The Refreshing Recap of a long journey. Part one.

Boatswain’s Log.  October 24^th.

 

Well, in case you wondered. I am not in fact dead. I went to Nicaragua and survived, I may have got a tad sick at times, but I am none the worse for wear and my Costa Rican mother tells me I have lost a lot of weight. Surprise for me…there was no mirror in my house in Nicaragua. I made notes by the day without the date, so I don’t exactly know what day corresponds to what date. With that said, here we go with two weeks of back history. I think I will give you a couple days at a time and then today, so you aren’t overwhelmed.

 

Day 1: We got to the Transnica bus station at balls o’clock. By that I mean 5:15 or so. Really. My mom desired that we get there very on time. We were so on time that we waited for an hour and a half for the group. At 6:30ish we exited the station on a huge bus for a new country. The bus ride lasted a long time. About 11 hours or so.

 

The first thing I noticed about Nicaragua at the border was that they have huge frikkin’ wasps there. I mean huge. Think about a fun sized candy bar. That is about how big the wasps are there. Scary huge.

 

We got to the center we were staying at and I proceeded to camp in a room with some classy gents and we had our first speaker. His name was Phil Bert. That made us giggle. He went to Messiah college in New York and had some negative things to say about it, in general he emphasized that things in life really aren’t that big of a deal. You aren’t as important as you think and ideas of that sort. He had a powerful point regarding the focus of Christian communities being about praise and worship and not doing the things Jesus did.

 

I guess I didn’t really agree with him on the matter of importance. I think that while it may not make a huge difference in the world in our eyes, our decisions are important. We are not insignificant things without purpose. We are human beings that all have a chance to make the world a better place by living out God’s plan for us. So, when someone tells me that I am not important…I tell him that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. It is the most tiny of plants but when it grows it is huge and birds can nest in the branches. If the kingdom of God is like this, then I think it is okay to say that small things make a difference.

 

We got dinner at this restaurant that was in the front of a lady’s house. I was hungry and overestimated the amount I could eat. I ate way too much greasy evil and felt incredibly sick. Mancub and I ate dinner with the bus driver. (Don Jose) He taught us some cool stuff. 1) mae (or dude in Costa Rica) used to be maje. Interesting. 2) young folk in Nicaragua call each other caballo. That means horse. 3) If you want to tell someone that you are feeling really good, you tell them “pura postra con huesita en la sopa” or “Pura postra with a little bone in the soup” Hurray for idioms. 4) Tenedor means fork because it finds its roots in the verb tener. To have. When you use a fork you have stuff. Roughly translated it’s a “haver”…cool.

 

Upon going to bed we all learned an important lesson about Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua…it gets really really hot there. Not just there. The whole nation. By comparison, Costa Rica is almost chilly.

 

This part is postdated. I finished early and went to bed. The next morning started my Fall break.