It's funny how life can be. The very same framework that you have for perceiving the passing of time can be so easily warped by something as seemingly benign as a halfway point. Your experience heading towards this mystical benchmark is one that seems to strain with an agonising lack of progress away from Day One as if traipsing through thick temporal treacle or being in some way magnetically repelled by the future. Your thoughts are consumed by doubts about ever seeing anew the green, green grass of home. And yet the very moment you cross the border into the as yet uncharted realm of the second half of the programme and the home straight unfurls before you like the most glamorous and inviting of red carpets, you start to perceive time differently. As the days begin to count down to the end, so too they hurtle by ever faster and you find yourself turning round towards the past, the fingernails on one hand scratching your head as you wonder where the time has all gone and those on the other hand desperately trying to claw in to the time you have remaining in order to halt its progress into its final resting place of that great, untouchable sanctuary of history.
This post is not about that.
It was inspired, admittedly, by the catastrophic thinking adopted by one whose time (albeit only my time in this part of the world, not in this world in general) is running out, but as for the nature and changeability of time itself, it is best left to philosophers and quantum physicists to discuss.
As we career helplessly towards our date with the after-Nicaragua-life (after a quick reunion with that God-neglected purgatory of Miami Airport), we have begun to view the project as a whole through evaluation-tinted spectacles. Also we have been encouraged to evaluate the project as a whole by the upper-echelons of Progressio, so you can take your pick as to which reason I was really inspired to write this.
One thing this has led me to mull over was what I wish I had known as a bright-eyed, knock-kneed newcomer to Progressio ICS and Nicaragua. This knowledge is probably infinite, certainly personal to me, and – by popular demand of the can-do Buzzfeed generation – presented to you here in a short, easily-digestible list.
Four Things I Wish I’d Known As A Bright-Eyed, Knock-Kneed Newcomer To Progressio ICS And Nicaragua:
1. People will get frustrated that you can’t speak Spanish
What on earth did you expect? These folks have welcomed you into their community, their homes, and are feeding you and in return you look at them, jaw agape, baby blue eyes wide and utterly devoid of comprehension when they’re asking you nothing more complicated or ground-breaking than whether or not you’re fine. Of course they find ways to surmount the language barrier and they do so with Herculean reserves of patience and magnanimity, but simmering very perceptibly beneath the surface is the frustration that they can’t get the simplest of things across to you in their native tongue and it’s excruciating and leaves you guilt-stricken. Learn enough of the language to carry out even basic conversations in order to avoid this calamitous beginning.
2. Nowhere with hundreds of inhabitants is uninhabitable
How we sweated and fretted about this one at the start; how many hours of sleep were consumed by and surrendered to thoughts of the myriad nightmares that awaited us in our host communities, lingering in the shadows like those threatening thugs from the movies. Each hellish horror we could possibly conceive of appeared to be jostling with the next one for the honour of being our official cause of death.
It seemed that the impending sense of doom brought about by mysterious new beasts that would thrust us for the first time in our lives slap bang into the middle of the food chain and long, scary-sounding words like chikungunya blinded us to any sense of reason. How I want now to reach my long arms into the past and shake my former self into seeing a very simple truth: communities that are home to and nurture hundreds of people into old age at a high success rate must be at the very least slightly hospitable. More than that, I’d like to tell myself just what a comfortable and pleasant place El Bramadero is in which to live. How many sleepless nights we’d all have saved ourselves if we’d trusted that life in the West hasn’t developed to such an extent that it renders all developing countries the equivalent of the fiery pits of heck.
3. You don’t have to chase the tan - it will find you…
This is a simple and short point that we all could’ve benefited from taking note of: the sun is not The Holy Grail - of contentious form and in an unknown location, hidden to centuries of eager and intrepid treasure hunters. It is a massive star in the centre of our solar system that causes places on or near or even not that near the equator to be really quite hot indeed. So roll down those sleeves and slap on some factor fifty, because that sun is coming for you.
4. Writing in a list format only serves to turn an informative and helpful blog post into an underwhelming three-point list with a joke fourth point added in to make the whole thing seem less miniscule and bring it to a clumsy and regrettable end.
Yep.
Written by ICS volunteer John Payne
