A Story About Nicaragua, June 2007
Part 1: Introduction
It seems like everybody around the school where I work
wants to learn English, with the notable exception of my students. Most of the
kids seem to not care one way or the other about my native tongue. Not counting
a small, hard core of dedicated students in my classes, most of them seem to
goof off in class, not study at all, and attempt to get by on the English that
they’ve learned in the first few years of elementary school. Aside from my
students, though, I’m surrounded by people who want to learn English: the
parents of my students, the administrative personnel at the school, the other
teachers, the cleaning staff, and even random strangers I meet on the street or
on the bus. One of those people is Samuel, the security guard at the school.
Samuel is contracted by a private firm to
carry out the security detail at the school, which includes a 12-hour-at-a-time
shift, since the school is guarded 24 hours a day. He presents a welcoming but
reliable face for the school. He wears a purple uniform with a prominent 9-mm
pistol on his belt, and when he smiles, which is often, one glimpses a mouthful
of gold-capped teeth, including an incisor with a little gold star in the
center. He’s good-hearted, friendly, hard-working, and, as it turns out,
Nicaraguan.
I found out about his citizenship as I was
giving him an English lesson in my break one day. He had said that since he was
working at a bilingual school, he wanted to be able to say at least a few
phrases in English to the parents or visitors that came to the school speaking
little or no Spanish. He asked me if I could give him a private class outside of
school, and offered to pay me something. I told him I had little time outside of
school, but if he’d take a quick lesson here or there when I was drinking my
coffee, I’d be happy to accommodate him, and he wouldn’t have to pay, either.
Samuel is not the fastest learner when it
comes to English, but then again, he’s 37 years old, which is a relatively late
age to begin learning a first foreign language. But what he lacks in language
skills he makes up for in commitment and motivation. I often scold my 7th,
8th, and 10th graders, chiding them because their parents
pay tons of money for them to get a good education and learn English, despite
the fact that they usually don’t even put forth the smallest effort. Samuel, on
the other hand, has independently dedicated himself to improving his life in any
way he can, including learning English, which can open up many possibilities in
this country. I tell my students that Samuel is my best student because even
though he’s not perfect, at least he tries. My students glance up, and then go
back to day-dreaming about their cell phones I confiscated earlier in the class.
In any case, when Samuel and I were covering
the basics of English, we came upon the question, “Where are you from?” He
answered, “I am from Nicaragua.” For me this was surprising, although that is
probably just because I’m not from around here. Every person I’ve mentioned this
to since then has said, “Of course he’s from Nicaragua. Just look at his gold
teeth and listen to the way he talks.” Guess I missed that. Then again, let’s
see these guys attempt to distinguish a Texan from a run-of-the-mill hick, and
see if they can nail it. Still, I’m getting off track.
I had last entered the country on April 8th,
which meant that my visa would expire on June 7th or 8th,
depending on whether one considered the 90 day visa as exactly 90 days, or a
cool three months. Either way, June 7th was the day of my wedding,
and I didn’t want to get deported for my honeymoon. Although I hold the Costa
Rican migratory authorities in the absolute lowest esteem and continually doubt
their abilities to operate efficiently, I still didn’t want to risk any sort of
fines or illegal status while I’m still waiting for the approval of my permanent
residency, so I decided that I should leave for the 72 hours, just to be safe.
Plus, I needed a little vacation.
I came up to Samuel about a week before I was
planning on leaving to go somewhere, and I casually asked him, “Hey, you’re from
Nicaragua, right? When’s the last time you went back there?” Well, it
turned out that he’d not been back to see his family for about two years,
partially because his passport had expired, and it would have been a hassle to
go to the Nicaraguan consulate in San José to renew it. Plus, he informed me
that his family was pretty poor, and since his family came from the part of
Nicaragua in the far north near the Honduran border, it had just been too far
and too expensive to make it back there frequently.
I proposed a deal. I told him that one way or
the other, I’d have to leave Costa Rica for 72 hours, and the best option up
till that point would have been to just cross to a Pacific resort on the other
side of the border. However, if I could stay at the small house he told me he
still had in Nicaragua, I’d pay for his passport renewal and his bus tickets,
which together only came to about 50 dollars. I told him that I’d probably
pay at least that much for a hotel for three nights, but that I’d much rather
have an authentic experience with a person from the country, instead of just
sitting alone on a beach and not actually seeing anything of the country I was
supposedly in. He agreed, and we decided to set off on the following Saturday
and return the Tuesday after that. It’d turn out to be a whirlwind tour far more
“authentic” then I could have ever imagined.
