A Wake and a Visit from Spiderman

I have a friend at the instituto, Isolina, who is the groundskeeper/janitor.  She rakes the leaves and sweeps and mops the walkways and waters the plants.  I’d guess she is about 45 years old.  She has a little son, maybe eight years old and some grown children, too.  Isolina worked for Doña Candida making rosquillas several years ago.  I brought her Christmas cookies last year and she lights up when she sees me.

This week Isolina’s father died as I found out while visiting Candida’s sister yesterday afternoon.  He had been in the hospital in Somoto and had died of a heart condition at age 80 that very morning at 11 o’clock. There would be a wake that evening at his house.  The next morning he would be buried. Internments happen fast for obvious reasons in this hot climate. I thought I should go to the wake for Isolina’s sake, but frankly I was scared. I don’t know anything about mourning traditions here and although the community is used to seeing me around, I felt I’d be a real oddity at the wake, maybe an unwelcome distraction.  But friendship trumps fear.   I found out that the appropriate amount of time to stay was between 15 minutes and a half hour.  I figured I could handle that.

I entered the small adobe house to find Isolina sitting in a plastic chair, one of 5 or 6 set against the wall, most occupied by fellow visitors.  She was sobbing. Her face was covered by a little terry towel and someone was trying to comfort her.  When I appeared the comforter gladly stepped aside and I took her place.  “Ah Carol,” wailed Isolina, “my papa is dead, my papa is dead.  I will never see him again.”  She grabbed me around the waist, burying her head in my chest,  and held tight as I bent over to cradle her head and pat her shoulder.  I kissed the top of her head and said how sorry I was.  I don’t know if that was the right thing to do.  When I looked around people were staring.  Maybe I was too physical or maybe they were just taking in the oddity of the situation.  Isolina and I rocked back and forth for a while.  I don’t know how to say this without appearing insensitive, but she really wasn’t crying—there were no tears-- but she was grieving aloud nonetheless. After a bit I thought I probably should step aside.  I told her I’d sit down for awhile and she offered me a chair.  I had the first moment to see where I was and what was going on.

The house consisted of a single small adobe room with rough dirt floor and no windows, although there was a front door and another out to the back yard where the kitchen and latrine were. There were people out back cooking and talking; one of them, I learned, was Isolina’s mother.  From time to time, people came in carrying sacks of food, bread rice, and beans and walked them through the house out to the back.  The one room house had a single electric light usually, but that day there were two more electric light bulbs atop two rough carved wooden posts .  These were placed on either side of a coffin, open to show the face of the deceased.  On this hot day there was a fan directed at the coffin. People were milling around outside and from time to time children would come in and out.  Once two small boys sidled up to the coffin to look, but Isolina shooed them out. 

The visitors began to take their leave of Isolina and she thanked them for coming.  One stopped to look at the deceased and make a sign of the cross.  Isolina and I sat there quietly for a while.  I asked her a couple of questions about her family.  She wasn’t sobbing anymore.  When a new visitor appeared, I took the opportunity to leave, stopping at the coffin briefly, long enough to see that the corpse was not made up.  There was white cotton in its nose and mouth. Dead.

Later I asked Candida what would happen that night.  Isolina’s father was a member of the “culto”, the Nica name for evangelicals, and the members of that church would be at the house in the evening.  The family would be there all night, providing coffee and bread for the visitors and feeding the extended family that would be staying over till the morning. Isolina will be back at work on Monday.

Sobering afternoon.  That evening, though, during coffee hour, I was amazed to see Spiderman cavort by the gate to the house. He was swooping down crouched low sending out webs in good Spidey style. I did a double take.  I never see children playing imagination games here.  And I have never seen a child in a costume, even the kinds my kids made from kitchen towels safety pinned to the shoulders of their shirts. Spidey was little Freder who lives on the corner.  His birthday is this week and his aunt from Matagalpa brought him the Spiderman (pronounced Espiderman) costume from the big city. There was a shirt, pants and a head hugging cloth mask. I was so happy to see him playing like that and he was happy to show me the costume and the mask.  We practiced making webs with the right finger action and he was off stooping down the street.

