Gettin' busy

Since I've "reached my destination," whatever that means, I'm going to drop the datelines on these blog entries unless I'm making a post from outside Granada.

This post brought to you by exhaustion, frustration and anxiety. The breakfast of champions.

I feel like I've done a lot of everything and a lot of nothing since I've arrived here. I'm behind on my blog writing, my journal writing, my journalistic writing and my PR writing.

PR writing?

Yes. I signed up to volunteer with a local volunteering organization named La Esperanza. Originally I was interested in helping teach English in local schools, but it's in the middle of the semester right now and when I told them I'm a journalist they immediately wanted to use my experience with writing to help publicize them outside of Nicaragua.* So I've gone to a few volunteer meetings and met some very nice people in the last week, but so far I'm still not sure what I'm going to produce for them and how I'll distribute it. I'm excited about it though. It's my first venture into PR writing and maybe if I like it and produce something good I could try to do it for a bigger organization, as long as it doesn't involve working alongside one single PR hack I've ever interviewed in my life ever. There's a few exceptions to that, but I don't have time for shout-outs.

I'm working on a story right now about how cuts to the national budget are making public funding for higher education almost non-existent, prompting students to take to the streets for protests that would make members of Students for a Democratic Society wet their pants. Burning tires, flaming effigies and home-made mortars are a theme in the streets of Managua whenever this time of the year comes around. These kids mean business. My biggest hurdle with this story is getting a single government official on the phone pertinent to this situation to talk to me and give me numbers about this year's budget cuts. You have to call people again and again and again in Nicaragua to get any kind of response. You even have to ask why someone isn't in the office, because a lot of times a secretary will say "So and so isn't here, but give me your number and he'll call you right back" without mentioning that he's not in the office because he's actually out of the country for a month. When you do get someone on the phone, it's like hearing a broken record. Everybody, even the students, have a party line on this issue. If your question reaches beyond what they've memorized, they'll just as soon repeat what they already told you and act like it's good enough for at least 1/2 a point on the quiz I'm giving them.

So who knows when I'll finish that fucking thing. It's making me more and more testy as my deadline approaches. That and the fact I'm having trouble understanding Nicaraguans more than any other nationality I've met on this trip. They speak fast, there's a lot of slang and they drop a lot of letters randomly in their speech. It can be especially complicated when I'm talking to someone on the phone. For that reason I've signed up for two hours a day of one on one conversation classes here in Granada. My first class was today, we had a pleasant conversation about Granada and I understood my teacher perfectly, but that's because she spoke like a normal person. I told her I need these conversations to go faster and with a lot more street dialect thrown in. We'll see how tomorrow goes. I'll take these classes for at least a week and if I still haven't improved my Nicaraguan Spanish maybe I'll just pay a crackhead on the street to ramble at me for two hours a day (though they already do that for free.) That would do the trick.

So like I said, I'm finding ways to keep myself busy and yet somehow not getting a whole lot done so far. Part of it also is that Granada is just a very calm and attractive (and often scorching hot) place to waste the days away in a hammock under a coconut tree with the fan blowing on you. I haven't had any desire to get out of the city yet, though I do at least want to visit the volcanic island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua as well as San Juan del Sur on the Pacific and the more colonial Leon to the north. A trip to Costa Rica to see my old Tico Times editora Meg Yamamoto and amiga superior Gaby Diaz might also be necessary (OK, so I do have time for shout-outs.)

Mitad y mitad es suficiente.

*The asterisk was to let you fine readers know that telling people you're a journalist is a lot like telling someone you're a lawyer or a tax collector. It's something you avoid mentioning at all costs for a variety of reasons.