Two months and a day have passed since I left Managua for the open road, and further down it, my home here in Nebraska. The adventure in getting here proved to be one of the most memorable experiences of my entire two years away from home, if not my life. Three motivating factors led me to throw caution, common sense, and expeditiousness to the wind. You see, there's something about the idea of making a journey home more challenging than just hopping on a plane and jumping into the open arms of the people waiting for you on the other side. Getting the chance to process how I felt about leaving Nicaragua without trying to manage the conflicting feelings of excitement and anticipation in returning home seemed like one of the best chances I had for maintaining my sanity. Second, there are few things I think are more educational in life than the possibility of not having any idea where you're going or how you're going to get there. I still think my trip through Honduras in the back of pickup trucks during Semana Santa last year will be one of those few memories in life that get carried with me until I die. Finally, although it almost seems implausible, after two years of living with my roommate Adriana, I still felt like there was so much that I didn't know about her. Not like she was a stranger to me. On the contrary, the longer we lived and worked under a lot of the same difficult circumstances, the more she became a stellar friend to me, one that I still had a lot to learn about. What better way to learn more about someone than by crossing four international borders and traveling more than 1,000 miles with her in less than three days?

So, without a lot of sleep, much of an idea about where we were going or how to get there, and with an almost overwhelming weight of all the people, memories, and places we were leaving behind on our minds, we set off on a long stretch of buses bound for Mexico City. No maps. Not a lot of money. Tickets for only half of the distance we needed to travel. Nearly everything we owned slung over our backs or carried in our hands. Just me, my trusty sidekick, and her uncle who had flown all the way from San Diego to ensure we made it back safely. Along the way, we would occasionally awaken in a startled, delirious state as we crossed another border, day became night, and our weary eyes could find nothing to entertain them in the flat, bleak landscape of the continent we were traveling up. The often extreme desolation of Managua became unbelievable opulence along the brightly-lit, palm-lined streets of San Benito on the outskirts of San Salvador. Faces from earlier buses that seemed unrecognizable soon became familiar as the same small stream of humanity followed us from bus to bus, headed north in a way so unlike the route nearly everyone else is forced to take. Mexican priests in Guatemala told us of the worst kinds of highway robbery, the kind that comes from the ones that are supposed to provide you with the protection. His stories added to our anxiety as our bus came to a standstill for hours in an out-of-place traffic jam along a quickly darkening stretch of highway near the Guatemalan/Mexican border. We alternately slept and stared out the window for what seemed like days as the rolling, rocky hills of Chiapas faded into the wind-swept plains of Oaxaca. Then, as suddenly as we had flown out of Managua days before, our bus rolled over the mountains surrounding the colossal capital, and we slowly descended into the glowing yellow light of Mexico City at five in the morning.

What was it I said about the best journeys are the ones where the destination is unknown? That couldn't have been more appropriate than on this trip, when I found out on the bus from Tapachula to Mexico City that -- in a last minute change of plans -- we would be continuing on to Cuernavaca, two hours south of the capital, instead of staying with previously unspecified relatives closer to the airport. The news set off alarm bells at first, knowing that in two days' time, I had to be back in Mexico City for my flight home to the States or else there would be no Christmas homecoming with my family. But, in an act of blind faith and friendship, I followed Adriana and Tio Sacramento through Mexican rush hour in a tiny Chevy rental sedan as we searched for a way out of the labyrinth of smog-filled highways and headed down out of the mountains towards the hot, truly Mexican, kind-of-place-I'm-looking-for pueblo of Cuernavaca. With nowhere to stay but the neighbors' place across the street from the house where Adriana had grown up as a kid, we hauled all of our stuff into the first solid, non-public building any of us had been in for days, and were treated to maybe the best meal I will ever have eaten as long as I live.

The coming two days were filled with the natural kind of abundance that doesn't make you want to bury your head under a pillow after having seen too much necessity for so long. Endless conversation about life, family, history, family histories, and of course, Harry Potter. Showers of sparklers and fireworks lighting up the night in celebration of yet another holiday in honor of the Virgin. Trips through street markets full of poblano peppers, crickets, dried fruit, cow heads, blinking statues of the Virgin, fresh everything-you-can-imagine. Surely the most caliente food my poor, yet oh-so-fortunate lips have ever tasted. Endlessly expansive views of the city and the surrounding hills from the rooftop as my laundry hung to dry. Hospitality that, although no longer uncommon in the places I've traveled, still made me humbled by its sincerity.

Then, just as quickly as we hurriedly found each other in a Houston airport two years earlier before we boarded our plane for Managua, Adri and I gave each other one last hug and a wave as she headed off to spend more time with her family while I set off to go home to mine. Of course, there's something about the idea of making a journey home more challenging than just hopping on a plane and jumping into the open arms of the people waiting for you on the other side. Like, setting foot on U.S. soil for the first time in 755 days only to find out that all of those belongings -- pictures, letters, phone numbers of friends, students' artwork -- I had been carrying on my back for days were still waiting to board a plane in Mexico. And, facing the prospect of spending the next five hours in a deserted airport without finding my cousin who had kindly offered to pass the time with me. But, when you haven't seen your parents in months, nor your home or the rest of your family in two years, and all of them will be waiting for you in a matter of hours around a table at Christmas, everything else seems simply inconsequential. It was in that moment, having tried to get through to somebody, anybody via a collect call to hear a friendly voice, that I couldn't think about my sadness in having left Nicaragua anymore. I couldn't worry about how my students would do during their first year of high school. I couldn't possibly care about clothes and shoes and everything else I owned possibly never finding their way to Omaha. I could only think about being there. And now that I'm here, my mind has already started to wander, and wonder if and when I'll finally land someplace where I just want to stay.


"I am a mountain, I am a tall tree
Oh, I am a swift wind, sweeping the country
I am a river down in the valley
Oh, I'm a vision and I can see clearly."

--Bonnie "Prince" Billy, "The World's Greatest"

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints."

--Robert Louis Stevenson

Normally, I like to save a quote for the end. Normally, too, I would find the time to gather my thoughts and write here every couple weeks or so. Since the latter habit seems to have gone by the wayside for the past four months, so will the former. My cousin Jen, who is now slaving away in medical school in New Orleans, wrote that quote in a card she gave to me the last time we saw each other before I left for Nicaragua. At the time, it seemed like nothing more than an apt expression of my desire to find some new corner of the world to explore, an adventure to be had, a romanticized, international version of Kerouac’s On the Road. In was in that light that I wrote those same words exactly two years ago today on the morning my journey to Nicaragua began.

In some ways, I still see some familiarity in those same thoughts that I had reading that quote for the first time. However, after having been here to see and experience everything that has happened in my life over these two years, the words have taken on a new meaning as well. For the last few months, I’ve found it so hard to concisely express basically any of what I’ve lived, whether it be in an update here, in my journal at home, letters to friends, or phone conversations with my parents. I don’t know where to begin. I look at one day, or even just a conversation that I’ve had with a student or a friend, and I feel like trying to convey the meaning that something like that has for me is equivalent to a blind person trying to describe what an original Picasso makes them feel inside. Most days, I don’t feel like I have the ability to do it justice. I simply feel paralyzed.

I recently read a short novel called Journey to the East by a German author named Herman Hesse. In it, his narrator begins to try to recount the thoughts and feelings that he experienced while on this mysterious journey with a secretive league of poets, artists, and other esteemed peers of his generation. In quoting another member of his league, the narrator says “He who travels far will often see things far removed from what he believed was Truth. When he talks about it in the fields at home, he is often accused of lying. For the obdurate people will not believe what they do not see and distinctly feel. Inexperience, I believe, will give little credence to my song.” While Hesse’s character seems to use that as his defense for not being able to adequately explain what he has been through, I find it to be the exact opposite of why I write. It’s never concerned me whether or not people see truth in the things that I’ve found important enough to mention, nor do I think that my words somehow fall short because only a few have seen first-hand the people and the places that I talk about so often. Inexperience or unfamiliarity with where I have been has nothing to do with the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of what I try to express when I write. The burden of proof falls on my shoulders as the writer, not the reader. I think in a lot of ways that’s why I take seemingly painstaking efforts to not just describe what I do on a daily basis or a funny anecdote about something that happened a week ago, but to dig further into what those people and those events mean to me.

Further into his endeavor while trying to process his thoughts relating to his journey, Hesse’s narrator comes to the more dramatic, and in my opinion, real conclusion that the possibility for someone’s experience to be understood or misunderstood doesn’t rest on the shoulders of those who didn’t experience it themselves, but rather on the person tasked with sharing it. As he struggles with his ability to do this effectively, he says:

“And now that I want to hold fast to describe this most important thing, or at least something of it, everything is only a mass of separate fragmentary pictures which has been reflected in something, and this something is myself, and this self, this mirror, whenever I have gazed into it, has proved to be nothing but the uppermost surface of a glass plane.”

I’m not going to lie; there are a lot of days when I look back at something I’ve wanted to write about and thought that my memory of it or my ability to put it into words felt just like that fragmented reflection that barely scratches the surface of what I really experienced. I think in a lot of ways that is why four months have passed while I kept trying to find the words that I have been wanting to write all this time.

Then, I read the quote from Stevenson again, and even though it still makes me feel like I’m only scratching the surface, those words form the best explanation of what I feel when I look back at the last two years of my life. I think the idea of coming down off of something can be taken in a number of ways. Maybe it means that I’ve left the comfort and relative luxury of the life that I was accustomed to living for most of my 26 years and have seen first-hand how far removed that comfort and luxury is from the lives of the vast majority of people that are in this world (whether inside or outside of the borders of the United States). I think that conclusion is pretty self-evident. It doesn’t take much more than a glance at the international section of a major newspaper to understand that there are incredibly huge disparities in the way people go about their daily lives in this world. We live in a world of the climate-controlled, iPhone-toting, multi-billionaire CEO and a woman like the mother of one of my students, who cried in front of me the other day because the dog she had bought for her son had died suddenly and she had to throw its body into the sewage drainage ditch full of rotting garbage that runs ten feet away from her one room house. But if we already know that both of these people exist, and if we probably already realize that some of us live on a feather bed of civilization while others walk barefoot on the jagged earth, why does Stevenson’s quote strike me as being so much more true today than it did two years ago, when it was just a motto for a great trip or an opportunity to go have an adventure?

Well, quite simply, because now I know the woman with the dead dog. I still don’t know any billionaires, but I do know the woman who spent six months’ salary on a hip replacement for her mother when she herself can barely walk on either of the two irreparable knees she has left. I do know the student who has been so afraid to go home because her father is waiting there with a belt to beat her that she would rather sleep on the street. I do know the kid who has dirt floors inside his house and a latrine in the front yard but speaks better English today than I spoke Spanish when I first arrived. I know the woman who is nearly 40 with the newborn child and the husband who is a recovered alcoholic. The deaf and mute seven year-old and her precocious twelve-year old next door neighbor who has looked after her as if they were sisters. The farm workers along the side of a highway in Honduras trying to catch a ride as they make their way to the next harvest. The truck driver on a long haul from Guatemala to Panama who doesn’t know when he’ll see his wife and kids next. The woman who spent all of her savings to take her father to a specialist in natural medicine only to have to listen to the father accuse her of trying to steal the land he had worked all of his life. The brilliant fourth-grader who solves Sudoku puzzles faster than I can and beats me in checkers three times out of four, but who also dropped out of school and won’t tell anyone why. The grandmother who spends all day sowing towels to sell so she can help pay for the medical expenses of her granddaughter who suffers from chronic swelling of the brain. The woman who sells snacks at the bus stop whose entire family was nearly killed in a rum-induced fight with machetes. The kid down the street who fell from a retaining wall and onto the stump of a skinny tree, nearly destroying his small intestine. The woman who sat for hours with me as she told me about how she wishes that she could work more with young students to talk with them about the prevention of HIV/AIDS because that’s what killed her brother just about this time last year. The kids who got robbed at gunpoint the other night coming home from a soccer game. The woman who lost three kids during the third term of pregnancy because each one suffered from severe birth defects as a result of her working in pesticide-laden banana fields all of her life, the same ones that produced the fruit I grew up eating with my Wheaties every morning as a kid. The man down the block who has been an exile from his own country since the days of a war that mine started with his. The list goes on.

Each one of those people and hundreds more represent for me that “mass of separate fragmentary pictures” that Hesse talks about. The way in which their paths have crossed with mine is difficult to consolidate into a few sentences or paragraphs. But, what they have come to share of their lives with me is why I write. It’s why I’m here. In two years of living far from my home, my family, my friends, and the life that I thought I knew so well, each one of them has come to represent one more reason why I could never imagine not having come here, and also why I can imagine where it might lead me next. They represent not just an idea, but the reality that the world in which we live is not just a feather bed and a field of cutting flints, separated by a gulf too wide to cross. They are proof that such a conclusion is deeply erroneous, and that all it takes is a willingness to come down off that cloud so they can tell you themselves what this world is really like. For their stories, and for your listening, I’ve been very grateful over these past two years to have been the one writing.


“I remember when, when I first moved here, a long time ago,
´cause I heard some song I used to hear back then, a long time ago.
I remember when even further back in another town,
´cause I saw something written I used to say back then.
Hard to comprehend?

And the question is, was I more alive then than I am now?
I happily have to disagree.
I laugh more often now.
I cry more often now.
I am more me.”

--Peter, Bjorn, and John, “Objects of My Affection”

I woke up this morning after having slept for the previous twelve hours, and it was then, during those first few minutes coming out of a deep, coma-like sleep, that I realized it was going to be an interesting day. I literally spent the first hour of the day trying to convince myself that yes, in fact, I was awake, and it was really me who was going through the motions of stirring a bowl full of oatmeal, getting into the shower, brushing my teeth, and throwing on a pair of jeans from my bedroom floor. It was like that children’s book where some girl wakes up and everything outside has changed. Birds can talk, houses on the street are upside down, dogs are walking humans. Yes, I thought to myself, it was definitely going to be that kind of day.

That’s when the scorpion bit me. I forgot that in warm, damp climates, it’s a bad idea to leave even warmer, darker places lying around, since that’s precisely where scorpions like to make themselves at home. So, with a stabbing jolt of pain tearing into my calf, I ripped off my jeans as quickly as possible and somehow managed to smash the culprit into the concrete floor with a pair of sandals. When you start the day off in a daze, wondering whether your level of consciousness is really quite capable of getting you through the tasks that still lay ahead, being stung by a scorpion puts things into perspective fairly rapidly. Shortly thereafter, I was informed by one of my roommates that during my marathon nap, another one of my roommates found out that the extremely serious infection her father is currently fighting has gotten worse. Likely, he’ll have to undergo surgery in the coming week to remove the majority of the infection, which poses potential risks for his already weakened defenses. Mary will now be flying home early next week to be with her family until her dad recovers.

For the past few days in the project, we’ve cancelled classes for the yearly visit from this guy who can be best described as a new-age, Spanish guru intent on instructing us in the finer points of conflict resolution by way of non-competitive children’s games and nursery rhymes. Precisely what I want to be doing with my 6th grade class…singing the equivalent of the Hokey-Pokey in Spanish. While I tend to look at a lot of his methods and activities as “infantile” or “silly,” I know that a lot of my coworkers actually get a lot out of it. Primarily, I think this has a lot to do with the lack of opportunities there are in a place like El Recreo, or maybe in a society in general made up of successive generations traumatized by totalitarianism and brutal war, to express any kind of inner emotions like anger or fear in a therapeutic setting. While a scraggly Spaniard who seems like he must not bath frequently doesn’t strike me as my idea of the kind of therapist a lot of my coworkers could benefit from, he at the very least gives them the opportunity to openly express a lot of the things that they go week after week, and year after year bottling up inside.

After listening all morning to a lot of pent up resentment, frustration, and sadness come out from the people that I work with on a daily basis, I needed some peace of mind before I came back from lunch. My plan was to check my email quickly, and then head out to the street to go for a walk around the neighborhood. News in an email that one of the rocks of my family, my aunt Lucille, is ill, and a coworker’s unintentional, but offensive comment about the situation now left me with a desire to start my walk immediately and end it when I had reached the city limits.

Instead of heading towards the mountains or the sea, I found myself on the way down the side of one of the long sewage drainage tunnels that marks the boundary between El Recreo and the next neighborhood to the west. From there, I cut up into a labyrinth of tin-roofed, cardboard houses until I came across the home of Ingrid, the 8 year-old girl suffering from hydrocephalus whom I’ve written about often. It had been months since I had gone to see how she was doing, and in Nicaragua, going without seeing someone for even a week can sometimes be considered a major fall in social graces. Ingrid’s grandmother was out in front of the house, sweeping the perpetual dirt of the city from one side of the yard to the other, and immediately dropped what she was doing to greet me. She led me inside to the bed where Ingrid was lying, having just woken up from a nap to smile and laugh as her grandmother tickled her. She excitedly told me of the visit they had made to the hospital the day before, where the doctor had informed Ingrid and her grandmother that the swelling around her brain is diminishing, enough so that the pressure from the accumulated liquid has gone down by a centimeter. I have no idea, in realistic terms, if that could make any difference for her future development, but to her grandmother, it was only an unnecessary reaffirmation that the unwavering care that she provides for Ingrid is worth every minute and every cent of the hard-earned time and money she puts into it.

Realizing that it was getting close to the time I needed to be back in the project, but not wanting to leave on a sudden note, I mentioned to Ingrid’s grandmother how glad I was that I had stopped by, especially given the news I had received about my aunt earlier that afternoon. She immediately asked me if I wanted to pray with her, which caught me so off-guard that I couldn’t say no. For the next twenty minutes, I was amazed by the sincerity of a woman I only knew through the unfortunate plight of her own daughter as she expressed in a hundred different ways all of the hopes she had for peace and tranquility amongst my family as we confronted the situation of my aunt’s health. Then, as I was getting up to leave, she pulled out a bag of three hand-knit wash clothes that she makes, insisting that I take them with me as a reminder of her support. I didn’t know this woman six months ago. I’ve talked with her no more than a dozen times since we met. She struggles to pay for anti-seizure medications for her granddaughter that cost hundreds and hundreds of cordobas each month. Water has started to leak through the rusted tin roof in the height of the rainy season, leaving her dirt floor a muddy mess. Yet, in the half hour I was with her today, the only thing she was concerned about was my family, which she has never met.

As I was walking up the block towards my house after work tonight, I was trying to leave all of the rollercoaster moments of the day behind me, saving the last of my energy for a warm dinner and a good book. No sooner did I get halfway to the door before Jassen, the rambunctious, foul-mouthed four year-old who lives next door, came sprinting towards me like a bolt of lightning shot out of a cannon. The force of his body as he jumped up into my arms and wrapped himself around me nearly knocked me over. He then proceeded to show me how he was playing “matador” with the giant, semi-rabid Doberman they keep as a pet, waving an old basketball jersey in front of the dog’s face until it would bite at the shirt. I suggested we find something better to play that wouldn’t put both of our lives in danger, so we picked up a plastic wiffle ball and bat, and went back to the street for some batting practice. For being what I thought was fairly uncoordinated, constantly running around with bleeding knees from all the times he falls to the ground, Jassen sure as hell sent the ball flying every time he connected with it. I would try to get him to run around imaginary bases that consisted of the light post, a gate, and a manhole, but he preferred to chase me as I ran to retrieve the ball from wherever it had landed. Then, I would terrorize him as he tried to run back to home plate before I could tag him out. Amidst his shouts, laughs, and many violent tumbles to the ground, I felt like my twelve hours of sleep had suddenly given me enough energy to play baseball in the street until the lights went out. But, I knew Jassen’s mom would be quietly infuriated with the both of us if I kept him out there much longer, covering himself in dirt and blood.

As I headed towards the front door, I could hear the voices of three more kids from the neighborhood who like to come by the house to draw inside. Not having taken one step inside the door, I was greeted by three more miniature hugs, and a picture of me being bitten by a scorpion. Lindy, the leader of this gang, then went on to inform me that her younger sister Belen had been bitten by an entire nest of scorpions two nights ago after the mother gave birth in her bed. She then laughed with her crooked little grin, a clear sign that this was yet another in a long line of stories she has made up out of nowhere.

Silvia and I were talking in the pharmacy the other day about different things that were happening in our lives. Among a myriad other difficult situations that she faces on a daily basis, she learned about a month ago that at 38, a year away from finishing her high school equivalency and months away from taking the first vacation she’s had from the project in the 15 years she’s been there, she’s pregnant with her third child. She very matter-of-factly explained to me that on the most impossible of days, when her husband refuses to go to work, she has little money to buy food for her family, and there is no hope of water or electric service, she reminds herself of the presence of all the random people who become a part of her day. Maybe they’re not necessarily signs of hope. Sometimes they’re just reminders to be grateful for something she’s begun to take for granted. Other days, seeing a kid from the neighborhood asking for money in the street whom she breast-fed when he was a child is a reminder of her connection to people that might never have played any role in her life had she not taken an interest in them. What they made her think about was not as important, she told me, as the simple realization of their presence in her life, whether it be a brief encounter or someone she had known for a lifetime.

On a day that began and ended with scorpions, and held a hundred other stories to tell in between, I seemed to think she had to be right.


“Everything is not enough,
And nothing is too much to bear,
Where you’ve been is good and gone,
All you keep’s the getting there.

Well to live is to fly,
All low and high,
So shake the dust off of your wings,
And the sleep out of your eye.”

--Townes Van Zandt, “To Live Is To Fly”

Tonight, I walked with a couple of my roommates a few blocks from our house to the national cathedral near the geographical center of Managua. Over the last year and a half, I’ve spent quite a few weekends searching in vain for a place where I enjoy going to Mass on a regular basis. Of all of the churches I’ve been to, the cathedral might be one of the places where I feel the most out of place. Maybe it has to do with the way the area immediately around the church is fenced off, complete with an iron gate through which the parishioners pass. Beyond the fence, separated from the people reverently praying inside, is a large group of people – from small kids without shoes to old women whose clothes look like a strong wind could tear them to shreds – begging for money. You need not worry about being hassled for money on your way to your car; you’re safe from that uncomfortable reality at the cathedral. Or maybe what bothers me is the near stampede that takes place right before communion, when the priest is still saying a blessing over the gifts. Thousands of people get up and push their way to the front of a massive line that stretches to the back of the church without order. I was out of luck the first time I went to a Sunday Mass there; the priest got up to give the final blessing and half of the church got up to leave while I and many others still waited in line. Should have been more aggressive, I guess. So, it was with a great sense of reluctance that I headed there this evening.

On the way there, I heard someone call out my name from the busy bus stop a block away from the church. It was a man that I had met over a week ago as I was coming home from work one night. His fate is no more or less unfortunate than many other people whom I encounter living here, but there was something about the way he approached me that told me he was not trying to come up with a quick scam to get as much of my money as possible. More than anything, he just looked like a guy who wanted to talk. So, we sat on the curb at the end of my block while he explained to me that he had been deported from Atlanta years ago, was living in a town an hour or so from Managua called San Marcos, and was here because he, his wife, and his baby daughter were all HIV positive. He had a handful of sheets from lab tests and doctors’ prescriptions to prove that none of the three of them was doing very well. We talked for almost a half hour about his health situation, the differences between life in the States versus Nicaragua, and how worried he is about his child. I offered him what I had on me at the time, which amounted to less than a buck, and told him to stop by our house if he wanted to talk more in the future.

When I ran into him in front of the bus stop tonight, I asked how things were going for him, trying to convey the genuine sense of concern I felt for his family as opposed to the contrived anxiety or curiosity that can be difficult to avoid when talking to someone whose daily existence couldn’t possibly be more difficult to comprehend. He told me they haven’t been able to go back to San Marcos because his daughter has been in and out of the hospital. He isn’t doing much better either, as he showed me a print out from a doctor’s visit today which showed a severe amount of phlegm collecting in his throat and lungs from a bacterial infection that requires $10 of meds to treat. And, if either of those things weren’t impossible enough to deal with, he’s sleeping in the grass next to the giant fountain in honor of the famous Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario, which just happens to be adjacent to the cathedral. We talked for a few more minutes, and then I apologized for not having anything that I could offer him even in a symbolic but futile attempt to alleviate the smallest of his problems. Had I known my time would have been better served by continuing our conversation, I would have stayed to talk some more, but at that point I headed towards the massive wooden doors of the concrete eyesore built with money donated by the founder of Domino’s Pizza.

