Nicaragua: Find yourself someway, somehow

"I'm sick of sitting through boring training sessions and I'm getting fat from too much refrigerio," a local NGO director confessed to me one afternoon a while back. (Refrigerio means snack provided during trainings).

Trainings of all sorts happen quite often around here, and they usually involve a group of people who gather together to listen to another person talk for a long time in front of a PowerPoint presentation. It seems to me that a lot of Nicas look forward to going to training sessions because it will either get them a day off of work, free food, or both. Common knowledge here is that if you host a training, you should provide refrigerio for your invitees. 

Part of my job here is to facilitate teacher trainings, and a little over one week ago I successfully orchestrated my first one. I made arrangements with the departmental superintendent, received permission so all of my counterpart teachers could attend, invited each participant, designed the content of the training, and delivered it successfully. The topics I covered were those which are taught at the beginning of the year in the entrepreneurship classroom: creativity, idea generation, feasibility study, and SWOT analysis.

We were a couple of hours into the training session and even though I incorporated a variety of activities to keep the teachers alert and even though the teachers participated with enthusiasm, everybody started to lose focus and energy after so much talk about entrepreneurship class. At that point, as any good host would, I brought out the refrigerio. Keeping all things Nica, I decided to bring sugar cookies and Coca-Cola.

As they passed the cookies around and poured each other glasses of Coca-Cola, they made sure to save some for me. Now here comes the fun part: a test of "how well do they really know Tracy?" As they were about to pour me a glass of Coke, they had a whispered discussion about whether or not I actually wanted some (she only likes natural things, they commented, she's a vegetarian). After a brief moment they came to a consensus that I did not want any Coca-Cola, and therefore they passed the test. It turns out that I have spent enough time with these people that they now know and accept my diet preferences, understanding that even though they all like Coca-Cola, the gringa prefers not to drink it.

So there we have it; I think we all learned something that day. My counterparts gained some new techniques on how to teach entrepreneurship and it was affirmed to me that it is possible to integrate while maintaining one's lifestyle. I think we are all looking forward to the next training.