The Good Life

First, lo siento for not blogging yesterday or Sunday. There were just so many things to say and so little time in which to choose what to talk about that I got overwhelmed and decided not to say anything at all. Now I'm regretting it because there's even more to share!

I've been struggling with my work at the clinic for a while because I feel like there's never anything productive to do. When the other volunteers who are here for an environmental conservation placement expressed similar feelings last night, it was like a light switch finally came on and I figured it out - maybe. I always knew that the pace of life here was a little different; we laugh about Nica time, for example, but it's a real thing. Ten o'clock never really means ten o'clock, "later" could be in five minutes or tomorrow, and there's no way to tell if the coffee shop is two kilometres down the road or forty-five minutes up a hill. For the first little while here, it was easy to think of Nicaraguan people as being chronically late, which made it really easy to get frustrated. Now, I'm understanding how nice it actually is.

Basically, my giant realization came to me today when I was bustling around at the clinic trying desperately to help with anything even though there was clearly nothing to be done. I poked my head into a room and found my doctor, a few nurses and another doctor just... chatting. My first impulse was to think, "Doesn't anybody have any work to do?!" but then I realized that actually, they didn't. There were no patients in the waiting room and they're so thorough with their charting between patients that there was no paperwork to do. I'd been so anxious about staying busy all this time (especially because I'm a volunteer and a lot of wonderful people supported this trip!) that I never really noticed what other people were doing; sometimes, it's nothing. The workplace is more of a slow-moving environment here, and "working" seems to mean "being at work," not "running around like a chicken with its head cut off." Nobody leaves early when there are no patients - because someone will occasionally wander in with a sore throat or a cut - but not everyone is on their feet all the time. So I finally said "Why not?" and sat down to shoot the breeze.

We had a particularly trilingual conversation about Spanish/English/French, talked about differences between Canada and Nicaragua, discussed possible names for my hair colour at length, compared health care systems and shared our favourite parts of the country. At one point, Dr Harold said, "Nicaragua is glorious! It's the good life!" and you know, he's right. Poverty is a huge issue here, health care is nothing like what we have at home and the charged political scene can make day-to-day life dangerous. Still, somehow, people here are resourceful, open and passionate. I've learned a lot in my time here, but I think that one of the most important things has been to slow down and actually experience the good life I have.