Listening to the priest talk on and on about the gospel reading of the Good Samaritan, endlessly enumerating the kinds of people that we encounter along the way who we are supposed to make a part of our life, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but my conversation with the man in front of the bus stop. Here I was, sitting in a multi-million dollar cathedral listening to a priest tell me about the people that we don’t notice along our path in life until we’re already past them. At the same time, I was trying to reconcile his words with the hundreds of others present who had walked right past the man at the bus stop, all so they could push their way to the front of a line to get something they were looking for, and then head home for the evening. I couldn’t understand what I was still doing sitting there. Then, through the form of a condescending petition said in the name of Jewish people so that they will recognize Christ as the true redeemer of the world, I found my reason to go back outside.

Lately, so much of life in Nicaragua seems to be incomprehensibly full of these kinds of contradictions. About a month ago, I had an experience that I’ve wanted to write about every since, but am glad that I waited until tonight so I could tie it in with all of my other thoughts. Last January, I mentioned the continued struggles of a group of thousands of Nicaraguan banana pickers who worked for years in fields that were sprayed with a pesticide called Nemagon, a chemical discovered to be a deadly carcinogen in the United States long before its use was stopped in other countries around the world. Currently, there are around 3,000 of those workers affected in one way or another by their work in the poisoned fields who are camped out in a massive tent city in front of the National Assembly. They are waiting there in the mud and rain until the government begins to fulfill the terms of half a dozen different accords it has signed promising a stable pension system for the affected workers and their families. Despite his message on billboards all over the city for the poor of the world to stand up in unity, President Daniel Ortega apparently doesn’t intend for that cry to be heard by the banana workers camped out a mere three blocks from his Presidential Palace, as he has openly called them delinquents in the mass media.

From the day that I had read the banana workers were making their way to Managua via a 14-day journey on foot along the highway from Chinandega, I knew that I had to talk to them. Yet, when you realize that someone is clinging to life by a string, as many of the affected workers are, and you have nothing to offer them other than a pot full of rice and beans and your time to listen, it can seem more than just disingenuous to show up knowing that your presence will do little to change their plight. So, on the night when I arrived at the camp with my cousin and the rest of my community members, I was caught off guard by the welcome we were given by more than 70 workers from San Marcos who suddenly circled around three of us as we told them we were there to listen to whatever they wanted to tell. Eventually, it was decided by the community leaders from San Marcos that it would be best for everyone if we went off to talk with a smaller group of about three women and three men while sharing a dinner of rice, beans, and bread in the shadow of the Assembly. For over two hours, we sat and listened to the stories they told of working in the banana fields as young as 15 years old, of children that died in labor or shortly thereafter due to severe birth defects, and of the endless bouts of cancer, pulmonary diseases, and other ailments that rendered them incapable of holding down any kind of job. Dona Virginia, an amazing woman who has lost three children to post-partum complications, spoke about the strength it takes to overcome the humiliation of leaving your home to sleep under a tarp in a field without any form of sanitation for weeks and months on end, with very few reasons to have hope that anything will be accomplished in return. Finally, they all commented on their concern that all the government has to do is continue waiting out the situation. Banana workers affected by Nemagon have been slowing succumbing to the illnesses that have inflicted them for years, reducing their numbers by the hundreds each year. At some point in the not too distant future, only the children of those workers and those of us who listened to their stories will be around to tell it.

However, by the end of the evening, it wasn’t any of those stories that made an impression on me so much as something that had just happened earlier that day. Around 2:00pm, one of the women from another town was cooking over a wood fire near the street that runs between the camp and the National Assembly. Suddenly, a car went flying by, followed by a gun shot, and before anyone around her knew what had happened, the woman was lying on the ground in a pool of blood pouring from her leg. She was rushed to the hospital and fortunately was treated quickly enough that she suffered no life-threatening injuries. I asked our fellow dinner companions if they were worried that this could be an alarming sign soon to be repeated. It doesn’t take too much of an imagination to figure out why certain groups don’t want the banana workers to be quite so visible. Their answer, however, is something that I still can’t get out of my head. Unanimously, and without hesitation, they all told us that if someone is shooting at them, it only reinforces their certainty that they are doing what needs to be done. It only solidifies their determination to stay until they get what they came for, and to support one another along the way, even amidst bullets flying. Sure enough, about two weeks ago, there was another shooting at the camp, this one hitting an elderly man in the ankle. Eyewitnesses turned in the bullet which they had dug out of the ground nearby, but police claim that couldn’t possibly be from the gun that was fired because it didn’t have enough blood on it. Yet, Dona Virginia and the thousands of others like her are still braving the daily downpours, the lack of food or drinking water, and the apparent harassment from less courageous forces so that they can do what needs to be done.

Amidst growing numbers of students who seem to consider it more of a waste of their time than anything to participate in any of the programs in the project where I work, there too I have been finding even more contradictions. I can handle the students, who frequently have yet to fully understand what the consequences of their actions, or non-action, mean in the long run. However, I also find people with much more life experience who are apparently only willing to amount to the least of their potential, like a certain administrator in the project who diverted $2,000 of donated money that was specifically earmarked to create a health care fund for my coworkers. Instead of putting that money towards the wellbeing of the people who built and maintain the project with their own sweat and concern, which was what the donor requested, the money was instead put towards repairs for outdated computers in our lab.

Yet for every story like those, there seem to be two more students like Arlen and Freddy, both of whom study in the morning class that I teach. Arlen is a hyperactive, three-foot tall, eight year-old who bears a vague resemblance to a small, Nicaraguan Harry Potter. He lives on the edge of one of the sewage drainage ditches on the other side of the barrio with his sister, mother, and other assorted family members. Despite his fascination with drawing, copying things I write on the chalkboard, and flipping through the pages of any book around, he cannot read, write, nor even recognize the majority of the letters in his own name. Although he is drastically far behind his peers in terms of his academic abilities, I have met fewer students in my time here in Nicaragua with a greater desire to learn. A very good friend of mine, who probably puts more time into worrying about how to best help my students than I do, sent me down a set of books for children learning to recognize the letters of the alphabet. For the past few weeks, Arlen has been voraciously filling in each of the mini-books that help him study the form and shape of each letter. He tears through newspaper articles and magazine clippings in search of the perfect letter B to cut and paste in his book. And, in what might be as seared into my memories of Nicaragua as much as dinner with the banana pickers from San Marcos, Arlen stayed after class the other day to think of a list of all of the words that start with the letter A, still insisting on continuing his quest as I was getting ready to leave for lunch.

Not far from the small, one-room, wooden shack in which Arlen and his sister live is the house of another student of mine, Freddy. Despite having passed by to visit with his parents more than once, I still have yet to figure out how many people, related or not, live in the same house with Freddy. Of the few things I do know for sure about him is that he is, without exaggeration, one of the most talented ten year-old artists I have ever seen. No one seems to know if he was ever taught how to draw and paint or if it’s part of some incredible inherent ability he possesses, but there are few ways to describe the work he is capable of other than phenomenal. The only other thing I know for sure is he comes from a home where his father would rather drink himself to sleep while the kids watch a Chuck Norris movie on TV than take a minute to realize how talented of a son he really has.

Thanks to the support of two friends of the project, he has been able to start taking art classes at a cultural center about twenty minutes by bus from El Recreo. Two weeks ago, Freddy came to class one morning and asked if I would be interested in coming to see an art show of his that weekend. There are few times when a student of mine asks me to support him in something as important as his first art show, which is why I told him I couldn’t have thought of a good excuse if I tried. The day of the show, Freddy stayed towards the back of the exhibition area as crowds of spectators who had come for the traditional Nicaraguan song and dance presentations passed by and then came back to stare at a still life he had done in pastels. Few of the paintings around his, which were done by artists twice his age or more, showed the same ability to use light and shadow, depth and texture to make the painting stand out as much as it did amongst the competition. Of course, I’m just a proud teacher who knows next to nothing about art, so I just took his quiet humility and permanent half-smile as a sign that the day really was as much of a success as I thought it was for him.

I thought a lot about Freddy and Arlen tonight as I was leaving Mass at the cathedral early. I walked outside towards the steps that lead up towards the street, and then sat down to look back on the crowd inside. After a minute or so, two young kids came up by my side and asked me if I had a couple coins I could give up to them. I told them I didn’t even have a single cent on me, to which they responded that I should give them a couple bills instead. Once they began to realize I was both telling the truth and was not going to run them away as often happens to kids outside of a church asking for money, they decided to sit down by my side. I asked them about their day, which had included a game of soccer between four palm trees in the grass around the cathedral, as well as a desperate search for a place to watch a game between Brazil and Argentina for the America’s Cup championship. They asked me about where I worked, and what it was like teaching kids in El Recreo, which gets a bad reputation for being one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city.

As I sat there on the church steps in the drizzling rain, talking with Noel and Michael, it occurred to me that the priest had at least been right about one thing in his interminable sermon when he touched on the idea of the kinds of people that become a part of our life. I think I can say with sincerity that I’ve never been naïve enough to think that what is important in a relationship between two people is what I offer to them. To Freddy and Arlen, maybe I’m a goofy teacher that doesn’t speak Spanish well. To the man at the bus stop with HIV, maybe I’m someone who lends some change so he can buy diapers for his daughter. To Dona Virginia, maybe I’m someone who is willing to take the time to listen to the hardest and saddest parts of her life. But to none of them do I think I’m any sort of answer to the often immeasurable and inconceivable challenges that they have to face on this planet. In the end, I think little of what we are able to directly, tangibly offer one another plays much of a role in what is truly important about those relationships.

Someone much wiser than me recently wrote in a letter that in her life, she had only known individuals. Those many individuals from points both recent and long ago had affected her life in ways that often seemed difficult to describe. At the end, however, she emphasized that it’s often times only through our relationship with those individuals that we come to see and have faith in the fact that “the world is not held up, not by ‘princes’ and their condescension, but by those who take care of each other, however whole or broken.” That faith in the immeasurable importance of people like Freddy or Dona Virginia, more than any tangible act of charity or kindness we could show one another, might just be what matters most when it comes to any of the relationships that have become a part of my life.

"Turn the light out, say goodnight
No thinking for a little while
Let's not try to figure out everything at once
It's hard to keep track of you falling through the sky

We're half-awake in a fake empire
We're half-awake in a fake empire"

--The National, "Fake Empire"

I’ve been struggling for about the last month or so to come up with a good focus for something to get this update started. It’s not that there hasn’t been enough going on. The community health education project is still moving, with plenty of challenges and successes. My students have spent the last week or so working on letters to a group of students in London. I dragged my roommates to Honduras for a weeklong retreat which included camping in the middle of a jungle. It’s just that it seems harder to report on the daily occurrences that seem to fly by before I have time to think about them while I’m at a point in my time here in Nicaragua when I want more than anything to try to draw all of those smaller pieces together to make sense out of the situation as a whole.

On Tuesday of this week, I celebrated having been here in Nicaragua for eighteen months by talking at length with Wilmer, my perpetually bright but equally troubled student, who had apparently stolen the computer teacher’s cell phone the previous Friday. Wilmer is my student who used to get himself stuck upside down inside a giant barrel of water, dance around my class in circles while swinging his backpack around like a weapon, treated my parents to a flute concert in front of his house for more than thirty minutes when they came to visit, and frequently finds himself dangerously close to being expelled from the tutoring program in which I work. He is either failing all of his classes in school with remarkable indifference or is studying diligently to show me that he can raise his grades by thirty points or more from one test to the next. There is no other student in any of the classes I have taught here in Nicaragua who is constantly challenging me more to not throw in the towel and call it a lost cause. Unfortunately, Wilmer’s parents have never quite felt the same.

I found out about the disappearance of the cell phone Monday morning when I got to work, since I had been in a meeting with Silvia regarding the health project all Friday afternoon when Wilmer was in the computer class. As soon as I got the story about him being the only person in the room at the time, another student seeing him with the phone, and knowing his past history for being suspiciously close to things that have disappeared in class, I went straight to his house to see if we could talk it out. Over the last year and a half, I feel like I’ve gone from being a needle in Wilmer’s side to maybe one of the only people that he can talk to, period. I don’t say that for my own gratification, but rather out of general knowledge about how few friends he has, how negatively his parents treat him, and how polar his behavior can seen to anyone who knows him. Despite realizing that there was virtually no chance he was innocent this time, I wanted to have an opportunity to talk to see if I could appeal to some sense of honesty that I hope he still possesses.

We talked for almost an hour, first with me trying to gain his confidence by talking about how much I enjoy having him in my class, how talented I think he is, and how much I’ve appreciated his ability to talk to me about things that are bothering him in the past. Yet, none of that seemed to bring him around, evidenced by his eyes still darting from side to side as he tried to avoid having to look directly at me. I explained to him the facts of the situation, that there were two ways to deal with it: one ending with the both of us being prouder of him, and the other ending with us confronting his parents about the dozen different lies he had come up with to cover his tracks.

It wasn’t like I was talking to a brick wall. A brick wall exists; you know it’s there. This was like talking to a black hole, staring into a big giant empty space. I didn’t know at the end of our “conversation” if anything at all had registered with Wilmer other than that I was going to be coming back the next day to talk to his parents. The trust I said that I had in him, the confidence I hoped he had in me, the anxiousness over what would happen if the situation was brought to his parents, none of it had any tangible effect on him.

Yesterday, as I was helping students finish up their letters to the students in London, I felt distracted throughout the class by the unfortunate reality that I was going to have to talk with his parents, one of whom, at the very least, is verbally abusive, while the other is probably physically abusive as well. At this point I didn’t care one way or another about the cell phone. All I wanted was to see that Wilmer was capable of realizing his mistake, while simultaneously beginning to understand that I wasn’t going to treat him differently (let alone kick him out of class) because of my disappointment in what he’d done. I just needed to know that he still had enough trust in me as his teacher that he could stop lying to me, thus showing me that working with him isn’t really the equivalent of having a black hole in class.

I’m not sure if our walk from my class to his house seemed more of a walk to the gallows for me or him, but by the time we were halfway there, he broke down and said that he would give the phone back. “You mean you’re telling me that you really are the one who took it, right?” I asked. He said that he was, but still seemed incredibly reluctant to hand it over. I soon found out why when we got to the house, his parents met us at the front gate, and fifteen minutes passed with all of them inside “looking for the phone.” He came out with what vaguely resembled a phone, but it was missing both the back battery cover and the front key pad. With some more prodding, I got him to bring out the rest of the phone, and as if he had been trained to repair cell phones for a living, he put the half dozen miniature pieces back together in a few seconds. His mom assured me that he would never be allowed to go to the tutoring program again, which for almost another half hour I desperately tried to convince her would serve no benefit to anyone involved in the situation. At the end of the day, eighteen months after I first set foot here in Nicaragua, I was left feeling about as powerless to form a real connection amidst my students’ often chaotic and unimaginable lives as I was during those first days of class when I could barely speak the language and was a novelty to the kids around me.

Oddly enough, it was only a week earlier that I found myself neck deep in a similar situation with another student, this time one who comes from one of the most caring and stable families I know. From my first day teaching, Dayanna Fabiola has always been one of my favorite students to have in class. I know technically as a teacher I’m not supposed to have favorites, but when you have someone who comes to class every single day because she’s genuinely excited to learn something, and she makes you laugh nearly every time you look at her, you can’t help but be glad that she’s there. Dayanna reminds me a lot of myself when I was in 6th grade. She’s the kid that hangs out with all of the popular kids in class, and they genuinely seem to like her. But, she’s just not mean enough to be on par with the rest of them as they go through their daily mood shifts and snap judgments of what’s cool. To them, she’s not, so by their benevolence she gets to talk to them and even sit at their tables, but she also has to put up with all of the jokes they make in the name of “friendship” at her expense. The latest nickname that seems to have stuck is Pork Chop. Being the kind of kid that cares about her little sister more than life itself and actually (gasp!) likes talking with her parents, she’s also kind of sensitive when the other kids start getting on her case. Maybe just a little too sensitive.

So, after a particularly bad day last week, when it seemed as if I was not going to be able to give a single minute of my class that particular day, I found myself talking to Dayanna after Julio Cesar had drawn on her shirt with a magic marker. It was approximately the fourth argument that I was trying to mediate that day, and by that point I decided that if there was some kind of peacemaking that I could help bring about between all the kids that seemed to have lost their minds, then it was worth the ten or fifteen minutes I spent talking to them instead of continuing with the lesson. However, after trying to get Dayanna to realize that the marker on her shirt wasn’t the end of the world, Julio wasn’t doing it because he hates her, and that it would be really mature of her to accept his (for once in his life) genuine apology, I had gained no ground. With tears still pouring down her face, blubbering about how no one in the world loves her, I decided that a way bigger conversation was needed, and that would have to wait until after class.

On the way home, we started talking about how things have been going for her this year, which brought us back to the fact that no one loves her. When a 10-year old kid tells you that they are pretty sure that no one loves them, let me tell you, talking with them about parents, siblings, teachers, and God is not going to win you any points. Especially not the God part. By the time we reached her house, it was time for a new tactic. I wanted to get Dayanna to think about the ridiculous nicknames that Ricardo calls her, the obnoxious things Julio will do to get under her skin, and the snotty way Fany Karina is sickly sweet towards her one day and ice cold the next, in a less fatalistic light. We talked about how she felt when they did those things to her, but also tried to put those feelings in the context of other things that have happened in her life that were more difficult or painful.

Basically, what I wanted her to realize is that she is only 10-years old, and has a long life left to live. There are going to be a lot of really great things that happen to her in life, along with a lot of things that really hurt. If she lets the little things like some bratty kid like Fany Karina making fun of her determine her emotional state for the rest of her life, then it’s going to be a tough life. We talked about how talented of student she is, and why she wants to come to the tutoring program everyday. None of the reasons she gave me for wanting to come had anything to do with those kids, so I asked her why on earth should she let things that have nothing to do with what really motivates her get in the way of her goals? Her continued insistence as I was leaving that I knew nothing about what I was talking made me grateful I’ve never thought child psychology was my calling in life.

The “feeling like I’m talking to a black hole” category only gets bigger. Sometimes I feel like it’s a new law of physics that has yet to be discovered, something along the lines of the more students I try to talk to, the less and less they seem to respond in any form of verbal or non-verbal communication. While my parents might say they discovered that law years ago, if I were trying to prove my theorem, Ricardo would be Exhibit A. He was one of the most out-going, spastic, goofy, and well, flamboyant students in my class last year. He was always planning some kind of choreographed dance number for the girls in class, writing the dialogue for a little one-act about some dramatic situation or another, or passing notes around class with the latest gossip.

These days, Ricardo comes to class maybe two days out of the week, nearly always is complaining of a headache, stomach pain, or exhaustion after only having been in class for less than ten minutes, and makes opening his notebook look like Sisyphus trying to push his boulder up a hill only to have it roll all the way back down again. There have been days when other students will come to me to report that his grandmother, who takes care of him and his younger brother Felix, is planning on kicking him out of the house, although it’s never really clear for what. While I know that it’s not the only thing that he’s struggling with right now (there was talk his biological mother was going to take him to Costa Rica with her soon), I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for him to try to understand all the issues, fears, and insecurities related to his sexual orientation, especially within the context of a society where mentalities of brute force, stoicism, and machismo dominate. Yet, despite wishing I could get the kid to talk to me about anything that’s going on in his life, good or bad, he’s in agreement with Dayanna that I must not have a clue what I`m talking about since I`m not in the 6th grade.

In addition to Ricardo, Dayanna, and Wilmer, there’s also Dimas. You might remember him; he was one of the two students to throw a rock at my head last year on a day when I had kicked them out of class. Despite our less-than-pleasant encounters in the past, he, like Dayanna, is one of my favorite people to have around. He comes from a home where his best idea of a parent is one of his older siblings who kick the crap out of him on a regular basis. He probably only sees his mom maybe once or twice a year when she comes back from working in Costa Rica. After taking a month-long hiatus from class, Dimas decided to come back about two weeks ago. It was right when the students were starting their letters to London, and after about five minutes of hesitation, he jumped in to the project with more excitement than I think I’ve ever seem from a student working on something I’ve given them to do. After almost an hour of writing and re-writing, he handed in a draft of his letter with so much hesitation I was almost worried he’d written something vulgar that he didn’t want to show me.

What he had written was one of the most honest and genuine things that I’ve ever seen one of my students put down on paper. He talked openly about his childhood living in a family that was barely that, how it made him feel, and what his hopes were for the future. The look on his face when I told him how proud I was of what he had written was worth a million bucks, but it was replaced by his usual violent anger the very next day. Trying to figure out what the trigger or light switch is that keeps him working harder than any of my other students one day and turns him into a ball of rage the next will probably always elude me. I’ve come so close to telling him to not return to my class, and have had to endure the constant complaints of fellow teachers and librarians alike, one who recently called him a “monster.” I think it was the willingness on her part to refer a 14-year old teenager with a lousy home and a talent for writing like she was talking about a murderer or a rapist that helped me realize a little better what it is I do here.

In the year and a half that I’ve been a teacher in Nicaragua, it has become increasingly clear to me nearly every single day that my job has absolutely nothing to do with long division, sentence structure, the scientific method, Spanish colonization, the proper accenting of the word “árbol”, or the verb “to be.” A friend of mine who knows much about teaching kids in Nicaragua was kind enough to point out to me once that within a year or two, there probably won’t be more than a couple kids that really remember anything concrete that I ever taught them in class. So, that begs the question of what is my job working with 6th graders in Nicaragua then? Based on my interactions with a few of them these past couple weeks, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be the immediate catalyst that makes them want to have more confidence in themselves, learn to find more constructive outlets for their anger, talk more openly about their feelings, or take advantage of how talented they are instead of doing desperate things for attention.

I’m fairly certain that if I ever came to Nicaragua with hopes of being the next version of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (who am I kidding, that’s exactly what I thought), it’s long since become glaringly obvious that I’m not going to see my students standing up on desks at the end of my two years, reciting some Nicaraguan equivalent of “Oh Captain, My Captain.” I’m actually pretty certain that despite the handful of them who repeatedly say they think I shouldn’t go back to the United States in December, most will probably leave class at the end of the year with their usual “Adios, profesor!” and only realize months later when they come back to school that I’m gone. To be honest, I’m pretty OK with that. In fact, I wouldn’t want it any other way. It means that from now until then I can keep being grateful for the unbelievable opportunity it is to get to sit in on a kid’s life, no matter how funny, exciting, or sad, and watch it all play out. It means that I can begin to realize more and more the reason I work here: to be a person who actually wants to jump in the middle of their fights, talk to them when they don’t want to listen, and most importantly listen to them whenever it is they decide they finally want to talk.


“What are you changing?
Who do you think you’re changing?
You can’t change things, we’re all stuck in our ways.

It’s like trying to clean the ocean,
What do you think you can drain it?
Well it was poisoned and dry long before you came.

But you can wake up younger under the knife,
And you can wake up sounder if you get analyzed,
And I’d better wake up,
There but for the grace of God go I.”

--Jenny Lewis, “Rise Up With Fists”

It’s taken me a week or two to get back into the swing of things since the time I had off the week before Easter, but I’ve finally found some down time as I’m lying in bed with the flu to write about my most recent trip to Honduras. Needless to say, work during the weeks before vacation kept me busy enough that I was beginning to feel like I went through entire months without taking the time to think about where I’m at, what I want to get out of the rest of my time here, and what I might want to be doing once I come home. So, with the hope of spending some time weighing all of the options and decisions floating around in my head, I headed off for a few days of hiking in a remote corner of Honduras near the Guatemalan border.

My trip started off somewhat inauspiciously, as I missed my first bus from Managua to Tegucigalpa. The moral of the story is to never borrow a roommate’s alarm clock unless you are absolutely sure you know how to operate it. So, what should have been a 3:30am departure turned out to be a morning of running all over Managua trying to find out if I could get on another bus, and then waiting as the next bus ended up leaving over two hours late. As the grey, dreary scenery of Managua slowly gave way to the dust and dirt of the open road, I was grateful to finally be on my way, but kicking myself knowing that I could already be in Tegucigalpa. Visions of hiking through cloud forests on the tallest mountain in Honduras kept me from beating myself up too hard.