Part 2: Getting
There
You have to get up pretty early in the morning
to get to Nicaragua. According to the bus plan we’d worked out, we’d need to
take three buses to get to Pantasma de Maria, the village where Samuel was from.
As it turned out, we actually needed four, but more about that in a moment. In
any case, the first bus left at a definite time: at 3:30 in the morning, a Tica
Bus would stop on the freeway outside San Ramón and pick us up. It did. Besides
the fact that they kind of screwed up our reservations, and besides the fact
that it sucks to get on a bus at 3:30 in the morning, things went fine.
It took a few hours to get to the border,
where we got out of the bus in order to go through exit and entry procedures in
the immigration and customs departments of each country. It was around this
point that it became clear to me that I was possibly sitting next to The Biggest
Bitch in The World. I had greeted her with a friendly “Buenos Días” when I got
on, but after getting no reply, I just went to sleep. Fuck you, too, then. All
the way from San Ramón to the Nicaraguan border, this same fat lady next to me
was mumbling to herself and shaking her head. I just thought she was
crazy, but it turns out she was much worse. From a glance at her passport, and
from her insistence on speaking in snippy English at the conductor to berate
him, I knew that she was American, and that her name was Deborah. But for the
sake of a smooth story and to not name names, let’s just call her Hoebag.
Anyhow, to leave Costa Rica, we had to
get out of the bus and wait in a line for Immigration to stamp our passports,
and Hoebag, who was sitting near the window, tenderly suggested that I move it
so we could get the hell out of the bus. I moved it indeed, cutting in front of
a few people in the bus aisle, and we waited outside in the same line that
everyone else from the bus had to wait in. Then, when getting out of the bus
again to enter
Nicaragua (borders here are complicated), we needed to take down our luggage to
have customs review it. I pulled my backpack down from the overhead rack and
Hoebag, who was chomping at the bit to get out, apparently was glanced by my
backpack. She mumbled something. I said, “Pardon me?” To which she gently
replied, “I said you just hit me in the fucking eye with your stupid backpack.”
I told her I was sorry, and that I hadn’t intended to do so, to which she
replied, “How fucking long are you going to wait to get off this bus…can we
leave?”
I sort of doubted Hoebag’s injured eye story,
considering that she was wearing large eyeglasses and a hat, but if I did “hit”
her in the eye, perhaps it was just the universe working itself out. I
don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a world where bitches don’t
get hit in the eye with luggage. Besides, a few minutes later I wished that my
backpack had somehow popped her eye right out of the socket when Hoebag put on
another presentation.
Everyone from the bus was waiting with their
bags in a line, and an old lady in her 70s or 80s hobbled up with her bags and a
confused expression on her face. She seemed to be trying to figure out if she
was supposed to wait in this line, when Hoebag offered the lady the following
piece of advice: “No no, you have to wait in the back of the line just like all
the rest of us!” She began yelling at the poor lady. “You get your ass back
there; there’s no way you’re getting in front of me!” The poor lady, who
obviously didn’t understand English, made a soothing gesture with her hand, the
universal signal for “take it easy,” which pissed off Hoebag even more. Hoebag
once again ordered the lady to the back of the line. After we got our bags
checked, we all waited outside the bus for about 30 minutes, including Hoebag,
the little old lady, and myself.
When we got back on, some English girls had
changed buses, and Samuel and I took their seats immediately. Hoebag presumably
continued on to her final destination of El Salvador where, with any justice,
she insulted another old lady and was subsequently maimed by a crazed pit-bull
belonging to a member of the Mara Salvatrucha. We can always dream, can’t we?
So, the remainder of the first bus went pretty
smoothly, but by the time we got to Managua, my stomach was feeling a bit off,
possibly from the shitty food they’d given us on the bus. The food made me feel
like I was in one of those 60s or 70s novels about a near future where the world
is controlled by totalitarian governments and the narrator describes eating food
replacement items with depressing names like “syntho” and “nutrical,” or where
all sustenance for a day is gained from a single pill. Whether the bus took us
into the future as envisioned by a campy dystopian novel or not, the sandwiches
were rubbery and the coffee tasted slightly ashy.
