Randy

Mr. Wood not only personally encouraged me to take a shot at exploring Nicaragua, he also co-wrote this--generally agreed to be the definitive guidebook--proving his rather expansive knowledge of the country.

Randymon, this R's for you.

Peace & Quiet-time

Considering it is a country best known to the outside world for its counter/revolutionary wars, Nicaragua is big on peace. Ometepe is (as previously mentioned) the "oasis," but the rest of the country is in on it too. Banners everywhere proclaim the country's opposition to foreign wars (U.S.-Iraq is the flavor of the era), and the people are quite proud of the domestic reconciliation that was achieved after the return to democracy in 1990.* Even the national seal (prominent on the flag) features a rainbow, which was explained to me at the National Museum as a symbol specifically of peace and hope. Nicas talk about their "peaceful nature" on regular occasion, and I suppose that assertion is reconcilable with their history; anger in particular has little to do with peaceability, and there's a lot to be angry about.

Peace, however, should not imply quiet.** Nicas are a raucous bunch, but there isn't a lot for them to channel their energy into. Dancing, yes. Political action, of course. But one of the uncomfortable truths of my stay there was that there is just too much leisure time available. The people who work, do work very hard. But there aren't a lot of jobs available. So there is a lot of TV-watching. And drinking. And sitting around. These three things I find fine in moderation, but in bigger doses they bore me. (The fact that reading isn't popular is...well, not endearing to me.)

But that's pretty much what there is to do after dark*** in a place like Granada. Occasionally there are performing arts or other diversions for getting people out and mingling, but apart from the bars--where it's just not easy to meet people--there's not much of anywhere to go. So you stay in...and you sit, watch, drink, talk. Or, if you're me, you start flossing two or three times a day. There is time to kill; there is oral hygiene to perform.


* Much credit is given to Doña Violeta--President Violeta Chamorro--the first woman to lead the country and a gifted rapporteur.

** (However, the lack of stereo equipment does.)

***After dark! The sun rises at 6 in the morning (immediately after which the atmosphere is heavy with an unsleepable heat) and sets at 6 in the afternoon. I soon found myself (and heard similar stories from a number of acquaintances) rising at 5:30 every morning and going to bed at around 9.

Ometepe

The island the residents refer to as an oasis of peace is also often called the "Jewel of Nicaragua," which for those of you in the Bay Area is akin to explaining Lake Merritt as the jewel of Oakland: it doesn't sound really impressive to an outsider at first gasp, but once you've seen it, you get it. Ometepe is cool.

It's also one of the few places I've been where the "friendliness of the locals" (most overused guidebook phrase of all time?) lives up to its reputation. Example #1: Bus service across the island is spotty (there might be one every three hours), and my first day there, I was attempting to walk from one town to another with a heavy backpack. Five minutes after I took off, a family in a pickup truck pulled up next to me, asked where I was headed, and then encouraged me to get in the payload. Half an hour later, when they dropped me off and refused the money I offered, I realized that their kindliness was just par for the course.

Ometepe, if you haven't bothered clicking on the links above, is the product of two volcanoes that emerged from the middle of an enormous freshwater lake, with a narrow land bridge between the two cones--overall, it looks like a figure-eight/infinity symbol. Volcán Concepción, to the west, is still active and perfectly conical; Volcán Maderas, to the east, is extinct with a crater lake (from collected rainfall) at the summit.

Hiking up Maderas is easier (7 - 9 hours roundtrip, as opposed to 12) and is generally acknowledged to be the more rewarding between the two, so it was a rather simple choice. I set out in the morning from Finca Magdalena, a farm/cooperative on the north side of the volcano where I'd spent the previous night, and the going was good. August is the middle of the rainy season (they call it "winter," ha), and when you're hiking up into a cloud forest, the air is moist and slightly cool already. In addition, I was carrying a largish backpack* and grunting my way up a fairly steep trail, so I was close to soaked within the first hour and a half. The trail was rather hard to follow--in many places it wasn't "marked" so much as "suggested," and once I apparently left the trail altogether and had to climb through some trees to get back to it--and after a little over two hours, I found myself completely unable to figure out where it was going. So I did what I always do in that sort of situation: I wandered about for another half-hour.

