Fiesta de Quinceanos

I had been invited some time ago by a student of mine to her quinceaños party. I was honored to be asked to this event which marks the fifteenth birthday of a girl, her debut of sorts, symbolically her coming of age as a woman.  On several occasions I’ve looked on from the outside as the quinceñera, on the arm of her father, walked through town from the church, where there is a ceremony, to the family’s house where the party takes place. Following in a procession are family and friends, dressed up for the occasion.  But the most amazing of all is the quinceñera who wears a ball gown, often of pink or blue, and a tiara, jewelry, high heels.

 The party was scheduled for the day after the end of the Access English camp at which I was serving as co-coordinator with 2 other volunteers, a camp which the quinceñera had been invited to attend.  The camp was a fabulous opportunity for her, a girl from a very poor community, to meet kids from 12 cities in Nicaragua, study English each day for three hours with the best teachers, visit the shrine city of Nicaragua, Granada (which everyone says they want to visit and precious few Nicaraguans have actually seen), and have crazy fun in the way American campers have fun, so different from the kinds of limited games kids play in their communities. But the quinceñera declined the invitation because she was needed at home to prepare for her party.  I admit to being a little sad about her decision, emblematic as it seemed of priorities, and at odds so with her father’s voiced commitment to me to do everything he could to support her education.

I came to the party with my gift, a pair of earrings some kids I know had advised was a good one for the occasion, but I put a book in the gift bag, a picture book in English, just to remind the quinceñera that she has a mind as well as her great beauty. The guests were assembled listening to music when I scrambled up the dirt path to the house where the celebration was being held. The party was held on the packed dirt area in front of the house although plastic chairs were set up everywhere they could be, around trees and bushes and the wash stand.  The path across from the house was lined with spectators, who were not invited guests but gathered to watch the goings on.  Hand cut pink tissue paper flags attached to strings marked off the area and pink and blue balloons decorated the walls and formed a little arch over the special white cake with blue icing.

When the music was over I and all the students present were herded to the side to have our pictures taken with the quinceñera.  Then the food was served by her mom and aunt, two plates at a time walked from the house and handed to each guest.  I was served early, a small fried chicken drumstick, rice, salad and a tortilla, but I noticed that other people got a rice and chicken mixture topped by a slice of white bread, a meal I’ve seen a lot here for special occasions.  My first guess was that the adults got chicken and the kids rice, but after a while it was apparent that I was among the honored guests who ate chicken. That was followed by some delicious arroz con leche washed down with coke and finally by cake.

I saw something for the first time other Peace Corps volunteers had told me about.  While I was eating my chicken I noticed that a student sitting next to me was holding two plates of rice and bread, hers an her sister’s, but not eating anything.  I suggested to her that she eat, but she said no.  She was not alone. All around were people balancing plates of uneaten food.  I had heard that in some poor country families anyone who is fortunate enough to be offered food away from home is expected to bring it home to be shared with the rest of the family.  I expect that was what was going on here although an alternate theory has it that in the countryside some people are shy about eating in front of strangers.

This observation reminded me of a theory I have been slowly developing about the relative importance of the group in Nicaragua as compared to the individual.  This is hardly a new insight.  What is new, for me anyway, is the application of the group preference to situations in my classes at school or to life in the pueblo.  For instance, the proclivity of kids to copy from each other in class: The whole group functions to ensure that everyone passes, not just the lucky few who understand the assignment or work harder or do the task.  To norteamericanos it is cheating—straight up--because the gringo idea is that each individual rises or falls on his own merits and copying interferes with that goal, but here-MAYBE-it’s an assertion of the emphasis on the common good (passing, not necessarily learning, being the “good”). Another example:  students have pena, that is, embarrassment about being singled out to do something, speak in class, for instance.  Sometimes it is really crippling, the poor student dissolved in humiliation, covering his or her face or ducking his head. One cause, in addition to personality, might be the discomfort about being singled out from the safety of the group.  Another example: my teachers are less inclined to hold individuals responsible for their misbehavior in class than they are to hold the whole class responsible.  For that reason they would rather harangue the class than single out and correct individual students.  This is an extension, also of the reluctance of the school authorities to deal with individual teacher’s weaknesses (e.g., talking on their cell phones during class) in favor of general speeches about values—every tack indirect preferred over the direct.  I wonder if there is also in this theory an explanation of Nicaraguans’ reluctance to travel to see parts of their country.  I always assumed the reasons were habit or finances, but maybe no one wants to look more “urbane” than the others.