Freder makes me wonder what is up here with the dearth of pretending. Pretending seems to me such a basic part of childhood, so essential a part of being a kid, that I wonder how Nica children get on at all without it.  What are they missing?  It’s like my feeling about the fact that they don’t read books, like something essential is missing and its loss must have serious developmental effects.

Or maybe I’m just not observant enough.  Maybe pretending is going on all around me and I just don’t see it till it has a costume. Maybe what seems essential to me is just customary in the States. Maybe there are parallel ways of growing to happy adulthood, one not better than the other, just different. Don’t know.   I’m going to do more investigation of this one and will let you know.

Shoe on the Other Foot

Shoe on the Other Foot

Another volunteer pointed out that sometimes Nicaraguan kids make a strange set of noises when she walks by.  They are “talking English,” as it sounds to them.  I said I had never had the experience but that changed last Sunday when, leaving my counterpart’s house, I passed three boys in front of a house on a corner and they shouted after me a gibberish which, as soon as I heard it, I could identify as Englishy though there was not a recognizable word.  They then started to laugh at me.   I admit I was not prepared for the reaction I had. 

I felt outrage—and for good reason—I, or my origins, were being mocked, subject to laughter by ignorant little kids who thought that anyone or anything not like themselves deserved mockery, kids whose parents had not trained them that it was at the least bad form and probably immoral to make fun of other people because of some basic attribute such as nationality or skin color.  I admit to being surprised by the strength of my reaction—how dare the little bastards?  But then I had two thoughts: First, this would not happen in my town.  Or it never has.  I like to think that where I’m known I am respected,. Second, I thought, “So this is what it feels like to be a victim of discrimination?”  I, who have been safely white, middle class, educated, privileged, was being treated like a devalued minority. It was a first for me.  And an experience for which I am thankful. Annoyed as I was, it’s instructive to know how it feels to be an “other”.

And then I remembered myself as a kid, in less enlightened times, when my friends and I would run around the school playground, our fingers pulling up the ends of our eyes, yelling “Ching, ching Chinaman.” In those darker days, people referred to others as wops or pollacks.  Just the other day, Candida and I watched a Spanish language version of Lady and the Tramp, a movie I watched as a child maybe 58 years ago, in which are featured a couple of stereotypical Italians with black mustaches, Tony (of course) and his buddy, who make spaghetti and sing with a concertina. Everybody thought it was a good joke back then.

And this experience, both the insult and the memory of similar behavior 50 years ago, is like ones I risk boring other volunteers with every chance I get.  Most of our volunteers are in their 20’s, often their early twenties.  They are rightfully outraged by all kinds of conditions here.  But many of those conditions were the same in the States in my lifetime.  For instance, piropos, the proposition/sexual taunts that young female volunteers suffer from men are not unlike the situation in American cities until well after the 60’s when as a young woman I could not walk down the street without hearing whistles and cat calls and rude propositions. They emitted from the “hard hats”, working guys who felt privileged to say whatever they wanted to a woman, or from male employers who made propositions with impunity.

Or there’s the matter of trash.  Yes, it’s a problem here.  It’s pretty much everywhere.  It is the norm to throw away on the street whatever you don’t want to carry—plastic bags, bottles, paper.  Trash is thrown out of bus and taxi windows, thrown on the floor in classrooms by students, tossed without a thought. Volunteers are pretty outraged.  But I remember my family doing the same as we traveled the new national highways in the 50’s.  The countryside was littered with refuse. Sometimes people threw newspapers out the window and the only protest came if they hit your windshield and made it hard to see. My folks emptied ashtrays out in the parking lots when they stopped at restaurants.  Consciousness as yet had not been raised; people just tossed what they didn’t want.

Then there is the sexism and its ugly brother domestic violence.  Big problem here, but so was it in the United States.  It wasn’t till after the woman’s movement revived in the early seventies that the problem even began to be spotlighted and new legislation passed.   Courts penalized the police when they failed to take a domestic violence situation seriously. Even now in the States we have domestic violence shelters and caseworkers, domestic violence courts and lawyers.

