Today Is the Day

As a recap of the last few weeks, let me just say how wonderful it was to go home for a few weeks and spend some time with family and friends. It never seems like enough, but it's wonderful to get the time we had. We've been back for about a week now, and the weather has been wonderful - warm and breezy and pretty delightful. Monday and Tuesday were teacher work days, and we start school tomorrow (Thursday). The reason we don't start today is that Daniel Ortega is becomng our new president today, and I think we're all holding our breath a bit.

If you have read our stuff on a regular basis at all, you know the contreveries surrounding Ortega. Again, we should be perfectly safe, but there is still quite a concern for the country. He is supposedly the "common man's" president, yet his first real contreversy is that the current presidential offices are not acceptable and he is remodeling another set of offices to the tune of 9 million dollars. In a country like Nicaragua, this is a huge amount of money. I think we're going to try and watch the actual inaguration on television; maybe we'll even catch glimpes of Chavez, Castro's brother, and the president of Iran, all of whom are supposed to be there. How's that for a trio? So far US is still full-steam ahead with finishing the new embassy and supporting Nicaragua, which is really great. (The US gets so much crap for "intruding" financally in other countries, which sometimes it probably rightfully should, but no one says a word when European nations threaten to pull support if Nicaragua passes too-strict anti-abortion legislation. Anyway...)

There are a few things that have made us start questioning a little what's going to happen to the country, though. We had some friends who were trying to fly out of the country on Sunday with buddy passes, and couldn't get out of the country until Wednesday, which is unheard of. Last week we were at immigration and have never seen it so packed - there was even a television crew. We didn't know what was going on, but now we're wondering if people were trying to get exit visas. One of the teachers was on a plane with a Nicaraguan living in the states who was coming back for one day simply to withdraw all his money from the bank. It's going to be interesting, to say the least. Today is an historic moment in Nicaragua's history, and we'll just have to see where that history takes us.