That didn't really do me any good. I found my way back to where the trail theoretically ended and assessed the situation. The mist in the air was rather thick, and it wasn't clear which way was "uphill." So I did the next best thing: I climbed a tree (still carrying the largish backpack) hoping to get a better view of my surroundings. By the time I got about 20 feet up, it was clear I wasn't going to see any more up there than on the ground. So I looked down.

At this point, I should mention that the trees (and everything else around me) were sopping wet, and coated in mossy/ferny growths. I'd managed to get up via a series of branches that were no longer accessible--having, um, knocked a few of them off--so I figured out that the only way to get down was to wrap my legs around the trunk and slide.

(Fast forward past recovering from the pain and getting up off my back. )

Standing there in the silent mist, option three presented itself: yell for help. I'd heard some rustling off in the distance, and--incredible luck--I came across a guided group of a half-dozen Spaniards and one tagalong Canadian. They had just gone down into the crater and were about to hike back down the outside when I'd found them. The guide, a thirtyish local whose name I later learned was Nelson, advised me to join them since the trail was an ugly mess and it was unlikely I'd find my own way back down. I was curious about how close I'd gotten to the lip of the crater, though, and the Canadian pointed to a misty drop-off 20 feet away from where I was standing.**

So we started heading downhill, and Nelson was hurrying us along because the Spaniards had to make a 4:00 ferry back to the mainland; as we descended, I noticed that the trail was nothing like the one I had been on earlier. Nelson asked me where I was headed, and when I said I was going back to the finca, he looked at me funny and started laughing. We were heading down the south side of the volcano. Apparently, in my wandering around near the "summit," I'd managed to circumnavigate halfway around the crater without ever actually seeing it.

Nelson found this hilarious (I supposed) and stopped our progress a couple of times in order to announce to the Spaniards just how lost I was. What a dick, I thought.

We made it to the southern shore at about 3 (by this point, I'd been on my feet for nearly six hours straight), and had to chase down a bus in order to send the Spaniards and the Canadian toward their respective destinations. Nelson turned to me and said that he actually lived not far from where I was staying and he could walk me back. OK, well, cool. I was still soaked, muddy, and exhausted, but at least not lost or stranded.

So we walked back along the main road for a while***, and he offered to show me a shortcut. We cut through the backyards of various farmers, and he stopped to say hello to a number of neighbors and acquaintances. In one clearing, we apporached an older man standing in front of a wooden shack, and Nelson turned to me to say, "This is my father. And this is my house." He told his father just how off-track I'd been, and I figured out then that he wasn't making fun of me so much as marveling at the fact that I'd earlier gotten off one trail and somehow managed to find another one.

Nelson offered me dinner (it was 5 by this time) and after he went inside to serve up the beans, rice, and plantains already simmering on the stove, I was left outside with his father. I looked at the wooden shack (dirt floor, corrugated-iron roof) and asked him how long they'd been living there.

"I was born here," he replied.

After we ate, Nelson pulled out a guitar and he and his father sang me a couple of nice songs about the beauty of Ometepe. We chatted for a few more minutes--they told me about the islanders' resolutely peaceful history compared to the mainland--and then he showed me the way back to where I was staying. I offered him some money (for the food, at least) and he looked at me funny as he reluctantly took it.

I think I might just have to go back some day.


* holding three (3) liters of water, sunscreen, camera, reading material, foodstuffs, extra clothes (just in case), and useless crap

** He also mentioned having heard that an another American had gotten lost up there for two days recently, with his family chartering a helicopter to come look for him. Apocryphal?

*** He told me that he only occasionally works as a tour guide, since his main occupation is permaculture, which is gaining popularity in the region.

Ñandú

I know what you're thinking: "But Mike, ñ is always for ñandú!" Bear with me.

One of the school's many educational tools was a deck of 54 alphabet cards, one pair for each of the 27 letters, each featuring the letter and an animal whose name begins with said letter. A is for armadillo, B is for búho (owl), C is for conejo (rabbit), and so on. This deck and our focus on basic literacy (letter recognition, to start with) made the theme of this journal a natural choice. (My alternate subtitle, by the way, was G is for gimmickry, N is for navelgazing.)