By the time I arrived, the sun had long since set, and Comayaguela, the part of the capital where most international buses arrive, is not a place where travelers want to be wandering at night. So, I hopped in the first taxi I could find, and had him take me a few blocks away to a fairly cheap, but safe-looking hostel. Early the next morning, I hopped on another bus at 6:00am headed for the town of Santa Rosa de Copan, some 350km and seven hours away on a series of winding mountain roads and long, hot stretches of desert. From Santa Rosa, it was another hour and a half bus ride to my destination, Gracias. By the time I got there, I hadn’t eaten more than a small plate of pineapple for breakfast more than seven hours earlier, but I didn’t have time to look for a meal since the sun was quickly sinking. I needed to find out how to get up to the visitors center in the nearby Parque Nacional Celaque, and only one restaurant in town was supposed to have information.

The helpful Dutch owner told me that I had come at a tough time to visit the park, since she had already rented out the last of her tents and sleeping bags, and my timeline of hiking in the park wouldn’t get me back to Gracias before the last bus left before Good Friday. You see, in Central America, Easter is kind of a secondary holiday to Thursday and Friday of Holy Week, when everything from supermarkets to banks to restaurants shuts down. The moratorium on doing anything during those days of course applies to buses, so if I wanted to spend more than 20 hours inside the park, I would thus be stuck in a remote part of Honduras without anyway of getting back to the capital in time for my bus to Managua on Saturday. As set my backpack down on a table and was beginning to weigh the frustrating options that I had been given, I heard a voice from behind me say “Hey, aren’t you a volunteer in Managua?”

I turned around to see one of the volunteers from Belize who I have seen in almost two years, since we were going through a two-week orientation in August of 2005. By sheer coincidence, he and two of his roommates had chosen to come to the same restaurant in the same small town in Honduras to get information for the same out-of-the-way national park where I was planning on going. Two minutes later, and I would have been already out the door on my way up to the park, which is unbelievably too large for four people to randomly run into each other like that. So, together we hopped into a mototaxi (kind of a moped with a backseat and a roof) and headed up to the entrance to the park, and from there hiked another half and hour to the visitors center.

We dropped our stuff off in one of the cabins, packed our bags for the morning, and laughed at stories of being a volunteer in Central America. Not having eaten a real meal in almost 24 hours, I was craving a plate of beans, rice, and tortillas from the small cook shack that was supposedly located near the cabin in which we were staying. Dona Alojandra, the woman who runs the shack, must have taken the night off, so I went to bed to the sounds of my stomach doing contortions. 5:00am came before I felt like I had even shut my eyes, and by 5:30 we were on the trail as the first rays of light came in through the huge fir trees above. Even on an empty stomach, there are few things I enjoy in this world more than being out on a trail with no signs of anyone else around, and the only noises coming from a river alongside rushing downstream. It makes Walden seem like day camp.

The trail was a horrible combination of steep, 35-40 degree sections that rarely formed switchbacks but instead went straight up the mountain, followed by equally steep downhill sections that crossed a half dozen streams running down the mountain. By three hours into the hike, we had reached a small camp at about 2000 meters above sea level, but our 600 vertical meters in elevation gain above the visitors center was deceiving given the number of times we had followed the trail down for hundreds of meters only to have to go straight back up. If I had brought my tent, which is sitting in a dusty closet in my bedroom back in the United States, it would have been the perfect place to set up camp and rest until the next day. But, by then I knew that I wouldn’t have much left in me for the return trip if I tried to keep up with the Belize volunteers, so we parted ways as they continued towards the summit, and I stuck around for a few more minutes before I was going to head back down the trail we had just come up. While I was relishing a granola bar my friends had kindly donated to me, along came an elderly man of about 60, who was leading a group of three haphazard college kids, huffing and wheezing their way along the trail even more than I was. I talked with him about the park, his family, and hiking for about twenty minutes, while he shared a bag full of this hard-as-rock sugary candy simply called “dulce.” The candy gave me a desperately needed boost of quick energy, and with that, Don Luis led me a few hundred meters away where the start of another trail that would lead me back down to camp poked out of the woods.

Before it started its descent, the trail climbed for an hour and another 300 vertical meters, well into the level where the clouds perpetually envelop the mountain, and I found myself walking along a ridge with a valley of white blindness on either side of me. It was one of the most surreal feelings I’ve ever felt, and since I knew that I would be getting back to camp long before the others, I took the time to sit down and enjoy it for awhile. With the exception of a few trees within twenty feet of where I was sitting, I couldn’t see anything. It felt like the strangest dream where you aren’t sure where you’re at or how you got there, but at the same time feel completely content to stay as long as you like.

My stomach reminded me that it was not content to stay there all day, and so I headed back down towards the base, and then hiked another two hours into town to find some food. Along the way, I stopped at a small roadside store where the sister of Don Luis made up a huge plate of rice, beans, and cheese for me. Later that night, long after my friends had finally made it back from their 12 hour epic journey to the top and had left for Gracias, I sat outside of the visitors’ center watching an unbelievable amount of stars flood the entire sky to the point that I couldn’t make out a single constellation because there were so many.

I spent the following morning hiking to a cliff that looked out across another one of the narrow valleys that cuts down the mountain. Across the way was an enormous 150 meter waterfall that came spilling off the mountain in a thin silver stream. I spent over an hour just sitting underneath the forest canopy, enjoying a PB and J sandwich for breakfast, and trying to come up with good reasons to come back to Managua as the sun slowly came up through the trees. Later that afternoon, as I was finishing up a meal at Dona Alojandra’s cook shack, I ran into a Honduran couple who were planning on a day hike through the park with their two kids. I convinced them that in sandals, with only a few remaining hours of daylight, and without a tent or sleeping bags, they wouldn’t get to enjoy much of the park at all. So, they offered me a ride back down to Gracias, saving my worn out legs another two hours of walking.

The husband was a doctor, the wife a nurse, and the two kids obviously well-educated prep school students by the English they insisted on using when talking to me. Naturally, we started talking about the park and how beautiful it is, and they all got going on a rant about how Hondurans don't take enough pride in places like that, and how they will eventually end up destroying every last corner of the country that anyone would ever want to see. Considering how few places Nicaragua has to enjoy something as beautiful as Celaque, I couldn’t have agreed with them more. We spent the rest of the ride talking about America's role in the world today, the need for more doctors that go into medicine to serve the underprivileged, and the growing level of violence in Central America as the economic status of so many continues to plummet. Along the way, they handed out giant tin cans of powdered milk to the kids walking along the side of the road, picked up a little old lady heading down to Gracias to get her husband at the local health clinic, and advised her on what she needed to ask the doctors about her husband's condition.

As they dropped me off in Gracias, they gave me their email address and phone number and told me they literally wanted me to stop by and stay with them in the town of La Lima if I was ever passing through Honduras again. Since there wasn't a room open yet in the hostel I had chosen, I walked back up through town to the restaurant where I had run into the Belize volunteers a few days before. A few minutes later, in walked the same family. Apparently, they had looked for me all over town because I had left a bag of PB and J sandwiches in the front seat of the car, and they didn't want me to go hungry without them. Where else on earth can you find people like this? After an hour with them, I literally felt like they could have been family members of mine. It takes more than just hospitality to not only offer a ride to someone, but to offer your home as well.

That evening, I wandered around the central park as people filtered in and out of the church during the Holy Thursday service that was taking place. As I sat outside looking up at the steeples bathed in white from the spotlights below, and at the warm yellow glow from the candles inside that spilled light out the giant oak doors, I felt amazed thinking about all of the people I had run into in the previous two days. My journey back to Tegucigalpa the very next day was about to blow me away even more by the people I would encounter along the way.

As I mentioned, there is no public transportation anywhere in Central America on the Friday of Holy Week. You can’t catch a taxi, a bus, a boat, or even a mule. But, the time honored tradition of hitchhiking when there is no other conceivable way of getting from point A to point B abounds on this magical day of the year. It was with this optimistic determination that I set out from Gracias on Friday morning to make my way back to anywhere closer to the capital. On the map, the shortest route from Gracias to the capital doesn’t look like it should take more than three hours. But, by land, you have to pass through some of the most treacherously unpaved roads in some of the most difficult mountain passes in the entire country. Hence, why no one travels in that direction, Good Friday or not. So, I slung my backpack over my shoulders and headed for the other end of town, to start the journey back the way I had come, over 400km (250 miles) of highway from the western end of the country, to the near northeastern corner, and then back down to the south central valley where Tegucigalpa lies.

I should mention that as much fun as hitchhiking can be, it’s not something I would ever do just for the sake of an adventure. First, it makes you look pretty bad as an American when you’re so cheap you won’t pay for a $3 bus ride that will take you over 200km just so you can have a story to tell. Despite it being a relatively safe and common thing to do in Honduras and Nicaragua, people use it as a last ditch effort to get where they’re going because they’ve run out of money or there are no other means of transportation. Second, it’s not something I would necessarily do unless I thought standing along the side of a highway, day or night, could be more dangerous than the possibility of getting into the back of a truck with a perfect stranger. Such was the situation in which I found myself the Friday of Holy Week, looking at a long stretch of road in front of me and a hot sun overhead.

The first two rides I caught were short, taking me only about 15km in total. But the third ride ended up being one of the best. After I had been dropped off by the second driver, I walked about half a kilometer down the road until a big blue Ford pickup came flying by, stopping some 30 meters ahead. As I got close to the passenger side window, I could hear the distinct sounds of Queen’s hit “Under Pressure” blaring from the radio, and it was then I knew it was going to be a good ride. The driver was a farmer in his mid-50s, and sitting shotgun was his 12-year old nephew.

The first thing they asked me, as do most people I meet when I’m traveling, was where I was from. When I told them I was from the States, the kid said in perfect English “Hey, me too!” I thought I might have just stepped into some international kidnapping scheme when the dad explained to me that all of his brothers and sisters lived in San Jose. The nephew had come to Honduras to visit during Holy Week, and was going back in a few days. The ride took me past my initial goal of making it back to Santa Rosa de Copan (only 45km from Gracias) and all the way along the highway in the direction of San Pedro Sula, in the northeast corner of the country. We spent the time talking about California, of which I know nothing about, traveling in Central America versus traveling in the States, what growing up in the small Honduran town of San Nicolas was like, and the geography of the dozens of peaks that surrounded us. They dropped me off on the near side of a town called La Entrada (I’m not entirely sure what it’s supposed to be the entrance to), and I passed through town to catch a ride on the other side.

There, I caught a ride in the back of a truck with probably the roughest looking group along the way. Five scruffy guys were sitting in the back of the tiny green pickup that was flying down the highway towards San Pedro Sula. Most of them looked like they had been or were still somewhat intoxicated, which made me start to wonder if this was a big mistake and I was going to end up on the side of the road without a backpack, or worse. But, when you’re standing on the side of a highway with trucks flying past you by the dozens, you don’t have more than a second or two to be choosy about the ride that you’re about to catch. They didn't say anything to me for the entire 100 km or so that we were traveling together, until we finally got out of the truck along the highway that runs through San Pedro Sula. That was when they asked where I was headed, told me which direction I needed to go, and warned me to catch a truck as quickly as I could because San Pedro is apparently not the safest place to be, day or night. They told me that even though they were headed to Tegucigalpa as well, it would be better if I went on by myself because it would be hard for me to catch a ride with them. I offered them the last of the water I had in my Nalgene, and we parted ways.

After crossing a huge bridge over a river full of Holy Week swimmers, I stopped under a tree along the side of the highway to put on some more sunscreen, check the map to see how far it was to the capital, and waited for another truck to pass. It was only about five minutes or so before a red pickup sped by, and then stopped 100 yards down the road. I hopped in back with five guys who had been working in Guatemala for a few weeks, and had spent the last two days trying to get back to Comayagua in Honduras. They looked exhausted and hungry, but elated to find out the driver was headed more than 10km down the road in the direction they wanted to go. One of the workers saw me putting on more sunscreen and asked if he could borrow some. He took so much that after rubbing it into his face for a good three minutes, it still looked like a pile of white goop, which the rest of the guys in the truck found hilarious. They asked me where I was from, and then proceeded to explain to me that was where they were eventually headed. I guess they were going back to Comayagua for family or more money for the journey, and then were going to turn around and head all the way back north to the border. They had no idea how they were going to get there, how long it would take them, and surely no idea what was waiting for them if they were lucky enough to actually make it.

Our driver didn't end up taking us all that far, and ended up dropping us off on the side of the highway near a tiny gas station and some banana stands. This literally was the middle of nowhere. It was probably about noon at this point, I've never felt hotter in my life, and we were a long, LONG, way from any real town. I stopped by one of the banana stands and got a half dozen for the six of us, and then ran over to the gas station while they headed down the road to look for the next lift. When I caught up with them, three were hiding in the shade that a tiny tree along the side of the road was providing, and the other three were looking desperate as they baked on the concrete highway.

After having shared the last half hour or so talking with these guys about their lives working all over Central America and their hopes for immigrating to the States, I felt like I owed them something more than just the junk I bought at the gas station, but it was all I had to offer. I handed over a liter of water and a bunch of the Can-Can cookies that I had stuffed in my bag, and jokingly said "Para que no se mueran de hambre ni sed" (So you guys don’t die of hunger or thirst) to them as I headed down the road. As soon as those words came out of my mouth, I immediately regretted them immensely as I thought about where they were headed in the matter of days. I passed over the crest of a hill and that was it, I never saw them again. Who knows where they're at now, or if they'll ever make it to where they were traveling.

Two more rides took me from the middle of the desert to a huge lake in the center of the country, and from there down into the Tegucigalpa valley. I was turned down every single time I tried to offer the drivers a few Honduran lempiras for the ride, was frequently offered a Coke or even a plate of food, and on my last ride was given a bag full of sample soaps and shampoos. I asked the driver if it was because he noticed I hadn’t bathed in two days, and he just laughed as he told me it was because he worked for a soap company. That last ride drove all the way to the opposite side of the capital from where their house was just so I wouldn’t be left in a bad part of town trying to make it to the hostel where I was going to stay for the night.

When I think about my trip during Semana Santa, a couple things still stick out. The first is that I got really lucky getting back to Tegucigalpa. I’m not sure there are many people who have crisscrossed the entire country, over 400km in the back of a pickup truck, in just one day. I could have been in a lot of trouble at a couple points during the journey if someone hadn’t offered me a ride. The fact that everyone knew there was no other way for me to get wherever I was going helped, and it was surely safer than usual considering four out of the seven trucks that offered me a ride were families out traveling for the day.

More than the luck though, I’m once again reminded of why I like being here so much, and by here I don’t mean in Nicaragua, Honduras, or even in Central America. By here, I mean a place in which I’m a complete stranger, a place where people could very well ignore my presence and continue on with their daily lives. Yet, just in the two days that I spent getting down the mountain to Gracias and back to Tegucigalpa, I came across more random people that went out of their way to not just offer me a lift, but to genuinely look after me, than I’ve probably met in all of my time living in the U.S. That’s not meant to be a commentary on the level of humanitarian goodwill at home versus abroad, but more so an observation on the importance of finding places like Gracias, Honduras, of experiencing a few short minutes or an entire afternoon with a person that never would have come into your life otherwise, and in turn, finding yourself asking a million new questions about the world in which you live.


"Ay, por el camino del sitio mío un carretero alegre pasó
En su tonada que es muy guajira y muy sentida alegre cantó
Ay, por el camino del sitio mío un carretero alegre pasó
En su tonada que es muy sentida y muy guajira alegre cantó.

Me voy al transbordador a descargar la carreta
Me voy al transbordador a descargar la carreta
Para llegar a la meta de mi penosa labor.

A caballo vamos pa´l monte, a caballo vamos pa´l monte
A caballo vamos pa´l monte, a caballo vamos pa´l monte.

Yo trabajo sin reposo para poderme casar
Yo trabajo sin reposo para poderme casar
Y si lo puedo lograr seré un guajiro dichoso."

--Buena Vista Social Club, "El Carretero"

Friday afternoon, I was sitting at one of the tables in my class with my students Dayanna and Julio Cesar. They were asking me if it was true that I was leaving Nicaragua at the end of the school year in December. While I’ve thought a lot about what that departure will mean, as well as remembered what leaving to come here was like, the conversation I was having with my students made me remember another date that might be equally as important. Two years ago today I was standing on the steps of the National Archives in Washington, DC as I called to accept the offer to work in Nicaragua. The day before, I had been sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen as I responded to constituent mail on behalf of the Senator for whom I was working. My parents had just arrived in town to visit me in DC for the first time since I had graduated from college, with little idea of how seriously I was considering the possibility of moving here. The next day I was running in the Cherry Blossom Ten-Miler, trying to just focus on keeping my feet moving, but finding it hard given the weight of the decision I’d just made the day before.

Later that afternoon, as my students were in their weekly computer and library classes, I headed over to Dona Cruz’s house to help set up the chairs and get the charts ready for our first meeting of the community health project that Silvia and I have been working on. Based on how much I paced around in her backyard before the women showed up for the meeting, it’s quite possible that I was less nervous on the day I stepped on a plane to come here. There was a good part of me that thought despite the hundreds of invitations that we had distributed to five women who are helping us with the project no one would show up. Three o’clock, the time we had planned to start the meeting rolled around, and no one but I and Dona Cruz’s son Michael were sitting there wondering if and when things would get started. Around 3:30, I started to lose all hope that this was actually going to work.

Then, one by one, as promised, the women with whom Dona Cruz works with on a regular basis in her part of the barrio began to pass through the gate and make their way towards the back. Not surprisingly, Dona Cruz played a hand not only in getting the women there, but also in their reason for being late. As it turns out, there had been a free pap smear screening being offered by doctors from the Ministry of Health in another part of the barrio that morning. So many women had shown up, including the ones that were coming to our meeting, that it took all day to see the entire line. By the time we were ready to begin, there were around 25 people sitting under the shade of a huge tree in the blistering hot Nicaraguan afternoon.

I guess it would be a good time to explain a little more about why Silvia and I have been working for so long to get this program off the ground. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the health care situation in Nicaragua is borderline broken. The government tries to finance small, understaffed, and ill-equipped health centers were patients are supposed to go for everything from a simple cold to chronic emphysema to cerebral hemorrhages. In the time I have been here, the country’s public health workers have been on strike for a number of reasons, ranging from higher salaries to the release of a nurse who had been jailed for manslaughter. The nearly 90 year-old mother of Dona Aura, one of the founders of the comedor in which I work, recently fell and broke the right side of her pelvis. After taking her to three separate hospitals in the back of Silvia’s husband’s taxi, she was brought home because no one would take an x-ray of the break. Over a week later, she’s still waiting for the surgery because the hospital hasn’t found the right prosthesis.

When I worked in a medical clinic in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic a few years ago, we frequently made use of a book for health care workers called Where There Is No Doctor. Ironically, in the middle of a major metropolitan capital, that same book has become the backbone of our work in El Recreo.

I know next to nothing about medicine or preventive health other than what I’ve seen while working in the D.R. or with the Nebraska AIDS Project. Silvia, who has worked in the project’s pharmacy in El Recreo for more than 15 years, has a million times more experience than me working with the illnesses that affect the people in our community the most. Still, neither one of us is prepared to launch a program with anything as audacious as trying to alleviate even a small minority of the chronic conditions in a place like El Recreo, which can seem more like living on top of a mountainside in terms of its isolation from basic health care. However, with our limited knowledge, we think we can at least entice a good number of people from around the neighborhood to start getting together on a regular basis to talk about the health issues that are affecting the people there the most. People that live in the south end of the neighborhood barely have a good idea of where the project is located in the center, let alone know anyone who lives in the other end of the neighborhood. So, if our meetings help raise some awareness about how to prevent parasites or dental decay, great. But I’d be a lot happier at the end of however long this lasts to know that a few people from opposite sides of the neighborhood were able to rely on one another just a little bit more because of the opportunity of getting to know each other through these meetings.

So, with those modest goals in mind we started out on Friday with a meeting about intestinal parasites, exactly two years after I had been offered the chance to come to Nicaragua. These kinds of meetings can tend to initiate an instant case of narcolepsy, so our plan was to involve the participants as much as possible, instead of spending the entire time lecturing to them about tapeworms and amoebas. We got a lot of laughs when we talked about the uncomfortable itchiness that the nefarious pinworm causes in kids. The women (and two men) asked a lot of questions, and provided just as much insight into the different kinds of symptoms and methods of prevention for each parasite. And, in what might have made my day (if not entire month), one of the women asked to borrow the charts that I had made so that she could copy them at home.

Silvia sent me an email today, and in her usual self-deprecating sense of humor, she claimed that she hardly put any work into the meeting at all. Yet, she still seemed to be more grateful for the experience to work with her friends and neighbors on something that is so important to her than I’ve seen since January when we went to Masaya with the recipients of the wheelchairs. In reality, our meeting on Friday, and all of the ones to come, wouldn’t be possible if Silvia hadn’t offered her unconditional support for the project from the first time I mentioned it to her. Maybe just as important was the advice that I received from another friend who convinced me despite my skepticism that it really was worth bringing up with Silvia.

Now, with my students on vacation for a week during Easter break, the first big hurdle in the health project behind me, and no one left to cheer for in the Final Four now that Georgetown has lost, it’s time to hit the road. Monday morning, I’ll be on the early bus for Honduras, stopping only long enough in Tegucigalpa to catch another bus for a town in the north called Gracias. There, I’ll hopefully spend the next four days without a soul in sight hiking in the highest mountains in the country, breathing clean air, and maybe thinking about where I’ll be two years from now.

“Between the click of the light and the start of the dream.”

--“No Cars Go,” The Arcade Fire

Tonight, I stopped by the gas station down the street from our house to pick up something to drink on my way home from work. As I was waiting in line, I noticed a father peering into the glass case of beverages with his son who seemed to be about five years old. His clothes were worn and covered in the eternal dust that clouds the air of Managua during this time of year. The son wore a beat up pair of rubber sandals and a faded yellow shirt that looked like it might have had more than a few owners before him. They both stared intently at the selections, finally settling on a bottle of Pepsi, and carried it over to the counter. The father dug into his pocket to pull out a few small bills to cover the drink and the hot dog that his son had been asking for since they were eyeing the beverages. Outside as they sat on the curb, the son consumed the entire hot dog in two bites.

A few minutes later, he came in holding five or six trinkets made out of different colored yarn on a stick. He shyly came up to ask if I would buy one of the dream catcher-looking contraptions for 10 cordobas, or about 50 cents. I said I’d love to, but that I wondered if his dad could come in to show me the other colors that he had to offer. The security guard looked at me begrudgingly, as if this dad selling a couple of ornaments made out of yarn would be bad for the sale of gas and beer. I asked about the father’s work, how he made the ornaments, and where they were from, which I found out was Matagalpa, a city about two hours north of Managua. Since I have passed through there before, I asked him where exactly just to keep the conversation going. His answer was the central park. Not around that part of town or in a neighborhood nearby. The park was where he lived with his son.

Frequently, people on the street asking you for a few coins will tell you that they really live in some other city and are just trying to get up enough money so they can make it home from Managua, which is often difficult to believe if they are one of the regulars that you see frequently around the neighborhood. However, there was nothing ashamed, apologetic, or dishonest in the voice of this father. It was clear he was just giving me a very simple response as a matter of fact. A few minutes later, they walked out the door into the night, and I soon followed with my pink and blue window hanging in tow.

Living and working in a situation like the one in which I find myself in Nicaragua, it can be easy to frequently view myself as part of a different world. There are so many things, people, smells, sights, and situations that I encounter on a daily basis that had never been a part of my life sixteen months ago. In that respect, I suppose that one could look at the idea of living in a place like Nicaragua for two years and distinguish it as being a separate reality from the one I grew up knowing for 24 years of my life. More and more, however, I find myself asking why that reality is so far removed from the reality of a father trying to make enough money selling trinkets outside a gas station so he and his son can get back home.

I went to see the movie Babel with my roommate Adriana a few weeks ago. I liked the film overall despite a strong dislike for Brad Pitt, but there was one scene in particular that has made me think a lot ever since I saw it. In the movie, Pitt’s character and his wife find themselves stuck in an isolated village in the middle of the Moroccan desert. With them is a larger group of fellow British and American tourists who have all piled off of their fancy air-conditioned tour bus while they wait. The circumstances of how they got there are important to the movie, but to me, it was the reaction amongst the tourists that struck a nerve the most. As Pitt is trying to convince them to wait before they leave, the group becomes more and more agitated at the thought of having to stay in the village any longer than absolutely necessary. Fears that they must be among American-hating terrorists begin to rise, and members of the group start considering it an unnecessary risk to stay in such a “dangerous” situation despite the fact that everyone in the town merely seems curious as to why these thirty some tourists have just stopped in their hometown.

