One of the reasons I was excited to come to Nicaragua was for the chance to improve my Spanish, the basics of which I picked up on my travels through Central and South America a few years ago. I figured that living in a Spanish-speaking country for half a year, working with Spanish-speaking colleagues, being exposed to the language almost 24/7, I would inevitably leave here more or less fluent. Well, four months in and it actually feels like my Spanish has gone backwards rather than forwards. OK, I have a better technical vocabulary now and can tell you the spanish words for "wind turbine", "battery", "wire" and so on, but in terms of pure social communication, I feel less competent now than before. I still can't really say much more than ""buenas dias, como estas?" to the mamas that cook our lunch for us. I have more success chatting with some of the French volunteers who prefer to talk in Spanish than English, but that's mainly because I can just throw in an English word when I get stuck.
I think there are two main reasons why things are this way. Firstly, the local Nicaraguan accent is so bloody difficult to understand, with dropped s's everywhere, swallowed syllables and use of the vos form instead of tu (meaning a whole new verb conjugation to learn, as if there weren't enough already). Any attempt at a conservation quickly degenerates into a frustrating round of me asking people to repeat themselves a dozen times.
The other reason is the fact that I have just spent the last six years fighting to understand and be understood in German, and I really do feel a case of language learning fatigue. Although by the time I left Germany I was reasonably fluent, I still never felt really free when it came to expressing myself. I mean, I could do way more than just get my meaning across, but at the same time I always felt restricted and sort of trapped by my limited vocabulary and range of expressions. Now that I am trying to learn Spanish I feel like I'm right back at square one again, and it is just far too hard to find the motivation and enthusiasm necessary to stick my nose in a grammar book and move beyond the basics.
Meanwhile, on the work front, nothing much new to report. The biodigester construction, after weeks of delay, is finally about to start; mainly because the non-stop torrential rains that have been falling since friday threaten to cause the entire hillside behind Guillaume's house to slide down into the hole he dug for it. Nothing moving on the 17' turbine - sadly there is no chance that it will be built before I leave here in a month's time.
I'll just leave you with some photos from a trip me and three of the volunteers took to the Kahka Creek Forest Reserve a couple of weekends ago. Getting there took a two hour panga (fibreglass boat) ride across Pearl Lagoon to the Garifuna village of Orinoco. Then a 90 minute trip on the most unstable canoe I've ever sat in (it felt like sitting on top of a pile of books), and finally an hour's hike through cattle pastures before we arrived at the lodge on the edge of the jungle. The reserve is 600 hectares in size and has been in the process of being reforested since its establishment in 2000. The staff at the reserve are conducting various investigations into ways of speeding up the reforestation process. For example, they explained to us that by removing the vines that otherwise smother the trees, the trees grow faster. However, they then discovered the hard way that the vines actually help to make the forest more resistant to hurricanes, by anchoring the trees to the ground much like the guy wires of our turbines, and also binding individual trees together to form one giant interlinked structure. Learned the hard way, as three major hurricanes have struck the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua in the last three years, compared to a historical average of only one every ten...
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