Deyra turns 19!

Deyra has lived with us for a month now! It’s been a really fun time for the most part. We did have one incident where she was an hour late when my sister picked her up from school… I kept calling her and telling her to go “right now” and she kept telling me that she was on her way (she was really hanging out with her friends). Needless to say, I was angry and sternly told her that she better never do that again. She almost cried and Kevin made me apologize (even though I didn’t really do anything wrong) and it was all better. She is always very prompt now!

A couple of weeks ago, we took Deyra and one of her friends to a water park for the day. Her friend is a second year student in the same program who is from a town very close to Deyra’s hometown. Neither of them had ever been to a water park before. The night before Deyra had refused to get on a large trampoline because she was scared, but she went down almost all of the slides! I thought that the girls were going to have heart attacks a couple of times but they said that they had a good time. Deyra told us that she never imagined that there could be places like that, not even in her dreams!

Last Friday was Deyra’s birthday and we threw her a party and invited her fellow classmates. I sent an e-mail to the host parents assuming that this would be the best method for getting RSVPs…wrong! Ten RSVPed, seven of those came, and eleven others showed up! Luckily we had tons of food so it didn’t matter. They ate, danced, sang birthday songs, and Deyra got more presents than she ever has in her life! (I may have gone a little overboard…) She got a lot of warm clothes since she does not have any, calling cards, and lots of sweets. We had forgotten how dressed up people in Honduras got for parties, and these kids were the same. It looked like they were going to the prom (my sister said that she could tell which students had already been here a year because they were not as dressed up) and I think they really enjoyed the chance to get dressed up and spend time together outside of school!

The day after the party, Kevin and I went to San Francisco to a Fresno State game and left Deyra at home. Before we left she said that she wanted to do laundry and I had her show me that she knew how to use everything. She called during the game saying that her clothes did not wash and I referred her to my sister who lives next door to us. Laurie fixed the problem for the time being but the breaker blew at some point leaving the clothes in a washer full of water. Deyra had no idea what to do so she just took them out and put them in the dryer. The blown breaker caused the dryer to spin but without heat. When we returned at 1:00 AM, the dryer was still running because it was set to detect dampness, not time! It had probably been running for at least four hours! And her fancy party dress was in there tinted blue because she washed it with dark jeans because she didn’t want to do two loads with a small amount of clothes. It’s amazing the things and knowledge of them that we take for granted!

I was talking to Deyra last week and I asked her what she was told to her about the U.S.: food, culture, what to expect before she arrived. She told me that the coordinators in Nicaragua told her that the U.S. was pretty and the people were nice. They told her nothing about the culture, food, or what to expect. I cannot imagine how scary that must have been for her leaving home for the first time and going to a country that she knew nothing about where she did not speak the language. She is a very brave girl.

Deyra told me that she never imagined that there would be so much stuff. Buildings, roads, food, stores, etc. She’s handling it all very well and is learning English at a rapid pace. Last night I helped her with her homework and she had written two paragraphs in English that I corrected for her. I was impressed at how well she spelled words (I have trouble spelling without spell-check!), and at her vocabulary. Because she knows that we speak Spanish, she tends to talk to us mostly in Spanish so I cannot gage how much she knows. I now know that she knows a lot!









Next up: Deyra goes to the “big trees”, has a car wash, and spends the weekend alone!

We're parents!

Due to popular request, we have decided to restart our blog. As many of you know, we recently became host parents to an 18-year-old girl from Nicaragua. She came here with a group of students in a program through Georgetown University called the SEED program. My project in Peace Corps actually worked with high schools in Honduras to try to find students to apply for these scholarships. I never actually did anything with it because I did not work with high school students but I had friends who did. The students come for two years and attend a community college. They spend the first nine months living with a host family and the remainder of the time living in the dorms. They study English extensively as well as general education requirements, and here, agriculture. At the end of the program the students all return to their countries of origin where they are supposed to do a project that they devised in school to better the community.

We talked to the last group of SEED students about ways in which they could work with Peace Corps volunteers upon returning home while we were back home visiting from Honduras. The director of the program contacted us for this cycle to see if we would like to be host parents. After much thought on the matter (9 months is a long time), we decided to give it a try.

Our new daughter (that’s right, we’re parents now!), Deyra, arrived with a group of 18 other students from Central America, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. She does not speak more than a few words of English and came from a very poor area of Nicaragua. Deyra has been amazing so far! I’m sure it must have been so scary for her to come to a country where everything is totally different from what she knows and she does not speak the language at all. She has six brothers and sisters and lived in a tiny house in the campo without electricity. Prior to the application process for this program, which required her to travel to the capital; she had never left her house for more than a day trip.

So far it has been really awesome getting to watch her adapt and witness so many entirely new things. She had never heard of a microwave, internet, McDonald’s, so many types of food, and numerous other things. She did not know how to open the car door! She’s handled everything really well and stays very calm. We took her to Walmart and she was blown away but all she said was, “Es muy grande y hay de todo.” (It’s really big and they have everything.). She is super sweet and wants to help as much as she can. I was working in the yard Saturday and she came out, got on her hands and knees, and started raking leaves with her hand because “it would look better if the leaves were raked”. Needless to say, I gave her a rake!

Deyra’s been a trooper at trying new foods. I asked her what she normally eats and she said rice, beans, tortillas, and cheese. Needless to say, we don’t eat very many of those things, especially in ways that she is accustomed to. She tried pizza for the first time, pancakes, English muffins, blueberries, and countless other things. One of the most common dishes in Nicaragua is Gallo Pinto which is rice and beans mixed together with some onion and pepper. We had eaten it before in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and loved it. I asked Deyra if she would teach me how to make and it she said of course and got really excited. We went shopping and picked out all the ingredients and made it last night. It was fun and I think it helped her to feel a little more at home. She was impressed at how quickly beans cook on a stove versus a fire, and very surprised that we don’t use lard, or even really oil to cook many things. She had never heard of cooking rice just by boiling it (I had this argument with one of my English classes in Honduras and one man told me it was impossible to cook rice without frying it first), and is surprised that we rarely eat tortillas, instead eating lots of bread!

We have found out that after eight months, our Spanish is getting a little rusty but we had lots of practice over the weekend! One of the goals of the program is for the students to learn English so we will be speaking to Deyra in English but right now there is not really a point as she would not understand anything. She is anxious to learn and we bought her a white board and she tells us words and phrases in Spanish that she wants to learn and we write them in English. She has been learning really quickly and loves to practice. Names have been hard for her, especially Shannon, but she’s doing better than most people in Honduras did with my name! She asked me to write our names, the cats’ names, and the names of my sister and her boyfriend so she could practice them and she did not want to come to dinner until she had learned them!



The entire SEED group Ciclo 2011



Deyra's room



Shannon, Kate, and Deyra drying tomatoes



Up next: Deyra gets in trouble, goes to a water park, and has a birthday party.