By: Emily Wilkins

Emily Wilkins
Sun, 09 Feb 2014 13:32:46 +0000

When I lived in Germany and worked as a nanny in one household while organizing a playgroup in the mornings for three other families, they called me their “second-hand Aupair.” I couldn’t get across that, while technically accurate, the term made me feel like hand-me-down clothes.

And in Nicaragua, there is no concept of “walking distance”, because if you have no other transportation options, everywhere is walking distance, the variable is time. One of my ESL students was deeply concerned that I went to the doctor on a sick day. His mother thought I was deathly ill. Where they lived, seeing a doctor was 23 hours away: a thirteen hour walk to the nearest “bus stop” and another 10 hour bus ride. From my worldview, walking distance is less than 30 minutes away (so that you can arrive not profusely sweaty.)