For me, it seemed like such a foreign concept that these tourists would become so panic-stricken without having been presented with any reason to justify their fears. Do people really go on trips to places as culturally and historically important as Morocco and not expect to ever have any contact with the people that make it such an interesting part of our planet? Whenever someone from the States passes through Nicaragua, they almost always inevitably end up staying at a hostel called the Bearded Monkey in the small town of Granada along the shore of Lake Nicaragua. While it might be a cheap place to stay, I’ve hated both experiences I’ve had there as the entire operation seems designed to keep you inside instead of going out to explore anything about the original colonial capital of Nicaragua, let alone any of the myriad people and places throughout the rest of the country. Who needs to talk to an actual Nicaraguan when there is an in-house bar, free internet, restaurant, library, TV room, and movies to watch?

After having lived here for over a year, I can’t imagine not having met the people that now make up such an important part of my life. Their realities, stories, and daily lives have become an integral part of my own, not in a semi-permanent, “it was nice knowing you, but I’ll be moving along soon” sort of way. Rather, they are people that I turn to on the worst of my days being here just as I would with the best of my friends or closest of family back home. They in turn share with me some of the most personal aspects of their lives because somehow our relationship has taken on a similar importance for them as well.

As I briefly mentioned a few entries ago, my coworker Silvia and I have been working for the past few months on laying the groundwork for a community health education group that will hopefully begin meeting on a regular basis within the next few weeks. As part of the preparations, we’ve decided to extend the invitation to participate in the meetings to as many of the women in the barrio as possible. This isn’t an easy task, considering the neighborhood in which our project is located covers a pretty large geographical area compared to other neighborhoods in Managua. Many people often don’t know the rest of their neighbors on the same block, let along in another part of the barrio. To bridge that gap, we’ve asked a group of five women in different parts of the barrio to help support us by providing their houses for meetings, planning the contents of each meeting, and giving the group a greater sense of self-ownership. Many of the specifics of the program still have yet to be decided, and the overall success in terms of the participation of the women still remains up in the air. However, in meeting with a lot of the women who will be helping us out, I’ve become filled with an even greater sense of gratitude for the opportunity to be a part of someone’s life that I never would have come into contact with had I stayed within the comfort of my own life in the United States.

For example, Silvia and I spent one Friday afternoon not too long ago visiting with Dona Cruz, a woman who was one of the original leaders in the comedor back in the early 1990s, when the project was nothing more than a cooking shed and a few tables at which the kids ate each day. Most people who know Dona Cruz will admit that she can be a little out there in terms of some of the things that she says. For example, she is a devout Evangelical Christian who quotes verses from the Bible like an English professor would quote Chaucer. Yet, as I found out this particular afternoon, she is an absolute fanatic when it comes to boxing. In passing, I had mentioned that there was a big fight coming up in May for Oscar de la Hoya, the same Mexican-American boxer who had easily beaten a well-known Nicaragua fighter last year. Dona Cruz immediately became so animated that she hopped out of her chair, started rattling off statistics about each fighter, and insisted that I come to her house to watch the fight on her tiny 10-inch black and white TV that she had haphazardly connected to a cable in the back yard.

In addition to her enthusiasm for boxing, Dona Cruz further surprised me by her willingness to talk about some of the most saddening personal struggles that she has gone through in her life. Somehow, we moved from discussing sports to family, and she began to recount the years when she and her children lived in terror of her alcoholic ex-husband. As is sadly the case with so many women around the world, not just in Nicaragua, Dona Cruz depended on her husband economically and therefore saw it as an impossibility to leave him amidst the most horrific of his abuse. For years, he uttered the most unimaginable obscenities at her, beat her to the point that she stopped wearing sunglasses to cover up the black eyes, and forced himself on her while the children slept in the next room. Fortunately for Dona Cruz, her husband eventually left her permanently, devoting his entire time to the alcohol that had completely consumed him. Yet, hearing of someone’s tragedy like that leaves you absolutely incapable of finding sufficient words to describe your sorrow for what happened to them. Despite all of the unbelievably difficult situations through which she had suffered, here was a woman who still has so much desire to spend some of her time working towards the strengthening of her own community. She shows up without fail now on Fridays, whether Silvia and I have a planning meeting scheduled or not.

Sometimes the strength of the relationships with the people I’ve come to know in the barrio doesn’t come through the stories that they have to share, but rather from who they are in general. Two examples come to mind, the first of which has been weighing heavy on so many members of the barrio for the past week. Each day, on my way from the nun’s house to the small school where I teach in the morning and afternoon, I pass by the house of a man named Don Tinoco. He is an amputee who lost one of his legs to an severe infection related to his diabetes. Every morning, I would stop in front of Don Tinoco’s vigil on the street corner by his house and talk with him about everything from how my students were behaving to how beautiful the weather was that week. Without fail, he quickly became one of the most dependable parts of my day, always willing to offer a firm handshake and a wave each time I passed by the house. This past January, we got Don Tinoco onto the list of people in and around the barrio that needed a wheelchair. We took him along with us on the trip to Masaya, where he waited patiently with the rest of the recipients for a new chair that would allow him to wheel around on the basketball court next door to his house instead of being forced to remain in the same spot unless someone else came along to give him a push.

On our way home from Masaya, I sat next to Don Tinoco in one of the three vehicles we had taken to pick up the chairs. He told me stories of when he first started working for the project as its first driver years ago. He also used to spend long hours working on the farm that the project owns in a small town called San Marcos. There, he would help harvest the crops that were then used to make the meals for the children in the comedor. It was obvious how proud he was of the work that he had been able to do for the barrio, and didn’t seem to let his current health situation affect that pride in the least. In the days after our return with his new chair, I frequently would try to challenge him and another one of the recipients to a race with their chairs out on the basketball court. I never got him to join in the race, but there were plenty of mornings when he would be out there wheeling himself around in circles, enjoying the fresh air and the early morning sun that he was always telling me about.

However, amidst both continuing problems with his circulation related to his diabetes, as well as extremely high blood pressure, Don Tinoco´s health began to deteriorate rapidly over the last month. He was hospitalized for over a week during the end of February, and was sent home for two final weeks before he passed away last Monday in the hospital. I had seen him only once during his last stay at home; he was out in front of his house in the same place that I had seen him everyday for the past year here in Nicaragua. Even from far away, I still got his characteristic wave and a “Hola...Mateo!” I stopped to talk with him for a few minutes, told him how glad I was to see him back out in front of his house, and went about the hundred other things occupying my mind that day.

When I got the phone call last Monday letting me know that he had passed away, my initial reaction wasn’t one of overwhelming sadness. I knew how much he had suffered, as well as how much his daughter Gloria had suffered trying to take care of him over the last few years. The first thing that I felt was a desire to be in the barrio with my coworkers, friends, and his family. It was already 9:30 at night when I found out, so returning to the barrio wasn’t an option, but all I could think about the rest of the night was how much I felt like being with the people who have become such an important part of my life here was what I needed at the time. It’s funny how you can go from being a complete stranger in a foreign country to feeling the same empathy that you would feel for a friend or a family member losing someone that they loved back in the Untied States.

The list of people goes on to the point where I wouldn’t begin to accurately do any one single person justice by trying to describe what becoming a part of their life means to me. However, two more have to be mentioned. This year, I’m teaching a 6th grade tutoring class in the afternoons. The majority of the students in the class are the same ones that I had in my 5th grade class last year, which was my plan in changing grades from the start. While it has been great getting to continue working with a lot of the same students that I struggled with for so much of last year, it has been just as rewarding to get to see small glimpses of the talent that some of the new students have as well. One that has stood out tremendously is a student named Brenda. She, along with two of her cousins, are three of the ten or so kids that I didn’t know coming into the beginning of the year. During the first few weeks of class, as students began bringing in the loads of homework that teachers always pile on at the start of a new year, Brenda sat quietly each day while she worked until she finished each assignment. Then, she would come find me to ask for more work to do in her notebook. I would give her story problems, creative writing assignments, or English homework that she would almost always breeze through without a problem. If she did have a problem, she was never too shy to ask for help, and after a little explanation, she would begin to understand whatever concept had her stuck in the first place.

Brenda made my day a few weeks ago after I had split a quart of strawberry ice cream with her, her cousins Eliezer and Andres, and another student named Dayanna. They had been the only four students to make it through the first month of class without missing or showing up late for a single day of class. As the rest were leaving, Brenda asked me if I had any books to read. It just so happened that a friend of mine in the States had just sent me a few books, one of which was from the Ramona Quimby series that always got read when I was a kid. I asked Brenda if she thought she might like that one, and her eyes immediately lit up. It was like something out of some cliché movie about motivational teachers and talented students, except I take no credit for her insatiable interest in reading. She returned the book to me the next day, giving me a complete explanation of what she liked and didn’t like about the book. This was when I knew that I had a big task in front of me. Our library in the project doesn’t necessarily have the most interesting books for kids her age. Finding something that will really captivate their attention like Ramona Quimby, Harry Potter, or James and the Giant Peach is a tall order. I was able to find a copy of Roald Dahl’s “Matilda” hidden in the back of one of the shelves in the children’s literature section, and thought that it might be something that she liked since it was about a young girl who liked to read.

Brenda read the book cover to cover in about four days, despite the fact that it’s over seventy pages long. She didn’t like it as much as Ramona Quimby, but she did seem excited when I lent her a copy of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis that my aunt Paty had sent down to me. She’s already finished with that, and took great joy in the fact that her family owned the movie of the book that she had just read. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone awaits her next, and I’m pretty sure that she’ll have that one done by the end of next week. If I could even begin to understand what makes her enjoy reading so much, I would put a patent on it and start selling it to the rest of my students immediately. She tells me that she wants to be a doctor someday, not because it will help her make a lot of money, but because it’s what she really thinks she wants to do with her life. It doesn’t put me to shame, but instead makes me absolutely amazed that there is a 12-year old girl in my 6th grade class with more insight and motivation for her own future than I have for mine!

The other person that I find it hard to not mention is Ingrid, the soon-to-be 8-year old with hydrocephalus that also received one of the wheelchairs from our friends in Connecticut this January. I’ve been able to pass by the house in which Ingrid lives with her grandmother, younger sister, and other assorted family members three or four times since she received her wheelchair. Previously, Ingrid’s grandmother, who is her primary caregiver since her biological mother died during the birth of her younger sister, would have to carry Ingrid around all day. Whenever she wasn’t holding her in her arms, Ingrid would be lying down on a twin bed without a mattress.

According to the most recent news from the doctors at the public health clinic where Ingrid has become one of the most popular patients, the swelling in her brain is beginning to diminish slightly, enough that it will probably not be necessary to operate on her to drain the liquid manually. Obviously, that in and of itself is a minor miracle for someone with her condition, so it’s hard to become too fixated on the possibility of what continued improvement could mean for her mobility and overall development. However, her grandmother, who continuously reprimands me if I refer to her as Ingrid’s grandmother instead of her mother, diligently goes through a list of exercises, touches, and movements that the doctors have recommended to help stimulate the neurons in Ingrid’s brain. She also told me during the most recent visit that she can’t wait to participate in the first of the community health meetings that we are planning for the second week in April. To her, the idea of not just taking care of your own home, but your entire neighborhood seems so basic yet so necessary. If half of the women that will hopefully participate in the program come with a similar perspective, I think that it will be more than Silvia and I could hope for.

In coming to the end of yet another verbose and overdue update, I keep going back to thinking about the father and his son who were selling trinkets outside of the gas station a few nights ago. I think there is a point in everyone’s life when an exchange or interaction between them and someone else who seems to come from a completely different reality can be unnerving to the point that they try to avoid thinking about what that other person’s daily life is really like. Where did he come from? Where will he go after he leaves here? What are the things that have happened in his life that didn’t happen in mine and vice versa? What was it that led me to being the one with an extra 10 cords in my pocket and him to be the one trying to sell me something so that he can get his son home? Yet, the more I spend my days here in Nicaragua, living, working, and interacting with hundreds of people whose “realities” couldn’t have seemed more foreign to me a few years ago, I can’t begin to imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t come.


"'cause no one wants to pay to see your happiness,
No one wants to pay to see your day to day,
and I'm not buying it either
but I'll try selling it anyway."

--Rilo Kiley, "It´s A Hit"

At long last, here is the link to the pictures that I have been promising everyone for at least a year now. I'll always add more as I get them, so keep checking back during your coffee breaks at work.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34347763@N00/

Started back to work two weeks ago, and as to be expected, it’s been full of long-winded discussions about things of varying degrees of consequence. We have moved on from the days of unremitting debates about the “birthday committee,” but still seem to get bogged down over how long the library class for the afternoon students should last. In the grand scheme of things, I doubt my students’ biggest problems in life revolve around whether they receive 45 minutes or an hour each week with the librarians. Fortunately, this year has brought the departure of the Mexican psychotherapist who was hired as a consultant for the project last year. Gone are the days of ridiculous workshops that involve simulating our birth by having to crawl through a cloth tunnel, and more importantly, his smug, condescending, and paternalistic attitude towards my Nicaraguan coworkers.

On our first day back to work, my coworker Silvia made an announcement that the annual shipment of wheelchairs from a group of medical volunteers in Connecticut would be arriving the next day. Last year, on my second day of work, I was roped into going along with two of my coworkers to pick up 20 brand new wheelchairs in a town about 30 minutes outside of Managua. The chairs were being stored in a temporary medical clinic inside of a school, where the volunteer doctors, dentists, and nurses from the U.S. were providing free medical care to residents of the surrounding communities. Since few of the staff spoke Spanish, and my coworkers don’t speak English, it worked out well that I went along. The chairs were loaded up into our truck, and we were off before I really had a chance to understand where they had come from or to whom they were going. This year, I expected the process to be as efficient and problem-free as it had been last year until I heard Silvia mention that the donors requested that all of the people who would be receiving the chairs travel to the clinic to pick them up.

At first, I couldn’t believe what seemed like such an absurd request. We had twenty people on a list who needed wheelchairs because of serious problems with their mobility. The majority of them either had an amputation or were suffering from a severe physical disability like cerebral palsy. To make matter worse, many of them didn’t live within close proximity to the project. A lot of them had been referred to us through family members or friends that were associated with one of our programs, and thus, in one instance lived as far away as La Libertad, a two and a half hour bus ride from Managua. How the hell did they expect us to ask all of these people to make a trip like that, when just a year before I had picked up the chairs on my own without so much as a question about where they were headed? I was shown an email in which the director of the medical clinic had communicated with the director of the project in El Recreo that there was a possibility we would be able to get up to 20 of the chairs without requiring the recipients to be physically present. So, thinking that we could save people a lot of trouble, Silvia, the project driver Don Felix, and I set off on Tuesday morning to see if I could sweet talk the people running the distribution of the wheelchairs in Masaya.

Classic mistake when working for a social service organization, or really any organization for that matter, is not fully understanding the nature of communication between two parties when you are sent in as a third party to get something from the first for the second. When we got to the clinic, the director, a dedicated and easygoing guy that I had met with the year before, made it clear that there was no way he could let us walk out the door with 20 chairs unless we had the people there to receive them. My initial reaction of frustration at their request began to fade as he explained to me various reasons why he couldn’t bend the rules this time. First, the organization that provides the chairs is separate from the group of medical staff running the distribution, and the wheelchair group requires a photo of each recipient in their chair to help with their own fundraising purposes. Second, we had a large number of patients on our list who were kids, unlike the year before. It’s fairly easy to judge what size chair a 60 year-old double amputee that weighs 180 pounds will need, but figuring out if a 6 year-old with hydrocephalus will even stay in a chair without sliding out is a whole different story. The importance of this point will become even clearer in a little while. Third, Dr. Carl had been faced with the unfortunate task of turning many people away from the gates of the clinic who had been waiting for hours for a chair because many of them had already been set aside for groups like ours. To send a truck full of chairs out the door with none of the recipients of those chairs in site would be difficult to explain to a man with no legs from the very same community whose children carried him in a plastic chair.

Finally, Dr. Carl pointed out that the initial email he had sent to our director had been since followed up by another half dozen more recent emails explaining that picking up the chairs without the recipients would not be a possibility. A tiny little fact that my director either failed to notice or deliberately ignored.

So, we headed back to Managua disappointed that we were coming back empty handed, but determined to find a way to get as many people on our list to Masaya as possible. I knew that our biggest hurdle wouldn’t be tracking down all of the people on the list, but getting the project to cover the cost of transporting everyone to and from the clinic in a microbus. While the project obviously has a very limited amount of funds from which it can draw for expenses like this, I think anyone in the project would have agreed that it was money far better spent than on the gallons of paint we used to repaint the school or a dozen other things that seem utterly superfluous at times. Yet, I knew that I would be met with resistance when we presented our case to hire a bus to drive everyone there.

So, when it was mentioned to me that there was another series of emails addressed to our director from the largest of our donors offering to cover the costs of the transportation, it took more than a little patience to keep my mind focused on getting everyone on that bus instead of taking my frustrations out at her. I very sheepishly sent the donor an email, explaining the situation, apologizing for the miscommunication, and asking if it would still be possible for them to cover the costs of the trip…a request made all the more awkward by the fact that they had just sent the project a very large check in response to previous requests we had made. Thanks to the help of a friend and former roommate who explained the situation to the donor over the phone from the States, I received confirmation by the end of the day that the costs for the bus would be covered. Now all Silvia and I had to do was track down everyone on the list and figure out how to get them to El Recreo by Thursday morning.

We spent half of our time glued to the phone, trying to track down people that lived outside of the barrio. The other half of the time, we wandered to every corner of the neighborhood trying to find friends, family members, or the patients themselves to notify them of the setback. As time was running out, one of the things that kept us motivated more than anything else was finding a way to get a kid with cerebral palsy from Pochomil to Managua by the next day. Just figuring out how the kid, Armando, ended up on our list was a bit of a mystery. After some asking around, we found out that one of the women in the microfinance banks, Dona Migdonia, knew another woman who lives in Andres Castro, the neighborhood next to El Recreo. The woman, Dona Rosita, has a son who lives in Pochomil, right next door to Armando’s father Armando Jose. Armando is seven years old, and has rarely ever left his house in the sleepy beach town about an hour from Managua. When his dad got him ready for the trip on Wednesday, Armando started crying because it had been so long since he had left the house that he couldn’t imagine where his dad was taking him. Dona Rosita informed us that the family wouldn’t be able to afford the bus fare from Pochomil to Managua and back, so we reassured her that once they got to El Recreo, we would reimburse them with the money left over from the microbus.

Thursday morning, I left the house around 5:45 in the morning to meet up with Silvia, and then catch a bus to Loma Linda, a neighborhood about 20 minutes away from El Recreo. There, we met a 15 year-old named Hugo, who suffers from hydrocephalus, a condition that causes a large amount of liquid to pool inside his skull cavity around the brain. We helped lift Hugo onto his mom’s lap in the taxi, and then flew back to El Recreo, where the buses were already waiting. Armando and his father, who had left Pochomil at 4:30am to make it to El Recreo on time, were sitting outside of the gate to the school. With them were others on our list: Don Tinoco, the father of one of the cooks in the comedor; Dona Antonia, an 84 year-old woman who could barely see, hear, or walk; Don Juan Fuentes, the grandfather of two of my students who suffers from Parkinson’s disease.

After loading the first of the patients onto the buses, we tried to figure out the most logical way to pick up the remaining six patients that were waiting for us in locations all across the city. The tight schedule we were on to get to Masaya before the clinic got busy and patients waiting for us along the way decided we weren’t coming was thrown off track when one of the kids who we were planning on picking up wasn’t at the designated spot when we passed by. No one answered the phone number that we had for the house, and would have been forced to leave without Liliam had one of the women who works in the project and lives near the house not stopped by to see if they were there. Sadly, the mother, who suffers from alcoholism, decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to take her son to get a wheelchair that morning. Dona Lesbia talked her into letting us take Liliam to Masaya despite the mother’s apathy about the entire situation.

Our last passenger that we were planning on picking up was a 38 year-old man named Gustavo. He lived in one of the last neighborhoods on the way out of Managua, and as such, we knew that he would have been waiting for a long time by this point. By the time we finally spotted him and his mother along the side of the highway, they had been waiting for over two hours. They hadn’t worried about us coming late; they worried about us passing by the meeting spot early, so they arrived an hour ahead of time. With Gustavo and fourteen other patients on board, we made our way towards Masaya and the medical clinic, where even more challenges were in store.

As our buses pulled up in front of the clinic, the people running the wheelchair distribution directed us inside, where I hopped out to talk about the logistics of getting fifteen people fitted for a wheelchair. Over the next four hours, we were running up and down trying to get people out of the vans, into chairs, fitted for their chairs, and taught how to safely operate them. It felt like I was being pulled in a dozen different directions at once, as there were only two other translators at the wheelchair site, both of whom were already busy with the walk-in patients from the street. Amazingly, the only person to lose patience was Don Felix, our project driver who constantly interrupted me while I was trying to translate for the wheelchair technicians because he wanted to know how soon we would be leaving. 84 year-old Dona Antonia, however, waited until the very end to get her chair. The day before, when Silvia and I asked her how she was doing when we stopped by her house, she flatly stated “bad,” yet she told me that Thursday that she was perfect every time I came back to check on her in the van. Armando’s father was so excited to see his own son in a wheelchair that he went to buy apple juice for everyone else in the group. In the meantime, Armando himself took to flirting with some of the girls that were on the bus with him.

Our last passenger to receive her wheelchair was a 7 year-old girl named Ingrid. At one of our first stops after leaving El Recreo on the way to the clinic, Ingrid had magically shown up with her grandmother, despite the fact that she wasn’t on the list. I hesitated at telling them to get on the bus, as I was terrified we would get all the way to Masaya only to find out they couldn’t do anything for her. Her situation was made even more difficult by the fact that Ingrid had by far the least mobility out of any of the people in our group. She, like Hugo, suffered from hydrocephalus, but was much more severe. The pressure on her brain had caused her head to swell disproportionately to the rest of her body, making it impossible for her to support the weight. Unless someone was carrying her in their arms, she had to lie flat on her back, perpetually staring up to the sky. But, much like all of the other obstacles that had gotten in our way over the previous 48 hours, Silvia and I looked at each other and decided that it wasn’t an option to say no at this point.

When the wheelchair technicians and physical therapists in the clinic came to examine Ingrid, it became immediately obvious to them that the upright, rigid chairs that they had in stock would do absolutely no good for a kid in her condition. Refusing to give up after having provided every single other member of our group with a chair fit to meet their needs, two of the technicians went to work on modifications that would allow Ingrid to sit comfortably in the chair. While the rest of our group waited in the increasingly suffocating vans, the two technicians cut out the back of the chair, dropped it back to meet the end of the handlebars, made a table for the front to help stabilize her, and fastened a seat belt to keep her from sliding out the front. I kept worrying that people would be getting impatient about the fact that we were spending literally two hours to make a chair work for one person, but every time I went back from the shop to the vans, each and every person inside told me they were happy to wait as long as it took for Ingrid to get the chair that she needed. When they finally finished with the chair, someone commented that Ingrid’s eyes were darting all over the place as she sat in her newly modified reclining chair. Her grandmother responded that it was because it was she was seeing everything in a completely new way, having never been able to sit up like that on her own.

There have been countless days since I came to Nicaragua when I feel so angered by the amount of indignities and injustices that the people I know face on a daily basis. I sometimes wonder if it would be possible to ever forget the things I’ve seen and experienced since I moved here. After awhile, it can become easy to feel like the only things that I’ll remember after leaving are the bad days, the disappointments, the ways in which people here are made to feel like they’re worth less than they are. That day in Masaya though, seeing Ingrid in her wheelchair with her eyes darting all over the place at a hundred miles an hour, we were reminded of just how much stuff happens in a day to balance out all the rest.


"So what went right,
What went wrong,
Was it a story or was it a song,
Was it over night,
Or did it take you long,
Was knowing your weakness what made you strong?"