In any case, to make things worse, by the time
we got out of the bus, a wave of heat enveloped us. I headed directly to the
bathroom, and while Samuel waited outside with my bags, I had a nice series of
dry heaves and then desperately evacuated my bowels over the seat-less toilet.
Neither of which was particularly fun but, hey, vacations are about trying new,
exciting things, right?
I came out of the bathroom and sat on the
floor. Samuel had already enthusiastically procured a taxi to take us to the
next bus station, conveniently located on the other side of the sprawling
Nicaraguan capital. I objected, saying I thought it might be best to just sit on
the floor for a while and then die, but he and the taxi driver assured me that
after getting out into the fresh air of the taxi, I’d feel better. So with
my head sticking out of the open window of the taxi to better inhale the
pestilent, polluted air of Managua, we hauled ass across town.
We had missed the bus to Jinotega by a fair
shot, but apparently there was a bus to Matagalpa, from which we’d be able to
catch the last bus to Jinotega. Possibly. At the bus station, the taxi let us
out, and I walked over to a stand of bushes and threw up. A minute or two later,
as I was sitting on the ground with my eyes closed and trembling quietly, a man
started shouting at me. I replied with a meek, “Como?” He asked if I was
going to Matagalpa. I informed him that I was vomiting. He said well, if I was
going to Matagalpa, I’d better throw up on the bus, because the bus had to
leave. He said I could open up a window, and thereby be on the bus and vomit,
simultaneously.
How can you argue with reasoning like that?
For the next three hours or days, I sat in a seat in the back of the bus with my
eyes closed, as I for some reason clutched a long-sleeved T-shirt in my hands. I
think I believed it was the only thing preventing me from falling out of the
window, somehow. I was buffeted by a constant flurry of hot dusty air, which
left what passes for my hair these days blown back and caked stiff, and left my
left ear black with soot and dust. A few hours into that ride, I was quietly
praying that I’d get randomly shot by some Bedouin sheepherder like Cate
Blanchett in “Babel,” just so I could be taken to a forgotten village to be
treated for a gunshot wound by a local veterinarian…basically, anything to make
the bus rides stop.
Occasionally, I did in fact stick my head out
the window to throw up a bit, and remarked to myself at the abstract beauty of
my foamy vomit flying back behind me like sticky, white streamers, making the
colorfully-decorated bus look like a float in the world’s worst Homecoming
parade. It was kind of fun, all things considered.
When we got to Matagalpa, we quickly changed
buses for Jinotega. I actually have no recollection of this part of the journey,
but I believe that on that bus, I sat next to Samuel while my head bobbed back
and forth like a jack-in-the-box. I offered him my peanut butter and jelly
sandwich I’d brought, and I began to feel better. My only clear recollection is
actually not really clear, mainly because it was based on such a strange event.
I remember waking up at one point when I realized that the bus had been stopped
for two or three minutes. I asked Samuel what was going on, and it turns out
that the bus had stopped because in the yard of a house we were passing by, two
boys were out front playing with machetes, trying to attack each other. Our bus
driver had pulled over to yell at them. I guess that’s just one of the hazards
that comes with living, loving, and leaving in machete country.
In Jinotega, we’d missed the last bus to Pantasma.
According to a group of old drunks on a bench, though, we’d only missed it by
five minutes, so we commissioned a taxi to take us on a mad dash to catch up
with the bus, already on its way to Pantasma. Somehow we made it (well, I
say “somehow” as if I didn’t actually understand how we caught up with the bus;
we caught it because the driver hauled major balls on some seriously potholed
country roads using techniques that would make Bo and Luke Duke proud).
The bus from Jinotega to Pantasma was actually
sort of enjoyable. Early in the trip, I gave up my seat so a girl and her mother
could sit down, and I walked to the back of the converted school bus, where the
last row or two of seats had been removed for cargo or standing passengers. I
was taller than most people and I had to crane my neck just to stand there, and
my head still often hit the ceiling when the bus went over holes in the road.
Still, the reason it was kind of fun was that it turned out the back of the bus
is where all the manual laborers sit around on bags of corn and drink beer.