So what does all this mean?  Only that things can get better here in Nicaragua.  The country has been held back for so many years.  There are problems of all kinds to address, but the good news is that change can happen.  It won’t be like this for ever—or doesn’t have to be.  People can be re-educated.  It won’t be easy here.  Economic issues are paramount.  Nicaragua isn’t the booming economy the U.S. was in the late 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when the problems began to be addressed.  But maybe by tying social progress to economic progress, as in the case of tourism where the economic advantage of more tourists is linked to a cleaner, less macho society, faster progress can be made.

As far as the three little creeps, when I go back to that town I’m watching for them.  I’m trying to think of  a response a little snappier than ignoring them: maybe I’ll comment that the pobrecitos can’t speak Spanish—how sad!  Nah, won’t work—they’ll just laugh and say, “shmashana litush.”

Drug Bust on the Bus

My part of Nicaragua is close to the meeting point of two highways, each of which leads from the Honduran frontier.  There is a decent sized police presence here.  From time to time, my taxi or the bus will have to negotiate a roadblock.  A couple of times my bus has been pulled over, and police officers boarded and walked up the aisle looking around and then left and the bus went on.  I figured they were looking for drugs. 

Last Saturday I was on my way back from Ocotal in a packed bus.  We were close to my site when I stood to struggle up the aisle so I could get off when the bus stopped. As the bus was negotiating the roadblock, the police signaled us over.  Standing at the front, I watched 2 officers enter, one through each door. The cop near me went up to a guy and opened the back pack he had stored above his seat.  With no further ado, the cop put the guy in handcuffs, examined some tattoos on his arm and trundled him off the bus, leaving the backpack in the rack.  A cop at the back had another guy handcuffed.

From the windows we watched as the two suspects were first segregated and then sent to sit in a police car.  After a while the head policeman came back to the bus and to the backpack he had briefly examined before.  He opened it, removed a shirt and pulled out three bricks of something brown, two about the size of a brick and the third half that size. The packages were wrapped in plastic.  I don’t know enough to guess what it was.  Then—finally—the officer took the evidence with him off the bus.  He returned again, this time with one of the suspects, and the two made their way toward the back of the bus where the suspect gave up another conspirator who was immediately taken from the bus handcuffed, there apparently being no honor among drug dealers.  It seemed to me that the police had information—identifiers for the suspects like the tattoos and the number of men involved.

All of this took about fifteen minutes.  The bus was steaming.  The people were docile and awed the way people are around serious bad news.  I had stayed put in the bus really out of curiosity.  I wanted to see how it all would go down.  But as the heat rose and the action looked to be over, I got off the bus and looked for an officer.  I wanted to walk to my site but I didn’t want to make a wrong move, not that I looked at all like a possible suspect.  The police were pretty impatient, annoyed to be asked. But they let me go and I took off for home lugging my big sacks of groceries. I don’t know how long the incident took to resolve, but I can say I got to my site before the bus passed on its way.

When new volunteers complain of boredom during the admittedly tedious first 2 months of service, I advise to get out of the house and go somewhere.  Something always happens out there.  It always does.

Wack-a Mole_

This past week in the classroom has been like a game of wack-a-mole. I wish I understood how it happens this way, but I don’t.  Today I taught both seventh and eighth grades. My section of seventh graders, the scourge of the school by general agreement, has been a “challenge” as we like to say in the Peace Corps. There are three repeaters, kids who were a problem last year and who have ripened into full blown menaces.  Even the sweet little girls are indisciplinadas. After fighting off despair and the ennui of my counterpart, I responded with a few systems—kids seated in rows segregated by sex, name tags and, finally, a system of sticker rewards.  Amazingly, on Monday, nearly everyone was participating, competing for stickers just like the theory says they ought to.  Meanwhile the eighth grade class which soldiers on in the classroom without a partition wall was impossible to teach because of the noise and inattention.

