Estelí
Here in Esteli I have returned to the homestay life, which is fortunate because I spent the earlier part of this week combating a stomach bug. I took some enormous orange pills that my host mother gave me and they seem to be doing the trick. I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable when you travel for a while, though it really isn´t fun as I enjoying eating and have had to skip most of my cooking classes this week.
The Spanish school here is pretty good. I am taking lessons with a person about my age who also works in the afternoon as a bricklayer. He doesn´t seem to prepare much in the way of lessons (which is understandable since he´s busy laying bricks), but that´s okay because I like to make my own way anyway. We have had a lot of interesting conversations about politics here, and I even felt today like I am learning a little bit of Spanish relating to the law, though only very simple terminology. From what I understand in Spanish, presidential elections are taking place here in November. No one likes the guy in charge, but the best alternative just died last week. He was a Sandinista that split off from the main Sandinista party. The Sandinistas are running Daniel Ortega, who I don´t know much about but he´s got a fair chance of winning. He is pretty famous from the revolutionary days. Mostly what I hear is that people here are really tired. Development is so slow and there is a lot of corruption.
My teacher was also telling me about Honduras today, where apparently gangs kidnapped and killed the president´s son. As a result, the president has burned jails full of people in the gangs and there are a few top military personnel who are secretly going around and just shooting gang members. The best part is that the gangs are from L.A. So all those anti immigration people who think that Central Americans are bringing gangs to the U.S. should realize that actually we´re the ones causing violence here.
It´s amazing what you don´t know about the rest of the world...I feel I need to learn more since my limited Spanish has limited my understanding here of what´s going on.
As a result of the tummy trouble, I haven´t done much in the town. But I have almost finished Hopscotch. I am enjoying it, but it is hard to know what to say about it as at times I wish I had both an Oxford English dictionary, a philosophy dictionary, and a French dictionary. It covers a lot of different ideas, some of which I remember from studying philosophy and others that I don´t know about. At the same time it weaves some weird characters and strange stories together. It is more influenced by French than I expected, though I am not sure I would recognize the Argentinian influences.