After I was standing there for only about one minute, they offered me a beer,
which I politely declined, saying with regret in my voice that I’d thrown up on
the last few buses, and that it might be better to not repeat that. After about
the fourth time they insisted, I finally accepted a beer. It was shitty and
probably one of the worst beers there is out there (Let’s put it this way:
there’s a reason Nicaragua isn’t really known for its beers), but it was cold
and it actually hit the spot. It was the first thing that had helped me that
day, and I was grateful for that.
Before they got off the bus, the workers
offered me two or three more beers, which I subtly passed on to one of their
cohorts, a young 22-year-old man named Jenny (really). He was a very nice guy
who asked me questions about the U.S. He was trying to speak English with
me, and he wasn’t too bad at it, but as he kept drinking the beers that I passed
on to him, his skills declined sharply. Still, he was very friendly, and it
seemed to not just be the result of the alcohol. At one point, he asked me if we
were friends, and I said, “Sure.” He asked me if I remembered his name, and when
I told him it immediately, he was impressed and said I had a good memory. I
didn’t tell him, though, that he had the same name as my childhood dog. Nor that
it was a girl’s name.
After however many hours of traveling, we
finally pulled to a stop on the side of a dark road, and Samuel told me it was
time to get off the bus. The village of Pantasma was dark, because evidently the
Powers That Be shut off the electricity most nights sometime around 6 pm. The
darkness lasted for anywhere between 1 and 3 hours the nights that I was there,
but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to how it worked. In any case, one of
Samuel’s nieces was waiting in the road where the bus had stopped, and she
walked with us to the house that Samuel owned.
Samuel had told me that his house was humble,
but I hadn’t realized how humble it actually was. It was really a one room wood
house, but since it was on a slope, the area beneath the room had also been
turned into a sort of second room. Off to the side of the upstairs room was a
kitchen with a dirt floor and a wood-burning stove, the smoke from which exited
through cracks in the wall and an area between the wall and the ceiling. In the
yard behind the house were three outhouses and a bucket shower, which a few of
the neighbors seemed to share.
As for the cast of characters, I immediately
got a lot of names thrown at me, and I was never entirely clear on the names or
the relations of the people that I met. I was also unsure whether it was
appropriate to ask or not. Samuel usually just introduced people as “my (type
of relation),” for example, “my niece.” To make things more complicated, he
tended to refer to most males as “Chico,” which didn’t help me much (although I
do think that one of the guys there actually was named “Chico”).
When we got to the house, though, I was pretty
exhausted. Samuel and I ate a meal of rice and beans alone in the kitchen, and
we chatted a bit. I couldn’t hardly eat anything, since my appetite was still
strange, but he assured me if I didn’t finish the food, someone else would.
After that, he sat in a chair and chatted with
some members of his family, and when he saw me nodding off in my chair, he
helped me to fix up our sleeping area. We slept on the wood floor, which we
covered with a piece of cardboard and a sheet. Fortunately, I’d brought a
blanket. I rolled up an extra pair of pants inside my lifesaving T-shirt, and as
Samuel chatted away I fell into sleep like a rock.
Part of Samuel's family.
Samuel with his brother-in-law and brother.
Part 3: Being
There
I stayed for Nicaragua for only two entire
days, but those days still left quite an impression. The first day I basically
sat around, and the second day, I went into the village with Samuel and some of
his family.
Most Mondays, when I return to work, I ask my
students what they did over the weekend. I am always surprised by how many of
them say “Nothing” (actually, about half of them say “Anything,” since they
still need to sort out that language problem). I usually say something like,
“What do you mean, you did nothing? You have 48 hours to account for. Did you
just wake up and sit in a chair and look at the wall all day?” It turns out,
that’s almost possible.
The first day I woke up and proceeded to move
from chair to chair, and although I didn’t look at a wall, I did watch the
street for hours on end which, as it turns out, isn’t that much more
interesting. If anyone were to have asked me, “Hey, what’s going on in
Nicaragua?” I feel that I could confidently answer, based on my field research,
“Not that much.”
For most of the day, Samuel was busy
distributing the big-ass bag of clothes he had brought, and was busy telling his
personal testimony. I hadn’t really realized before, but he was an evangelical
Christian, and he was happy to talk about his experiences over and over and to
praise the Lord. All of which is fine, but since it’s not for me, I was left to
contend with a rather boring day. At least I got to know the various members of
Samuel’s family and friend circles a bit more.
