Nice People

Sometimes I get so used to the real decency of people here when it comes to strangers I forget to note it.  But recently, traveling around some, I was reminded. I showed up at the bus stop to find the usual gathering of people with their boxes of chickens and baskets of rosquillas.  It’s always a good sign when there are people waiting for a bus.  It means one is coming.  The only question is to where.  So I always ask which bus people are waiting for.  That prompts the universal question here: “A donde va?”  Where are you going?  I remember being a little put out when I first got here—what business is it of yours where I am going?  But the question is ubiquitous—everyone asks everyone.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s because to go somewhere is an uncommon event, worthy of note.  The answers are never that fascinating and no one really comments on your destination but they nod their heads, a little more enlightened: “Ah, Somoto.”   The bus I wanted was the bus to Somoto and that was the bus everyone was waiting for, too.  But a few older people were worried that I should wait for a bus. There is another alternative, a taxi, but it costs more and I like the bus just fine. I explained all that but that didn’t stop these concerned folks from signaling a taxi for me, anxious that I take the luxury transport, get there more directly, avoid the bus. I’m guessing they figured a gringa like me should take a taxi.  There was an awkward moment while I waved off the taxi driver.

Another day, another bus. Another nice man standing up to give me his seat, something that doesn’t surprise me anymore but it still delights me. Kids don’t do it.  It takes a man of a certain age, say 35 to 60, to remember his manners and give la señora mayor a seat. When I got to my destination I was walking around looking for my bank which is not with the other banks in town.  I asked a gentleman standing on the corner.  He though a moment and then said that I was going to have to take a taxi to get there.  Meanwhile I spied the bank halfway down the block.  I thanked him and took off for the bank.  What was he thinking? The truth is that he didn’t know where the bank was.  But he didn’t want to be unhelpful.  So he advised the taxi (surely the taxi driver would know where the bank was). This happens in one form or another all the time.  If you ask people for information, they want to help you.  They seem constitutionally unable to say they don’t know.  That isn’t helpful.  So they sometimes make stuff up.  In the value system it’s better to give wrong information (maybe it turns out right after all.  Who knows?) than no information at all.  For this reason you can’t really rely on what people tell you.  They aren’t lying; they are just trying to help.  Still, you have to double check all the time, ask multiple people.  If you get the same answer multiple times, maybe you can rely on it. 

Interesting how in this culture you can't always know.  More interesting is how used you get to living without being sure.

Massage

It’s hard to believe I know but I enjoyed a real massage up here in my little town in the north of Nicaragua. This is how it happened.  I know a young man named Jorge who is a serious and responsible and modern 19 year old .  He is studying on Saturdays to be a nurse.  Studying on Saturdays is the norm here, the fortunate and unusually well-off students being the only ones who can afford to go to the university daily. Part of the problem is the cost of transportation, but I get the impression that studying on Saturdays feels to people like just the right amount of studying.  Anyway, Jorge’s course of study is 3 years after which he will be a nurse.  Part of his training was a course on alternative medicine including massage, which he took during a month or two of weekly trips to Managua.  

 But Jorge is also an entrepreneur.  There is a Swiss government initiative here to try to encourage new businesses.  It already has 2 projects operational, one a dressmaking workshop which is fitted out with some very nice machines and cutting tables, and the other is a bamboo workshop which has a building on the highway and employs a number of workers who make bamboo baskets for sale.  They come in 2 sizes, big ones for transporting rosquillas and smaller ones for gathering coffee beans. I think they also make a few novelty baskets for sale.  Every few years the Swiss government “partners” with the mayor’s office to identify other possible projects and then gives the new entrepreneurs business training, after which the Swiss put some serious money into the various projects.

 Jorge not only wants to be nurse, he wants to own a pharmacy and give professional massages.  He was chosen to be in the class of 3 would-be entrepreneurs given the chance to learn about business.  And at the end of the course, damned if the Swiss didn’t come through.  They built a big addition on the front of the house of Jorge’s family, fitted it out with floors, a ceiling, glass cases and inventory.  They also got him a massage table. (More below on the two other projects that got Swiss funding.) I heard about the possibility of a real massage while visiting La Farmacia del Angel to congratulate Jorge on his new enterprise.  He showed me the massage room, a tiny former bedroom in the house, dirt floored, adobe-walled with the usual tin (actually zinc) roof open to the sky at the eaves.  Jammed into the room, besides the enormous table, was the ubiquitous plastic chair and a tiny table (notable because tables are rare here) with a wooden incense holder and 2 types of incense. Jorge was ready to go.  So I booked an hour massage for the price of 100 cordobas, about $4.—a bargain by US standards but not something the average person here could do or would do.  I got the feeling I was the first paying customer.

