Buenas,
Nothing really new to report. Classes are going great. We have been scoping out new friends for this weekend. The hotel is very busy so we have many people to choose from, but we are pretty sure we are going with the couple from Denmark!
Dan is going fishing with a family on Saturday and then we are having dinner with them at their home.
We are excited for our vacation to the ocean next week, and to start our journey home, even though it will be very sad leaving our students.
Here are some random pictures.
Hasta Luego.
D&J

Jessica planning lessons in the work hammock

Us, sunset, volcano

The village hospital

Full moon sunset

A Royal Egrot (Garsa Rayal)

We kayaked down the lake to see Volcan Conception up close, but it was hazy out, so this is not the best pic

Dan lounging

Fatima, a mother of one of our students, in her kitchen. She also helps out in one of our classes.

Dan and one of our teen students, Darwin, reading with the little ones.

Our students reading bilingual books.

Our little friend P. Mantis!

The beginning of the most amazing sunset EVER!

Kayaking down a jungle river trying to get back out to the lake to get ashore for the rain storm rolling in behind us!

Muscle mania!

We went to the local elementary school today to donate school supplies and observe classes. The school also received a donation of stuffed animals today. Each student received a stuffed animal!

A family of  of some of our students invited us for lunch today, this is their kitchen. Their home was very primitive, with dirt floors, mud or  stick walls, and a palm tree leaf roof.

Jessica with our students, Yoadi, Miguel, and Johan in the front door of their house.

Can't beat a $2 forty of jungle beer!! That is the small Volcano in the back.

Us with our class of Teens...the ones who show up on time anyway!

Birds from our kayak trip in the jungle river.

Hi All,
We have been busy, busy, busy! Last weeks classes went great. We were busy last week creating a blog for the Ometepe Bilingual School. The school runs purely on donations and volunteers, so there is no curriculum. We started a blog as a resource for the volunteers to communicate with each other about what they have taught  each class so everyone is on the same page, and the students will have a more consistent curriculum. Last week we also worked closely with the owner to set up an online donation site and created a letter to be sent to possible donors and volunteers, as well as to Government officials here in Nicaragua and the US. We need more volunteers and donations so we can send more students to University. All these projects will be complete by the end of this week, hopefully!
Yesterday we went for a long kayak ride down the lake to a river that flows through the jungle. We saw lots of cool birds and heard monkeys, but unfortunately we did not see any of the alligators that live there. This weekend we saw the most amazing sunset we have ever seen in our whole lives, and shared a bottle of delicious Rum with some new friends we made! We are meeting up with these friends next week in another city.
Starting this week we have an extra class in the morning with our most advanced students. Also starting  this week we will be observing at the elementary and high schools. We have a bunch of school supplies to donate to the schools! Tuesday we were invited to have lunch with one of the families of a student, and we are excited for that. We have been receiving home grown fruit from a couple of the families, and it is so good! Dan will be going fishing this weekend with one of the families and then we will have a feast with the family. There is a legend that if guests eat Red Fish, then they are destined to come back to the Island, so the family said they are going to feed us Red Fish so we are guaranteed to come back and stay with them at their home!
This Sunday we are hoping to rent a motorcycle and drive around the Island and go to Ojo de Agua, a fresh water spring. This is our last full week here on Ometepe Island. We leave next Wednesday and will spend 4 days on the ocean in San Juan del Sur! We will be staying right on the beach and learning how to surf! After that we go back to Costa Rica for 2 days, fly back to NYC and stay for 2 days, and then we come HOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We are so excited to see our family and friends!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We will try to post pictures later :)

Us with our class of little ones and 3 adult helpers.

Dan's night class of teen girls. They are a bunch of gigglers! We split the teens class into 2 classes because it was a large group.

Us with the little ones again.

Sunset....paradise!

This is the common building at the hotel. This is we eat, our room is in this building, and where people lounge out in the many hammocks  around.


All is well here! Classes are great, we are very busy lesson planning, fundraising, and creating online education sources for the students and future volunteers for after we leave.
Hasta Luego!
D&J

Our class!!! This is the little kids class. That hammock in the background is our office! The lake is behind the hammock, and we can see the sun set during our night class!

The snake that fell from the ceiling and slithered into our room!!! Eewww!

The view from our balcony and our king sized hammock!!  That is the lake in background, it is hard to see here.

One of the monkeys from our Kayak trip to Monkey Island this morning.

Us in the kayak with Monkey Island behind us. There is a monkey in the tree to the left of Dans head, but it is hard to see here.

Kids fishing for their dinner tonight from a hand carved boat. These kids were using line with a hook to fish, but many kids use their hands (and are quite successful) or use nets. Many kids fish from the end of our dock, and we have learned that what they catch is dinner for the whole family. Families are very large here, they seem to average about 6 or 7 kids per family. Our students were shocked to find our Dan and I each only had 1 sister!

Our dock looking out onto Lake Nicaragua.

Dan and our friends walking back from our hike earlier this week. This shows the condition of the roads around here (this is actually a very good stretch of road) and how there are always horses, cows, pigs, chickens, and dogs just wandering in the street.

A view of the waterfall we hiked to from about half way up the Volcano.

Dan and our friends climbing down the ravine.