One of these people is an old man
named—seriously--Primitivo. And yes, it means the same thing in Spanish. I had
noticed an old guy with a cane the night before, and I was able to gather that
he was Samuel’s father-in-law. The next morning, then, I realized that he was in
the same room as us, sleeping in a bed. The term “bed” conveys a bit more of a
sense of comfort than actually existed, though. He was actually sleeping on a
wooded bed frame with pieces of hard leather stretched in a cross-hatching
pattern throughout the empty space in between. The leather straps were then
covered with a piece of cardboard and a sheet. No wonder he began his days by
spitting up gobs of phlegm.
I also realized another reason for the phlegm
when I noticed a handwritten chalk note above one of the windows.
It read: “Primitivo Gamez se enfermó el 26 de NOV del 2006.” This meant
that he had gotten sick the previous November and that someone had decided to
record it on the wall, for whatever reason. In any case, he didn’t seem to be
terribly sick, but at the same time, one could easily tell that he wasn’t having
an easy go of it. He generally hobbled around very slowly with his cane, and
when he sat down, it was very hard to hear his voice, let alone understand it.
His voice tended to be very quiet and almost squeaky, and when he talked about
his family—especially his daughter, Samuel’s wife—the voice would quickly crack
and he’d begin to cry. This would literally happen dozens of times a day so for
me, a relative newcomer to the Spanish language, he was a bit of an
unconventional conversation partner.
Nevertheless, we sat on the porch in plastic
chairs for hours and hours. Occasionally, he’d say something and I’d try to
understand it, but if he asked me a question and I tried to reply, we’d have a
completely different problem on our hands, since he couldn’t hear well, either.
We eventually fell into a good sort of conversational groove wherein both of us
were content. That groove consisted in dozing off most of the time, and we’d
occasionally jerk ourselves awake to mumble something like “hot day” or to kick
at emaciated dogs or stray pigs trying to sneak into the house to steal food.
Occasionally, Primitivo would wake up and work at his throat a bit, hocking a
giant loogie or a snot rocket onto the porch in front of us. I was beginning to
understand the logic behind dirt floors.
Through the day, various people walked by the
house, and even though I was wearing a hat, many of them stopped to look at me,
and I could tell that an American was a bit of a novelty around those parts. A
few guests came to the house, too, since they’d heard that Samuel had come home.
I also realized that whoever made up the stereotype about British people having
bad teeth had obviously never been to Nicaragua. And I’m not only talking about
the gold-capped teeth. I saw many a mouth with nary a tooth. Although I saw a
fair number of policemen, I never saw an inspector from the Colgate Cavity
Patrol.
Another character who figured prominently into
the day was named Charita, and she was an older lady who lived in the area below
Samuel’s house. I believe that she was related to him in some way, but I’m just
not sure how. She was a little woman packed with energy and, possibly, neuroses.
People said that she had epilepsy, but when she had one of her supposed
epileptic attacks, she was really just walking around the kitchen rambling at
people. I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think that’s epilepsy. Still, I sort of
dig the tendency towards self-diagnosis; it’s cheaper than paying for a doctor
and more entertaining.
After God-knows-how-many hours of porch
sitting, Samuel finally returned from wherever and said that he’d like to cut
down an avocado tree that was beginning to destroy a cement retaining wall below
the kitchen. He was afraid, with good reason, that the kitchen might slide down
the hill by the next time he returned. I helped him with that for a while, and
was pleased to discover that the avocado tree had at least never bore fruit. We
then “constructed” a system to hold up the dishwashing area of his kitchen,
which was really just a piece of wood jutting out from the back wall of the
kitchen. In any case, though, it was beginning to rot and fall down, so we put
the trunk of the avocado tree underneath it to sustain it. Brothers gonna work
it out.
The whole time we were working in the back, we
were serenaded by a neighboring parrot which would periodically screech,
“Mamaaaaaa!” Every now and then, when getting no response from its mama, it’s
change to, “Papaaaaaaa!” It was kind of unnerving, like something out of a
suspense/horror movie, right before Samuel turns on me with the axe.
