Where no matzah has gone before...

Sorry if you saw an unfinished version of this post earlier...I clicked "Publish" instead of "Save Draft" last night.  Also, photos are up!

This past weekend, I decided to pay a visit to my homestay family from La Laguna, the extremely rural town we visited for a week at the beginning of the program, where I macheted until my arm ached, ate ridiculous quantities of rice and beans, slept in the most uncomfortable hammock in the world, and allowed an 8-year-old boy to get way too attached to me.  So why go back?  Because I ended up getting surprisingly close to my family, and I wanted to see them again before I leave the country with no definitive plans to ever return.  And also, because I said I would if I could.  And I could.  So I did.

When I called them to see if it would be OK if I came back (it was), I asked if there was anything I could bring them from Managua, something it was tough for them to find near where they are.  They said they'd think about it and call me back.  I was thinking of something like a hard-to-find kitchen item or a school supply or something.  But no.  When they called me back, they said they could really use...a mattress.  At first I thought it was a miscommunication.  After all, talking to them on the phone is quite the challenge, as I have the triple disadvantage of not being fluent in Spanish, having trouble with their crazy campo accent, and the phone connection being less than stellar.  But sure enough, they wanted a colchón (not to be confused with cochón, the slang word for gay here, which I thought they were asking for at first).  When I thought about it, though, it made sense.  They essentially sleep on tables right now, covered with the most patheticly thin of blankets.  A semi-decent mattress might actually improve their comfort level significantly.  OK, I said, I'll get you a mattress.

Feliciano and Vicenta, my host mom and dad, met me at the main bus station in Matagalpa, the city closest to where they live, and after hugs and quick updates, off we went, mattress-shopping.  We found a decent, but cheap one that they liked at a market on the other side of town.  That was the easy part.  Then we had to get it home.  Keep in mind, I was on my own this time, with no SIT vans or pickup trucks to assist us.  We walked it back to a different bus station, one that is differentiated from the main one by the fact that it services the boonies of the department exclusively.  We loaded the mattress on top of the school bus, and soon were off!  ...at about 5 miles per hour.  When we reached a random bridge about 40 minutes later, the closest we could get to La Laguna by public transport, we disembarked and had our mattress thrown down to us.  And then we proceeded to take turns carrying the mattress on our heads as we trudged for an hour up the steep rocky road that leads to La Laguna.

I had been worried it might be weird to go back, especially just for a night (even though it costs about $4 each way to get to Managua, that's prohibitively expensive for these folk), and even more especially with lots of material goodies, which I felt only reinforced the rich gringo patron image.  But whatever, they needed/wanted this stuff, it wasn't a big deal for me to bring it, and, unless they're really really good actors, they seemed to genuinely care about seeing me, not just my stuff.  Especially Jeffrey.  He came bounding down from the house to give me a hug with the hugest grin.  It was really priceless.  Even though one of his first questions was "When are you leaving?" (tomorrow) followed by "Why do you have to go?" (work)  followed by "And then will you ever come back?" (I hope so?) followed by "I'm gonna miss you."  I'd hoped to avoid goodbyes for at least the first 10 minutes.

On the happier side of things, there were piglets.  11 of them.  3 days old.

And in general, I was stunned by how ridiculously familiar everything felt.  After all, I'd spent five nights here two months ago.  But I felt like I'd left yesterday after living there for ages.  I've discovered that to be a theme of this program, the fact that things feel routine obnoxiously fast.  Maybe it's a coping thing.  The program moves so fast that I've quickly latched on to anything that happens more than once. 

Also, in this case, everything was almost exactly the same.  Granny was still kickin.  And smokin. 

The baby (Fanny) had grown a bit.  They stuck her in a Santa suit (why a Santa suit in Nicaragua??) and demanded that I take a picture of her.

We were still eating animals for lunch that we played with during breakfast.

And Alvaro, my campo brother, was just as cheerful and surprisingly emotional as before. 

Notice the Matzah.  My parents sent me a Passover Supply Box...that made it to me through the Nicaraguan post two weeks after Passover.  So, mostly for my own amusement, I brought a box of matzah (or "sacred Jew crackers" as I explained them) with me to the campo.  They loved them.

Jeffrey seemed to decide that, if he only had his gringo for one day, he was gonna get his money's worth of play time in, gosh darn it.  We played about 50,000 card games, searched for the missing mama pig together, climbed trees, played in the abandoned well-thing, jumped on me while I attempted to nap, and played a furious game of tag.  A bunch of kids we passed seemed mildly surprised to see me, but remembered my name, which made me feel just great.  In the night, Alvaro and I went to visit Bladimir, the oddly-named (he is in no way Russian) coordinator of the Laguna homestays.  After chatting for a bit, he also asked me if I was going to come back.  "The gringos always say they're going to come back, but they never do..."

In the morning, Alvaro woke me up at 6 to say a manly goodbye as he had to leave for classes.  He's getting some kind of agricultural degree through weekend school.  I stuck around for the morning, then headed back down the road (a lot easier without a mattress), caught the bus back to Matagalpa, said a rushed goodbye to Vicenta and Jeffrey because the city bus was leaving, and headed off to meet up with Tricia, who was in town to have an interview for her project.  She convinced me to stick around for the night with her and Darah (who was coming in later in the day) instead of trying to make it back to Managua before dark. 

It was a great decision.  I got some work done in a fantastic cyber (for some reason, this rural mountain city had much faster internet than Managua...I was able to video skype for the first time!), and then we all went out to this delicious Italian restaurant we'd gone to as a group when we stayed here after our Laguna stay.  Again, routines.  Of course we went to that restaurant...that's what we do every time we're in Matagalpa for the night...

And once again, back to the broiling, politically unstable, public space-less capital of Nicaragua.  I'm gonna do my best to work hard so I can get away this weekend again, but we'll see...I feel like the finish line is a little too close for my liking and I still have so much I need/want to do.