Today, I arrived to teach eighth grade with a heavy heart but a good lesson plan.  My counterpart was in a bad mood.  She is periodically depressed I have noticed and with good reason.  She has a hard life, hard children, few friends, too much responsibility and not enough money.  When she is depressed she takes it out on the kids, as she did today, but to amazing effect. They kept still, paid attention.  The good lesson kept everyone on task and progressing.  Kids were learning and happy they were doing so.  You can see it—the bright eyes, the little satisfied nods when they get something.  Not everyone, of course, but enough so that the tenor of the class was positive, kids feeling accomplished.  And, as icing on the cake, the teacher in the other half of the classroom had her class under control so that the noise diminished to nothing, at times only the scratch of pen on paper.

I was starting to feel like I finally got this teaching in Nicaragua thing.  Maybe I should give a lecture to someone on how to do it. Heart singing rather than groaning, I climbed up the hill to the instituto to spend an hour with seventh grade again. It couldn’t have been worse. The lesson plan wasn’t brilliant but it wasn’t bad. My counterpart was exhausted from the heat and work and, unlike me, faced an afternoon of lectures on her usual time off.  And  the kids were out of control.  No one had their name tags. Kids were squirrely as hell.  One of the menaces was so bad I walked him out of class and down to the library to sit, an intervention that is not permitted in my school, but I did it anyway. 

Thus is it ever. You just get one thing going right and then it doesn’t. Can’t really prepare yourself for a bad day or a good day because you can’t even guess how it will be.  You just keep working with those teachers to make the best plans you can together and show up and see what happens.  Everything depends on so much-- teachers’ moods, the heat, the time of day, the prospects of the kids that day, and an indefinable, unknowable other thing that always keeps you guessing.

I'm going to try attaching a couple of pictures fro my trip to the Atlantic coast.

Semana Santa on the Atlantic Coast

I have been back from vacation on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua for two weeks but I’ve been exceptionally busy, too busy to write about the trip. When I first started this bog, I had a fear of turning it into a travel log, but I have had the good fortune to see a lot of great sights in this country.  All my visitors have been impressed with the natural beauty of Nicaragua and the visual cacophony that is this country, so that now I can relax and say, “Why not a little travel log?  Y’all come.”

So to begin, there is a tradition in Nicaragua that people go to the water during Semana Santa.  School is on holiday and it’s the hottest time of year.  For that reason my friend Lisa and I, who wanted to see the Atlantic Coast, hesitated briefly before committing to the 10 hour plus bus/boat trip out east.  Would it be crazy crowded?  Would we be able to get back to our sites on Easter Sunday? But we had the same idea.  There are only two week long vacations left before we return to the U.S. and, here in Nicaragua, free time has a habit of filling up.  So we decided to get this trip in. 

We packed light and left at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning from Managua on a bus loaded with people going home to visit their families for the week.  Four other English teacher volunteers were on the same bus, they having a friend in Bluefields, the first stop on the Atlantic Coast.  Bluefields is an interesting little city, the largest on the Atlantic Coast, settled first by the British on land occupied by various indigenous tribes, some of whose communities survive with language intact—the Miskito and the Garufina to name two.  So Bluefieds is a cosmopolitan sort of place, Creole being the main language, but Spanish and English spoken by many and a mix of indigenous tongues as well.  But to get to Bluefields, you have to get off the bus in El Rama because there is no more road.  You load onto a panga, a boat that holds about 12 people, for an hour and a half ride down the Rio Escondido.  We lucked out due to some pushy racing from bus to river port so that we had a panga with a plastic awning.  The ride was screened from the sun.  I have to say that the benches on which we sat, both bottom and back, were the hardest ever.  By the end of the trip I was feeling the pain, on the verge of taking off my life vest so I could sit on it.  Photo attached. Lisa is on the left.

In Bluefields we checked into an amazingly cheap and decent hotel—two beds, fan A/C private bath for $17. per night for the two of us.  We set out to explore the city, looking for something good to eat.  The folks on the Atlantic Coast know about desserts and we sampled our way through cocobread, luscious picos filled with cheese, sugar and, I think cardamom, pito, a spicy ground meat filled pastry, and the and various cakes—all on the first day. People on the Pacific Coast don’t do dessert much.  We have cake (spelled queque) and torta which as far as I can see is the same thing, but those Creoles makes cakes and tarts out of all kinds of fruits and nuts, coconut being the major ingredient.  It makes things moist and rich.