As the daylight began to wane, I noticed I
smelled like ass, and I asked about the shower. It turns out that a bucket
shower is about as straightforward as its name implies. I stood in a wood
structure with black plastic on the inside, with the top open to the sky (as
well as to the back windows of the houses above). I’m a pretty tall guy and I
was sticking out of the top of the shower a bit, but I didn’t really worry about
peeping Toms from above, since I got the sense that that wasn’t something to be
concerned about. Sort of an unspoken “Don’t show me yours and I won’t show you
mine” type of policy. Plus, it was getting darker by the minute, and the cold
bucket water I’d retrieved from a neighboring well also motivated me towards
opting for a quick shower.
Still, while I was showering I paused for a
moment to look up as the first stars of the night began to emerge from the
darkness. It was really pretty beautiful, and for a moment I felt as though I’d
gone a couple hundred years into the past when a bucket shower or a river was
probably all most people had to get clean, if they were lucky. In a way, it was
a nice feeling, where you begin to think, “Well, if there’s a nuclear war and
indoor plumbing is wiped out, at least I could get by doing this!” But at the
same time, it was comforting that I didn’t have to.
The shower; view from above.
Part 4: Field
Trip!
The second full day I spent in Nicaragua gave
us a bit of a chance to walk around Samuel’s hometown, Pantasma de Maria. Since
our time in the country was limited, we tried to pack a lot of socializing and
getting-things-done time into one day. I began my day with an attempted visit to
one of the outhouses in the backyard. I’d not “gone” since I arrived in the
country, partly because of my sickness while traveling there, and partly because
of a hesitance to sit on or even squat above a concrete shitter filled with
cockroaches, if at all possible. But this morning, the call of nature was
turning into a scream. I pleaded with my body to just hold out one more
day, and maybe we could enjoy the facilities at the Managua bus station on the
return trip, but my guts were following their own agenda. So, I gave up, grabbed
a roll of toilet paper, and headed out the back. I made all sorts of faces as I
opened the door to the latrine. I laid a few scraps of TP on the concrete rim of
the hole, to enjoy at least the partial illusion of sanity and/or comfort. I
pulled down my pants and began to squat down, but just as my left ass cheek
partially glanced the rim of the john, my ass sent a high speed message to my
brain, something to the effect of, “Oh my God, you were right!” My system shut
down immediately, like a NASA mission control center struck by lightning. And it
stayed shut down until I arrived at my toilet back here in Costa Rica. At that
point, the food or water in Nicaragua began to have a profound effect on my
constitution, and I spent a fair amount of my free time for the next two weeks
sitting on that same toilet, contending with what I began to call “Nicarrhea.”
But enough talking shit.
Midmorning, Samuel and I left the house with
his sister-in-law and her son in tow. To get to the center of town we took a bus
which, although it was only a Toyota 12-passenger van, at least it got us there
quicker. On the way, I was surprised at how poor things really were. I mean, I’d
seen Indian reservations in the US and driven by the slums of Buenos Aires and
Mexico City, but while those places all exhibited poverty, they still had at
least a certain level of material comforts. Many houses in those places had
glass windows and even a TV, but that was not the case in Nicaragua. I read in
my travel book that after Haiti, it’s the poorest nation in the western
hemisphere. Which makes me curious to check out Haiti sometime, actually.
We first tried to track down the Western Union
office, which had apparently moved. Samuel had tried to send 40 dollars a few
months before, and something had gone wrong. We finally found the office in a
building guarded by a fat man with a pistol and shotgun. At one point another
man walked by the fat guard, grabbed the pistol from his belt, said something
quickly, and went into the office. I didn’t really understand what was going on,
but I guess perhaps the fat guard had been holding on to his friend’s pistol
while the friend did a quick errand somewhere else. I hope. Otherwise, the
casualness with which some guy walked into a money transfer office with a gun is
somewhat alarming.
We also went to the city hall to do something
involving Samuel’s birth certificate. While I was waiting, I read a poster on
the wall that gave information about Nicaragua in general, and it listed some
facts and statistics. The statistic that caught my attention the most was one
that said that 78% of the young people in Nicaragua would leave the country, if
they had the chance. There were no qualifying statements like “If working
conditions were better elsewhere,” but I still have a feeling that these young
Nicaraguans weren’t expressing a desire to leave the country to go on a classic
4-week European Riviera summer tour. The results for the same question were
lower for older people and city residents, but still, that number is pretty
alarming. I tried to imagine what America would look like if things were bad
enough to make 78% of its youth want to jump ship. It was hard to do, and mainly
I just came up with a vision of lots of cars burning in the streets while chants
of “Hail President Rosie O’Donnell!” rang out. Still, it’s an obvious statement
that the children are the hope and future of any country or group of people, but
if your children are looking to bail, it doesn’t spell out a very pretty future
for your country.
