¿Why Nicaragua?

Good question. Where would be a good place to take my son for an immersion experience with a Spanish speaking family, be able to see jungle wildlife, but not follow the roads more traveled? Of course there is not just one answer to the question.
Several months back, I began to think about options from Mexico to Panamá. I kept coming back to Nicaragua for its natural beauty, lack of pretention, wonderful spirit of independence, and absence of major tourism. What can you say about a country that has been invaded several times by big brother to the north and yet has managed to neither become a complete banana republic, a drug war zone, or a tourist attraction like some of the neighbors? Add to that a REAL national sport (see Wikipedia link) and that's a place I want to visit.
Next step was to figure out where to go? A bit of web searching yielded the perfect place, Hijos del Maíz (see link). We will be heading straight from Managua to Estelí, then to El Lagartillo where the school is. Hopefully we will have a chance to post from there, although given there are no cars, there might not be internet connections, in which case we will post when we can.

The Guardabarranco, the national bird of Nicaragua, posing with the FSLN (Sandinista) banner