At the halfway point of their #IGL experience, our @IveyMScStudents are given a week to get away from the demands of their projects and day-to-day work life to enjoy some time off. In Nicaragua, Linh (twitter.com/linci2703) and Sydney (twitter.com/SydtheKidd4) took two very different approaches when deciding how to spend their days out of the office. Sydney, our resident athlete, opted for a week full of surfing and fun in the sun along the ocean, while Linh, always looking to expand her cultural horizons, decided to return to her Nicaraguan host family to brush up on her Spanish and see some familiar faces.
Sand & Surf with Sydney
When I first arrived for my break week in the beautiful coastal surf village of Punta Apostentillo, I was under two assumptions.
I had decided after five weeks of living in a country where the average daily temperature hovers around 30 degrees Celsius, that I had a fairly good tan in place.
After a season playing hockey for the varsity Women’s Team at Western, where practices often happened multiple times a day, I was certain I was in some of the best physical condition of my life.
It took approximately ten minutes of my first day at surf camp alongside professional surfers for me to realize that neither of these assumptions were true. In my mind I was my childhood hero Kate Bosworth from Blue Crush. In reality, my mere forty-five minutes of previous experience swimming in the ocean was showing … painfully.
I left the first day with a fin-sized bruise along my ribcage. In the next three days, after a bloody lip, “sand burn” on my back, and a possible minor concussion I finally realized daydreaming on the surf was kind of like trying a local hotdog from a street vendor (neither of these scenarios end well).
There’s this part of learning to surf, where you’re using a board that is too big to allow you to do the customary ‘duck dive’ (diving under the wave with your surfboard). Instead, you have to either let go of the board and dive under the wave, waiting for the inevitable leg tug from the leash, which pulls you back, or roll with the board over your head and hope for the best. Either way you typically end up far closer to the shore when you surface than you anticipated. Never have I quite so literally experienced the expression “one step forward ten steps back.”
To the amateur surfer this physical and mental battle can be taxing, and there is always the option to just quit for the day. However, like most things in life, on the days that you don’t quit you can be rewarded with some of the best breaks of the day. I spent seven days in the waves. For every one time I rode a green wave to shore I spent twenty minutes battling a wall of waves to get back out past the break. Patience and persistence in these unforgiving conditions was paramount to success. There is so much more to surfers than meets the eye.
I remember on my first day of Ivey this past January feeling those nervous butterflies in the pit of my stomach. They weren’t the ones I’d become accustomed to with hockey games, they were the ones that tell you you’re about to do something outside of your comfort zone. I realized that first day I hadn’t done something so “different” in the four years I’d attended Western previously. Feeling them again when I arrived at surf camp, travelling alone to a place I’d never been to before, reinforced my desire to continue to step outside of these comfort zones. If I hadn’t I never would have experienced a week without wifi and subsequently become a Jenga professional. I would never have become friends with a pair of rugby players from England, a geologist from Montreal, an entire group of men from Barbados, or the incredible staff. I wouldn’t have jumped from a 30-foot high Mangrove tree, rode horseback along the beach, or held a baby in a local village. I wouldn’t be able to call myself a surfer and I wouldn’t have found this little piece of paradise.
Family & Culture with Linh
My favourite part of travelling has always been cultural immersion. Since I had already had a chance to explore the hottest touristy spots and relax on the beach during the pre-trip and our weekend getaways (stay tuned for a separate blog post), I decided to go back to the homestay family and spend a week with them and take more language lessons at Viva Spanish. On top of that, I stayed in Managua to volunteer with Vital Voices —– the not-for-profit organization empowering emerging women leaders and entrepreneurs around the world. I was matched with a local entrepreneur to guide and mentor her on her family start-up.
That week the house was full of people: besides regular family members and me, we had the family’s aunt and uncle visiting from the States and my new housemates moving in — two medical students from the States. Also my homestay family’s grandma came by and spent most afternoons with us. Being an only child and raised by parents far away from relatives, it was my first time living in a house full of people of different ages, and I absolutely loved it! It was great having so many people to interact with in different ways: I did homework with little brothers, watched a TV show with grandma, helped mamá with chores, and listened to host father’s work stories. The family also took us out to the neighbour’s birthday party — an event with live music, dancing, and lots of Nicaraguan food. We learned that Nicaraguans are very close with most of their neighbours. Moreover, relatives usually live on the same street or at least in the same part of the city.
To encourage ourselves to practise Spanish, my American friends and I came up with a fun game: we weren’t allowed to speak English in the house. If any of us said a word in English, he or she put 20 córdobas (almost 1 Canadian Dollar per word) in a jar — the money accumulated over the week was spent on buying something for the family. If there was something important to say in English, we either went to the backyard or outside of the gate on the streets. Happily, by the end the week, we had only $210 córdobas in the jar.
A shot of Linh enjoying the pool with her welcoming host family.
Linh (right) enjoying the pool with her welcoming host family.
We spent the weekend in Matagalpa, the beautiful mountainous region of Nicaragua with a mild climate and amazing coffee. It is also known as the “Pearl of the North” and “Land of Eternal Spring.” Although I am usually a typical urban dweller and not much of a nature person, it was so refreshing to get away from the hustle and bustle of the capital and enjoy the weekend of hiking through the natural reserves, visiting local farms, and jumping off the waterfalls. We even caught a dance show on a Saturday evening performed by artists from Guatemala and learned a lot about the history of Nicaragua’s neighbour and women’s rights in that country.