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.
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