(Ñandú, for the curious, means "ostrich." Other long shots include wapití (some kind of deer) and xilócopo, which according to the picture on the card is a bee, but none of the native Spanish speakers I've asked has ever heard of that word.)

The kids like to use the deck to play Memory or Go Fish, both of which are good educational games, but for a while the sight of the cards would fill me with dread. Two reasons:

1. A few of the kids seemed bent on doing whatever possible to avoid actually learning the alphabet. When we played Go Fish, one kid in particular would often just shove a card at me and say "this one."
   
   And which letter is that?
   
   (Shrug.)
   
   OK, which animal is this?
   
   He'd eye the picture of a seal with its name (foca) printed underneath. "Nutria!" (otter)
   
   All right. Easy to mix up. "No, it's a foca. What letter does foca start with? fffffffff..."
   
   "D!" No. "R!" No, (ffffffff). "J! I don't know. Give me the card."
   
   And so it went on, over and over. We tried different ways of getting him to start recognizing the letters themselves, and we made slow but measurable progress at it, but (speaking as a nerd) he had a shocking and innate-seeming aversion to actually learning anything.
   
   
   
2. They smelled. The cards, that is. (Some of the kids did too, but you can't walk into a school for street children and expect everyone to be washed and tidy. It's ugly but true.) The combination of grubby hands and open mouths (a few of the kids would absently suck on the cards while waiting for their turns) covered them with a visible, tactile, odoriferous extra layer that was one of the many reasons I was thankful that I had thought to invest in a small bottle of hand sanitizer before leaving the States.

Still, as time went by, and with the arrival of other whimsy-loving volunteers, I grew to enjoy the game and the simple pleasure of yelling ¡'Hache' de hippopótamo! ¡'I-griega' de yac! at the kids. I like to think we all learned something interesting from the experience, but I wouldn't hazard to say what it is.

(Although for me, it may be that the Spanish words for raccoon and magpie are mapache and urraca, respectively.)

Names

To begin, let me just say that I am acquainted with the pathology of baby-naming in the United States and we are just as bizarre as any other nation, if not more so.

Working with children in Nicaragua, however, gave me something of an appreciation for the odd patterns in their naming, one of which stems from the recurrent influences of U.S. intervention. I met a lot of kids with slightly-tweaked English names, like Jeeson, Jostin, Antoni, and Yimi. There was a girl at our school named Darling, which sounds impossibly precious in English but is rather likeable with a Spanish accent. Some names, like Yester, I just couldn't quite pin down the inspiration for.

There is also, per Spanish custom, a tradition of giving double names; calling out "Juan" will get you no response if you don't specify Juancito, Juan Carlos, Juan Gabriel, or Juan Rafael. We had both a María José and a José María, which still strikes me as interesting given the Latino perspective on the importance of gender.*

It is also not uncommon, I heard, for parents not to have names picked out by the time the baby is born. An expat I met, who had been living in Granada for quite a while, had been asked to be godmother to a local family's little girl.

"What's her name?" she asked.

The response: "Oh, we're just calling her 'baby' for now."

(My acquaintance decided to back out of the responsibility when she discovered that the family still hadn't chosen a name by the day of the baptism, six months after birth.)**

I can't imagine there was a particular dearth of choices, what with Spanish, English, and indigenous influences swirling around, but some parents seem to like sticking to what they know. Hence, a pair of brothers: Rodolfo and Luis Rodolfo. And I discovered a possible inspiration for the parents of a rather bratty girl named Valezka when I was sitting in a bar in San José and happened to look up and see her name on a bottle of vodka.

What was most remarkable to me, at the end, was that just about all of these kids, from four-year-olds on up, from Aníbal to Melvin to Yarixza, and inclusive of those (many) who didn't know the alphabet from hieroglyphics, were able to spell their names. God bless this phonetically-spelled language, and good luck to all the Kayleighs and Maddisonns the good ol' U.S. is churning out. You'll need it.


* On one side of the classroom, another volunteer had put up a poster she had made featuring pictures of the regular students with their names written underneath. For a while it was within reach of the kids, and one day a couple of bored pranksters attempted to deface it. They hardly touched the pictures (one blacked-out tooth, no horns or moustaches), but they changed the genders of all the names they could reach (María became Mario, Luis became Luisa, etc). That's their idea of scandal.

