Grupo Uno: Tortuga Movil Visit

Hola! Me llamo Christie and I will be in my final semester at UMD as of next Monday! I am on my way to becoming a School Librarian in a Baltimore/DC-area school next fall.

This morning my group (Grupo Uno) started off bright and early with another fabulous breakfast at Villa Isabella. I had the pancake for the first time today and thoroughly enjoyed it. Other options included a cheese omelet, waffle, and traditional rice and beans. Here is a photo of some classmates and our professor enjoying the morning ritual in the dining room at Villa Isabella. (Note my pancake in the foreground!)

After a couple of unavoidable delays, we were off on the windy road to Tortuga with the Movil (or the bookmobile branch of the San Juan del Sur Library). Here are a couple of shots of the views along the way:

This is one of the several streams we traversed as seen from the front dash.

A beautiful view from the road.

Those are the books in those bins!

When we arrived, we were greeted by many children going to their schoolhouse to meet us, exchange books and partake in crafts. We were fortunate to have the cooperation of the teachers at the site who agreed to come on one of their days off for the holidays to open the school up for the bookmobile. We started with Alesha reading the ever popular El Dia De Nieve by Ezra Jack Keats (Nicaragua’s 2011 Read for the Record Book. En Española: Lee Para El Record.) I Read Historia de Dos Sapos by Mario Montenegro, the wonderful Nicaraguan children’s entertainer that we saw perform at ANIBIPA and Dariamba.

Here I am, reading to many attentive students in the classroom at Tortuga:

Next we broke the kids into groups to do crafts. We had groups creating snowmen made out of bananas, chocolate chips, and licorice, another group making snowflakes out of paper, another group folding dogs and cats out of origami, and everyone was getting the extremely popular face painting. Meanwhile, the students were also picking books from the Movil to take home. 

An example of an origami perro (dog):

Alesha reading with a young scholar after he picked his books from the Movil:

A beautiful snowflake from a snowy day:

The students pick out books and give their names to Edwin, who checks them out on their library cards:

After we got back from the Movil, we went on our canopy adventure which you can read more about on Sarah's blog about today.

After we got back from that, our kind hostess, Ms. Jane Mirandette, invited us up to her house on the hill for the sunset and some pre-dinner drinks and antipasti. It was delicious and the sunset was fantastic.

Finally we headed back to Villa Isabella for a wonderful dinner made by the chef there, Ms. Roxanna. It was a carb-lover's dream!

Another great day in Nicaragua!