Corinto, Chinandega

I love my site. The large earthquake in Japan caused there to be a tsunami warning for Corinto, as well as a 4.4 size earthquake off the coast-this was a minor setback in my journey to Corinto. I was banned from traveling there on Friday and Saturday morning, due to the possibility of being swept away by a giant wave. Saturday I finally made it! Took a 25 minute bus ride from Chinandega, which is the capital of my department; arrived at the Corinto bus station and waited for my PC site mate, Evan (he is finishing up his 2 years in a month), to come pick me up there. From there I headed to my host family's house to drop off my bags and eat lunch. I have a really great family-the mother-Aidalina-is a firey energetic ex-director of one of the schools here-she's almost 50 years old. She has a daughter and a son-Gina and Mario-who are 23 and 26 respectively. Mario's girlfriend also lives in the house. My room in their house is a fairly decent sized room, with a bed and a toilet (pretty excited about that!).

Some may call Corinto a typical sleepy fishing village, but the only true part about that statement is the fishing part. Sleepy it is definitely not! Fishy-yes. My first day, I went bike riding around the city to see what´s there-we went to the fish market. It was somewhat sad, but they were chopping up 3 huge manta rays, a pretty large shark and some massive fish. We also went to the beach, saw the mayor´s office, the central park-where the local alligator and his turtle friends live in the fountain, town market, supermarket, Health Center and where I will be based out of La Casa y Clinica de los Adolescentes(CCA)- basically its a health clinic/teen center where the youth of Corinto can come for health questions, youth group meetings etc... ALso working there is a volunteer from Germany-Christian, my Nicaraguan counterpart-Xiomara and a pyschologist-Marcy (I think thats her name). As well as all of the above mentioned activities, the CCA also has a comedor infantil, which literally translates to child feeding center (but that name sounds somehwat strange to me)-basically a soup kitchen for children. They feed 35-40 children 3 times a week and I probably will be helping out with this. There is definitely a lot of work that I will be doing, but a lot of it will not be 100% decided until I actually move there which will be happening in 2 weeks. I have 2 Peace Corps site mates- John who is a small business volunteer and Dave who is a TEFl (teaching english) volunteer- theyre both pretty awesome, so I´ll be excited to do some cross sectoral collaborating with them. In Chinandega there are 4 more volunteers- Lindsey who was my roomie in DC and Managua-shes a Maternal and Child Health volunteer, Nelson is a Healthy LIfestyles health volunteer, Craig is a 3rd year health volunteer and there is an agriculture volunteer as well, I think, but I have not met him yet.
One interesting place in Corinto is the bus station. There are always 2-3 busses waiting at the station to bring people across the bridge to Chinandega. This is the only place that the busses go-CHinandega. Corinto is an island, so really there are no other destinations other than Chinandega. Aunque this is the case, the men working on the busses, yell at the top of their lungs, "Chinandega, Chinandega, Chinandega" just in case you did not realize that Chinandega was your destination. If you are at a large bus station, this is important, but in Corinto, with only one place to go...it does not make too much sense. It´s pretty funny...they take this part of their job very seriously!
That´s all for now-I will find out more about everything once I get to Corinto, but please continue to post questions and I will continue to answer them!