Host Families

Susan has asked me to write about staying with a local family on the mission trip. My contribution won't be as funny as Chuck's, but I will try to make it informative and realistic.
When I first decided to go on the trip, Chuck was not going with me. He decided at the very last moment to go and boy am I glad he did. You see I know no Spanish. I don't know what I was thinking. I was going to stay with a family that spoke no English and I spoke no Spanish but John had said no problem, because an English speaker lived across the street. At least that is what I heard. I guess I thought every time I wanted to say something, I was going to run to them and have them translate. That would have been cute in the morning in my p.j's asking for help with the most basic of requests. Plus there was no English speaker across the street. The closest were John and Bill, three houses away. Anyway, Chuck decided to come and he had two years of high school Spanish and 1 week of listening to tapes at home just before we left.

Chuck and I were assigned to stay with Lucy. She is a parishioner at the church in San Juan DE Oriente. She has 4 sons. Ernesto is still living at home and is studying to be a potter. While we were there he also passed his driving test to drive a taxi. Now taxis are not the same there as here. In San Juan they are basically a scooter, with a back bench and a roof over it.

Lucy's house was quite middle class by Nicaraguan standards. She had concrete floors, a gas stove and refrigerator and stucco walls. She washed her dishes outside in a sink that did not have running water to it. You see in Nicaragua, water does not consistently come to the houses. You never know when you are going to get it. It could come in the middle of the night. So she had barrels of water stored behind her house. She used this to wash dishes, wash clothes ( no automatic washer and dryer here) and to flush the toilet.

Electricity is not regular either but while we were there it was always available. However, John and Bill told us it was very expensive. Lucy was very nice to leave the lights on for us at night when we came back from John and Bill's but we felt guilty. However, I am proud to say that Lucy did use compact flourescent lightbulbs. It made my green self feel glad.

We were to eat breakfast and most dinners with our host family. The first couple of mornings she made us huge breakfasts of eggs, rolls, meat and coffee. I did not want to seem ungrateful, so I stuffed myself trying to finish. About half way through the week, she realized she may be over cooking and started serving us family style, allowing us to take what we wanted.

To take a shower she had to heat the water for us, put that into big pails and put them inside the shower stall. The bathroom was a separate building about two feet from the house. It had a regular shower stall, all tiled, with a shower head and shower curtain. Just on most days nothing came out of the shower head. So we took a bowl and poured it over our heads to take the shower. It really made me appreciate how precious our natural resources are. I used the water sparingly. To brush my teeth, I would take tooth brush and toothpaste as well as bottled water into the bathroom and pour a bit on my toothpaste. None of this letting the water run continuously while brushing.

Our conversations were very interesting. Ernesto was trying to learn English and I relied on Chuck to tell them in Spanish what I wanted to say. You could say it was one of the few times I have ever been speechless. Fortunately, they had two big Spanish English dictionaries in the house. We made good use of them. Ernesto could read English better than he could speak, so many times we wrote things down. It took about twenty minutes to say the most basic of sentences but we all managed.

Inside the house was not a lot of furniture. The living room consisted of four rocking chairs, a coffee table, a long mirror and a bookshelf. They did have a CD player and a TV in another room. One night we came back to the house to find about 20 people in the living room for a bible study class. We always say our place is not big enough to entertain. It could be because of all the stuff we have in it, like a sofa, two chairs and a huge coffee table. Seeing how Lucy lived made me realize I don't really need all my stuff to have a good life.

Chuck and I were very glad we got to stay with a local family. It gave us a good sense of how they lived. They were very generous and friendly people. At the end they gave me a beautiful wooden necklace, bracelet and earrings. We also got a locally made wall hanging of a little house.
I hope we do this trip again next year and that by then I will be able to speak for myself in Spanish.