I showed up on a Sunday afternoon with few misgivings and a lot of happy anticipation.  We navigated the potentially difficult issue of how much clothes removal was optimal and, encouraged by Jorge to disrobe as I was comfortable, I opted for naked on the theory that you get a better massage that way and besides there are no other issues when you are 68 and the masseuse is 19.  Besides in the States the therapists are expert at preserving one’s modesty as they manage sheets.  The only problem was that although Jorge had a table he had no sheets, but rather a bath size towel. Managing the towel worked out más o menos.  And at the first touch on my back I knew this was the real deal.  Jorge was tentative, but he knew what he was doing (unlike the sad little massage I had one day from some street vendors in Peru who had no training and thought of massage as sort of like a friendly back rub.) The massage moved as it should from back to legs to arms, chest and face with a successful turn over half way through.  Finally, there was a blissful head and face massage and, an hour and twenty minutes start to finish, we were done. Jorge gave me a minute to collect myself.  I opened my eyes to gaze out through the roof at the trees in the yard.  I was covered in a mixture of sweat and body oil, my hair a snarled mess.  I got up from the table and used the towel to mop up my body and the table.  I started to get dressed when I noticed that Jorge had left his several pages long massage instructions on top of my bag.  Glad to see he was paying attention. Dressed and left, wrapping my head in a scarf, and said good bye and muchas gracias to Jorge, promising to return again which I will. I have 5 months remaining in Nicaragua, enough time for 5 nice massages at my US rate of one per month. How lucky can a person be?

Note on the other 2 entrpreneurs in the Swiss program.  One is a partnership of two guys in town, both of whom I know for their interest in learning English.  They own Nuevas Segovias Tours and have a Swiss provided office right on the highway with, get this, conference table, computers, display case for artenesias, business cards and brochures, which I helped translate so that they are in two languages.  This is a lot of stuff for a start-up and I really hope these guys can make it.  It’s a little hard to imagine because my part of Nicaragua is not on the usual tourist route. The third business is called Yalavisa and is a video service/cable channel. The owner has Swiss-supplied video cameras and he films the goings on in town and then puts them up on a cable channel. It’s kind of cool to watch the Miss Instituto contest—all 3 hours of it-- on TV. Time will tell if the guy can make a buck.

Winter of my Discontent

Yes, it finally is winter here in Nicaragua.  As I write the rain in hammering the tin roof of the house again, hard and loud and long.  This is the third time in as many days.  The only question is how long it will go on.  Sometimes a couple of hours, sometimes eight. The effect could not be more dramatic.  The world is a cool damp place now, even when it isn’t raining.  The skies are often cloudy.  There’s a break from the sun.  Things are clean and weedy.  The hills around here are greening up and the river that passes by my town is actually flowing with water. Mosquitoes are down while it rains; they show up again when there hasn’t been rain for a few days.

  I’m still trying to figure out the complex relationship people see between health and rain.  Rain isn’t considered too healthy—it brings bad germs down on your head.  Last night Candida’s granddaughter, infant great granddaughter, the child’s father and the child’s niñera (baby-sitter) were visiting at about 5 o’clock when it started to rain.  They live 2 blocks away.  They didn’t leave while it was raining.  Next thing I knew Candida was making dinner for everyone.  “Don’t they have an umbrella?” I asked, knowing that of course they did or could borrow one of ours. “They don’t want to bring the baby out in the rain,” she explained, even if she won’t be touched by a drop of water. So the rain continued and they stayed till Candida was making evening snacks for everyone.  Still here at 9 p.m. when I went to bed, and again at 7 a.m. when I got up—Sleep-over.

Just as the rains started a week or so ago, I got sick—and I for one see no causal connection.  It just was my turn to be sick, I having dodged any illness except a cold since I got here. What I had was a urinary tract infection that showed up on the same day as a case of dengue, the notorious tropical scourge of volunteers and Nicas alike, or at least that is the working diagnosis. The combination of symptoms from the two left me pretty knocked out for 9 days or so.  I am almost completely recovered now. But even though my usual positive outlook has returned, thank God, I feel compelled to say that being sick in another country is as bad as I feared it would be. What I always suspected is that emotional reserves would be shot while I suffered through the body aches, fevers, etc.  This was true. I not only wanted someone to take care of me, preferably my mother, but in my weakened state, I was visited by all the worst demons of self-doubt, second-thoughts and self criticism. What a miserable state of affairs that is, and why it should be so I don’t know, but it is, and there is not much to do about it but exclaim in wonder when you are better and the confidence returns with the-más o menos-pink cheeks.