It’s funny how you can know something in theory and not recognize it in practice. It’s also funny how understanding the why of something makes it easier to deal with.  School starts in a couple of weeks and I’ll be watching for the individual/group distinction in action.  Meanwhile, my beautiful quinceñera student had her big day in the community instead of her big opportunity at camp. 

What A Difference a Year Makes

In Catholic Nicaragua, the month of December belongs to the  Virgin.  We celebrated Nicaragua’s exclusive holiday, La Purisima, on December 7, and 5 days later Our Lady of Guadalupe had her day of parades attended by little Juan Diegos with corked mustaches. Now the Catholics are getting ready for La Navidad (I am told, by a Catholic, that the evangelicals don’t celebrate Christmas and I’ll watch to see if that’s true.) I’m in my pueblo for the holidays, as I was last year, unlike most volunteers who return home to the States. I worried about that decision, but now that it’s made I am content to be here, in part because this Christmas promises to be so happy and rich compared to the last one.

Candida is in full preparation mode.  The tree and assorted decorations went up two weeks ago, but now she is cleaning every square inch of this house and washing every washable item and painting faded walls and hitherto unpainted surfaces.  The old blue and yellow slip covers are gone.  Tomorrow or Friday the red slip covers will appear.  The Christmas food is bought. I have had the traditions recited to me and, bless her and her family, I am included in them all.  On the 24^th the family will stop by our house bringing gifts for Candida and she will have been cooking since the early hours so she can feed all and sundry who drop by.  Then at 8 we go to church—a three hour mass!- which I will attend in the spirit of the season, while reserving the right to leave from time to time when the wooden pews get too much for my back as they assuredly will.  At 11 we open presents.  At midnight  there are fireworks—lots of loud fireworks—and then there is a dinner at the house of Candida’s sister Celia.  Not much happens on the 25 except recovery from the full Christmas Eve.

My contribution to the festivities will be Christmas cookies which I have been planning for some time.  I got recipes from the internet.  I searched out and bought big round pans which will serve for cookie sheets.  One of my friends from the States brought me decorations and real vanilla.  I hunted up baking powder and powdered sugar and real butter so I am ready to go. I have great plans to bake , ice and decorate three kinds of cookies, wrap them in cellophane and deliver them to my friends in town: Yamileth who taught me to make tortillas this week (while the kids in the family laughed their heads off at the sight of me and my misshapen tortillas); the family of Doña Dora who never charges me the customary 10% to  put more time on my phone; my directora and counterparts; the family of Doña Marisol which is always sharing food with me; Laydi, the lovely librarian and my co-teacher of the little kids; Isolina, the custodian and my friend at the high school; Hazel, the school secretary; Adriana, the owner of the ciber who gives me a discount and solves my computer problems; and the large extended family of my host mom.

I am filled with happiness these days, beginning with my return to the pueblo after a week’s absence and finding people so glad to see me back.  The place feels like home.  Grooving on this spirit for the past week (I’ve learned to groove while you can because something somewhere is going to change the mood—that’s the lesson of emotional life for volunteers here) , I couldn’t help but reflect on my last Christmas here.  I had been in my site for a month, with nothing to do but try to “integrate” into the community.  My Spanish wasn’t even passable by Peace Corps standards, I was living in a house where I felt like an unwelcome tenant, I knew no one (the teacher counterparts disappeared as soon as vacation started) and I was engaged in a daily struggle to lift up my heart and keep on going.  On Christmas Eve I lay awake in my bed listening to the family open gifts and prepare to set off fireworks, feeling as isolated as a plague victim. Nothing like that this year. I’m interested in why the shift, aside from the obvious answers—your Spanish is better and you have a good home to live in and you know more people.  Some of the change comes from a change in me.

Instead of assuming I’m a bother to the people of my town, they have taught me that I’m useful, interesting in a foreign kind of way, funny sometimes in a laugh- with as well as a laugh- at way, and, best of all, part of the landscape.  When I walk into a store I feel that I provide a vague sort of diversion, as though people would say over lunch, “That gringa was in today.  She bought tomatoes and rice.  She lives in Pensilbania.” Or “She likes Nicaragua.” And the listeners would say, “Ah, si.”