Us in the waterfall!

Us on the dock with the big Volcano in the back!

Class!

The last picture is of Dan on his birthday with the cake I had the kitchen make for him. I am having a lot of trouble uploading pics lately, so we will post what we can!
We have been busy creating lesson plans and talking with the owner about how we can improve the education program here. We are starting to really get to know the students, their families, and the community. Some of the situations of the kids are quite sad, and it can be hard to see and to deal with...it really puts into perspective how fortunate we are.
We went for a bike ride this afternoon, after our morning class, and saw more of the countryside. The ride was a bit rough because the roads are in such bad condition here on the island. Ohh we also an encounter with a snake this morning...we were in the common area of the hotel and a snake  fell off the ceiling, onto the reception desk, across the computer of the reception desk, and slithered its way into our room, and into our laundry! A young gentleman bravely captured it with a pair of my pants and set it free outside. It was a  thin, long, non-poisonous snake.
Tonight we are going to watch the sunset with some $1 beers! Tomorrow we are going kayaking to monkey island to feed the monkeys and then down a river to see some alligators and birds!
Thank you to everyone for keeping up with our blog and sending us messages!! We do get a bit homesick at times, mostly because we miss all our family, friends, and Samson soooooooo much, so it is really nice to hear from you all!
Love D&J

 

The waterfall from our hike 2 days ago.



Ughh...the computer is not working well and I can not upload any more pictures right now, but I will try again later.

Our classes are awesome!!  We have two classes: one at 2pm with about 15 kids ages 2-9 and another at 5pm with 20 kids ages 10-25. Both classes are great in their own respects.  Our classroom is a large room with two open ends, one of which looks out to the lake so we can watch the sun set during our night class and it is covered so we do not get wet when it rains! We sang Happy Birthday to Dan Wednesday, and the kitchen made Dan a birthday cake that was shared with everyone here at the hotel. We had to move out of our sweet balcony room with our own bathroom to a smaller room with a shared bathroom, but we were spoiled with our balcony room. Dan had become quite fond of a gecko that lived in our balcony room-he named it T-Rex Gex, T-Gex for short!
All of the friends we had made have left, but more will come. We have made friends from all around the world!
Well, off to class!
Love D&J

Us with Volcan Maderas in the background.

The view from a quarter of the way up the Volcano.

...two hours later, after climbing steep ravines up the volcano we made it to these amazing falls! They were so incredibly tall, I could not fit the whole falls into one frame on the camera. This pictuure kind of puts the size into perspective.

More pics to come!

Word spread quickly that the new teachers were here, and we had 7 eager students come to meet us last night, so we held a small class. We have our lessons planned for the rest of this week, and we begin classes officially tomorrow(Wed.). Although we told the students there would be no class tonight, 2 showed up and wanted to learn, so we taught! In this community, and many places around Nicaragua, people are eager to create tourism that will sustain their way of life and culture, which would allow them to better the quality of their life. It is very undeveloped here, and impovershed in places, and creating sustainable tourism without allowing colonization and Westernized companies to take over, is very appealing to many people here. Many of our students wish to become tour guides, and want to learn English, while others wish to attend University where English is the primary language. We will be teaching English while incorporating the importance of sustaining their Nicaraguan culture, way of life, and the Spanish language. It is important to us that we do both these things. We are so excited to start teaching tomorrow!
Today we hiked 8.7 miles to a waterfall on Volcan Maderas. It was a really tough hike but so worth it! The waterfall was easily the longest falls we've ever seen! We stood under the cold refreshing falls as our reward when we finally reached it. Two people we met last night came with us and they are really cool. We will post pics soon.
Tomorrow is DANS BIRTHDAY!!!!! I am having the kitchen make him a birthday cake for our dessert! We will also celebrate with the kids. Dan is excited because one of our students invited him to go fishing with him and his father who is a fisherman this weekend.
Love D&J

Dan kayaking in the lake at Laguna de Apoyo.

Dan swimming at Laguna de Apoyo. The tallest mountain behind Dan is Volcano Mombacho, the volcano we saw from Lake Nicaragua. We kayaked all the way to the other side of this lake!

This is one of the monkeys who would disturb our Spanish classes at Laguna de Apoyo. Our classes were help outside in the jungle, and these monkeys would always be fighting. This monkey is lounging after a heated dispute.

This is a shot of Isla de Ometepe taken from our ferry ride volcanoes look so small from here but actually they are so big this is the only picture I could get of them both fitting in the same shot. The one on the left is called Volcan Conception and the one on the right is called Volcan Maderas. We are staying on the right side of the island in a small village called Merida. Volcan Maderas is in our backyard!

There are butterflies and beautiful flowers everywhere here!

This is Volcan Conception. This is taken from our dock. This picture does the view no justice, this volcano is so gigantic!

Swimming off our dock at sunset.

We have a lot more pictures we want to share of here, but we will lots of time to add more at a later time. 

Today we had a nice breakfast at a restaurant down the road, and then got a bunch of things together and prepared to start teaching on Wednesday. 

Love and miss you all!

D&J

 

Eric J. Masters! Send us an e-mail let us know how things are going down in the Holler! How is our garden doing? How is work? We would love to hear from you! 

j.l.lasda@hotmail.com