Speaking of the youth of a nation, one of
their representatives was outside of the town hall, drunk as a skunk. A
shitfaced skunk so drunk it can’t even hold its bottle of booze. When he saw me,
he tried talking to me, but all I could make out in the slur of words was, “Gracias
al Dios, es un gringo!” He tried grabbing my arm, but missed by a fair shot
and almost fell down. Right then, Samuel came back out and led me away, and we
continued on our magical mystery tour.
The tour included a few more Poverty
Highlights, the most interesting one having to do with Toddler Fashion. We saw a
fair number of naked kids standing and/or running outside, but they weren’t the
carefree, cradle-to-the-grave social security, Scandinavian kind of naked kids.
These were abject poverty, do-you-have-any-food-or-pants-for-me?, Third World
kind of naked kids. One fashion combo that was featured prominently was the
young child wearing a shirt, but nothing else, leaving his or her butt and junk
to stick out. I’ve never really understood this combo, because it seems to me
that once you’re sporting a truly unfinished basement, there’s really no point
in wearing a small T-shirt to cover what’s left above your “shame.”
As we walked through town, though, I noticed
that the drunk at the city hall had not been an isolated event…well, he was
actually the only drunk we came across, but what he said wasn’t isolated. Many
people seemed to be interested in a guy with blue eyes and blond hair, even if
the hair was covered in a hat. A few times, random schoolgirls said hi to me and
smiled, and one random guy in his early 20s tried to shake my hand. After my
encounter with the drunk guy, I thought this guy was joking, but Samuel said I
should go shake his hand. The guy said that they appreciated Americans a lot,
and he was glad to see me there. Even stranger, he seemed to mean it.
I tried to process this information. As a bit
of a traveler, I’ve seen a fair part of the world, although it was mostly the
European part. In the last few years, especially, Americans haven’t always been
welcomed with open arms, even though their tourist dollars might have been. In
Germany, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Slovenia, Italy, the United States itself,
and various other countries, I’ve seen some variety of anti-American or
anti-Bush sentiments, especially in the form of graffiti or mumbled comments.
But here I was in Nicaragua, just a few short months after the Sandinista Daniel
Ortega had re-won the presidency, in a part of the country that was known for
continued small-scale Sandinista activity, and the people loved Americans? What
the hell was going on?
I talked to Samuel about this, and he said
that the goodwill was in fact genuine, and that most people are able to separate
a person or group of people from country’s political outlook. It made me feel
pretty good to know that. I also found out a lot more about Samuel and his
original reasons for leaving home nearly 20 years ago. The main reason had to do
with the war. It had affected his village a lot, and there were multiple threats
against his family, who had supported the Sandinistas. He had eventually left
after his family members’ houses had been shot up various times and people from
the village had been hanged. I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to
talk to him about his past, and I have a feeling that I just scratched the
surface of the Samuel Experience.
We paid visits to a few of Samuel’s friends, and I took
pictures of some of them. I thought it was interesting that before taking
pictures, most people asked me for a few minutes to change into their nicest
clothes, since they wanted to look good for their photos. Also, that’s perhaps a
reason that these pictures don’t really show people in old crappy clothes, or
men wearing T-shirts that say stuff like “1998 Southern Minnesota Girls High
School Volleyball Tournament.” Most of all, though, I came to appreciate my
digital camera’s capability to display the pictures I’d just taken, which people
loved. (Also, thanks to Bobby for the extra battery you gave me—it saved my
ass!)
We went eventually made our way back to the
house to visit more with Samuel’s neighbors. Charita approached me on the porch
and asked if I knew how to write. I told her yes, so she asked if she could
dictate me a letter, since she couldn’t write very well these days. I thought
that was kind of ironic, considering that due to Sandinista educational
movements decades ago, most everyone else there probably was able to
write, but she still chose the Foreign Guy who couldn’t hardly understand a word
she said. It was a long process, and I’m sure the letter she dictated to me in
Spanish was full of mistakes.
