This Holiday season brought a sensory package of Granada sights, smells, tastes and sounds.
We kicked off the holiday festivities with an impromptu boat ride for late afternoon birdwatching on the lake, around the clusters of tiny islands that dot the Granada lake front. A sunset ride delivers magical sights…sunsets and a lot of bird activities.
As blogged earlier, we launched a Top Chef Granada family competition, in order to take advantage of all the culinary talents in our midst. Episode two (watch for soon to be uploaded episode on Youtube) was a simple challenge of Pasta, pasta, pasta. Boring? not with this group…
This was all “revving up” for the REAL holiday activity, namely taking in the Christmas spirit that engulfs our street, Calle Corral. True to our observation that, in Nicaragua, anything worth doing is worth doing louder, our eardrums were assaulted by the non-stop mortar shells and smaller explosives yielded by young and old alike. The um pa pa of the big tuba could be heard from a distance and as all the neighborhood kids know, the tuba notes are a call to arms as it signifies that the next pinata is due to be whacked.
After Christmas eve which ends in the wee hours of the morning, Christmas day is a low key scene. It is however an opportunity to give some of the neighborhood kids some of the goodies they have been asking Peta for. So what do these kids want? More than anything else? Materials to go to school. The best gift consists of backpack, pens, pencils, notebooks etc.
Faithful readers may recognize Peta’s “girls”, a group of 6 sisters whom she has helped since our arrival to get them in school. Incredibly, all 6 are still going to school, which is unbelievable given all the obstacles that stand in their way, none more important than the fact that their mom thinks it’s a waste of time and that they should be in the street trying to bring in some much needed cash. Still, she is starting to recognize that the longer the girls stay in school, the better their future might be. Here are three of the girls coming to get their school supplies…