--Gnarls Barkley, Smiley Faces

A year and a half ago, I started writing in this journal as I was preparing to leave my home for a country about which I knew nothing. I was worried about packing enough stuff in my bags, leaving behind friends and family, what my job would be like once I arrived, and what I would end up doing in two years once I was done. Nearly seventeen months later, I have to reread all of those first entries to even begin to remember what it felt like to be going through such a strange process of leaving and arriving, saying goodbye and being introduced, feeling out of place and trying desperately get used to the new world in which I was living. Tomorrow, as I head back to work for my second year as a teacher in one of Managua’s most impoverished neighborhoods, it seems like there is more on my mind than ever.

I am reminded on a nearly daily basis of how fortunate I am to be present in the lives and events that are constantly surrounding me. Towards the end of the school-year in December, my coworkers and I spent three days evaluating the needs of the project. As part of that process, we spent a few hours sharing some of the more significant events in our lives that have led to us getting here. Few words could possibly describe the emotion that all of us felt as we listened to stories from Margarita about her father being kidnapped during the U.S.-funded civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s and her subsequent childhood spent in and out of refugee settlements. We listened silently as Karla expressed the grief she has felt her entire life at knowing her twin was left to die in the same dirt floor where she was born because of the severity of the defects with which it was born. Mariela described the immense gratitude that she has for the project, which took her in some fifteen years ago as a young, unwed mother with an infant daughter in need of a stable source of nutrition. The room burst into laughter hearing Myrna’s stories about stuffing the family pigs into barrels as a child, rolling them down the mountain where her family farm was located, only to find out they had unwittingly killed the pigs in the process. No one could begin to imagine the guilt that Gloria has lived with for years since her father blamed her for losing his leg to diabetes when he preferred to die in the hospital rather than have it amputated. And I, maybe more than others, sat in admiration as I listened to Greti talk about begging her mother to participate in the literacy campaigns following the revolution in 1979, and Silvia being so disheartened about the public health system in Nicaragua, which had been providing drastically inadequate care for her son, that she decided to start the pharmacy that now provides much needed medications to the majority of the barrio.

I’m grateful for the lives of people like Doña Josefa, who I went to meet in order to pass along greetings from one of the volunteers that just moved home to the States. In a matter of seconds after realizing who I was and why I was there at her stand of odds and ends outside the supermarket near work she had her arms wrapped around me in one of the biggest hugs I have received since I moved here. Maybe it’s not unique to Nicaragua, but I don’t know where else in the world you could walk up to someone on the street who was previously a complete stranger and expect such a public display of affection in return. Doña Carmen continues to refuse payment for the fruit drinks she always offers me whenever I go to visit her and the rest of her family. After knowing the family for nearly a year, and having been lobbied to be the godfather of her granddaughter Cecilia for half of that time, I have finally accepted. She continues to tell me her plans to move to Spain or Costa Rica in order to be able to provide a better living for her daughters and grandchildren. For a woman who lives in a home with mostly dirt floors and almost always works seven days a week in front of a hot wood stove for more than eight hours at a time, it almost seems hard to disagree with her dream of working for $300 a month in a luxurious home with her own private quarters in San Jose. However, thinking about what her absence would mean to me, let alone to her four daughters, is one of my least favorite questions these days.

After having said goodbye to four of the volunteers with whom I have lived for the past year, as well as the prospect of spending another Christmas without the company of my family, I was bracing myself for a bit of a rough holiday season. Yet, better than any present that could have been stuffed under a fake plastic tree, two good friends from college swooped in at the last minute on an eleven-hour bus ride from Costa Rica. I had spent most of Christmas day trying to avoid the thought that they wouldn’t be able to make it because one of them was recovering from a nasty bout of dengue fever, when I finally checked my email to see they had made it on a bus that morning. I raced down to the bus terminal, not having any idea what bus they were on nor when they would be arriving. Just as I asked the guy at the ticket counter when the next bus from San Jose would arrive, they serendipitously walked around the corner and greeted me with possibly better hugs than the one I received from Doña Josefa.

As with everyone that has come to make sure I’m really not just sitting idly on the beach for two years, I had grand plans of showing the two of them so many of the people and places that have made up my experience in Nicaragua. In the end, they got to see and know far less of that reality than I had hoped, but at the same time reminded me of how lucky I am to know people who make such a sacrifice to be a part of this experience when they could spend their vacation in any other part of the world. We did manage to find ourselves hitch hiking not once, but twice, first in the back of a giant farm truck carrying a family home from the beach on New Years, and then down a mountainside in Honduras in the back of an open-air Pepsi truck. During the second ride, we stopped in a little town along the way for two of the delivery guys (fortunately not the driver) to grab a beer, so I went to buy a Pepsi. Instead of letting me buy the Pepsi at the corner store, the guys on the truck just stabbed a hole in one of the two liter bottles so it would look like it had been damaged, and then just gave it to us to share on the way back. We split half the bottle as we hung on with one hand each, flying around the mountain until we reached our stop. Fortunately, it was before the Pepsi incident that they had asked me to be the best man in their wedding, as I fear they now seriously question my judgment.

Despite having fought off illnesses for the previous three weeks, my friends finally decided that the Central American gods were telling them it was time to head home. So, after dropping them off at the airport in Tegucigalpa last Sunday, I made my way back to town to rest up before one of the best hikes I’ve been on since coming here. About 20km outside of the Honduran capital is an incredible national park called La Tigra, a giant virgin rain forest on top of a mountain perpetually shrouded in clouds. The average elevation in La Tigra is around 2,300 meters above sea level, higher than the highest point in all of Nicaragua. That next morning, I slipped out around 6:30 and headed up to the park. It was pretty cold, and the rain started to pick up the farther up the mountain the bus went, making me wonder if this was really worth getting pneumonia. To make matters worse, the bus dropped me off about 5km below the entrance to the park, leaving me walking the rest of the way with nothing but my pack and green fleece to keep me dry. The guards at the visitor center looked at me like I was crazy when I told them I was going to cross the park to the entrance on the other side of the mountain, but I refused to end my trip to Honduras on the depressing note of walking back down the way I had come, still getting soaked in the rain.

Since it was a horrible day to hike, I was literally the only person on any of the trails running through the entire park. It reminded me perfectly of how much I love being on my own…it just needs to be a place with as much character as a virgin rain forest with a 50 meter waterfall and a view that stretched for 20km across the valley on the other side of the park. There were places along the trail where the trees overhead were so thick that the sunlight barely reached the ground and the only sound that could be heard for miles was the wind whipping through the braches. Not twelve hours before, I had been wandering around a crowded, commercialized city with a Pizza Hut on every corner, wondering why I shouldn’t just hop on a bus home in the morning. Then all of a sudden, I was reminded once again of why I feel so at home here in Central America at times.

Tomorrow, I’ll be heading back to the job where I was reminded over and over again last year of why I want to be here in Nicaragua at this point in my life. I’ll be back with Piter, the oldest of eight siblings who looks to his grandmother for support since his biological mother can barely take care of her five year old daughter with pneumonia. I’ll spend my days pulling Wilmer, the unbelievably hyperactive flautist and star of my nativity play last year, out of giant water barrels in which he seems to perpetually get stuck head-first. I’ll be walking Dianna and Fany Karina to school each afternoon because their parents worry about the local teenage punks throwing rocks at them along the way. My voice will go hoarse shouting through the fence at students coming in late from recess or fighting out on the basketball court. Despite a million new challenges and adventures that I’ll be a part of this year, not that much seems to have changed.

Sadly, when I look at the bigger picture of daily life in Nicaragua, not much has changed either. My students are still part of an educational system that cannot seem to afford more qualified professionals than it takes to keep the ratio steady around fifty students to one teacher. Illegal logging continues to strip away the few remaining forests that equal the beauty of a place like La Tigra at a rate of about 150,000 hectares each year. Vendors throughout the country, including the pharmacy on our corner, still sell cheap bags of moonshine to the drifters and alcoholics who wander the streets despite the fact that a poisoned batch killed more than 50 people and hospitalized another 850 last year. Drug trafficking continues to infiltrate beach communities on both coasts of the country, evidenced by more than 3,000 kilos of cocaine that were seized by police in a town an hour away from Managua last September.

Local farmers who barely maintained a decent living before the signing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States are now more threatened than ever by its implementation. Thousands of small farms producing the country’s supply of rice, beans, and maize will go broke, leaving those farmers and their families without a pension or possibility for retraining, as their competitors who receive large government subsidies in the United States would receive in similar circumstances. The implementation of CAFTA also threatens any number of the 80% of Nicaraguans who live on less than $2 per day and rely on generic equivalents to brand-name medications produced in the United States for their very survival. CAFTA’s intellectual property clause ensures that the patents on medications produced in the U.S. will remain in place long after any supposed economic benefits from the trade agreement would allow the average Nicaraguan to buy them.

Last on this list, but certainly not the end of troubles facing people here today, are the thousands of banana farm workers from Chinandega who continue to wait for some kind of compensation – even recognition – from fruit companies like Dole, or chemical companies like Dow and Shell. Those same companies are the ones that manufactured and used a highly carcinogenic compound known as Nemagon on the fields in which these people worked for years after the deadly effects of the pesticide had been discovered in the United States. One company, Shell, actually had the audacity to countersue the Nicaraguan government in May of last year for $489 million in lost profits. Meanwhile, our friend Dona Marta and many more like her continue trying to move on with their lives in the midst of such disgusting greed.

Not much changes here in a year, except the more I learn about what life is like in a place like Nicaragua, the more I’m able to attach those numbers and statistics to real people, ones who I work with, ones who are my neighbors, ones who are my friends.

The other day I was going back to read some of the things that I was writing about a year ago at this time, laughing to myself about how much the things that I spend my time thinking about have changed. I was amazed by the claustrophobia of the city markets, struggling to keep up with the mountain of dirty laundry I had to wash by hand, and staying as close to the toilet as I could as my stomach adjusted to a new diet. A year later, I’m getting ready to say goodbye to four of the people that have been living in my house for the past year, trying to show four new people around those same crazy streets on which I was lost not too long ago, finishing my first year as a teacher with a Christmas pageant, and planning for a community health education project that I’m going to work on with Silvia, the woman who runs the pharmacy in the project. I spent two weeks out of the past month with my parents, whom I hadn’t seen in a year. That alone deserves an entire entry here, which I’m not sure I could do justice. The fireworks celebrating the Nicaraguan super-holiday La Purisima have been exploding in full force for the past twelve days, and Christmas favorites such as “Feliz Navidad” and “Campanas de Belen” have been filling the radio waves 24 hours a day. In the midst of what sometimes seems like an endless stream of errands, obligations, and work, it’s time to write about a walk I had the other day in the mountains.

It’s been hard to feel like I can offer the amount of energy to the people coming in and out of my life lately that I want to be able to offer, so while the rest of the country was celebrating the Immaculate Conception I decided to take two days to get out of Managua and go hiking in the mountains with my roommate Julie. There’s a coffee farm in the mountains just south of Matagalpa that I’ve wanted to see for a long time. The land was purchased by a couple from North Carolina years ago, but was then handed over to the local community to run. All of the workers receive a salary far above what an average worker would receive on a coffee farm in Nicaragua, and any other profits from the business are then invested in a community project in the nearby town of San Ramon. To get to the farm, it’s an 18.5 km hike from the edge of San Ramon up to the farm that overlooks the fertile valley floor below. While the stay at the farm itself was incredible, it was the walk back down to San Ramon the following day that made the deepest impression on me.

We left around 11:15am, with a cloudy sky keeping us cool as we started out on the three hour trek. A little after noon, we stopped at a small roadside store to pick up some more water. The owner and her son immediately brought out chairs for us so that we could rest for a few minutes while we filled up our bottles. As we were sitting there with our hosts talking about why North Americans would do something as crazy as hike 23 miles in little over 24 hours, a middle-aged man with a huge burlap sack slung over his shoulders went walking down the road. Neither Julie or I thought anything of him as we were more amazed by the hospitality of the people who had been complete strangers to us not ten minutes earlier. We thanked them for their generosity and good conversation, and then headed on our way.

About half an hour later, we caught up with the man that had passed us in front of the store, slowly making his way down the mountain with one arm still carrying the heavy burden over his shoulder. We had passed a lot of people both coming and going up that road, and they all inevitably gave us a friendly greeting as we kept on walking. Our latest fellow traveler however was decidedly more outgoing, and started up a conversation with us out of the blue. He was moving quite a bit slower than we were, and I was worried that if we didn’t keep up the pace we were going to miss the next express bus from Matagalpa to Managua, leaving us to wait for a couple more hours. But as Jose Alberto introduced himself to us, it was clear that this was not a conversation from which we were simply going to be able to excuse ourselves.

It was clear that he had probably been drinking much of the night before or a good portion of his journey that morning. But, over the next hour an a half, we listened as he told us about the bean harvest which is currently in full swing, his family in a small town an hour’s walk from San Ramon, and his overwhelming desire to make it to the United States someday. It was this last subject that was discussed the most intensely, as Jose Alberto asked us question after question of what life is like in the United States. How much do people make? What can you buy with a dollar? How close are New York and Los Angeles? What kind of a job could he get if he made it there? Could we give him our cell phone numbers so that he could call us in case he ever did? He was so intent on leaving his wife and four children behind so that he could try to find a better way of providing for them than by moving from town to town throughout Nicaragua as the harvest for each crop came and went.

The farther we walked together, the more he wanted to know, and the more difficult it became to try to help him realize the far from perfect picture that would await him if he ever did make it across so many borders. All I wanted to say to him was “Do you have any idea what you would be risking to make a journey like this? Do you know how many people die each day trying to cross the border between the U.S. and Mexico, let alone all of the other borders in between here and there? Don’t you know how much more likely it is you’ll end up working and living in abysmal conditions as an indentured servant in order to pay back what you owe for crossing the border than actually being able to send money back to your family in Nicaragua?

But how does a 25 year-old kid with a North Face backpack and twice as much money in my pocket than the man next to me has made in the last week say I think he’s better off staying where he’s at in life? How do I tell him that he might never get to see his kids again if he makes that journey to the U.S. when he’s been traveling from town to town all across Nicaragua for his entire life trying to find work that will put food on the table? How can I honestly tell him about the struggles that he’ll face if he even survives the journey across the desert when never in my life back home have I come close to living any of those realities? How do I tell him I don’t want to give him the loose change rattling around in my pocket for bus fair because I think he’ll probably use it instead to buy more booze when I really have no idea what he thinks will be the best use for that money?

I guess after having lived in Managua for over a year, working in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city, getting to know people in situations just as difficult if not more so than that of Jose Alberto, I somehow always seem to think that I’ll reach a point where situations like this won’t phase me at all. At some point, I naively think that conversations like the one I had on the way back to San Ramon will seem more natural, like it would be possible for me to personally relate to what the person is telling me about their life. The reality, after living in Nicaragua for more than a year, is that I couldn’t possibly begin to relate with the things people like Jose Alberto struggle on a daily basis. I can listen, I can offer support, I can tell their stories to my friends and family back home. But beyond that, what is a kid who grew up in Omaha and moved here supposed to say to a guy who would give up everything he has in order to go in the opposite direction?
¨
"Early, early in the morning
It pulls all on down my sore feet,
I wanna go back to sleep,
In the motions and the things that you say,
It all will fall, fall right into place.

As fruit drops, flesh it sags,
Everything will fall right into place,
When we die some sink and some lay,
But at least I don´t see you float away."

--Modest Mouse "Gravity Rides Everything"

It’s that time of year again, when we go to the polls to choose our national and local leaders through the incredible system of democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville, John Locke, and so many other great political philosophers dreamed of hundreds of years ago. As I write, Nicaraguans across the entire country are waking up and heading to their polling place, where they will wait in line for up to hours to cast their vote in what has been said to be the most important presidential election in Central America in the last twenty years. Newspapers from the left and right have been full of accusations for weeks of fraudulent activity on behalf of both of the two major parties running in the election (FSLN and PLC). Polling place volunteers have been at their respective stations at the very latest since 4:00am Saturday morning in order to prevent any tampering of the ballots. The sale of alcohol has been banned in any location since noon yesterday. Former president-turned-international election observer Jimmy Carter shook the hand of every passenger on the plane yesterday that one of my bosses was on as she headed down here to meet with us. It’s nearly impossible to describe the amount of hype this election is receiving, but let me try to lay out some of the background, and then my own thoughts on all of the craziness.

Since the Sandinista revolution overthrew the brutal four decade dictatorship of the Somoza family in 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) has become one of the most constant and powerful parties in Nicaraguan politics. Throughout the 1980s, many people began to lose confidence in their government of revolutionaries-turned-politicians due to a combination of corruption, mismanagement, bad economic policies, and the fact that it was being forced to fight a covert war against a band of counter-revolutionaries trained and funded by the U.S. government. The Sandinistas, led by Daniel Ortega, called for internationally observed elections in 1990 to show that they were open to the idea of an electoral democracy, and were thus overwhelmingly voted out of power. Many Nicaraguans still deeply resent the despair and suffering that they experienced during the time of the Sandinistas, as evidenced by a half hour conversation I had with a taxi driver the other night after he had already dropped me off at my house.

Since the elections of 1990, Nicaragua has seen the succession of three presidents from the more conservative PLC party, Violeta Chamorro, Arnoldo Aleman (possibly the only politician in Nicaragua with dirtier hands than Daniel Ortega), and Enrique Bolanos. However, amidst unrelenting poverty in a country where more than 80% of the population lives on less than $2 per day (45% live on less than $1 per day) and there is a 1 in 10 chance at birth that you won’t live past the age of 40, there are many people who believe that today’s elections could bring the return of the Sandinistas to the presidency. Their candidate, party chairman Daniel Ortega, has spent an unbelievably massive amount of money in a country like Nicaragua to get reelected, to the tune of $10 million. That might seem like a drop in the ocean compared to what most candidates are spending in the U.S. to get elected this Tuesday, but just take another look at those statistics above. I have a hard time getting my students to understand how much a million is most days.

As I mentioned, there are allegations flying left and right about possible voter fraud already having taken place, or suspicions that it could be a problem today. Hence, the presence of a former U.S. president here today. Many are concerned that the frequent power outages that we have been suffering here in Managua could be used to one party’s advantage later tonight, when all of the polling centers are sending their tallies to the Supreme Electoral Council’s headquarters. Yesterday, there was a story in La Prensa, one of the two Nicaraguan daily newspapers, alleging that hundreds, maybe even thousands of voter identification cards that still had to be picked up by their rightful owners have disappeared. Some believe that Sandinista operatives got a hold of the cards, and will now be able to use them to effectively vote for themselves. However, lest you think that the Sandinistas are the only ones who play dirty here, let’s take a look back at the elections in 1996, when bags of ballots were found at the homes of PLC officials or buried deep beneath the mountain of waste at La Choreca, the city dump. For whom had the people voted on these ballots that were never counted? Daniel Ortega.

As you can see, politics is a very dirty game here in Nicaragua, as some might say it is in larger countries to the north as well. Candidates, parties, and the people who support them will do just about whatever it takes to ensure that they win. We’re not just talking about massive election day “get-out-the-vote” campaigns. More likely, we’re talking about massive “change-the-vote” campaigns. Now, just imagine that you’re an average, middle or lower class Nicaraguan who still hasn’t quite made up your mind about the candidate for whom you’re going to vote. Maybe you don’t have a lot of confidence in any of the candidates (except for the promising one that died back in July), but you still feel that it’s your responsibility to go to the polls and perform your civic duty. You’ve been bombarded by advertisements on TV, radio, and billboards for months. You’ve been stuck in traffic on the bus home from work half a dozen times in the last few weeks because there is a massive rally of [insert political party name here] in the roundabout ahead. At work, at home, with your neighbors, with your friends, all anyone does is talk about the good or the evil of every candidate. You cannot escape the anticipation and borderline insanity surrounding this election, thus making you start to wonder if it’s possible to just make a well-informed personal decision at all.

It doesn’t end there though. Because democracy means free and fair elections for all as long as they elect the leader that will support U.S. interests in the region, there has been no shortage of blatant interference for the past two months by the likes of everyone from U.S. ambassadors to Ronald Reagan’s fall guy, Oliver North. Paul Trivelli, current U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, has been trampled in the press since summer because of the frequent comments he makes regarding the ill-effects that will befall the Nicaraguan people if they choose the wrong candidate (multi-millionaire, business magnate Eduardo Montealegre from the ALN party is the U.S. poster boy). It has been made clear by State Department press releases and news conferences that Nicaraguans can expect a flight of foreign capital investment should the Sandinistas return to power. Obviously, in a country where the percentage of adult males without a job is staggeringly higher than in the United States, the threat of even fewer jobs is taken very seriously (so seriously, in fact, that three of the four leading candidates have all made promises of zero unemployment should they win).

Three weeks ago, Nicaraguans were fortunate enough to also receive the electoral advice of former Lt. Col. Oliver North. When I was a kid, Oliver North was just the dumb name that my dad gave to a toy alligator he had bought me at the zoo. Others of an older generation might remember him better as the former member of the National Security Council who took the fall when it was discovered that the Reagan administration had secretly (and illegally) been selling anti-aircraft missiles to avowed enemy Iran. The U.S. went on to use the money earned from the sale of those weapons to fund the not-so-secret Contra war that the CIA was waging all across Nicaragua against the Sandinista government. Why did the Reagan administration have to funnel the money through Iran in order to be able to pay for a war they had started? Because Congress had already cut off direct funding for the operation and even specifically enacted a law known as the Boland Amendment, which prohibited the use of funds to overthrow the Sandinistas. Needless to say, the man that was eventually held responsible for the entire Contra war that killed Nicaraguan men at the rate of 50 per day is not the most welcome U.S. figure here these days. That didn’t stop North from flying down on a private jet to meet with and give his personal endorsement to PLC candidate Jose Rizo. Rizo was the vice-president under current Nicaraguan president Enrique Bolanos, but broke away when Bolanos brought corruption charges against former president and current Rizo ally Arnoldo Aleman. Thus, the reason for many Nicaraguans´ fears that no matter who wins the election, politics will continue to simply be a means for people like Rizo and Ortega to line their fat pockets with more money they steal from the state.

Finally, there’s the most recent example from an exalted member of our own U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California. Rohrabacher, Chairman of the House International Relations Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, recently posted a plea on his official website to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff to find some kind of legal justification to PROHIBIT any remittances being sent from the United States to families in Nicaragua should Daniel Ortega win the election. In case you aren’t familiar with remittances, they are the hundreds of millions of dollars in income sent annually from immigrants in the United States to their families in places like Nicaragua. As you can probably imagine, in a place where 80% of the population lives in LESS than $2 a day, remittances from family in the U.S. are kind of important for their daily survival. Congressman Rohrabacher, as I can attest to having interned for the House International Relations Committee, is well known for making inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and simply ridiculous statements. However, this one might beat them all.

Congressman Rohrabacher claims that Daniel Ortega is the leader of a “pro-terrorist party” that will seriously undermine U.S. security interests in the region with a return to the Marxist-Leninist system it imposed on the country in the 1980s. He continues to argue that the FSLN has “targeted and killed American citizens, including four United States Marines.” Rohrabacher’s claims that an Ortega win will undoubtedly mean a return to the nationalization of all foreign companies invested in Nicaragua seem to be slightly discredited by the fact that Ortega turned his back on his own party during negotiations over the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), voting in favor of the deal of the century for U.S. business interests in the region. His invocation of the tragic loss of four U.S. servicemen during the 1980s unfortunately overlooks the fact that the servicemen were in Nicaragua at a time when the U.S. government was leading an illegal war against the government of Nicaragua, without the full knowledge of the American public. It also seems to ignore the fact that right-wing death squads in neighboring El Salvador that had been trained by the U.S. military during the dictatorship of President Jose Napoleon Duarte were also responsible for the deaths of four U.S. citizens at the time…three nuns and a laywoman who were brutally raped and murdered on their way from the airport in San Salvador in 1980. I, in no way, shape, or form condone the murder of anyone, whether military or civilian, so I am not discounting the deaths of the marines in Nicaragua. However, the Congressman would do well for himself and his constituents to beef up on his history before he shoots his mouth off again, making threats to the daily survival of millions of Nicaraguans if they don’t choose the right candidate.

But let’s just assume that Mr. Rohrabacher is right in his assumptions that the return of Daniel Ortega will be a further threat to U.S. national security and could mean possible allegiances with international terrorist groups. Let’s just assume that a political party that has chosen lovely pastels such as pink and yellow as its official campaign colors this election really is going to turn out to be the next regime to align itself with North Korea or Iran. Does that really mean that cutting off the payments that immigrants in the United States make to their family members back here is the most effective way to deal with such a threatening regime? How well has that economic embargo that we have against Cuba worked to remove Fidel Castro from power? What has it been, something like 47 years since Castro took power? What about the embargo that we had in place against Saddam Hussein? Did that form of economic pressure bring him to his knees?