In Bluefields we joined with the other volunteers including my friend Alba who lives close by, for some meals, a trip to a baseball game and a trip to the beach across the lagoon from Bluefields on the Atlantic Ocean.  El Bluff was a great beach destination.  Although not blessed with typical Caribbean aqua water, it has small waves and the warmest water ever.   I stood for a couple of hours just being happy as the little waves splashed on my face and knocked me around a bit, like the gentlest kind of roughhousing.  The baseball game was a great opportunity because baseball is the national sport, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see a professional game here.  The Costeños played a team from Masaya, losing the first battle of the double header but winning the second.  I forgot how nice it is to be a fan, how fun just to sit a give yourself over to something not that important, something for which you have no responsibility. Spectator—unjustly maligned avocation.

After a couple of days in Bluefields, we headed off to Laguna de Perlas, a 45 minute panga ride away on inland waterways to the laguna to the north that gives the town its name.  The other volunteers left on the same day so we were becoming a nice extended group.  We stayed at a couple of places in Lagunas, the first being a little expensive on account of Semana Santa.  Lisa found another place that cut our room cost in half and we moved.  Spent the first day locating a good comedor for gallo pinto (Nica rice and beans staple) but with a costeño addition—cocomilk. Also, naturally, we found the bakery where we made friends with the Creole bakers who were so warm and generous that we ended up using the bakery for the gathering place during our stay.  We met up with another volunteer, Sarah, for whom Laguna de Perlas is a second site, her first having been up near me, and for that reason we are friends. Sarah showed us around and arranged for a tour of the Pearl Cays, famous for being uninhabited and beautiful in the Caribbean way—white sands and clear aqua water.

Unfortunately the tour didn’t materialize.  The day was so windy that the guide called it off. Disappointed, we maybe too hastily hooked up with two Austrian girls who had arranged a tour inside the lagoon to some of the indigenous communities. (A kind of nerdy tour, we joked but what else can you expect from people who read books and volunteer in 3d world countries?) I’ll give you a heads up about how this story ends.  The guide, we later learned, is unscrupulous (details to follow) and should have warned us off because of the weather, but he didn’t, and we headed off expecting a little cultural broadening even if we couldn’t have a glorious beach day.  There were 9 of us in the panga.  It rained hard as soon as we set out and we made the first leg of the trip stooped under a black plastic tarp.  It was still raining at the first stop, a Miskito village where another guide met us to show us  around.  Not much to see but the guide tried to give us some information.  I saw a small sculpture from pre-Comumbian times, of a manatee, a totem figure for the Miskito.  But as we were walking around, feeling pretty obvious, one volunteer said it: “This doesn’t feel right.”  Of course it didn’t.  We are used to being a part of communities not unlike the one we were touring, and it felt bad to be there like a tourist, gawking, even if we politely gawk.

Back to the panga and on to the next stop, this one where  we were told lived a man from “San Francisco”.  The guide said it wouldn’t hurt to talk to him.  We unloaded and walked up a slight hill to behold the biggest, most overdone, monstrous ostentatious house I’ve ever seen in Nicaragua or maybe in the States except for gilded age grotesqueries.  For some reason the guy permited us to use the bathrooms and so I can confirm that the interior of this house was a match for the exteriaor.  We met the man—not as it turned out from San Francisco, but from a town outside L.A., a retired guy who came down to Nicaragua, bought up riverfront land from, he assured us, an unassailable source  (a claim with which his Miskito neighbors begged to differ) and steamed in container loads of stuff from Managua, over Lake Colcibolca down rivers into Pearl Lagoon like some latter day Kurtz where he lives in splendid isolation, not able to leave because of the damage that for some reason happens to his property when he is away.  Why were we here?  “Too get material for blog entries,” we reasoned, no other reason being apparent.  Joe San Francisco’s only connection to the indigenous, it appears, is the wrath he has incurred by building on what he has been told is his land, but the Miskito persist in thinking is theirs. Second possibility:  The tour guide wanted a relationship with a gringo with so much money to throw around.   Third choice:  The guy wanted a relationship with the guide because there was some talk of turning the monstrosity into B and B and anyone who could deliver customers is a valued guy.

