It's been awhile.

A few updates on life:

The volunteer work here is interesting. This country is so flipping disorganized that the volunteer work is hit or miss. Which is asinine considering the need here.
For the past month Shawna and I have been working at a day care run by nuns, doing nothing more than playing with kids for two hours a day. Not to say that our presence wasn't a help to the three employees who take care of over 60 children everyday, but when you look at all of the problems going on around here, you can't help but think there is a better use of your time.
The work at the day care is now over, because all of the schools are going on their summer break. Tomorrow, Shawna and I start work at a different organization that seems a bit better run. I'll be teaching English from 1-4 in the afternoons. God help me if I am stuck with my own class without a helper, as I suspect is the case. It's one thing to teach one on one with carlos, and another to have a class full of preteens all to myself. lol. God help me.

Shawna and I have also been teaching English on the weekends at a school run by a lady who does online Spanish tutoring at our school. We've both been really enjoying that, and last Sunday, four of the guys we teach asked to take us to their town and show us around next weekend. It should be a random and hysterical event, considering Shawna and I got a joint love letter from two of them ysterday. (we suspect they went behind the backs of the other two to try and secure a place our hearts. haha.)

We are staying at the school one week longer than originally planned... and for that week we will be living at the school, which I'm pretty excited about. Our family has been great, but I'm about done living in someone else's house... and it will be nice to be at the school for a week. We really love the people there, and the lady that lives at the school is one of our fav's, so we're pretty glad to spend our last week in Granada with them there.

It's been interesting here since the elections. A week after we had our presidential elections, Nicaragua held all of their municipal elections. Practically the entire nation was closed for the four days surrounding the election in an attempt to keep things a little safer. Even with that, there has been plenty of fighting after the fact in all of the cities where the elections were a bit dirty. ( I'm pretty sure Granada is the only place that didn't see any riots...) It's calmed down some, but the papers are still full of election news and riot photos. Not gonna lie, I've enjoyed it. (Obviously, I wish it weren't this way...) but it's been interesting to see how things work here, and understand just a little bit more why this country can't make any progress. They fight each other too much to get anything done. (that's not the only problem... clearly... but it plays a huge part...)

We've had a Christmas tree up in the house for the past three weeks which is just weird... it's ingrained in my mind that first you hav thanksgiving and fall scenario's, and THEN you can have Christmas. But then again, it doesn't even feel like Christmas when it's 100 degrees out. lol.
For this reason, I loaded a bunch of Christmas music on my ipod before I left for when December hit... but, unfortunately , my ipod has been stolen. I'm sure whoever took it couldn't possibly buy one themselves, so hopefully it blesses them.
And they better freaking enjoy my Christmas music.

Anyways... that's the short update for now.