Does a family of five kids, whose father adamantly opposes the Sandinistas and works night and day as a construction worker in Brooklyn so he can provide his family back in Nicaragua with enough money to eat, really deserve to be punished because Congressman Rohrabacher thinks Nicaraguans should have voted differently? I KNOW that family, and dozens upon dozens more just like them. So forgive me if I seem a little more than indignant when people like Rohrabacher, who at the VERY LEAST officially earn around $120,000 from their Congressional salary, start talking about taking money away from my next door neighbor or half of my fifth grade class because they think it will change the outcome of an election. Still don’t think all of this propaganda has an effect on the average Nicaraguan who will be voting today? Still think Nicaraguans wouldn’t pay attention to the things that a U.S. politician says about their election? On Wednesday afternoon, I was told by my students that if Daniel wins today, I need to leave the country by tomorrow because he wants to kill all Americans and they don’t want me to die.

For the record, I DO NOT want the Sandinistas to win this election either. I think that Daniel Ortega is a corrupt, power-hungry politician who would wreak further economic damage on this country. I have listened to far too many people tell me about mile long lines for a pound of rice during the 1980s, or families of nine being given their ration of one bar of soap to last for two weeks. However, I do not think that a vote for the Sandinistas is a vote for international terrorism, nor do I think that a Sandinista win today will result in the flight of all foreign investment because of fears that Daniel Ortega is a communist in hiding. Daniel Ortega is a slimy, get-rich-quick, used car salesman, and if the people of Nicaragua feel that he is their best choice for the presidency, then that’s democracy. Democracy is NOT “We’ll tell you who to vote for and if you don’t, we’re going to bleed you dry.” Democracy is people getting to vote for whomever the hell the want and if that guy turns out to be a crook or a liar, you vote him out the next time.

Check out a sample of the rhetoric that Nicaraguans have had to listen to for the past three months here:

http://rohrabacher.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=52175

In other news, if you’ve actually been patient enough to listen to me on my soapbox for this long, I have some good news for you. Last Tuesday, the day after I wrote about my student who had run away from home, I got news from his sister that the Nicaraguan Ministry of Family had located Enrique and taken him to the home of his biological mother. Despite the fact that he’s now living with a woman that refused to lift a finger while he was missing, I’m hoping that it’s better off than the situation in which he was living in El Recreo, where he obviously was experiencing some form of mistreatment strong enough to make him disappear for three weeks. More than anything, I can’t even begin to describe how relieved I am to know that he’s safe, has a roof over his head, and isn’t living alone on the streets.

Woke up this morning at 5:00am. The step-mother of the student of mine who has run away from home had heard that Enrique might be sleeping underneath the awning of a supermarket near the neighborhood in which I work. She had tried going at night to see if he was there, but the other kids that sometimes sleep there at night had all apparently warned Enrique, giving him enough time to do his disappearing act once again. It´s his step-mother that has taken the primary role in looking for him, even though his biological mother also lives here in Managua. Apparently, based on conversations the step-mother has had with her since Enrique´s disappearance, she refuses to take part in the search because she is a devout Evangelical Christian who believes that if God wants Enrique to come home, he will. Given how adamant he is about not returning home, my worries about the rumors that he was being badly beaten by his aunt seen more and more likely to be true.

I had passed by last week, hoping to catch him before he left to ask for money on one of the bus routes, which is supposedly where he´s been spending his days. It wasn´t nearly early enough, so I was determined not to make that mistake again this morning. When I got there around 5:45, there wasn´t any sign of him. I talked with another homeless kid with a shaved head standing by the bus stop, who said she hadn´t seen him. There were a few security guards standing around, so I went over to show his picture to them, hoping they had seen him wandering around. One had said that Enrique had been passing through the parking lot either last Thursday or Friday, but that he hadn´t been back since. No one had said they had seen him sleeping under the awning, but they all agreed to tell him that I was looking for him if he passed by again.

More than anything, I just want him to know that someone other than his family, which might not have been the most compassionate, is looking for him. If he really refuses to go back to live with them, there are dozens of homes for kids like him around the city. He is by far not alone in his desire to escape a violent home, and there are a lot of organizations that our project works with that would be willing to give him a bed and some food. Maybe not the most ideal situation, but better than going home if the rumors of how he was treated are true.

Since news about him running away came to my attention two weeks ago, it´s made me think about a lot of my other students who either have, or have thought about doing something similar in the past. As I´ve mentioned many times before, Enrique is far from being the only one who is abused on a regular basis. When a kid misbehaves in this culture, it is abnormal for a parent to explain to the child what they did wrong, tell them to go to their rooms, or keep them from watching TV. It is almost a first instinct to raise a fist, smack them across the face, or in the back of the head. This doesn´t just apply to kids that are almost teenagers, like Enrique. I know of fathers who beat their two or three year-old daughters on a daily basis. We talk about the importance of disciplining children in more positive and effective ways all the time during the meetings we have with the parents. They all nod their heads, agreeing that hitting a child will only lead to more violent behavior down the road, not to mention the devastating physical and emotional toll it takes on them now. But, the cycle never ends. Parents beat their kids, who grow up to beat their kids, who grow up to beat their kids. When I compare the situation of kids like my student Piter, who´s step-grandfather is one of the most abusive men in the entire barrio, to that of Enrique, it sadly makes me think that maybe Enrique is somehow better off sleeping on concrete in front of a grocery store and asking for money on buses all day.

As I mention with frequency around this time of year, I don’t like making a big deal of out my birthday. I was really hoping to make it through this month without a party, singing, or lots of other unnecessary attention (other than whatever is inevitably coming from my students, who have been “secretly” planning something for the past three weeks). More than anything, I really just wanted to go back to Momotombo and, for the third time, see if it was possible to make it to the top. I look at the volcano everyday on my way to work, when I go for a run, and anytime I leave Managua towards the north.

Friday, I was excitedly racing my way through the day so that I could get out of work and onto a bus towards the mountain. It’s been raining a lot lately during the afternoons here in Managua, so it’s been hard to get any laundry done when there’s no free line space for it to dry. I ran home during lunch to finish up a load before the trip, and then stopped by Dona Carmen’s house on the way back to work to see how her husband Roger is doing.

A week and a half ago, things still looked pretty bad for him. Despite having already undergone an operation to remove the pins and screws that had precipitated the infection in his leg, it continued to spread. Along with my roommates Emily and Julie, I had rushed over to the Red Cross after work one night to donate a pint of blood so that they would be able to give him the units that he needed to replenish what he was losing through the infection. After giving him four units over the course of a couple days, they began to get the infection under control, and he was released a week ago. When I arrived at the house to talk with Dona Carmen, she came rushing out of the back to give me one of the biggest hugs that I’ve ever received. As she was profusely thanking us for offering our support to the family while she went through her eighteen-day vigil in the hospital, I made the mistake of telling her that it was nothing. She was quick to remind me that it was far from nothing, and that I had to go talk to Roger to see for myself.

I’ve never seen anyone who has spent eighteen days in the hospital with a borderline gangrenous infection in his leg, facing the prospect of a double amputation, look quite so energetic. Then again, after having declared that he would rather die at home than have his legs taken away in that hospital, I could begin to understand why he seemed so at ease. I listened for nearly twenty minutes as Roger showed me his battle scars and Dona Carmen told me about the miserable conditions inside the hospital. When you imagine someone being in the hospital for nearly three weeks, you normally picture them inside a fairly comfortable, air-conditioned, private room with a TV and an intercom to call the on-duty nurse. In Nicaragua, at Hospital Lenin Fonseca, there is one nurse for forty patients, twenty of whom are sleeping in a large room together. At one point, the nurse came in to give Roger an injection, only to realize at the last minute that the injection was meant for one of the other patients recuperating in the same room.

After wishing him well and looking at his scars one more time, I headed out into the living room to talk with Dona Carmen some more. People are constantly passing by her house, buying a quart of the juices she makes, stopping to see if she wants to buy a few numbers in their self-administered lottery, or just to talk. So I didn’t think anything of it when a woman that I didn’t recognize stopped by with a bundle of flyers in her hand. She seemed pretty agitated, and began to tell Dona Carmen and me about how her son has been missing since last Sunday. They had taken a photo of him to a number of the news stations, hoping that they would show the picture and a number to call if anyone had seen the kid, but the stations never aired it. After they had been talking for five minutes or so, I borrow one of the flyers from the women, and my jaw dropped and my heart sank as I recognized the face.

Enrique had been a student in my morning class in the comedor for about three months, but hadn’t been in class since the beginning of September. A few months ago, when we had gone to protest in front of the electric company offices, he had insisted on coming with us. He had been playing in the marching band at Colegio Benjamin Zeledon, where he went to school, in preparation for the Independence Day celebrations around the 14th and 15th of September. Since the band practiced in the morning, he stopped coming to my class, and had yet to return. His mom tearfully told us how she hadn’t seen him in five days, and had no idea where he might have gone. I immediately grabbed a handful of the flyers and headed back to the school to pass them out to the rest of the teachers. A handful of kids among the six grades in the tutoring program said they knew him, but only one had apparently seen him since he had gone missing.

All of the excitement I felt about a weekend out of the city seemed to slip away like the rocks tumbling down the side of Momotombo. As class ended and I grabbed my bags to head for the bus station, my roommate Emily pulled me aside for another dose of bad news. Dorling, the coordinator of the tutoring program and the 6th grade teacher who gives her class next to mine, won’t be coming back to the project next year because she’s found another job outside of the barrio. Amidst all of the frustrations I’ve had with the project this year, Dorling has always stood out as one of the reasons to hope that the areas in which the project lacks direction or outright fails can be overcome. I´m incredibly happy for her, since the job that she accepted is going to be way more financially viable for her in comparison to her near-volunteer level salary in the project. At the same time, I hate to see one of the youngest and most level-headed voices in the project leave, putting more pressure on some of the less vocal Nicaraguan workers to step up to the plate.

As I boarded the bus for La Paz Centro out of Mercado Israel, were my student Enrique had last been seen, I futilely looked out the window, knowing there was no way I was going to see him. The company of three of my roommates picked up my spirits as the rain fell with more ferocity and the bus trudged on towards the volcano. By the time we reached La Paz Centro, it was coming down in sheets, making it hard to see more than a few feet ahead. Instead of continuing on the next bus towards Leon Viejo, the town closest to Momotombo, we stayed the night in the same hostel in which we had camped out on my first trip back in February. The owner guaranteed us that he would find a taxi to take us the next morning to the base of the volcano, saving us precious time on the bus and subsequent hour-long walk.

However, at 5:00am the next morning, there was no taxi to be found amidst the downpour that had continued throughout the night. Since I was the only one in the group with a poncho, I wearily headed down to the highway at the edge of town to hail a taxi passing in either direction. If you´re ever waiting along the side of the road in La Paz Centro at 5:15am, hoping that a taxi will pass by, don´t waste your time. We decided to brave the rain and head to the opposite side of town, from where all of the buses left. It was there that we ran into a taxi driver that was actually willing to take us on the flooded, pothole-filled road towards the north shore of Lake Managua and the volcano. He provided us with a good dose of realism, as he described the rockslides, scalding hot steam from the rain falling into the crater, and (I swear I was never aware, nor encountered these on either of my first two trips to the volcano) poisonous snakes.

So, as he dropped us off by the same restaurants along the lakeshore at which I had eaten a hearty meal back in June, we each looked at each other with overwhelming skepticism and disappointment at our chances of having a good hike. We walked back up through town, and were going to wait along the side of the road for the next bus passing back towards La Paz Centro, when my roommate Adriana called out to me from a few yards behind. Apparently, she had just heard someone say “Look! There goes the American professor that stayed with us back in June.” My jaw dropped for the second time in 24 hours as I walked back to the same hostel that I had stayed in during my trip to the volcano at the end of June, when I had hung out with the 80 year-old Dona Estela and her two granddaughters the night before the hike. The rest of my roommates and I sat down in their living room, dripping wet, and once again shared stories over a bag of Oreos and trail mix.

It wasn´t anywhere near what I had been expecting when I had planned out what I wanted to be doing to celebrate my birthday. But, it served as another vivid reminder of the way that life in Nicaragua is a continuous stream of surprises, a lot of which are unpleasant or infuriating, but almost just as many that are incredibly rewarding. I´m losing one of my favorite coworkers in a few months and one of my favorite students has run away from home, giving no one a clue as to where he could be. But, Dona Carmen and her husband are finally at home, getting a break from the stress and constant anxiety that they´ve been living under for the past month. And, an incredibly gracious grandmother and her two granddaughters, who didn´t believe me when I said I was going to come back to Leon Viejo to visit, became yet another one of the surrogate families that has taken me in here as if I were family.

I just got off the phone with most of my mom´s family back in the States, celebrating the 60th birthday of my aunt Mary (but she looks not a day over 40). It´s frustrating when you haven´t seen anyone in your family in almost a year, but hearing how excited they are to know what you´re doing when they should be celebrating somebody else´s birthday is a pretty good feeling. There´s something about reminders from home like that, or being practically adopted as family by people who were complete strangers a few months ago, that makes the good of living in Nicaragua far outweigh the bad.

Sorry that I couldn’t come up with a better title for this update. At the very least, I should have tried to think of something that would have kept you all in suspense about the bulk of what I’m going to write about, but it’s getting late on a Saturday night, and I’m not sure how much more creativity I have left in me. Needless to say, it’s been a long couple weeks in the project, but fortunately the last few days have given me some hope that I’m not turning out to be a complete disaster as a teacher.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I’m absolutely amazed at the amount of fighting that 5th graders can accomplish in one day. On any given day, it seems like any student is perfectly capable of causing a fight with five other kids. They form alliances that last for no more than 30 minutes and then disintegrate into thin air as they start malicious rumors about someone’s mom. The combinations and permutations of shifting allegiances within a week of class makes my head spin. One day two kids are best friends; the next day they’ve each found some reason to be mortal enemies for a few hours.

The petty bickering and general obnoxious behavior of 5th graders is one thing which I’ve learned to handle with an incredible amount of patience. Unfortunately, it frequently crosses the line of kids being immature to outright violence. Such was the case two weeks ago as we were cleaning up the area in which I give my class one Friday afternoon. As I was enlisting students to sweep up the mountain of notebook paper they had chucked all over the floor, I heard a lot of shouting coming from the basketball court outside my class. Two of the girls in my class who have a habit of being some of the most pretentious fifth graders on the planet were over by the fence as two of the most aggressive boys in the class were throwing rocks at them from the court. I immediately ran over to ask the girls what the hell they were thinking standing around while two boys were aiming large rocks at their heads. Once I got them to move to the other side of the school, my anger turned to the boys, still with rocks in hand on the basketball court.

Dimas and Harving are two of the students that I’ve struggled with the most this year. They aren’t the most violent kids that I’ve worked with in the project. There are others who I kicked out long ago for constantly being vulgar or violent towards their classmates or professors. These two, when they want to be, are some of the brightest students I have. They unfortunately can also be the most short-tempered and easily provoked. Even looking at them wrong can immediately lead to them bolting across the classroom to smack another kid in the back of the head. Saying that they come from less than desirable households is a drastic understatement. Dimas probably has it worse, not having a mother, aunt, or even grandmother that lives in his house. His 30-something sister is the only one there to take care of him, and she accomplishes that on a daily basis by showing him the backside of her hand with enough force to knock a filling loose.

Back to my attempt to mitigate the near-riot that was about to break out in the midst of my otherwise beautiful Friday afternoon. As the two boys put their rocks down on the ground and looked as if they were calm enough to walk away, I turned to go find out what obnoxious comments the girls had made to provoke this brawl. That was when the rock hit me in the back of the head. You know in the movies when someone is about to get hit with something, how they always pause the action and provide some commentary on what is happening? That happened to me, except the pause came after I got pegged in the head, and the commentary consisted of a lot of four-letter words in English that my students fortunately didn’t understand. Before I could even get to the gate leading out to the court, Dimas and Harving were off like bolts of lightning, running as far away from the school as the could.

It’s hard to know what to do in a situation like this one. On the one hand, I was so pissed off that two students in MY class had the guts and/or stupidity to throw a rock at my head that I felt like I had to chase them down. On the other hand, a teacher running through the neighborhood after two punk kids looks kind of ridiculous. I had a feeling that the rock wasn’t supposed to hit me in the head, and maybe wasn’t being aimed at me at all. Something told me there was a good chance they would be back before long.

Sure enough, fifteen minutes later, the two accomplices came sulking back to the school begging to talk with me. Normally when something like this happens in my class, I drag the students immediately home so that I can explain the situation with whoever is responsible for them. This day, I knew that I was still too mad about what had happened for it to be a good idea to be talking to anyone’s parents in my capacity as a teacher. So, I listened to their teary apology (whether fake or real didn’t matter to me at this point), as they tried to explain to me how the rock wasn’t supposed to hit me in the head and that I couldn’t kick them out of class because they would get sent away by their families to a home for violent kids.

In the end, I told them to stay out of my class for a week, and that we would talk about their future as students in my 5th grade class after that. More than anything, I needed time to think about how to get it into their thick skulls that I absolutely would not accept anymore violence in my class. Talking to their parents really was out of the question. If I felt like someone in their home would sit down with them and explain the unacceptability of such behavior, it would have been worth it. But, knowing the environments in which they’ve grown up, I knew that the only explaining that would come to either of them would be in the form of a belt. While trying to get already violent kids to stop being violent by beating them might make sense to some people, it still seems to baffle me.

After long conversations with the rest of the educators, supervisors, and directors of the program, we decided to have a meeting with Dimas and Harving alone, without their parents. It was made clear that the next instance of any type of violence would lead to them being permanently removed from any program in the project, as well as a meeting with their parents. Asking two kids with violent histories to stop being violent, especially when they are constantly being provoked by the rest of the class because they are so disliked is like asking someone who smokes three packs a day to go cold turkey. But, despite numerous instances of other kids in the class trying to piss them off, knowing that it will ultimately lead to their removal, both Dimas and Harving have made a pretty impressive effort to come talk with me whenever something happens. I’m not sure how much longer their newfound pacifism can last, but for the sake of everyone in the class, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’ll be able to make it until the end of the school year in December.

Another one of my students, Piter, has been equally disruptive in class lately, and as you can probably guess, he comes from an equally dismal home as the one in which Dimas lives. Piter’s biological mother has spent time in jail for drug distribution charges. She has seven other children in addition to Piter, but considers few of them her responsibility. If you ask Piter who is his mother, he will tell you that it’s his biological grandmother, Paula. While Piter might receive more attention from his grandmother than his own mother, it’s not necessarily the positive kind. Paula is unfortunately married to one of the most abusive husbands that I know of in Nicaragua. On more than one occasion, Piter has run to the nuns’ house in the project because Paula’s husband is beating her so severely.

She’s obviously not the only one who must unfortunately face the wrath of this dead beat. The other day as I was preparing my class, one of Piter’s closest friends came running up to the fence outside of my classroom in a panic. Piter’s grandfather had been looking for him all over the neighborhood, apparently with the expressed intention of giving him the “beating of his life.” It makes me sick to my stomach on the days when Piter isn’t in my class, because I know the majority of the time it’s not out of laziness that he didn’t show up. I try to stop by the house just to see if I can talk to him for a few minutes, but I’m almost inevitably told that he’s running an errand and won’t be back for awhile.

The general behavior of the class didn’t improve much the week before last, so to make an effort to keep my sanity for another week, I made an escape for a small town in the central part of the country called Camoapa. Rumor had it that there was a good mountain to hike there called Cuisaltepe, and sitting on top of a rock thousands of feet up in the air with a 360 degree view of the surrounding countryside seemed like a good way to clear my mind. The last bus headed in the direction of Camoapa on Friday night dropped me off on the side of the highway about twenty kilometers from town. I grabbed a plate of gallo pinto and cuajada (rice and beans with cheese) at a roadside restaurant, and then hitched a ride in the back of an SUV with a rancher headed into town. As we sped through the Nicaraguan night, he told me all about the rodeo they were preparing for in Camoapa in conjunction with the party they were having for their patron saint, Francis of Assisi. A brief tour of the town and I was dropped off in the center of town, where fried food and games of chance filled every last square inch of the park turned carnival grounds. A few blocks away, I found a cheap place to stay for the night, and wearily drifted off into sleep to the sound of, you guessed it, fireworks exploding in the background.

In the morning, I hopped a bus for a small community outside of Camoapa where I was supposed to be able to find a guide to take me to the top of the mountain. My directions were literally to “get off the bus at kilometer 99, walk down the road past the red bus stop, look for the first house on the left after the schoolhouse, and ask for Euclides or one of his brothers.” With directions as absurd as those, I was half tempted to climb the mountain by myself, but I had heard stories about crevasses, thick forests, and precipitous inclines with loose rocks. So, I took my chance with the directions, ran into Euclides’ brother Jose Luis, and headed out on our five hour trek to the top of central Nicaragua and back.

The first hour was spent passing up and over the hills surrounding their farmland, which seemed to stretch out into the countryside forever. We would walk another couple miles, and I would ask him if we were still on his property, to which he perpetually responded yes. The dizzying north face of Cuisaltepe would occasionally poke over the tops of the hills like a giant thumb sticking straight up out of the ground. Once we finally got to the base of the mountain, I dubiously looked at Jose Luis and asked him if this was the side we were really going to be climbing. The incline and amount of solid granite rock made it look like no one without a good set of rope, a harness, and more guts than me would have a chance at getting to the top. But Jose Luis, in his big rubber farming boots with his two dogs Peluche (Stuffed Animal) and Congo following faithfully behind, assured me that he had climbed the mountain many times in his life. There was no reason to worry. When was the last time my guide had tackled this monolith? 15 years ago, give or take.

As I spent most of the climb on all fours, trying not to fixate on the abruptness with which the ground gave way behind me, Jose Luis bounded ahead without a problem, carrying a bottle of water in one hand and a machete in the other. I wouldn’t say that I’m petrified of heights, or that I have a serious phobia. After all, here I was climbing a veritable mountain in the middle of Nicaragua. But anytime I can picture myself making a wrong step and falling into oblivion without any way of stopping my fall, let’s just say that my palms get a little sweaty. The incline on Cuisaltepe wasn’t anything close to “oblivion” but it still induced a dizzying sensation anytime I looked up at how far we had to go, or down at how far away the ground was below.

About two and a half hours after we had started the climb, we made it to the top, giving me a view of Nicaragua that easily rivaled, if not beat the view from partway up Volcán Momotombo. While we feverishly ate the granola bars, peanut butter sandwiches, and cookies that we’d been hoarding until the top, Jose Luis pointed out all of the surrounding landmarks, showed off the expanse of his family’s land below, and told stories of his wife and three kids back in Cebollin. He was one of the humblest people I’ve ever met in terms of his demeanor, but equally proud of the land that he worked as hard as an ox in order to send his oldest son to a private school in one of the nearby villages.

After resting our legs and filling our stomachs for almost an hour up top, I was once again reminded that the process of getting down a mountain is always much more difficult than getting up. While I spent most of my time sliding down on my butt, permanently destroying the pair of pants that I was wearing, Jose Luis spryly tackled the descent without so much as loosing his footing once. Back in the village, we each gulped down an ice-cold red Fanta, and parted ways. As I’m sitting here in my bedroom at 11:00am on Sunday, soaked in sweat even with a fan blowing on me, there are few places I can think of that I’d rather be than on top of Cuisaltepe again.
Back in the project this past Monday, I went to pay a visit to one of the families that I’ve become good friends with since moving here. Dona Carmen, in addition to having the best fritanga stand in all of Managua, is probably one of the most gracious people next to Dona Marta in El Viejo. My roommate Julie is the godmother to Davis, one of Dona Carmen’s three grandchildren, so we regularly get invited to the amazing amount of birthday parties and baptisms that they constantly have in their crowded home. Both Dona Carmen and her husband suffer from diabetes, which in Nicaragua is a much more difficult illness to live with than it is in the United States. Getting uninterrupted access to testing strips, glucometers, and insulin is an arduous process, to say the least.