** Pets in particular aren't saddled with names if it's not deemed necessary. The family I lived with had a couple of cats, who were only ever addressed with "Get out!" when they wandered into the dining room. (I informally named them Nicho and Saraberthá, in honor of the front-runners for the local mayoral race, whose names were everywhere in town.)

Managua

I know I'm weird.

Most people, if faced with the choice between spending one's last day of travels in either a much-loved crystal-blue lagoon filling an extinct volcanic crater or a much-reviled, amorphous and rapidly-growing capital city, would choose the former.

I, on the other hand, made a bee-line for Managua. I'm a city person and a contrarian, and it was for me the more interesting option. All I'd seen of it so far were the airport, a few bus stations, and the snatches of street life I'd caught from taxi rides between those exit points.

My first reaction: I didn't hate it. After a few hours, actually, I found myself developing an odd affection for this bizarre city. It's unlike any place I'd ever been to and it violated all my internal principles of navigability, but it works somehow. A little background:

Granada and León were Nicaragua's principal colonial cities, representing very different aspects of the the political culture; Managua (a small fishing village) was chosen as the capital in the mid-19th century as a sort of compromise. During the 20th century, its population exploded, but the effects of having a major earthquake every couple of decades has caused entire neighborhoods to be abandoned and new sections to be built seemingly at random. It looks now as if a dozen groups decided to each build a part of the city on their own, with the assumption that someone somewhere else would take care of the "downtown" idea. There is no downtown. There is no governmental or business center. What there is is a residential/commerical neighborhood here, then a gap, and then another neighborhood, and another gap, and then a mall (built in the last five years). And then a crater lake.

What's remarkable about Managua is that when you're standing on a hill* in the center of it, you do not see a city of 1.5 million people around you. You see lots of trees, interrupted by the occasional hotel/mall or cathedral**.

Despite its uninviting reputation, it's actually a rather interesting place to wander around in. The major drawback to this is that maps aren't widely available, and even the ones that are available aren't a huge help because most of the streets don't have names. "Addresses" are based on the distance and direction from a given landmark (or the previous location of a decades-gone landmark). As the sort of person who is loath to yield my freedom of navigation to cabdrivers, it was a bit of a challenge learning to get myself around.*** Eventually, I resigned myself to hopping on buses at random just to see if I could get anywhere close to where I was going. (I'm happy to report that it worked.)

Finally, Managua is a safe city. I never felt threatened, and more than anything else, I found that people were curious about why I was there if not on business. The truth is, I guess I'm just even more of an urbanist that I thought.


* (next to a black metal silhouette of General Sandino nearly a hundred feet high--it's not visible from the entire city, but there were a few times I'd be walking in a distant neighborhood and happen to catch sight of it, and jump)

** In case you're wondering: when it's not artfully lit, the cathedral's milk-bottle/concrete-box design can be astonishingly ugly.

*** The biggest surprise for me was that using my shadow as a compass wasn't much help when I hadn't realized that my shadow would be pointing due east by 1:30 in the afternoon. The joys of latitude-awareness are manifold.

Likes:

1. Lizards running around on the walls and ceilings of most buildings

2. Lakes and lagoons (many in volcanic craters) scattered around the country, ranging from deep blue to shimmering green to mysterious gray

3. Lusty young couples in parks and doorways*

4. Light meals cooked in banana leaves, served up fresh and cheap on every corner

5. León, the traditionally liberal colonial city of the north, and its elegant churches and art


* (I like the way it so concisely describes the pervasive lack of privacy in Nica society, which is one of those things it takes forever to put one's finger on and then becomes incredibly obvious)

Kissy-face

We've all heard that it's rude to point, but Nicas--in another of their dazzling innovations of decorum--have found a way around it. Instead of showing the way with the dreaded index finger, whenever possible they indicate direction with their puckered lips. At first it was mildly disconcerting, but now I'm more put out by the fact that in practical terms it's terribly inexact.

And I still find it too intimate a gesture to ever adopt myself.

Justice & Judgment

I don't know how Nicas do it. Living here physically* wears me out...but I have a plane ticket back to California and I have health insurance and even when I've been agonizingly sick (which has been twice since I arrived here), I can afford to rest myself in a comfortable bed in a private room.

