Matagalpa

What's life like here in Matagalpa? What's it really like living in a third world country? Well let me tell you: most of the day there is no running water so we have to wash our plates and ourselves with water we have collected in buckets, from the time during the day that there is running water! It's amazing how much you just take running water from a tap for granted. Especially clean running water. I am sure there are worse places in the world than this where there is actually just dirty water to wash and, clean and drink from. I fact I definitely walk past a community of people who live by a river in Tim shacks who basically wash and clean from the dirty polluted river water so in a way in our house we are lucky. Still it's rubbish having to shower with a cold bucket of water, or wash the dishes with water collected in bottles, or not have running water from a tap to clean your teeth with. Also drinking this water , which I doubt is clean, is probably advised against. I think now I don't get sick but I definitely used to. I am not sure why. I mean what kind of things are in the water to make you sick? ? Is it just bacteria or is their some kind of pollution from the pipes? Lead or other poisons? You just don't know In a third world place like this because you expect the water authorities or the government to be keeping the population supplied with clean water but when you you see the amount of poverty and lack of education here, who is ever going to hold them accountable for things like this? They can do what they want.

Matagalpa on the other hand is a beautiful place. It's very chilled streets, cobbled with nice houses, surrounded by hills.it is also immensely cheap. I reckon I spend $10 a day here, food, rent everything. It is definitely much much cheaper than the corn islands.

Life here is easy, it's perfect place to just stay for a while and learn Spanish. 

Teaching in the school in La Chispa is also an experience. Basically I was at first given two lessons a week teaching computers. Unfortunately most of be class wer completely hopeless. None of them had a clue what they were doing, they could barely read the instructions and then copy the code I had written for them into the computer. However there were a few promising students, Larry and this woman called Daisy. She just seems to get stuff I teach her which makes me think it is worth the time!

I designed 6 lessons written in Spanish to teach people the concepts. People seem to like them which is great, however my main issue is the speed at which people want to learn. I would rTher teach the teachers in a short space of time, than stay here for months and months. That just isn't what I want to do. Larry has even organized meetings with the university as he thinks I will find some much more able students in programming because they are engineering students. I agree. I even had th idea of finding the best students and then creating a company here and getting them to program me android apps, for much much less money than in Europe or Ameroca. You could easily lazy a programmer here $400 a month and they would be happy. But that is a huge commitment of my time and some money. I just don't know if I would want to do that. It's an amazing idea though. I mean if I could get some business from Europe and organize the developers to make apps it would look very very good on my cv. It would also give the people here work, money and opportunity tha they would never otherwise have. I need to do some serious thinking.

I bought about it and decided I didn't want to commit myself to that long. I have my own life to get on with. I want to travel. I do t wanna waste my time there. I met some talented programmers who could be useful or atleast I could put them in touch with the right people/