 I am certainly not a tourist.  I like to think that to the people in my pueblo, I am their gringa. I trust that in a crunch people would take care of me.  Fantasy?  Entirely possible.  Why should my impressions, so madly wrong in the past, be any more accurate about this?  No reason, but it’s my belief anyhow.

Mood soberer:  Not 10 minutes ago (it’s Christmas day now) 3 ragged children came to the door.  I took me a few tries to understand that they wanted me to be the “madrina” for one of the boys who looked to be 8  or 9. That’s “godmother” but implies someone who will provide financially for the child.  The boy was wearing the kind of rubber boots people use to work in wet fields.  He wanted shoes.  I explained that I cannot be a madrina because so many people would want my help and I can’t help them all. I told him where he might be able to get shoes (Tom’s operates in this part of Nicaragua). But he looked at me so steadily, the way people here who want something look, as if to say I am asking and hoping. When you say no, the look doesn’t change.  It says, “You can’t blame me for asking and I can’t blame you for saying no, although I want you to say yes.”  This look tears me up.  It also makes me defensive (What are you asking me for?)  In Ocotal one day recently a girl asked me to buy oranges with the same look.  When I said know, she said “Soy pobre.”  “I’m poor.” What do you say?  I’m sorry. There’s no getting around the request or the need to say no.

Merry Christmas to all.

The Usual Mix

The following is a list—with elaboration—of what’s gone right this week and what’s gone wrong. Or as we say in the ever-positive Peace Corps, what were the successes and the challenges:

1.      One of the kids who got into the Access program dropped by to tell me all about it, already using double the English he could before, and so pleased with his opportunity he practically floats.

2.      Candida bought collars and leashes for the dogs, after they escaped one day this week while she was in the shower. Help, she called to me as I walked in from a morning of teaching.  I asked some people in the street who miss nothing of the little that is going on, including the direction taken by run-away dogs.  The dogs headed for the highway which runs by the town, and by the time I got down there I could see in the distance their tails on the OTHER side of the road.  They were headed off into a barrio, but by the time I got there they had disappeared into it.  Disheartened I returned to tell Candida that I had lost their trail, at which point a group of about 6 neighborhood boys ran up, triumphantly carrying the 2 dogs.  I learned later that while I was running all over, Candida, much smarter, had offered a small reward to the group of kids who just happened to be passing, and they spread out all over town till they found the dogs. The dogs don’t much like the collars and leashes Candida bought the same day as the great escape, but she likes them a lot.  She ties the dogs up on the porch and, proudly, she takes them for a one or two block walk, Dogi trotting along compliantly but Bobi refusing to move his legs so that the “walk” is more like a “drag”. Dogi and Bobi don’t appreciate their good fortune. They are pampered dogs.  I can count on one hand the number of dogs in this town that have collars, never mind leashes.

3.      I didn’t teach much this week.  Usually I have a full load, but PC has a rule that we don’t teach if we haven’t co-planned the classes with our counterpart teachers.  Various and sundry circumstances intervened to scotch the co-planning (my teachers and I are really good about this usually.)  So I had time on my hands—and I enjoyed every minute.   This is an advance for me.  For a while here I relied on work here to a large degree to keep me kind of balanced and centered, along with other techniques which would make an interesting blog paragraph sometime. This week I had no trouble staying centered and happy without much work.  I did some yoga, read a bit more, took a few naps, did a fun presentation on 2 American holidays—Halloween and Thanksgiving—for the Access class in Somoto, traveled to a town a half hour away to pick up my medicine from another volunteer who brought it from Managua and to have an altogether delicious ice cream cone (chocolate with almonds), observed a few classes, ran into another volunteer in Somoto and had coffee with her just like in the States.  In short, I enjoyed just living. Back to the grind next week.