Her husband was in an extremely bad car accident about seven years ago, leaving him with multiple screws and pins imbedded in his right leg. Being a machista Nicaraguan male with a disease that’s already difficult to take care of has created a lot of problems for Dona Carmen’s husband. Most recently, an x-ray revealed that the screws in his right leg are dislodged, thus creating an infection that has only worsened because of his diabetes. He has been in the hospital for the past two weeks, waiting for an operation to either repair the shoddy orthopedic work or to amputate the leg, which had come dangerously close to developing gangrene. You cannot even begin to imagine the constant stress that Dona Carmen has been living under for the duration of this ordeal. She comes home for half an hour or so each day to shower and put on clean clothes, and then returns to her bedside vigil in her husband’s hospital room. He’s a taxi driver by profession, so the prospect of losing one of his legs hit him even harder than it would someone who doesn’t literally rely on that leg to earn a living.

While in the hospital, his blood sugar reached dangerous levels, far above anything that would allow the doctors to perform any kind of operation on him. However, the waiting game only led to a worsening of the infection in his leg. In Nicaraguan hospitals (unless we’re talking about the ultra-expensive, private hospitals that ask for your credit card on the way in the door), any auxiliary supplies that a patient needs during their care, such as gauze and bandages, must be provided by the patient himself. If Dona Carmen, who years ago went through some limited schooling to be a nurse, hadn’t been there to demand that the dressing on her husband’s wounds be changed on a regular basis, he would have been left to suffer quietly in his misery. Despite her best efforts at caring for her husband (since no one else seemed to really be concerned by his situation), doctor’s came back to announce that once his blood sugar went down, they would be forced to amputate both legs instead of just the right. His response was that he would rather die at home from the infection than let the doctors go through with the operation.

The last report that I heard before I left work on Friday was that they had gone through with the operation anyway, but had somehow miraculously not needed to amputate either leg. His road to recovery will still be an incredibly difficult uphill battle, especially given the quality of care that he will likely receive in a public hospital, as well as his own stubborn attitude regarding his well-being. I’m anxious to hear how things went over the weekend, but for now hoping that this will actually be one of the first good stories I’ve ever heard about someone’s trip to the hospital in Nicaragua.

My coworker Karla, who teaches first grade in the project, isn’t able to look at the public health situation in the country right now with quite as much optimism. Her son, Judder, has an increasingly inflamed hernia in his lower abdomen that has needed to be operated on for over a month. While the job in which her husband has worked for over a year now provides the type of social security that would cover a family member’s operation like the one Judder needs, they are increasingly finding themselves caught in a web of red tape and government bureaucracy. The first obstacle that they had to overcome was the blood donation that is required for any person undergoing an operation in a public hospital in Nicaragua. Depending on the type of operation and the amount of blood that could be required for a transfusion during the operation, the patient must have someone donate a specified amount of blood before the operation can take place. The donor’s blood isn’t used for the patient, but is required in order to maintain an adequate supply in the blood banks. Much like the bandages and gauze that Dona Carmen had to provide for her husband’s infected leg, the blood required in order to undergo an operation is a glaring example of the burden put on the patients themselves in Nicaragua if they actually expect to be cared for.

After receiving the certificate signifying that Karla had gotten someone to donate enough blood for Judder’s operation, they then found out that the Nicaraguan Institute of Social Security (INSS) would not sign off on the waver saying that her husband had indeed been employed in a job covered by INSS. No one really seems to know what the hold up is, but in the meantime, Judder’s hernia is making it increasingly difficult for him to do anything but lie in bed. Each day without his operation increases the chances of his hernia rupturing, thus sending him down a spiral similar to the one from which Dona Carmen’s husband is trying to get out.

To end things on a somewhat brighter note, my students didn’t necessarily impress me with their behavior this week, but they did bring a big smile to my face on Wednesday. I had been stuck in a workshop with students studying pedagogy from the Autonomous National University of Nicaragua all of Tuesday afternoon. Apparently in my absence, my students decided to take it upon themselves to start planning for my birthday at the end of this month. When I came to work Wednesday morning, I found a box on the floor outside of the comedor. Curious to see what was inside, I opened it up to find dozens of posters, cards, and letters that they had made the day before. I asked the computer teacher, Mariela, what this was all about, to which she gasped that it was supposed to be a surprise. The kids had left the box on the floor by accident instead of turning it in to her for safekeeping. Since then, they’ve been taking turns carrying it to and from their houses everyday so they can work on the preparations more.

Not wanting to spoil their ingenuity, I’m playing along as if I have no idea they even know when my birthday is. Thursday, as we were having a meeting with the parents after class, eight or nine students from my class and some of the other grades stayed in the library to work on more posters and cards. Just to see how they would react, I kept knocking on the door to the library, asking to borrow books. Despite a general dislike for my birthday, their sneaky behavior actually kind of has me looking forward to it this year.


"You traveled far
What have you found
That there's no time
There's no time
To analyse
To think things through
To make sense.

Like cows in the city, they never looked so pretty
By power carts and blackouts
Sleeping like babies

It gets you down
It gets you down
You're just playing a part
You're just playing a part

You're playing a part
Playing a part
And there's no time
There's no time
To analyse
Analyse
Analyse."

--Thom Yorke, "Analyse"

As usual, here I am starting off an update by apologizing for not having written in almost a month. Lest you worry that I’ve been detained in jail for protesting more corrupt public utilities, I promise that it’s just because I’ve been kind of lazy about getting around to filling you in on the odds and ends of the last few weeks. So, will start this one off with an entertaining story from the “strange foods eaten in a foreign country” department, and see where it goes from there. As usual, please don’t read if you’re squeamish or faint of heart.

Early last week, a large shipment of boxes arrived in the project with the national seal officially stamped on each one. As it turned out, the boxes had been a donation to the project from the first lady of Nicaragua. Cheese? Vegetables? Rice? Beans? What was this mystery gift that the generous government had decided to bestow upon our comedor? If you guessed 100 pounds of export-quality mondongo, you’d be right on the money. What’s that you say, you’ve never heard of something called mondongo? Well, consider yourself all the better because of it. Mondongo is the intestinal wall of a cow. It is a soft, rubbery, porous material that needs to be washed multiple times in scalding hot water and sometimes bleach, for obvious reasons. Maybe this is just my assumption, but I had always thought it was best not to bother eating something that needed to be WASHED IN BLEACH in order for it to be edible.

This is probably about the time you’re asking yourself what would possess me to eat something that once was part of the digestive system of a cow. I have a deal with my students in the comedor that I’ll always eat a small bowl of whatever is being served so that they can’t use their favorite excuse of “It hurts me” when they don’t feel like eating it. That said, even my students wouldn’t have expected me to eat mondongo. It’s viewed even among Nicaraguans as kind of weird thing to be eating, so expecting a foreigner to chow down is hardly ever an issue.

More than anything, it came down to two things. The first was my annoyance with the comments that a German volunteer had been making ever since the shipment arrived. In front of other Nicaraguans, she was so tactless as to repeatedly make the statement that in Germany people feed this kind of stuff to their dogs. I’m the first to admit that it sounds (and smells) like the least appetizing thing in the world, but that doesn’t justify telling someone who considers it a national delicacy akin to sauerkraut that it’s not fit for dogs to eat. I’m just as capable of being the tactless foreign volunteer at times, but this was one of those instances when I had to distance myself from how unbelievably offensive she was being.

The other reason isn’t quite as noble; I just thought it would make for a good story to put here. So, I ate it and obviously I’m still alive. Apparently, there was nothing to worry about in terms of cleanliness since this was export-quality mondongo (that begs the question, who IMPORTS mondongo?), but I did not feel much like eating for the rest of the day. Much like trying to climb an impossibly steep volcano, it came down to sheer mental concentration as I thought of all the good things I’ve eaten in my life, like apple pie, Key Lime pie, and bubble gum ice cream. It’s my general rule of thumb to never turn down something that’s offered to me in Nicaragua, but now that I’ve tried mondongo, I can safely say there won’t be a second chance.

Last weekend, I was feeling my perpetual claustrophobia of living in Managua. The power is still going out for five-eight hours at a time, the water is cut off with even more frequency, and recently, there has been a shortage of propane gas which we use to cook. I spent an hour the other night after our tank ran out at home trying to find a neighborhood store that had full tanks for sale. Tropigas, the company that distributes the gas around Managua, must be run by the same people that run Union Fenosa because after lugging our empty tank around to half a dozen vendors, there was no gas to be found. Subsequent calls to the company’s distribution center got nothing but a continual busy signal from the hundreds of other people who were unlucky enough to have run out of gas in the middle of this shortage. The woman who runs the “venta” closest to our house looked appalled when I asked if she sold firewood. I’m assuming she didn’t trust the idea of gringos cooking over an open flame in their back patio, so she promised to help track down a tank for us. Unfortunately, there won’t be any available until Monday, so we’re sticking to generic Fruit Loops, PB and J sandwiches, and trail mix until then.

In order to help maintain a positive outlook on things, I took a short day-trip to Volcan Masaya, which is about a 30-minute bus ride from Managua. The hike up to the top is done on a paved road at an incline barely steep enough to make you need a rest break, and the scenery isn’t much more than a surreal wasteland of black volcanic flow from the last time that it exploded. While the view from the top doesn’t begin to compare to Momotombo, looking down in the massively-wide crater that constantly spews white, sulfuric gas almost makes you feel like you’re looking into some dismal abyss into hell. In fact, some Spanish missionary back in the 1800s apparently thought that was what it was, so he constructed a giant cross along the ridge to prevent evil spirits from escaping.

The active crater is connected to a taller, dormant crater that has long since filled in with trees and other vegetation. I decided to steer clear of the crowds of visitors piling out of their cars in the parking lot at the top of the active crater, and headed up to walk around the rim of the dormant volcano. The view from on top was way more worth the time spent getting there, as there was no one around and I could see all the way from Volcan Momotombo along the shores of Lake Managua to the northern edge of Lake Nicaragua in the south. As I got to the far side of the rim, the trail got a lot narrower, eventually leaving me with not much more than a couple feet on either side of the trail before the land precipitously dropped a good ways down the volcano (read: at least 200 feet). Fortunately, there was a park guide conveniently stationed right about where the trail started to narrow, and he assured me that it was safe to keep walking all the way around to the other side. However, he failed to mention the grotesquely huge flock of vultures waiting along the trail about a hundred yards ahead. While I try to use reason in situations like that, telling myself that vultures only eat things that have died, I was still a little more than freaked out by hundreds of giant black birds flying all around me as I made my way along the trail.

Fortunately, there weren’t any reenactments from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and I made it back around to where I hard started without anything worse than some sweaty palms. I found a small lookout shelter with a couple of benches between the two craters where I laid down for a half hour or so to take a nap. Falling asleep to the sound of nothing but the breeze blowing through the brush around me, as opposed to barking dogs, buses honking their horns, and the neighbors shouting next door was the perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon. After I was awoken by some Spaniards wanting to get a look at the gates of hell, I made my way back down through the valley of black lava, and hopped on a bus for home.

Today and tomorrow are two of the most important national holidays in Nicaragua. September 14th is the day when in 1856 a regiment of drastically outnumbered Nicaraguan soldiers staged an emotional victory against the forces of a pro-slavery, white supremacist from the United States named William Walker, who had installed himself as the de facto president of Nicaragua. The battle featured Nicaragua’s version of Patrick Henry, who continued to fight even after his rifle malfunctioned, leaving him with nothing but rocks to throw at the approaching American mercenaries hired by Walker. Tomorrow, the 15th, is the date of Central America’s independence from the Spanish crown in 1821. Yesterday, we had a school presentation in honor of the two holidays in which my class proudly sang the national anthem. They were all singing at their own rhythm, most of them off-key, but they were beaming with pride at the end of the song.

Since none of my students have class today, I’m hanging out at home catching up on work that I’ve been meaning to get done for a long time. I made it out this morning though to watch some of my students compete in a “handball” tournament at their school. I’m not sure how this absurd combination of basketball and soccer ever caught on in a place like El Recreo, but my students have been telling me about this tournament for the past month like it was the World Series. The play it everyday during recess, putting tables up on their sides for goalposts, and crashing into each other as they try to rip the ball out of each other’s hands. They asked me no less than twenty times over the last few days if I would be able to come, even at one point offering to pay the 1 cordoba entrance fee for me.

So, at 7:30 this morning, on my day off from work, I made my way back to the barrio to see what this hype was all about. No sooner had I walked in the door than half a dozen of my own students came rushing up to say hello. They proudly took me to inspect their classroom, introduced me to their homeroom teacher, and then stared in fascination as the school’s English teacher talked to me in, well, English. The girls that I have in my class ended up winning their game 3-1. The boys apparently didn’t pay attention to the schedule, and ended up not having a game at all. It was a lot of fun getting to hang out with them outside of my class, meet their teachers and talk about areas in which the kids need help, and see them be unruly without having to worry about disciplining them.

My last update for the day is about Wilmer, frequently the most unruly student in my class, who at the beginning of the year was failing seven out of the eight subjects on his report card. For the past two weeks in the row, he has without a doubt been the most well-behaved student in my class. He’s worked for the entire two and a half hours of class without needing my constant attention, and hasn’t picked a single fight with another student. For a kid that normally ends up quitting five minutes after class has started, leaves without asking for permission, and ends up head-first in a barrel of water, this is the stuff of miracles. I stopped by his house a week ago today to tell his mom how proud I was of his behavior in class. When I got there, she immediately brought out Wilmer’s report card to show me that he was doing remarkably better in his morning class as well. He’s gone from failing seven out of eight classes to only failing one. I have no idea what’s behind his drastic change in attitude, but I’m determined to figure it out so that I can help him keep it up through the end of the year.


“Well I’ve been waking up at sunrise,
I’ve been following the light across my room,
I watch the night receive the room of my day,
Some people say the sky is just the sky,
But I say why deny the obvious child?”

Paul Simon, “Obvious Child”

The title of this entry is the Spanish word for collision or conflict. Lately, life in Nicaragua seems to be moving in the direction of constant choque on many levels. As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, water and electricity outages have been increasing in frequency and duration pretty much since I got here. There are arguments from all sides as to the causes and possible solutions, but for now the simple truth is that there are fewer parts of Managua (even the richest neighborhoods with the best connections) that aren’t being affected on a daily basis. In El Recreo, a choque between the Costa Rican nuns that are in charge of the financing for the project and the Nicaraguans who work in the project is beginning to reach a boiling point. As foreign volunteers who see it as our primary role to accompany our coworkers in support and solidarity, it’s becoming increasingly maddening to watch decisions being made behind the backs of our friends, as well as watching the nuns continually showing distrust and condescension to their faces. First, to the power and water crisis.

Upon our return to Managua from a weekend retreat in a little mountain town along the Honduran border, we were greeted back in the barrio with the news that the water had been out for the past four days straight. Not one drop from Friday afternoon until Tuesday around 1:00pm. Obviously, when you run a comedor that provides food on a daily basis to more than 100 kids, it’s difficult to accomplish such a feat without any water with which to cook, wash dishes and food, or make the juice that the kids drink with their lunch. Our frustrations with the inability to do a vital part of our job didn’t even begin to cover the outrage that people felt throughout the neighborhood when they weren’t able to flush toilets, take showers, or wash clothes. The problems that accompany living in a place where kids are already susceptible to a host of parasitic infections is made infinitely worse by the dehydration that quickly sets in after a day of not having anything to drink.

Despite the fact that is has a much more dramatic, tangible effect on the lives and well-being of the people that I live and work with, the shortages of drinking water are actually secondary to the power outages. Although ENACAL, the government-run water utility supposedly has generators to keep supply constant throughout the city, they are apparently finding it too expensive to operate said generators when the power goes out. Thus, the responsibility for parts of Managua’s increasing likeness to many of the giant slums of sub-Saharan Africa falls into the hands of the privatized power industry, run by a Spanish transnational corporation called Union Fenosa.

I generally try to make it my policy to keep my comments that I make here as balanced as possible. The problems that confront a developing country like Nicaragua are incredibly complex, combining factors ranging from the historical influence of foreign countries (namely the U.S.) to the ineffectual, corrupt policies of politicians at the local and national levels. While I have lots of strong opinions about the issues that Nicaragua is confronting these days, I also don’t want to come across as though I have the story straight in every instance after only having lived here for nine months. However, in the case of the robber barons running Union Fenosa, I’m more than happy to let the gloves come off and say what I really think.

Their main claim for not being able to supply power throughout the country, but especially in Managua, is the lack of timely payments made by consumers. While their argument does hold some ground, as the rate of compliance for paying everything from taxes to utilities is generally low in Nicaragua, people are given little incentive to actually pay what they owe. For example, part of El Recreo recently went more than twenty days without ANY electricity provided to their houses or businesses. When the bills came for the period of time in which this outage was included, the amounts owed did not even begin to reflect that people hadn’t been able to turn on a light or an electric stove for almost a month. Another example comes from one of my coworkers, Sylvia, whom I’ve mentioned in the past. A normal month’s electric bill runs her around 200 cordobas, not a small amount for someone who works for only a meager stipend in the project’s discount pharmacy. However, without any explicable rationale for such a dramatic spike, her bill has recently jumped to nearly 700 cordobas a month. When a company fails to accurately gauge a consumer’s usage for billing purposes, why the hell would anyone want to pay?

To add insult to injury, Union Fenosa recently asked the Nicaraguan government to provide $9 million in emergency funding to help bailout the supposedly bankrupt plants that the Spanish conglomerate runs here. Never mind the fact that the already desperately bankrupt federal government couldn’t come up with money like that even if they wanted (see earlier entries in which I talk about their willingness to provide a livable wage to the country’s public doctors). What’s the most outrageous about such a request is that Union Fenosa recorded record profits in the previous fiscal year, a whopping 120% higher than in 2004. So, when you look around the city and see graffiti on nearly every available surface calling for the government to end their contract with Union Fenosa, you begin to understand why.

Since we couldn’t feed the children in the comedor this past Tuesday, an all-staff meeting was called to discuss possible actions that we could take as a project and as a neighborhood to voice our frustration and indignation. It was decided that we would spend the day (canceling our afternoon tutoring program) soliciting signatures for a letter that we wrote to the board of directors of both ENACAL and Union Fenosa. In addition, we encouraged our neighbors at nearly every house in the barrio to participate with us in a protest in front of the offices of the Nicaraguan Institute of Energy (INE), the arm of the government responsible for doling out contracts to shady multinational corporations like Union Fenosa. By the end of the day, we had more than 1,000 signatures and a heap of banners to take to the protest the next day.

At 9:00am the next day, around twenty members of the project started out on the five mile walk from El Recreo to the offices of INE, carrying signs, waving banners, and stopping at two television stations along the way. Reporters and cameras were sent out to film our motley crew as we blocked a lane of traffic along one of the busiest streets in Managua. The founder of the comedor, Dona Aura was sent in front of the cameras to give one of her passionate, “I’ve lived through dictatorships, revolutions, and a civil war, but this is too much” speeches. I was extremely impressed by the effort that my coworkers put into the march and the media attention they were getting, but was slightly skeptical as to the amount of people that would actually be in front of the offices once we arrived. Part of me wondered if we might be the only twenty people there.

To my surprise, as we rounded the corner to the office building, we were met with hundreds of people, giant speakers loaded on the back of a truck, and a man shouting into a megaphone. The energy of the crowd immediately became more intense as our group assimilated into the masses, and it wasn’t long before Dona Aura naturally made her way to the megaphone. I’m sure that what we were a part of last Wednesday couldn’t begin to compare to something as powerful as Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But as Dona Aura shouted into the megaphone at the pencil pushers inside, nearly coming to the point of tears as she described the conditions in her neighborhood, I couldn’t help but think that she would have played a magnificent role in the civil rights movement had she been born in another time and place.

The crowd remained relatively calm for the majority of the morning, with parents holding their kids up on their shoulders, and ice cream vendors pushing through the crowd. A man decorated head to toe in native dress wandered through the crowd with a bow and arrow. A little while later, the giant, elaborately dressed “gigantona” showed up fulfilling its historical role of making fun of the Spaniards. However, as the hours passed with no response from anyone inside the building to the demands we were making outside, the crowd began to get more agitated. People began gathering around the front gate, demanding to be let in to a building that is normally open to the public. Eventually, it reached the point where the security guards on the other side realized they were drastically outnumbered, and it would be better to open the gate than see it come crashing down. So, about half of the crowd that had been waiting outside rushed through the front doors and quickly began sitting down in offices on every floor of the building, as well as walking out onto the second-story roof over the entrance.

Not having any idea what was going to happen to our coworkers inside the building, the three of us volunteers decided that we would do much more good from outside than possibly ending up in jail upon entry. Shortly after the largest group had entered the building, police officers began arriving in trucks from both sides of the street in which we were standing. They quickly surrounded the front of the building in order to keep anyone else from getting inside. It was kind of comical to watch some of them, who were clearly not motivated to be there. One fairly overweight guy, who barely looked like he fit into his blue pants and shirt, desperately called for the attention of one of the hot dog vendors that was panning the street for potential buyers. The cop stood there for the next couple minutes chowing down on a couple dogs and an ice cream cone. Meanwhile, I waited with my coworker Karla’s son Jonathan perched on top of my shoulders, and the rest of our crew tried to reach her or anyone else on the inside by cell phone.

Eventually, the police officers began to spill out into the street, and it began to look like something big was about to happen. A few minutes later, a bunch of slick-looking guys in button-down shirts and khakis came out and made their way over to the truck with the speakers and megaphone. They stood there emotionless as the leader of the consumer defense league that had organized the march read the official complaint. When he had finished the lengthy list of grievances, they took a copy of the complaint and walked back inside, not even dignifying us with a response. The police closed their human wall around the building again, and we waited for another hour or so until all of the protestors inside the building were released.

In the long run, it’s tough to say what kind of an effect the march will have on INE’s likeliness to even file a complaint with Union Fenosa, let alone end their contract with them. But, many of my coworkers are heading to another rally tomorrow morning, which leads to what made me most impressed about the whole event. Despite the fact that we run a community center that provides services to just about every possible demographic in El Recreo, the level of activism there is startlingly low. To get neighbors fired up about cleaning the basketball court that’s surrounded by mounds of rotting garbage is like pulling teeth. Seeing my coworkers take an issue as serious as this into their own hands and looking for possible ways of responding was one of the best things I’ve experienced since I moved here.

On Tuesday morning, while we were making plans for the march, one of the younger teachers in the project had questioned the necessity to walk around the barrio all morning and afternoon, soliciting signatures for the letter we had written. Sylvia, who has worked in the project for the past 14 years, had no qualms about making the other teacher seriously rethink her apathy in front of the rest of the group. Although it was dramatic, she compared the current crisis that Nicaraguans are facing to the mountain of challenges they faced on a daily basis during the revolution. She made a reference to a group of Managuans that fled the capital in the last days of the revolution, walking more than 40 kilometers along the side of the highway to a town called Masaya. Sylvia’s point was that if the other teacher didn’t feel like she could manage walking around the neighborhood for a couple of hours for a cause as important as this, maybe she should rethink what it is she’s doing working in the barrio. Between Sylvia’s pep talk about sucking it up and getting the job done, to Dona Aura nearly breaking down on the megaphone in front of the INE offices, I don’t think there’s ever been another time that I’ve been so proud to work with the rest of the people in the project.

My growing appreciation for many of my coworkers has been increasingly met with disdain for the nuns that run the project. Since the project has been around for over sixteen years, it would be difficult to sum up the history involved in the relations between the Costa Rican nuns who hold the money, and the Nicaraguans doing difficult jobs for very little appreciation. However, here are a couple examples that have come up recently to try and clarify my point.

About a month ago, we found out that one of the volunteers who will be coming down in December is going to be placed in the gym. The first problem with this news is that the gym isn’t supposed to still be in operation. The group of Nicaraguans who are the coordinators for each of the programs in the project decided last year that the gym simply requires too many resources for the amount of benefit it actually provides to the community. When two of the six classes in the after-school tutoring program are forced to teach under a tin roof outside due to lack of space, the decision to close down the gym doesn’t seem that hard to understand. However, the director of the project, who happens to be one of the despised nuns from Costa Rica, decided to go over the heads of the coordinators and continue to provide funding for the gym.

