Logistics - The FAQs about Where We Are

We’re renting a house from our friends’ brother and sister in law who are currently visiting the United States. We have a kitchen, bathroom, living room and access to 2 bedrooms. We’re all sharing 1 bedroom for sleeping and the other bedroom is for the Caterpillar to play in or if we have guests… which we are hoping to in a couple months! We’ll see!

Sleeping wise, we’re back to co-sleeping: the Caterpillar is in and out of bed at night and it would be really tough to do middle-of-night navigating of mosquito nets. Plus we all like it so, another win for attachment parenting.

There’s no hot water… which is fine because the temperature here is usually hovering 30. It’s 26 degrees celcius right now (9 PM). Although the girls aren’t so stoked about showers, it’s generally all good.

There is a washing machine at our friend’s house - but I prefer to wash clothes by hand. It’s a little project for the Caterpillar and I to do together and I need to get the exercise! All clothes are hang-dried.

Food is crazy good albeit based on rice/beans/chicken/tomato/onion. Our friends’ mother keeps giving us the best food in the world and we won’t stop her. On that note, weight loss not likely.

The water is from the well, so technically not potable although our friends drink from it and are fine. We have filtered water for us to drink and brush teeth with and are washing fruits / veggies in bleach water then rinsing with boiled water. So far nobody’s been sick, fingers crossed it stays that way!

We live beside an orphanage and we will absolutely 100% be supporting it when we go home because we can already see that the kids are treated so, so, so well. It’s amazing.

Our community is pretty well developed: we’re on the side of the highway with the new development. There is water, electricity and as of last week there is garbage pickup, but there are dirt roads. The other side of the highway has paved roads and is a little further along in development.

And funding: How did the finances of getting here work? We needed to raise $700 USD to cover the cost of the Alpha Marriage course. John and I believe in the project, so we contributed $350 USD - and some of our local community contributed the other $350. Separately, some friends (between 3 separate families) also gave us another $350 Canadian which they said to use for spending money - so this has been set aside for that purpose (or airport food, which is crazy expensive). Other than that, the entire trip has been covered ourselves - so we're trying to keep things as cheap as possible. This has been slightly discouraging because Nicaragua isn't as cheap as we thought it would be! Some things are less expensive than Canada, but it's a little over the budget we planned, so we're praying we don't eat into any more mortgage savings by being here. (That's not an ask for money, that's a prayer for smart budgeting.) 

Also, Nicaragua is in Central America… not Africa. I feel like that’s an important thing to say because a few people have assumed that we’re in Africa… and we’re not.