4.      Every night at 6 o’clock the synthesizer at the evangelical church up the street and around the corner starts up for two hours of musical renditions.  There also may be drums and a guitar.  There is always amplification and there is always singing so that the whole town is treated to the religious expressions of others.  The singing, always by only one person, is heartfelt but is amplified dissonance.  The guitar is way out of tune. (I hesitate to suggest that this might be an evangelical tradition, but in one house I lived in there was a family of evangelicals with a horridly tuned guitar which was played by and accompanied a man with an equally tuneless voice; and my Spanish teacher of several months ago, also a guitar teacher, told me that he was so offended by the sound of the guitars coming from an evangelical church that he offered his services gratis to tune the guitars, an offer declined by the church members. Draw your own conclusions.) Someone told me that this nightly service is attended by only 4 or 5 people, but they obviously get a lot from the amplification and the chance to sing.  I have grown accustomed to the 6 o’clock serenade, but nearly every night I think that it would never be tolerated in the States.  The police would be called.  Petitions would be got up.  An ordinance would be passed.  But people here don’t complain at all.    People don’t have the kind of ego that is readily offended by the actions of others. They don’t take the actions of others as intentional assaults on their own sensibilities.  Or maybe they eschew confrontation or the imposition of their own will on others. There is a modest sweetness to the lack of indignation, to the live and let live tolerance. The longer I’m here the more I admire it.

5.      I have been bitten by bugs during the night for the last couple of weeks. They leave painful welts.  I know they are not mosquitos.  I tried to study the pattern of the bites—often two close by, only on my torso, usually in front, only while I’m sleeping. I didn’t think they were bed bugs, too big.  Maybe spiders, but it slowly dawned that they had to be in or on my bed. Or maybe in my nightgown.  I started wearing a long sleeved shirt to bed.  No help.  So I called a PC doctor who said to strip the bed and wash the bed clothes.  He said to use bug spray on the bed and set it in the sun for a couple of hours.  I told Candida about the problem and showed her the bites.  I followed doctor’s orders except for the sun part.  We don’t get direct sun at my house, usually a great blessing. After taking all these steps, I came home from school to find that Candida went one further.  Although not two weeks ago I had thoroughly cleaned my room, she cleaned it again and more thoroughly, moving the heavy bed and the wardrobe to get every speck of dust—I’m embarrassed to say a dustpanful—which she showed me as if to imply that my notion of thorough missed the mark by a good bit.  She’s right—I’ve always valued tidy over clean. I was ashamed that she had had to clean my room, but grateful, so that night I made a big batch of macaroni and cheese, a favorite of hers, to share.  No new bites have appeared. I have my fingers crossed.

You can see that the successes outnumber the challenges, but the just plain living is what it’s all about.

Turning 68 in Nicaragua

It’s true—I just celebrated my 68^th birthday and will celebrate one more before I leave Nicaragua next year.  How did I get so old? Pushing 70, but feeling 50.  On reflection, I wouldn’t take the reverse, pushing 50 and feeling 70.

My birthday was pretty great.  I got to talk to my two sons.  I made a carrot cake, the first baking I’ve done here in Nicaragua because people are pretty reluctant to use ovens due to the cost of gas. But since I pay for half of the gas in my house and use much less than half of it, I asked Candida if I could celebrate my birthday by making a cake. Of course, she said yes. The cake went together pretty well.  I found all the ingredients except baking powder so added a little more soda and hoped for the best.  The oven has 4 settings—1,2,3,and 4.  God knows to what temperature they correspond.  I set it at 4 and took my chances. Probably it was a little too hot as the bottom of the cake had just started to burn when I rescued it from the oven.  But the burn didn’t affect the taste and the cake was pretty good.  Candida and I tried it warm with queso Americano (kind of like cream cheese) on it.  Then I cut it into pieces and took some of them around to people in town I like, people who have been kind to me.  I’ll deliver some more tomorrow if the election permits.

Tomorrow the municipal elections in Nicaragua take place. They are really important as the municipality is, I’d guess, the biggest employer here, so jobs are connected to election results. And political feelings are high, conflicts between the sandanistas and the liberals.  Elections are occasions for possible violence and so Peace Corp has us on “stand fast”, confined to our sites for 3 days. Tonight I was talking to Candida and learned that there had been some fighting in town today. I hadn’t seen or heard it.  It involved about 10 people, she said, but no weapons.  So I’ll take this one seriously and stay inside, as she advises.

I spent some of the day cleaning my room, getting rid of cobwebs and moving stuff around to mop the floors. This is the first thorough cleaning I’ve given it and, aside from staving off boredom, I thought it was a good thing to do to mark not only my birthday but also the year-to-go mark.  At this time next year I’ll be packing to leave.

