference Fair Trade makes. Because in reality I can't help these people here. They have a perfectly good smooth running organisation and they don't really need a do-gooder getting in the way. I sort of knew that would be the case anyway, I just thought there might have been something for me to do.