By this time, needless to say, people were getting a little disgruntled.  The tour had promised a 30 to 45 minute hike at this point which was not happening because the guide ”forgot his shoes”.  Back in the panga we headed off for the next indigenous community and lunch. The guide told us that some nice lady in a community would make us lunch for about 70 cordobas.  This price had been confirmed repeatedly by the guide, the last time just before we left Joe San Francisco. It rained on us all the way to the next town, a Garifana community, maybe the last in Nicaragua, the Garifana having originated in Honduras to the north. We headed up from the dock and into a hotel where we were seated—maybe the little indigenous lady was cooking in  the hotel kitchen.  I should say that our group was comprised of us volunteers, the 2 Austrian girls and a middle aged couple from Managua, Conny and Mario.  As we waited for lunch seated in a large circle, Conny and Mario broke out red wine and orange Fanta, ordered up, ice, a pitcher and 9 glasses and treated us all to middle-of-the-day sangria (do not mock—try it.) Lunch was delicious, clearly worth more than the 70 cordobas advertized. When the bill came, however, the cost was nearly double.  By this time dissatisfaction with the guide  focused on the bill.  We agreed to pay 100 cordobas each and told the guide he had to supply the rest, some 240 cordobas.

Things were not going well.  The guide was furious.  We had received from him no insight into the different cultures around the Laguna, and so, after a hasty walk to a beach close to the Garifuna town, named Orinoco, we set off for Laguna de Perlas.  The trip was long, maybe an hour and a half, and frankly a little frightening.  The water was choppy, winds high and there was intermittent rain.  The engine cut out from time to time; the boat heeled over in the wind. But we arrived safely back.

That night I was thinking about visiting the guide the next day to explain what he might try in order to keep tourists happy, but I ran into the small business volunteer in town and explained the situation to him, thinking he’d be a better person to talk to the guide.  No way, said our volunteer, he’s the worst guide in the place.  In fact, he said, he “killed” 7 tourists in conditions much like we were in the day before. He went to jail for the deaths.  The volunteer said the guide was only in it for the money.  He wasn’t someone the volunteer cared to work with.  Grim news.

Luckily for dinner our last night Lisa and I tried the famous “rundon”, a Creole dish of fish, lobster, plaintain and yucca in the most incredible coconut milk sauce so subtly flavored I couldn’t tell you what was in it.  Best meal in Nicaragua yet.

This has gone on too long.  But the end of the trip was its own kind of magic.  I ran into Conny and Mario in town and they invited me to drive back to Managua with them in their car the next day.  Lisa and I had been planning to leave on the bus and so when I told her I had the offer, she was elated. The drive back was tough for 4 hours over dirt roads and 4 hours on decent paved roads, but incredibly more pleasant than the bus would have been in the air conditioned car.  Conny and Mario are a first for me, an upper middle class Nica couple who travel and like to talk.  We talked a good deal about language.  We stopped for breakfast (Lisa and I confining ourselves to tortilla and cheese) and they picked up the modest tab. They dropped us at a mall in Managua.  I got their email and received a nice response to my thank you note and an offer to meet up again.

This story will end:  Lisa knows a guy from the Embassy who opens his house to volunteers.  He said we could stay the night. The house is huge—3 bathrooms, a big US style kitchen, a humongous flat screen TV and, best of all, a washer and dryer.  He let us wash our clothes, something I had been day dreaming about—my clothes are so not-really-clean all the time.  The guy ordered take out for us.  The best, though, was the conversation about politics, foreign policy, books.  I hadn’t had one like that in a long time and left the gated, concertina wired, guarded house the next day grateful for the lovely ending to a great trip.  The bus to my site was waiting when I got to the bus station and I got a seat.  Life is pretty sweet.

Infratructure Blues

I just got back from a vacation to the Atlantic Coast for Semana Santa (please see next blog post for details) The trip is an epic journey of somewhere between 13 and 16 hours by bus from mt site.  Half to a third of that time is spent either on bone-rattling dirt roads or in pongas—boats that carry 10 or 12 people. It’s hard to believe that there is no direct road connecting the capital city to the main city of the Atlantic Coast, but there isn’t.  This has gotten me thinking again about the huge need for infrastructure in this country where everything—raod building excepted—is done by hand.