The best birthday present of all came in a telephone call I received from Carlos of the Access program.  If you read the blog entry entitled “If God Wills It” you know that I was pretty bummed by the slim chances that my 5 students had to be accepted into the program.  Well, God apparently willed it because Carlos called to say that he could take 4 of the 5, the fifth one being too young for the program by a couple of months.  I am dumbfounded.  I thought for sure the kids were out of luck.  And I’d hop in a taxi or walk down to their community tomorrow to give them the good news but for the stand fast. So tonight I am a happy camper, stuffed with carrot cake, heart bursting with happiness for my kids, the room cobweb free and swept. But there are two more days of stand fast and I can feel signs of cabin fever growing.

The Best Day Ever

The Best Day Ever

Well, maybe not the BEST day, but a damn fine one.  There were no classes today.  Instead the teachers broke into teams to visit the communities and to chat with the parents of failing students.  (An aside: The 23 communities are widespread.  No one uses mail to communicate.  There is no delivery and it costs to send letters. Telephone communication costs money, too, and besides no one to my knowledge has all the phone numbers.  So the teachers visit.  I’m betting this is a requirement of the Department of Education, left to the end of the year by our school.  With two weeks of classes to go, you wonder what effect can come from the parental contact.  Why didn’t they do this at the start of the second semester when there’d have been time for the visit to do some good?  Ask and despair.)

Anyway, I jumped at the opportunity to sit in on this one and showed up early at the bus stop of a near-by community to wait for the others.  A teacher from my school lives in that town and was just leaving the house of a relative on his way to another community.  This teacher and I like each other.  He tries to speak English and this morning he was doing just great.  We had a brief exchange in English during which he invited me into the house for coffee and rosquillas. Of course, I went, with time to spare and someone new to meet.  Profe Ozmán had to take off but he left me in the loving hands of his family who could not get enough of me.  It’s hard to describe what it’s like being the object of such beaming affection by people who have so little.   There is such kindness, no sense of me as the rich American and they the resentful poor, only a genuine pleasure to meet a new and different person whom they have decided they already like and to find out what they can about her.  This is the famed Nica hospitality at its best. Eventually, I had to go, but any time I am invited to return to that house for more coffee, rosquillas and conversation.

We started out the family visits in teams of two, I with a counterpart.  She and I decided to speak only English as we walked from house to house.  She, too, was in good form today and we had real communication as we walked around the town.  I watched her in action in one household, the parents pulling out the ubiquitous plastic chairs (2) for us to sit in while they stood (no other chairs) with the kid present to witness the teacher explaining that he was intelligent but refused to obey rules or do any work. I admired her skill with this awkward situation, the boy and his parents humiliated, having to respond, to agree with the authority, but trying to find reasons or excuse themselves.  Had this conversation taken place a few months ago it just might have done some good.

We ended up at two different houses where there were no parents, only overworked grandmothers. In one, an ancient grandmother, wearing ancient flip-flops repaired with string, invited us to sit as honored guests.  She explained that the boy about whom we had come, a very short, hyper-active kid who does nothing but make trouble, is the son of a mother who lives about 20 miles away with her boyfriend and does not want the boy. The rest of the family pitches in as they can, but the grandmother is the person in charge and she cannot control him.  He cries, she tells us, because his mother doesn’t want him with her. My counterpart and I were subdued.  I asked if anyone in the family had influence with the boy.  The grandmother went next door and brought over an aunt, a young woman who is studying at the university on Saturdays.  She acknowledges the challenge but says no one had been able to help.

At the house of the other grandmother, the story was similar.  The student’s mother lived a distance with her boyfriend and the child was left with the grandmother who could not control her.  At fourteen, she had an eighteen old boyfriend she spent time with.  He, according to the grandmother, neither studied nor worked. The girl’s poor grades are the least of her worries, it seems. (Another aside: I heard stories like this in the States often, parents abandoning their children to grandparents to raise.  But here, when added to the number of kids whose parents are absent because they work in other countries, the census of poorly cared for children further burdens an already plagued school system, has effects for classroom management and bodes ill for the institutional strength of the family.)

I got back to my town in time to get to the ciber before lunch.  My goal: to get to vote in the election on November 6.  The background:  I arranged for an absentee ballot before I left the U.S.  There was a change in the law last year and I had to register again in on the federal level.  I thought I’d done that on line, but I never received my ballot. Needless to say, I was pretty unhappy, in despair of fighting the bureaucracy from Nicaragua, and I’d given up when another volunteer urged me to try to see what I could do to get the ballot.  I called my voter registration office at home and, guess what, someone—Penny—actually answered the phone and helped me.  I had to fill out the form again and email it to her.  She is supposed to send me a ballot.  I have to print the ballot and mail it tomorrow, getting it postmarked.  So, “Si dios lo quiere,” I’ll be able to vote, just one vote, but in a swing state, and that makes me very happy.