Every day I walk to work past people missing extremities in order to spend a few hours interacting with children who have a slim shot at attaining basic literacy, who frequently don't have shoes**, who have been on the streets selling gum and hair clips since they were five, and who look an average of 2-3 years younger than they actually are, thanks to malnutrition. I am reminded daily that life is not fair, and that those on the short end deal with it however they can. What's surprising about my students is that, by and large, they're good kids. Sometimes they cheat and sometimes they quarrel, but they still walk in smiling.

Until recently, I was renting a room from a widowed lawyer with two teenage daughters. It was rather interesting to see the differences--the divisions--between the poor and middle-class locals. One day during lunch, my hosts were discussing my volunteer activities. One mentioned that there aren't quite so many street childen around as there were last year. "Yes," another replied between forkfuls of salad, "they must have died off over the winter."

Overall, what I've come to discover here is that the answers may not be immediately apparent, but the questions are now much clearer to me. Who is responsible for development? What should be the top priorities? and most importantly, What the hell can actually be done?


* though not emotionally, which may indicate any number of things about my well-suppressed sense of compassion

** I'm not obsessed with shoes, I'm obsessed with public health.

Intermigration

When I first decided to go to Costa Rica, the main reason was that I just needed to get away from Nicaragua. I didn't realize until later that visiting the former would make such a difference in my perspective on the latter--I feel like I have more context now.

To make a rather simplistic analogy, Costa Rica is to Nicaragua as the U.S. is to Mexico: it's a much more prosperous nation right next door, and consequently a lot of people have crossed the border (dominated in this case, as in the more northerly one, by a fordable river) seeking higher-paying jobs--or the prospect of jobs, period--and sending money to help support family back home.

A young music teacher I met in a bar in San José mentioned that these remittances are a source of great controversy in the Rich Coast. Despite my initial surprise at this assertion, I quickly figured out why: Nicaragua's population is over 5 million, while Costa Rica's is less than 4 million. The money sent out of the country by hundreds of thousands of immigrants must represent a considerable drain on CR's economy, which relies largely on tourism and agriculture.*

There are other obvious differences from the U.S.-Mexico case: here, there's no language barrier and less of a cultural one, so Nicas can be more easily assimilated. (As I was browsing in a souvenir shop my first day walking around San José, the proprietress peppered me with polite questions about my travels. When she heard I was working in Granada for the summer, she delightedly exclaimed,¨"Oh! I'm from Masaya!" I haven't quite nailed down the irony in having to leave one's economically-depressed home in order to make a living selling trinkets commemorating one's new place of residents to tourists who can afford to vacation in the land of opportunity, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.)

CR is, unlike Nicaragua, a tourist magnet because of its relative prosperity and relatively civil history. The politics are more moderate here--no revolutions on one hand, recognition of civil liberties on the other--but religion is still important.** It is still a Central American nation (and there are all apparently proud of their shared identity), despite attempts to label it a European pretender, like Chile.

Discussing the differences between the two makes me feel like I should choose sides in the international rivalry, but in Central America the real division remains between capital cities and the rest of each country. I have barely set foot in Managua, while on the other side I hardly left SJ. I suppose I can say that I am more of a city person, although the countryside will always have its charms.


* Considering the size of the U.S. economy and the fact that its population is nearly three times Mexico's, the remittances sent by Mexican workers are a relative pittance. Entire countries have adopted the U.S. dollar as their official currency and no one in the States seems to mind--or, for that matter, even to really know about it.

** I arrived in time for the festival of the Virgin of the Angels--CR's national patron saint--and went to Cartago to see that national pilgrimage site, a basilica with fantastic woodwork housing the remains of another indigenous-looking apparition of Mary. Thousands of people had walked from San José (nearly an hour away by bus) and other places farther away, arriving at the basilica in Cartago, where many of them dropped to their knees and shuffled in prostrate ranks from the rear doors to the alter. (Two sets of rear doors, by the way, were marked with signs saying "Entrance Only on Knees" and "Entrance for Walkers," respectively. The latter group seemed slightly larger and seemed to be comprised mostly of ticos content to mill about and watch their more dedicated compatriots shuffle by.