Up here in the north, too, there is simply not enough public space for basic activities.  For example I teach in both the high school and the primary school buildings.  The school buildings are in blocks of 2 or 3 classrooms each, single story brick structures with two doors for each classroom and windows along the long sides to admit air, insects, noise, dirt.  In some of the 2-classroom structures there is no wall separating the two classrooms, but rather a folding wall which someone thought would be a good idea for large gatherings.  This year I have 4 classes each week in one of these structure, but unfortunately the folding wall has been broken since the beginning of the school year in February, the pieces tied together with string and hauled to the side of the classroom. As a result two classes meet in either end of the large space.  The noise is incredible.   We’d be better off outside.  If my fellow teacher has group work planned and I am presenting material, I really can’t be heard above the din.  Or so I thought.  One day I sat on the side and watched my co-teacher present some material as the noise from the other classroom made her remarks unintelligible to me.  But I watched the kids.  Not everyone was listening, but those who were trying to understand could hear her.  I think they were reading her lips. Had this situation happened in the States, either the teacher would have refused to go on or the students would have been put out beyond words. But my kids were cheerful, participating as they could (once again those who chose to participate) paying no attention to the horrific din.  As an aside, no one complains to an authority about the missing wall.  The teachers will say what a pain it is not to have a wall, but no one is marching down to the delegado’s office to demand that conditions improve.  This is how it is for right now, the attitude of both teacher and student says, no use getting upset about it.  Just let it be. Could be the theme song of Nicaragua.

I also teach a community class in Somoto twice a week.  It’s at two in the afternoon, the hottest time of day in this, April, the hottest month of the year. By contrast, this class is taught in the second fanciest facility in town, the Palace of Culture.  However we share the space with 2 or 3 other groups who meet at the same time.  One, a guitar class given by my old English teacher, Profe Ernesto, has an inside room, but my class and an art class share a corridor outside.  Ernesto’s students make a fair amount of noise but it’s not unpleasant noise and I can talk above it.  The artists are a quiet bunch, so the three of us share the space peaceably.  What I note, however, is how unfazed my students are by the sharing.  They appear to have no expectation of a separate facility.  They are used to sharing, making do with what is given.

My little class for the primary grade kids continues at the town library once a week. The library is a hot little room painted a bright yellow.  There is a door and two windows.  During class people come and go.  Kids not taking part in the class visit the library to play games or hang out with their friends.  Usually there is not much problem.  I can’t say the visitors actually respect the class but then they aren’t too disruptive so we go along on parallel tracks, they occasionally sitting down to see what we’re up to, sometimes joining in for a few minutes.  But this week there was a new element. A chainsaw, rarely seen or heard in It this town, was employed by government officials to cut up a big tree that had fallen outside the door of the library. As you can imagine the noise was considerable.  It was impossible to be heard. The librarian tried to compensate by closing the door and shuttering the windows. The noise continued; the heat rose. The kids continued working on their projects, oblivious, not even curious.  Everyone is so used to putting up with things.  Only their gringa volunteer has a problem.

I have described before how all the labor to build things here, with the exception of roads where machines are employed, is manual labor.  The roads, too, are the only exception to the haphazard way things are built.  There are apparently no standards for anything.  Sidewalks, where they have them, start and stop without reason, change levels, contain obstructions or holes.  It’s safer to walk in the streets.  Stairs are built as the builder, often not a professional, sees fit which means that sometimes the steps are steep, the tread narrow, and sometimes they are shallow and wide. I’ve fallen 3 times in Nicaragua, once in a hotel where I was looking at paintings for sale on the wall and didn’t pay attention to the fact that the floor inexplicably dropped a level. (Another time I fell while walking on the impossible sidewalks, the sun in my eyes.) This is all part of what it means to be third world. 

I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining. (OK—I admit to complaining about the noise while I teach, but in my favor I can say that it doesn’t surprise me anymore and I recognize that my reaction is a matter of incomplete acculturation.) I am just amazed on how much is to be done here, and how patient and adaptive the people are.