Bright lights during convalescence: Candida peering shyly into my dark room holding out a golden glass of fresh melon fresco; the super sensitive care of Peace Corps doctor Marta who long distance listened to symptoms, decided on lab tests needed, prescribed and told me how to get everything done without having to get on a bus and always wanted to know if the plan we made sounded OK to me; my Kindle and its 3G connection.

So that’s all.  For some reason I needed to say it and I did. 

Various

Here are a few random thoughts and experiences:

1.      It is hot. How hot?  I don’t know because we don’t get constant information—or any information at all—about the temperature, which probably is good.  We suffer enough from the heat without knowing how much we’re suffering on a scale.  But it’s so hot that nearly always there’s a thin film of sweat on my face.  My shirt sticks to anything it touches, including my back, the chair, my pillow.  I opt for my room where there is a fan and over the last two months, I have set the fan at a gentle 3, then a robust 2 and now a serious 1. There are three blessings heat wise.  When I teach, I don’t notice it.  And at night, in my part of Nicaragua it cools down, unlike some sites in Leon and Somotillo where volunteers use fans night and day. And this is not only the hottest time of year, but the windiest and the breeze is a blessing, teasing the damp skin at the base of the hair on my head until it feels positively cold for a moment, a micro second of natural air conditioning.

2.      It is dry.    Everyone is waiting for the rainy season to start which will cure the heat and the dryness. A week ago I, and everyone in my town I imagine, awoke in the night to hear the rain pattering on the zinc roofs of houses, a little at first and then a torrent and finally the sky emptied barrels of water on the house or that’s what it sounded like.  I smiled and I bet everyone in town was smiling, too.  Ah, the rains.  But no, it was an anomaly, no rain since.  When the rains finally come (on May 15^th I’m told) it will rain often in the afternoon and evening.

3.       Today I left the house at three in the afternoon and headed to the park for a little newspaper reading and to see what’s up, I being tired of hiding out with the fan.  I young man came up to chat.  This happens sometimes and I wonder what they want from me.  Usually it is to tell me that they have a family member in the states.  Sometimes they wonder what I’m doing sitting in their park.  Today we were joined by the man’s friend who carried the tell-tale bag of a bus salesman. All kinds of people sell stuff on the bus.  Sometimes they are on and off at the bus station, selling food.  Other times they get on and ride till the next stop.  During that time they lecture the crowd about one thing or another trying to sell something to the captive audience.  Sometimes it a preacher with a Bible looking to share a reading and a prayer with a bus full of   short term congregants.  Often what they are selling is health related, like mimeographed books on the supposed heath benefits of food, quite specific.  Did you know that papaya cures renal disease? But mostly it’s pills that are sold and the most common pills are anti-parasitical.  The salesman starts with a chart which depicts in enhanced color and size maybe a dozen parasites know to inhabit the human gastro-intestinal system.  Having gotten everyone’s attention, he shows a bubble pack sheet of pills that will take care of everything.  He tells them how many they will need to take and the price—special for bus passengers, cheaper than in the pharmacies.  The he walks down the aisle putting the right dose in everyone’s hands.  Later he returns and it’s amazing how many people buy the pills.  I’m not sure if it’s fear of parasites, the alleged relatively low price , or the psychological effect of holding the pills and not wanting to give them up. The guy I met in the park was a parasite pill salesman.  I tend to have a low opinion of bus salesmen.  While I recognize everyone is just trying to earn a buck, it bothers me to have to listen to the harangue. My Nica bus mates don’t seem bothered.  I’d guess they see him as somewhere between a public service and entertainment on the long ride. 

4.      Recently I took the bus to a nearby community to co-plan with one of my counterparts.  We were done kind of late in the afternoon and  when I went to get a taxi home, they all passed without stopping—full.  I was starting to get worried, really tired from a long, hot, too full day, when one of my students saw me and joined me to keep me company and to talk.  We hung out for a half hour or so during which he handed me 2 flowers from the llamarada de bosque tree (flame in the forest) one of the few whose names of which I know.  I’ll attach a couple of pix.  The closeup of the flower , the most beautiful in my view, hardly does it justice. This is the time of year for the llamaradas.  Compensation for the heat.

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.