POST by FRAN: A Head count for Head Lice

Francesca at Niagara Falls with Canada in the background

Do you want to know what it's like to be standing outside a familiar house, with familiar people inside the house and not be invited in, but instead be put in their cold garage all because you have head lice? 

It all started on a cold Thursday morning... around 10:30 a.m. The Capital on the Edge group, which contains ten Nicaraguan boys, my Dad, my Brother, my Sister and me. We reached the Seaburg's after a long bus ride, and Jen Seaburg, the woman of the house, detests lice! 

She came into the garage and talked over all of us in her best Spanish: "Okay guys, DO NOT come into our WARM house, you have to stay in the COLD garage, while I go through each of your hair one by one!" 

The response I heard after Jen's little speech sounded a little like this: "NOO!! We don't have lice!" Dad then yelled "At least we aren't sleeping on the street again tonight!" Jen laughed a little and slowly said in a bitter-sweet voice "Alrighty, who is first then?" What happened next was excruciating!

Francesca with her baby cousin

POST by RENZ: Nothin' like Nica-Neatness

You might not think it , but Nicaraguans are clean freaks. The women are always sorting and cleaning things, even when they are not at their own house! I guess they probably clean because it is so humid and there is a lot of dirt everywhere.

It is mainly the poorest people that look the best out of everybody for some strange reason. Probably because they do not like to look poor or something like that. They have like five showers a day at least and are always washing their belongings.

Now, because of them, I wash my shoes a lot more than I used to and wash my clothes by hand because for some reason I find it fun. That, and I also like washing mops and mopping the house and the porch. Every day, a mum of one of the kids in our school comes to help clean the "school areas".

Jonny & Lorenzy

I was talking with one of them one day whilst we were cleaning and I asked her if she liked cleaning. She said that she likes doing it and also especially at our house because we had tiled floors and it is more fun. The next day I asked another kid's mum and she said the same thing.

Jonny, one of the guys that teaches dance to the kids, my siblings, and I, is sick right now with a cold and  stuffy nose. The way he blows his nose is the most interesting way that I have ever seen anybody blow their nose. He does it two different ways. The first way is he blows with his fingers on his nose and then flicks his fingers it is really weird and I cannot even explain it.

The second way is with his shirt. He always carries another shirt with him and blows it like that, which I thought was really weird, because he is Nicaraguan and I thought blowing his nose with his shirt would be his last option but then again, I have never seen him blow his nose with toilet paper.