The second problem with the new volunteer being sent to the gym is that she is a woman who will be working in an all-male environment. In a country like Nicaragua, where a woman can hardly ever walk down the street without being mentally undressed by the men hanging out along the way, putting a foreign female volunteer into that type of environment is an impossibility. In the past, the coordinators have had final approval over all foreign volunteers who come to the project, thus preventing a situation like this one from happening. However, our ever-shrewd director has recently decided that she will be the only one who has approval over the volunteers and their placements, thus allowing her to support whichever programs she deems most important.

In talking with our director about our concerns regarding this situation, the conversation ended on an absolutely outrageous note. As we were getting up to leave, the director thanked us for bringing our concerns to her. She said that she always felt like she could talk to us, unlike the Nicaraguans, because of our similar backgrounds (alluding to the fact that all of us are well-educated also apparently meant that we shared similar racist backgrounds like her). It wasn’t until just this past Friday that I began to get a sense of how this paternalistic, intolerant attitude towards the Nicaraguans in the project is not just ingrained in the warped mind of our director. As part of an eight hour workshop on communication (or something to that effect…do workshops ever really have a specific purpose except to waste time?), we spent part of the morning having one-on-one conversations with the rest of our coworkers. One of the younger nuns, who works in the library, spent more than half an hour during her conversation with my roommate Julie chastising her for always siding with the “gente,” which in this sense was meant as a derogatory reference to the Nicaraguans.

I’m finishing up this entry, which I started a couple days ago, while lying in bed trying to recuperate from some virus or another that has been ravaging my body for the past week and a half. Long story short, it started out as a bad cough, but now I can’t swallow very well, I feel like a light breeze might knock me over, and I have a temperature that shoots up to 101.6 degrees and back down to 97.4 in the matter of a few hours. I’ll be going to see the doctor tomorrow, although I’m convinced that he’ll be just as utterly confused by my overabundance of symptoms, and just prescribe some lame cough syrup and a penicillin injection (Nicaraguan doctors are obsessed with injections, as if they’ve never heard of pills). While the gente of Nicaragua are fighting for the basic rights of electricity and water, my coworkers are fighting to be treated with the dignity they deserve from our boss, and my body is fighting the mother-of-all-infections, here’s a list of things I’m grateful for right now, so as to end this on a good note.

- My roommates, who although they get on my nerves at times, do a more than excellent job of keeping an eye on me when I’m feeling less than 100%, and Father Joe, our in-country coordinator who is taking me to the doc tomorrow.
- ENACAL and Union Fenosa, because they’ve decided to keep the water and light on all day, without even one outage.
- One of the disabled students with whom my roommate Adriana works. He drew me a picture after I had visited him a few months ago, and has since asked Adri every single day when I’m going to get around to drawing the picture of Superman that he wants in return.
- The book I’m reading right now, Pathologies of Power, by Dr. Paul Farmer, possibly one of the smartest people out there.
- Having my laptop that Matt brought down for me, allowing me to write my entries in bed, instead of at the internet café. Also, listening to all of the old music I have on here from college reminds me of people I haven’t seen in a long time.
- My parents, who despite reading discouraging entries like this one, worrying about me participating in street protests, and hearing from me on an irregular basis, still make the conversations I do have with them seem like they’re holding it together pretty well back home.


"You're preventing the world from hearing my songs
Imagine if the world could get behind it
The combined strength would propell us all
And release us from our stilted social norms."

--Criteria, Prevent the World

If I still wasn’t convinced that I should write the next great (Central) American novel, a trip that I took with three of my roommates a few weeks made up my mind for me. In a sneak preview of what will hopefully be taught in every Contemporary American Lit class for decades to come, here’s the background on the trip, and what’s been going on in the weeks since.

Back in December, I spent a few of my first days here in Nicaragua staying with a family in a small town called El Viejo in the north part of the country. Dona Marta, the matriarch of the family, had become good friends with the second-year volunteers last year while she was protesting the use of an extremely carcinogenic pesticide on banana farmers throughout the country. The chemical, Nemagon, had been developed by Dow, and was sprayed on fields (and the farm workers in the fields) for decades despite the knowledge that it was linked to just about any form of cancer imaginable. Dona Marta was one of many farm workers that left their homes to camp out in front of the National Assembly here in Managua for months, waiting for a response from the government to their demands of compensation.

The reason that I’m writing about her background isn’t because it’s particularly relevant to the story, but because it gives you an idea of how much I admire her. She’s a single mom who has raised four kids on her own, works harder than I would ever be capable of, and is without a doubt one of the warmest, most generous and witty people I know in Nicaragua. During my first days living here, her family showed me amazing hospitality by opening up their small home and making me feel like we had been friends for years.

Spending time with Marta and her family reminds me so much of my summers in the Dominican Republic, when the families with whom we would stay would adopt us without hesitation and make us a part of every aspect of their lives. It’s hard to explain what it feels like living in a foreign country, where the people that you know best are a disparate group of fellow volunteers that you hadn’t met until eight months ago. To have a connection to a Nicaraguan family that has welcomed you with open arms since the day you met makes the feeling of being out-of-place less intense.

Since it had been more than sixth months since any of us in the house had seen Dona Marta or her family, we decided it to take a weekend to head up to El Viejo and see how they are doing. A lot had changed since I had been there in December. Marta had built her oldest daughter a small two-room house behind the house in which Marta and the rest of her family live. The second oldest daughter had just given birth when I last came to visit; now the baby was twice as big as it had been and was crawling all over the dirt floors of the house. Marta’s 24 year-old son Isidro is now engaged to the girl that lives next door, literally. The fact that both are my age and haven’t had ANY kids yet is quite remarkable by Nicaraguan standards. Maria Luisa, Marta’s nine-year old daughter is more precocious than ever. When we go to the beach, she still thinks that I can be used as her own personal attendant, carrying her on my back through the water, and holding her plate of rice and fried fish while she eats lunch.

Saturday night, we walked a few blocks to the house where Dona Marta’s mother, an 80-some-year-old toothless wonder named Dona Chepita, lives. We sat visiting for hours under a thatch-roof cooking hut out behind her house. She told us stories of a volunteer doctor that had stayed with her more than fifteen years ago, yet she still talked about him as if he were her son who had left home yesterday. Her myriad grandchildren ran in and out to spy on our conversation in between games of hide and seek, and then came in permanently to show us how well they can read from their school workbooks. Chepita wouldn’t let me leave until I had learned how to roll cuajada, a mushy Nicaraguan cheese that has enough salt in it to put someone into cardiac arrest on the spot.

The following morning, we lazily got ourselves ready for a day at the beach, and finally headed to the central square in town around 9:30am to catch the two-hour bus to Jiquilio, a small fishing community along the Pacific coast. After a long, bumpy ride, the bus dropped us off at the end of a dusty road. We wandered through the trees to the edge of a bay that emptied into the ocean. For the rest of the day, we hung out on the hot sand, waded in the water as the tide came rushing into the bay, and walked for miles down the beach without seeing more than a handful of other people. Marta and Julie spent a good hour and a half tracking down a place to buy food and someone to cook it for us, but eventually came back with a feast of freshly-caught, fried fish, mountains of rice, and ripe tomatoes. We all stuffed ourselves along the shoreline, watching the sun set lower in the sky and listening to Marta tell stories of swimming across the bay when she was a girl.

Turns out we should have been paying closer attention to the passing afternoon. The last bus for Chinandega allegedly was going to leave at 3:00pm. Unfortunately, that was 3:00pm on the “hora vieja,” which is 4:00pm for those of us living in Managua, where we half-heartedly follow daylight savings time. With the sun starting to set low in the sky, Maria Luisa fell sound asleep on Julie’s and my lap, and the bus chugged slowly along down the highway. Since it was Sunday evening, everyone and their great-grandmother were hopping on board to make it back to the city for the start of the week. What normally would have been a two-hour trip quickly became three before we finally pulled into the market in Chinandega. The buses headed south leave Chinandega from the other side of town, so we frantically hailed a taxi with the hopes that it could get us to the station before the last mini-bus left for Managua.

As you might have already guessed, we didn’t have that much luck. Only one lonely van remained in the otherwise empty lot. The driver responded to our ridiculous inquiry about a ride home by briskly stating that if we found 10 other people headed for Managua, he’d be happy to make one more trip. By that time of night, anyone with half a brain and headed towards Managua had already caught their bus, so we dejectedly dragged our backs back out to the highway hoping to hitch a ride to anywhere outside of Chinandega.

I’d like to take this opportunity to mention that I don’t know the first thing about hitchhiking, being used to having my own car to take me where I need to go. However, as my mom can attest, desperate times call for desperate measures, and when it comes down to spending the night on the side of the road or waving down a passing truck, you have to go with the latter. After about an hour of doing everything short of jumping out in front of the cars speeding by on the highway, a cheery Spaniard from Leon (Spain) agreed to let us hop in the back of his pickup headed for Leon (Nicaragua). The next 45 minutes will probably go down as some of the best I’ll ever spend in the back of a truck. As we flew down the road, we laid down in the bed of the truck to look up at the brilliant night sky above us. Not only were there more stars than someone who grew up in a city could ever imagine really exist, there just happened to be a meteor shower adding to the spectacularly surreal scenery. Hoping such an once-in-a-lifetime ride wouldn’t end until morning, we begrudgingly hopped out at a gas station on the outskirts of Leon to look for our next ride.

Thinking that things couldn’t get much better than riding with the Spaniard, I was proven wrong when I flagged down a passing semi-truck with a driver heading from Guatemala to a town about 30 km outside of Managua. He seemed like a decent guy, and since there were four of us riding together, we felt safe enough climbing up into the cab of the truck. We sat on his bed behind the driver’s seat and listened to his stories of traveling from the highlands of Guatemala to the Panama Canal. He told us about his wife and kids at home, the loneliness of being on the road at night, and why he liked Nicaragua better than anywhere else in Central America. Despite the incredible stories and great conversation, his rig reached a top speed of about 45km/h, so by the time he rolled into his truck stop outside of a town called Nagarote, it was getting close to midnight.

We politely turned down his offer to let us sleep in the truck, and quickly caught the first passing truck towards Managua. Our last ride of the night introduced us to an elderly woman heading to the market to sell quesillos (sour cream and cheese-filled tortillas) outside of the bars until 5:00am. We parted ways with her a little after midnight, and quickly accepted the driver’s offer to drop us off at the end of our block before he headed to the other side of town. From one of the most remote, northern beaches in Chinandega to a block from our house, in four rides and hours of the kind of conversations you have with your best friend.

After our hitchhiking adventure, life back here in Managua has failed to let up its hectic, migraine-inducing pace. Lately, class has been reminiscent of the struggle to capture the students’ attention from the first few days of my career as a teacher. It doesn’t help that there hasn’t been a full week of class in about a month, due to a disastrous combination of national holidays, eight-hour long workshops, and students deciding that they don’t need to show up whether they have a legitimate excuse or not. My mission as of late has been to track down as many of the delinquent students at their homes and find out whether they want to be in the class or not. I’m perfectly happy to work with the ten kids that actually do want to be there, but I’m not about to let the rest of them go without at least giving me an explanation in front of their parents why they don’t want to show up anymore. I’ve come to realize in my process of home visits that it’s frequently the parents that don’t care about their kid’s educational progress as much as it is the kids themselves.
With the students that show a serious lack of interest also come the ones that make me glad to be doing what I’m doing. About a month ago, I started picking up three students from their houses after they had been absent from the class for more than two and a half months. I talked to their parents about why they hadn’t been coming, and found out that all three of them had been harassed by a bunch of punks trying to act tough by throwing rocks at the school kids passing by in the street. Now, everyday about a half hour before class starts I walk down to where they live, bring them to the school, and then take them back to their houses after class. It’s become kind of a motley crew of kids from that part of the barrio that follow us to class each day, sometimes just the four of us, sometimes as many as ten trailing behind.

Another student that I’ve been working with is a sixth grader named Yelsin. He used to bring his English homework to school for me to correct once every couple of weeks or so. Now, I stop by his house to leave lessons for him and his younger sister Migdel every few days. The two of them, along with their mom, might be one of the best families I know in Nicaragua after Dona Marta and her clan. Both of the kids seem to tirelessly help out with cooking, cleaning, and running errands - in addition to their own school work - so that their mom can devote her energy to her sewing, which is the family’s primary source of income.

It’s been somewhat of a struggle to justify spending so much time outside of school helping one student. According to Yelsin’s teacher, he’ll have to repeat sixth grade if he doesn’t pass English this year. But, I have a dozen students at risk of not passing; how can I commit so much time to just one? I’ve reconciled working with Yelsin as long as he continues to show the remarkable amount of interest in the help I’m giving him, and as long as I can continue to be available to other students when they need my help as well. In the meantime, I’m more than happy to trade a few hours a week for the occasional avocado or ice-cold glass of lemonade.

Outside of the barrio, all of Managua has once again found itself in the midst of celebrations that must rival Madri Gras or Carnival. The patron saint of Managua, Santo Domingo, had not one, but two feast days over the last two weeks. Coincidentally, the roundabout a block and a half away from our house in the Rotonda de Santo Domingo, making our neighborhood the epicenter for the overwhelming insanity that began on the night of the 31st. The best way I can describe it is what it must be like to live next to Rosenblatt Stadium during the College World Series if you’re from Omaha, except with people drinking moonshine out of plastic bags, other people covered head to toe in black tar, and a giant greased pole that teams of intoxicated revelers try to climb. During the day, people march for miles through the entire city, following a procession for Santo Domingo despite near 100 degree temperatures. At night, everyone gathers around the roundabout, listening to blaring music, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, and dancing with anyone and everyone passing by on the street. Oh yeah, and the fireworks continue like a barrage of cannon fire 24-hours a day.

However, in a place like Managua, one party just isn’t good enough. So, about ten years ago, a bunch of wealthy Nicaraguans (most of whom now live on palatial estates in Miami) started a parade of their purebred horses through the city. Los Hipicos, as it’s now called, has become the party to rival the best party in town, so we of course had to do some investigative research ourselves. A route that stretches for more than 5 miles, from the shore of Lake Managua to one of the roundabouts not too far from my house, is now lined with vendors, bands, and tents full of wealthy Nicaraguans doing their best Churchill Downs impression. The absurdity of watching rich people watch their horses trot down the boulevards of Managua was too much for me, especially since part of the route passes by the barrio in which I work. I saw at least half a dozen of my students working with their families selling food, beer, or souvenirs along the side of the road, while the elite of Nicaragua paraded by on horses worth tens of thousands of dollars. My frustration with the entire spectacle reached its peak when a Mercedes Benz SUV tried to plow its way down a street packed with people, at one point literally running over the leg of a vendor along the side of the road. I saw a quote in a magazine once that said “the rich never need see the poor,” but this was taking it to one hell of an extreme.

To wrap up this verbose update on the last month here in Managua, I’d like to thank my two friends Matt and Pat for coming to hang out with me for a week and a half. Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to get much time off of work while they were here, they came anyway and did an incredible job helping out in the project, despite the fact that neither one knew Spanish all that well. Pat worked one-on-one with a few students that desperately need my undivided attention, but rarely ever get it throughout the hectic day. Matt, a third-year dental student, took his crusade against dental decay to an international level, and prepared surely the best talk my kids have ever received on cavities, gum disease, and the importance of proper brushing techniques. It got to be kind of exhausting translating the simplest phrases for them when they wanted to order a Coke or find the bathroom, but it was a blast having them hear and getting to show them a little bit of what my life is like here in Managua. Surely, it was better than reading this blog.

Although it was almost certainly not even noticed back in the States, the World Cup ended the weekend before last in a climactic final shootout between Italy and France after two scoreless overtimes. I went with Mike and Vince to a bar a few blocks away from the house to watch the game and hang out with a few of our friends. Although I’ve never really been a huge fan of watching soccer on TV or in person, it was a lot of fun to see how caught up in the tournament the entire country of Nicaragua was for three weeks.

Despite the fact that Nicaragua didn’t even come close to having a team in the Cup, there wasn’t one person that I talked to that didn’t have a favorite team they would cheer for relentlessly until they were eliminated. If their team got knocked out, they would just pick the next best choice and go with them. There were very few kids in either of my classes that wouldn’t have given their left arm if Brazil had won. Everyone had stickers, notebooks, jerseys, and photos of Ronaldino (considered the best player in the world) with them everywhere they went. More than a few fights broke out in my class when someone stole something that had to do with the Brazilian soccer wonder.

I’ll probably never fully understand the passion and agony that people feel for their favorite soccer team the way that I would be if the Cubs were ever to come close to making the World Series again (an extremely unlikely event in my lifetime). But, it was pretty cool for a few weeks to see kids in the streets playing soccer practically 24 hours a day. Some had real soccer balls and goal posts, while others played with a deflated lump of rubber and a few bricks to mark the boundaries, but every one of them would run screaming down the field when they scored as if they had just won the World Cup themselves.

As I’ve mentioned before, Nicaragua is holding what will probably be the most important presidential elections in all of Central America in the last twenty years this November. The prospects for a decent candidate who can bring some genuinely positive changes to a country desperately in need of them are looking pretty slim. The former mayor of Managua, Herty Lewites, was considered pretty much the only legitimate candidate with a chance to win. Herty had been elected the mayor of Managua four years ago, and was largely recognized as one of the first mayors to spur major development in a capital city that has barely changed since it was leveled in the 1972 earthquake.

In a country where politician and corruption should appear side-by-side in the dictionary, Herty had avoided ever being involved in any scandals involving bribes, murder, extortion, etc. His major downfall was that he was a former Sandinista (the party that had taken control of the country following the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship) who had broken ranks with the party because he believed that it had fallen into the hands of greedy, corrupt caudillos (Latin America thug-dictators). Despite a lack of support from the party that brought this country its freedom, Herty still looked like he had a good chance to win the elections. Then he died from a heart attack.

There’s that old saying about kicking someone when they’re already down. Well, for a lot of people in Nicaragua, that’s the best way to describe how they’re feeling. Herty’s running mate is an economist who formerly worked for the Inter-American Development Bank. By all accounts, he’s a brilliant and analytical thinker who very well could have a lot of positive ideas for the country. Unfortunately, he’s lived more of his adult life in the States than he has in Nicaragua…not the best way to gain trust in a country where people are already extremely wary about foreign influence. He’s taken over the campaign in Herty’s name, and has chosen Carlos Mejia Godoy (the Nicaraguan equivalent of Francis Scott Key and Bruce Springsteen) to be the vice-presidential candidate. Carlos Mejia is a chubby, accordion-slinging, old Nicaraguan man who wrote pretty much every song about the revolution. There are few things that all Nicaraguan agree upon, but their love for Carlos Mejia just might be the only thing that keeps former president and current Sandinista party chairman Daniel Ortega from winning in November.

It’s appropriate timing to be talking about the revolution since yesterday was the 27th anniversary of the Sandinista’s victory over the National Guard forces of long-time dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. To celebrate the memory of the revolution, the Sandinistas throw a huge party every year in one of the largest plazas down near the lake. Unfortunately, the event has become less a memory of the bloody sacrifices that so many people made to free this country from the crushing grip of a military dictatorship, and more of an excuse to pat the corrupt and out-of-touch Daniel Ortega on the back.

I went to the rally with a coworker of mine named Don Felix to see what kind of a spectacle it would be. Felix is a diehard Sandinista who finds it unconscionable that someone wouldn’t love the FLSN as much as he does, and tried (unsuccessfully) to get me to wear one of his hats the entire day to prove it. There were only a few thousand people in the plaza when we got there around noon, but by the time Ortega was supposed to have arrived to speak to the crowd at 2:00pm, there had to have been more than 30,000. Where else would Felix want to be but right up in front of the stage, where we were pressed up against a fence and a row of police with nightsticks and loaded weapons? Vendors weaved in and out of the crowd selling plastic bags full of guaro, which is the Nicaraguan equivalent of moonshine. The drunker the crowd got and the more they packed themselves into an already unbelievably tight space, the less safe I began to feel. Finally, as people began to start shoving matches all around us, we decided it was time to relocate in order to avoid finding ourselves on the wrong end of one of those nightsticks.

Two things amazed me about the rally, yet disappointed me to no end at the same time. The first was the fact that so many thousands of Nicaraguans seemed to be worked into an absolute frenzy by the baseless words of a demagogue like Ortega. To make a long, extremely complex political history short, the rise of a man like Ortega into such a powerful position is the classic story of a Latin American revolutionary completely losing any of the ideals that made the revolution such a success in the first place. He’s now recognized as one of the most corrupt political figures in the country, which will hopefully be reason enough to keep him out of office for at least another five years. Unfortunately, any of the alternatives to Ortega are equally as familiar with his dirty, backroom politics, or don’t have any realistic chance of winning at all.

Yet here were thousands of people waving the traditional Sandinista red and black flags, literally climbing over themselves to get a chance to see the pompous caudillo come riding into the rally on a white Arabian horse. He spoke of zero unemployment and free university education for the poorest of campesinos. I’m not much of an economist, but I’m pretty sure zero unemployment is not only theoretically impossible, but not even a desirable thing for a country to strive towards. I won’t even get started about the impossibility of providing something as costly as free university education in a country where the public doctors are once again thinking about going on strike, and the “free” public elementary school that most of my students attend charges fees for everything from books to photocopies for making exams. Someday I’m going to write a paper on the ability of corrupt political figures to completely mislead their constituencies and still get elected to multiple terms in office. I already have two perfect case studies in mind.

The other thing that bothered me so much about the rally was the amount of Americans and Europeans that I saw throughout the crowd waving the red and black as well. First of all, I find it horribly patronizing and arrogant for foreigners to openly and actively take part in the politics of another country. As much as it would pain me to see it happen, if Nicaraguans decide to elect Daniel Ortega as their next president, so be it. Second, the fact that these foreigners found it in their place to support a certain political party over another was compounded by the fact that they chose the FSLN, most likely for its image as the party of the revolution. Here were some backpackers who had probably just arrived in Nicaragua after a few weeks at the beach in Costa Rica. They heard about a rally, and somewhere in the back of their minds they remembered that the Sandinistas were the thorn in the side of the U.S. during the 1970s and 80s. Still trying to be part of some counter-cultural cause, they decided to show up and lend their “support” for something they knew nothing about in a country they would likely never begin to understand.

Last on my list of random anecdotes from the past few weeks, I spent part of Saturday and Sunday watching the house of our American dentist who was on vacation with her family. We don’t have a TV in our house, and I’m not that big a fan of watching TV to begin with, but I found myself transfixed to the set at her house. Nightly news in Nicaragua usually consists of a few reports about the gruesome traffic accidents or violent murders that took place during the previous 24 hours, so getting to sit down to watch BBC World News for hours on end was possibly one of the best things I’ve done in a long time.

After hearing report after report about the endless bombings in Lebanon and Northern Israel, I was struck by the strangest sensation. I remembered watching similarly dismal reports on world affairs while I was sitting in my air-conditioned apartment or cozy office on Capitol Hill, and thinking how sickening it is to literally see certain parts of the world just fall apart. I could certainly never begin to compare the conditions in a place like Nicaragua to the rampant violence that people experience on a daily basis in places like Beirut or Haifa. But watching the news coming from those places felt strange while living in a country that’s not all that different in a lot of other respects.

Random sights I’ve seen in the past few weeks:

• A police officer standing outside of an elementary school with an AK-47.
• A dead dog stuffed in a sack by the side of a basketball court.
• An elderly woman knocked to the ground by men drinking cheap liquor from plastic bags.
• A man riding a white horse through a crowd of thousands of people, fervently waving red and black flags and pumping their fists in the air.
• A student of mine, who hasn’t been to class in weeks, climbing out of a sewage drainage ditch.
• My next-door neighbor talking to me for half an hour, telling me about how she wants to leave her husband because he won’t stop cheating on her.
• A pregnant woman killing a rat with her shoe that was stuck while trying to climb out of a hole in the sidewalk.
• The same pregnant woman, who had just started to go into labor, lying in a hammock while calmly going through the sheets for this week’s raffle.
• Dozens of screaming kids diving on top of each other and hurling themselves in front of a swinging bat for a chance to get a piece of candy from a piñata.
• A fellow teacher leave work crying after she had told us that her uncle had just passed away, and another friend on the verge of tears as she told me how her father, who also works in the project, wouldn’t go to the hospital even though he was probably having a minor heart attack.
• Hundreds upon hundreds of dogs being brought to the basketball court next to the school to receive vaccinations for rabies (When the same public health workers came a few months ago to vaccinate the kids for polio, measles, Hepatitis, and other serious illnesses, I had to spend hours explaining the importance to the kids, yet hardly any came).