The Best Day Ever ended with my trip to a town about a half hour away where Peace Corps has just sent a new English teacher volunteer—a compañera up here in the North.  I must say it’s been a little lonely up here and I’ve been looking forward to someone else to work and talk with.  They sent a great person, an intelligent,  self- confident young  woman.  We talked for two hours in the park, enjoying the company and the surprisingly cool breeze (the rainy season is over—we’re heading into winter, shorter days, cool nights).  The volunteer is only visiting, but will return to her site at the end of November and we’ll hang out some, I think.

So, I’m writing tonight in a long sleeve shirt, having made macaroni and cheese for dinner, tea and homemade yoghurt with honey for dessert.  No work for 4 days. Maybe I vote tomorrow. Life is good.

If God Wills IT

If God Wills It

I read somewhere an exchange among some volunteers about the attitude revealed by the phrase, “Si dios lo quiere”, which you hear a lot in Nicaraguan conversations.  It means “if God wants it or wills it” and implies that people  can make their plans but they may not happen.  To a North American ear it sounds indefinite.  “Will I meet you at 10?” “If God wills it”.  The discussion among the volunteers lamented the powerlessness they hear in the phrase. Some of them thought that it revealed a lack of commitment or strength of intention. It showed, they thought, a tendency to avoid responsibility for one’s obligations.

I was thinking of that phrase last Monday as I walked the half kilometer to the empalme to catch a bus to Ocotal, carrying with me the carefully assembled applications of five of my students for the Access program starting up in Ocotal for the first time in November.  Access offers free English classes to 24 students.  The commitment is a big one for the students—2 hours a day, Monday through Friday, for two years, but the results of the program are impressive.  Kids learn to speak pretty good English after one year.  The program is supposed to be for the poorest students and if the student lives a distance from the city, it pays for his or her transportation.  As I think I’ve written before, it’s an excellent use of tax-payer dollars.

The assembling of these applications had been a hurried affair for many reasons, but they were done. I had written five recommendations for these students in whom I believe.  The deadline for submission was noon and I was aware of the hope I carried in my bag.  It occurred to me that any number of things could prevent the delivering of these documents by the deadline.  The bus could break down, there might not be a taxi at the bus station, the taxi driver might not know where the office I was looking for was located (this last actually happened).  Just getting the documents assembled was not the end of the process and in a country where the best efforts can be easily foiled, anything can happen and who knows how God is feeling about any particular endeavor.

We don’t honor randomness much in the States.  We think we can control outcomes by working hard enough, by the force of will-power and stick-to-it-tiveness.  At least I admit to having that attitude when I worked at home.  And it dogs me still here in Nicaragua.   I was talking to one counterpart about the difference between the two outlooks.  When I explained that Americans often think they can make just about anything happen, she laughed aloud.  Then, afraid she had given offense, she went on to declare her admiration for American intelligence and work ethic, but not to acknowledge our dependence or forces outside ourselves, that was just plain silly.

What I want to address is the experience of the two points of view in my life here in Nicaragua. I can actually feel myself puff up when I am in norteamericano, getting-things-done mode.  The assembling of the Access applications is an example.  I was all over that one.  One student couldn’t get a document she needed until after the deadline.  I was shooting off emails requesting the right to submit the document electronically.  Made it happen. Puff up a little more.

But then, having delivered the documents, God apparently having been willing that I do that, I learned that there were over 60 applications for the 24 places in class, that some of my students’ application essays lacked sufficient words, and worst, that the class is only offered in the morning, when my students have their regular high school class.  Looks like they are out of luck. Ego deflation; no more puff.  I guess God didn’t will that one. 

Or maybe he will.  Maybe something will happen and the program will decide to offer two classes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon and the selection committee will be so impressed with my kids that it will pick all my students to enroll. Or who knows?   We’re in Nica waiting mode, our fates in the hands of others.

