Departure and Arrival

Part I: The best is yet to come!
The night before I left home, I wrote this. ¨Crying. Deep sadness. The end of an era. THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER. You know the best is yet to come.¨

Before dawn the next day, as I said goodbye to my old dog and Oregon paradise, and to my parents for at least a year, I was sobbing and questioning my sanity, certainly. But a thought occurred to me as I lost sight of my parents in the security line. The best is yet to come. Those of you who really know me will be wondering whether Michael Buble began to serenade subconscious. This thought went deeper. I suddenly felt my feet on a supportive ground, my breathing calmed, and my soul grinning. Goodbyes are rotten. But the Beatles always have it right. For every goodbye, there is a hello. And if you believe that your happiness is up to you, that hello will be fuller and more powerful than the goodbye, if you let it be. Pun intended.

I took a class from a Greek Orthodox priest, a pleasant, bearded, Robert DeNiro look-alike who thought himself very wise. Sometimes he was. He´d recite his beliefs with merciless certainty, but I liked the fella for his indominable spirit. The following schpiel rolled off his tongue as he dangled a leg off a sagging desk...I´ve jazzed it up a bit. ¨The lovers part wondering if they´ll ever smile again. Neither can any of us predict what sort of human beings we will become. The flower goes to bed at night not knowing whether she´ll awake the next day. Every end leads to a beginning, whether or not it can be seen.¨This makes me feel hopeful about life, and death.
I will allow tears, the cleansers of the soul. But I will rejoice in what I feel now. Here´s to the people I will meet, the love I will share, the experiences that will claim a piece of my heart. The best is yet to come...and babe, won´t it be fine...you think you´ve seen the sun, but you ain´t seen it shine...

All endings are also beginnings. We just don´t know it at the time.
-Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Part II: Verbal Snapshots of Managua
There´s no way I can blog adequately about the mountain of change that I am climbing. So instead, I´ve taken a few pictures-in-words and hope you will be able to imagine yourself climbing with me.

• Beautiful brown eyes, most of them young, miraculously hopeful, and staring intently
• Much like Tijuana (never actually blogged about my times there, but you can read this), only the sprawl of Managua rises out of a subdued jungle that has bloomed in the rainy season...Now is winter, which implies 80 degrees F everyday. Ha.
• La Virgen Maria adorned in palm leaves and Christmas lights
• Huge red and tiny black ants, skinny clingy cats and mangy dogs, cockroaches and scorpions, pet ducks and geckos that laugh
• Images, statues and tales of el heroe Augusto C Sandino por todas partes, usually accompanied by brightly colored propaganda promoting the saviordictator (depends on who you ask) El Presidente Daniel Ortega
  
• My fellow JVs ¨platicar-ing¨with chavalos (kids) on the street, jamming on guitars or making gallo pinto or pancakes for their energetic, annoying newbies (Heather, Meg=Tobin, Tony, Adrienne, Bianca)
• TVs, computers, and DVD players in houses made with latrines, fading tin, adobe and plastic bags. Ah, the pervasiveness of American culture
• Ditches, trash, cars, US and Chinese imports and packed multicolored urbanos (Managua buses) sharing the road
• Sounds of firecrackers, merenge (YES), bachata, Rhianna and Eminem (NO), carols to La Virgen, self-assured, eloquent parrots, water vendors screaming, children whispering, and chavalos whistling. Oh, and lots of Spanish. AYYYIIIII!

That´ll have to do for now, friends. Safe, happy, and healthy, I am currently staying with a Nica family in the barrio where the JVs live, instead of in my room in the JV house. Monday, I´m slightly nervous to be going to the campo (rural Nica) to stay three nights with a family there. How are you and what are you up to? Know that I love receiving mail and email, no matter what you have to say.

My mailing address:
Heather Moline-Jesuit Volunteers
APDO LM 161
Managua
NICARAGUA

Stay tuned for word from my stays with families, and for PICTURES!