Heat and Houses

Heat and Houses

According to everyone I meet, March and April are the hottest months in Nicaragua.  Until a couple of days ago I wasn’t sure they had that quite right.  Through the first half of March, my site up here in the North has continued to be quite pleasant with cool nights and dry, warm, but not impossible days.  I’ve been dreading not so much the heat but the start of the rainy season in May, on the theory that the rains will bring humidity, not cooler temperatures as promised.  But whatever the reason for the delay in the onset of the heat, it’s here at last, at least during the day.  (The nights and early mornings remain blessedly cool if no longer cold.)

By 8 in the morning it starts, not so much heat as solar intensity.  The sun is very close here and very strong. There is nothing benign about it.  The sky is deep blue and there are fluffy white clouds, but the sun is a demon.  For a while I walked in it unprotected except for sun screen.  Then I tried wearing my baseball hat, but women here almost never wear a baseball hats (men do) or any other kind of hat for that matter.  Instead, they carry umbrellas and look at me as though I were a little crazy without one.  So I got over my resistance to being further encumbered than I already am with water bottles and bags of necessaries like notebooks, sunscreen, insect repellant, cell phone, etc. and gave in, raising my black umbrella over my head as I walk in the sun. The black umbrella isn’t optimum.  People tell me I need a lighter color to effectively deal with sun and heat.  I’m in the market for a nice pale blue one.

By noon even the umbrella doesn’t do the job.  When I get home after school at about 12:30, the brick house with a tin roof is throbbing. There’s a rapid ticking sound that comes off the roof as it heats up. What saves me is the wind that, cooled by the shade of the house, blows through. Lunch makes me sleepy.  But a nap in the heat makes for wild dreams.  I wake up disoriented and damp.

 It’s not a good idea to walk around between noon and 4 if you don’t have to.  I’ve changed my habits to do any afternoon errands as late in the day as I can.  By 4 it’s better, there’s more shade to walk in. And by 5 the sun is low in the sky and the cool evening begins, often with a fine sunset.  I love to stand in the door of my house and watch it in the breeze. So the moral of the story is that you just need to know how to adapt.  The sun teaches that lesson effectively.

Friday I move to a new house, my third and, I hope, last in my site.  My first home was a house I described in previous posts, a really nice middle class house with roosters, dogs, kids, etc.  I lived there two months.  The house had 2 problems.  First, although in the pueblo, it was isolated from neighbors.  This made for nice privacy but not my goal of being a part of the community.  In addition one person in the house made it pretty clear that having a stranger in the house was not an arrangement that suited. (Although this time was rough to live through, I must say I understand.  It’s not for everyone to have a barely articulate stranger haunting the rooms of one’s house.)  So I moved on to another house, the only one available on short notice, out in the barrio of about 15 families, a 20 minute walk into town.  This house is really basic, government housing (rough concrete floor, shower and washroom in the kitchen, cook top but no refrigerator).  I like the family and could spend the rest of my service here despite the lack of amenities, but its distance from town interferes with community integration and makes it impossible to, for instance, give community classes at night because there isn’t a safe way from the town to the barrio at night.

And so, with the kind help of a lady in town who for some reason likes volunteers, I found the third house. And what a house!   It has cool tile floors, upholstered furniture in the living room, indoor plumbing, a small refrigerator with a freezer on top (ice!!) and—get this—an island in the kitchen! (In the barrio I have been preparing food, chopping tomatoes for instance, in the sink, there being no other space.)   There is a small porch in front where I can sit and say hello to the people who walk by all day long. Best of all we have 2 puppies.  The lady from whom I’ll be renting a room is maybe a few years older than I, with 6 children, four of whom live in town.  She lives alone in all of this splendor.  I am hoping we will be friends. (That is not a cynical comment.  I really hope to makes friends here, like I have in the States, something more than cordial friendly relationships.)

Do I feel a little guilty about moving out of government housing and into fat city?  Of course.  The barrio house is very Peace Corps.  It’s what I signed up for.  I don’t need all the luxury of the town house.  But am I glad to move into town and to leave the latrine behind? Si.  I’ll just have to deal with the guilt, sucking it up “for the sake of the mission.”  Fingers crossed it’s my last move.

And finally for all of you who have read my whining about the slow progress of my Spanish, I finally tested into “intermediate mid” the base Peace Corps language requirement.  Not sure I’ll ever be “advanced” but I’m minimally competent.  And for those of you who talk about coming to visit, don’t be put off by the weather report above.  Everyone says the worst of it is right now.