Dressing Like a Nica

In my house we have two cute little fluffy  almost white dogs, Dogi and Bobi, who like nothing better than pulling my clothes off the line and eating them.  I have rescued shirts and underpants that were dirty by the time I got to them, but not ruined.  My luck changed about a month ago. I woke up from a nap and went out to check on the progress of the clothes drying outside.  My jeans were hanging on the line looking a little dirty, but when I checked on them I found a hole the size of washcloth eaten out of the seat.  Candida had found them on the ground and hung them up, somehow not noticing the huge hole.  She was horrified when she saw what the dogs had done and had several suggestions, among them sewing the edges together, which would have left no room for my butt, and sewing a patch on the seat which even she had to admit would be hard to miss as I walked down the street.  No, there was nothing to do but buy a new pair of jeans.

The ruined jeans were my first pair of Nica jeans.  I had bought them for the outrageous price of $27. at a mall in Managua with the assistance of a younger volunteer who had scoped out the mall stores and knew where I could go.  I bought this first pair because the two pairs I had from home were much too big, I’m happy to say.  But when you make $200 a month, $27 is a big bite.  So I asked my counterparts and they told me where I could go locally to buy jeans for a better price.  I spent an hour trying them on, an ordeal just as bad in Nicaragua as in the States, worse because it’s hot work on a hot afternoon and because the dressing room is a space behind a door, but I found a good pair for half the Managua price, nice skinny stove-pipe legged jeans, dark blue.  They’re made in China, but what isn’t.  They bleed when washed, but they don’t bleed when dry. And I fit right in, now, with Nica women for whom tight jeans are a uniform, although mine are not tight all the way to the ankles as is the norm.

But Dogi and Bobi struck again.  Somehow they got out of their pen unobserved, streaked through my room and grabbed the top item in my laundry bag, which just happened to be one of the two bras I have that fit. I brought 5 to Nicaragua but they don’t fit any more.  My sister came to the rescue with 2 new bras, but that means I’m always washing one while wearing the other. The bra was discovered the next day in the dogs’ pen, torn to shreds. Candida, who never throws anything out and is forever optomistic, suggested hopefully that maybe I could sew it, but a serious look revealed how impossible that would be. 

Bras are a fashion statement here.  (Are they in the US?) They are to be seen either through a blouse or their straps are color co-ordinated with a top. You can buy them anywhere, in pulperias along with eggs and cheese and beans. So, clearly unable to operate with only one remaining U.S. bra, I went shopping at two local local pulperias.  At the first I was disconcerted to find that one of my students, a little 12 year old girl, waited on me.  She wasn’t at all embarrassed to show me what she had in my size (medium by U.S. standards but big here in Nicaragua where I tower over most women and many men). Unfortunately there wasn’t much, only one actually, a purple number with big baby blue circles on it. “Nothing in white or beige?”  I asked, not really in the Nica spirit.  No, she said sadly.  She would have liked to sell her teacher a bra.

 I hit the next pulperia and was waited on by the owner, a man who seemed a little worried about showing me his stock of bras.   But he put all of them on the counter along with a plastic bag.  I should help myself.  The closest thing I could find to beige or white in my size (really in any size) was a lemon yellow number.  I reasoned, most un-Nica-ly, that yellow might not show through most of my clothes and I asked the price.  Thirty cordobas, about a dollar and a half.  So I bought it.

The bra is a little low on quality. But the price is right.  It, too, was made in China. I am amazed to think of countries like China not only making clothes for first world countries like the U.S. but third world countries, too, the quality a little shakey but the price unbeatable. 

So thanks to Dogi and Bobi, I’m starting to look as much like a native as a gringa can here.  I’ve replaced a good deal of my original wardrobe with cheap ropas americanas shirts, at 50 cents to a dollar per shirt.  I have Nica hair ornaments to hold back and up my longer hair.  Only my shoes and my skin betray me.  And my hair color.  Despite suggestions from Nica friends that I might want to try to dye my hair to get rid of the gray (women of all ages here dye their hair; rarely do you see a gray haired old person), I’ve had no trouble resisting that idea.

The transformation is on-going.  I find myself in the pulperias, having bought tomatoes or eggs, lingering over the jewelry offered for sale, eying the big colorful plastic hoop earrings, the long dangles, the red or pink disks the size of can lids. Might just have to ante up the 10 cordobas to complete the look.

I'm attaching a picture of Smith, featured in my last blog entry.