I´ve been living in Jucuapa Occidental about 3 months. When I first arrived, people would stop in their tracks and stare, jaws dropping, and children would hide behind trees and stare, because I might as well be an alien. Now, people mostly know who I am but at times I still think that they can´t believe this random Asian girl is living here. Admittedly, I would be shocked too if I were a Nicaraguan who in the comfort of my home was watching a Jackie Chan movie on TV when one day this Asian girl walks into my house and starts talking in Spanish to me. (By the way, this really did happen..several times.)
Part of Peace Corps experience is sharing American culture with Nicaraguans. For me that means explaining that there are people of all nationalities who live in the U.S. In the proecess, I´ve found that Nicaraguans are generally very misinformed about Asians in so so so many ways. I have cringed so many times at these questions - Are Japan, Korea and China all the same country? Which is closer to us.. China or the U.S.? If you speak Chinese to a Korean he can understand you, right? Do you know kung fu? Are you related to Bruce Lee?
Therefore, I have hatched an important side project, non agriculture related but really super important. In the next two years I will properly school Nicaraguans on Asian culture. Sometimes I get frustrated like explaining for the millionth time that I don´t know kung fu. But other times I am pleasantly surprised. One day I was helping this kid with his English homework and at the end of the session we were chatting. He asked how to write my name in Chinese. I´ll use &&& to represent my name here. Then he said he was going to try and write it so he took my notebook and a minute later returned it, having written neatly on the page ¨THANK YOU &&&¨ It really made my day because here was this Nicaraguan out in the sticks who´s never in his life travelled outside a 20 mile radius from his home, and he made that connection.
