Beep

I haven't made a normal blog post in a while. I suppose I'm over due...

Well lately we've gotten a whole lot of snow. Yesterday and the day before we got snowed in at home, so we were basically cooped up on the farm for a couple days. It's not too bad... it gets a bit tedious, but hey. It was nice to take a visit into the city yesterday night though, once everything was cleared up.

This morning, Lake, Jorge, Thelma and myself made a presentation to the 8th graders in my school. We talked about our program, Nicaragua, the U.N. as well as Millennium Development Goals, that were set by the U.N. in the year 2000. These goals are suppose to be achieved by 2015, but let me tell you, they are far from reaching these goals. Finding a cure and reversing the HIV/AIDS pandemic by 2015? NOT happening. Sorry... I'm not a huge fan of the U.N. and I'm a bit of a pessimist as far as MDGs go... The intentions are good, but these goals are unrealistic. If you're interested in learning more about the MDGs, please click on the following link.

http://www.undp.org/mdg/
click on the little icons with numbers to view each of the 8 goals that have been set.

Tomorrow night Thelma has english class. She's trying really hard to learn english, but sometimes I think I'm not giving her enough oppertunity for her to speak english. When her and I have a conversation together, I'm always speaking spanish. Yes, of course, I want to keep practicing my spanish as best as I can while I still can, but I know that part of how I learned how to speak my spanish as well as I do now, is because I practiced speaking spanish in conversations. My spanish isn't super broken like it once was, but my grammar still sucks. I feel in a way that I'm depriving Thelma of being able to practice having a conversation in english. Thelma can speak spanish to me at regular speed or a bit fast and I'll understand about 95% of what she's saying to me. But if I do so to her in english she hardly understands anything. I have to speak extremely slow and use very simple words with short sentences. I try not to translate for her at work because I know she can get along just fine.

Eeek, I have to go. Talk to you all soon!

Ari