A bit later in the afternoon, four of us guys
went to a cemetery to clear off Samuel’s mother-in-law’s grave, which had become
covered with weeds. It’s always interesting to see how people bury their dead in
other countries, and here was no exception. The cemetery was actually more of a
field with an occasional tomb, and various chickens and other animals were
walking all around. It was near a series of beautiful hills on one side and a
misty valley on the other side, and all in all, it didn’t seem like such a bad
place to spend the rest of your death.
As we were working on clearing the area, one
of the guys—whom Samuel called “Chico,” although that might not be his real
name—cut his leg with a machete. It wasn’t too big of a gash, but it was still
bleeding a fair amount. He was laughing a bit, so I didn’t feel too bad laughing
as they collectively decided that the best provisional treatments would be to
put a leaf on it, and to secure the leaf with a handkerchief. Just another
hazard of living the Way of the Machete. Plus, if the pros even do it, now I
won’t feel so bad when the time comes that I cut myself for the first time with
my own machete.
That night, we visited Samuel’s brother’s house, and had a
candlelight dinner outside. Not for romance, mind you, but rather because there
was no room inside, and the house doesn’t have electricity. Near the end, just
when I thought we were about to make tracks back to Samuel’s house, he started
to ask his brother for forgiveness for fighting when they were kids. Then their
mom asked for forgiveness, too. What proceeded took about an hour and a half,
and was uncomfortable, to say the least. They were holding each other in a group
hug, crying and talking and praying, and at one point, Samuel’s brother’s wife
joined in. That left me on the periphery, along with two of the daughters of the
house, who I had never actually been introduced to. I could sense that they also
felt awkward about the situation, but fortunately, there was no light, so we
didn’t feel compelled to make awkward conversation. While everyone else was
weeping and praying, we stood quietly to the side of the circle, rocking back
and forth from our heels to our toes to avoid passing out.
Probably the most awkward part of the prayer circle was
when Samuel referred to me a few times as an “angel of God,” since I’d paid for
his bus ticket. I’m not a really vocal person about my personal beliefs, so for
me, it was kind of disturbing to be called an angel. “Let’s not exaggerate,” I
told him. I think if I actually were an angel, I should have the power to fly,
or at least be able to have flowing Angel Hair. And I probably wouldn’t cuss as
much. So I don’t quite buy the claim that I’m an angel. But I guess it does give
me something else to add to my résumé. After our Southern Gospel Revival
Meeting, we headed back home, and that concluded today’s episode of The
Adventures of Samuel Chavarria and Angel Boy.
Part 5: Coming
Back
Compared to the vomit-filled mayhem that was
the trip north, our return to Costa Rica was relatively calm. When Samuel and I
were leaving, we gave the equivalent of 5 or 10 dollars to Charita to buy some
food, and as we walked to where the bus would stop to pick us up, her rambling,
quasi-incoherent proclamations that God bless us, God bless us indeed, bade us
farewell.
We had another pre-four-o’clock bus departure,
but the trips this time were all pretty smooth and somewhat enjoyable. We didn’t
miss any buses, and nothing terribly interesting happened. Managua was still
polluted, but it was a nicer day, and it was nice to see more of the city and
listen as Samuel talked to the taxi driver about the state of the nation of
Nicaragua.
The border crossings were annoying again, but
they didn’t last as long, since it was later in the day, and by now it was old
hat for us. Coming back into Costa Rica, though, one noticed a marked contrast
in the quality of life and housing, and it made me grateful to live here. Costa
Rica is really a great country, and I especially liked the slightly rugged
northwest province of Guanacaste, which looks like what I imagine Florida might
have looked like some 50 years ago: hot, flat, scenic, and a bit fucked up. As
the sun set out the bus window to my right and “Rocky Balboa” played above me, I
mentally tried to digest my trip.
In all the storytelling and joking in these
blogs, I realized that I failed to mention one important thing: Nicaragua is a
beautiful country. Sure, it’s got its problems--there are unregulated areas of
environmental damage, and many people simply throw garbage out the bus window,
for example—but it’s also the biggest and least densely populated country in
Central America. That means that there are huge natural areas with beautiful
views, all the way from Lake Nicaragua in the south to the foggy highlands in
the north. I saw many amazing landscapes and many beautiful, friendly people. It
was the people that worried me a bit, though.
As I said, I realize now how lucky I have
things, especially when I compare Nicaragua to the United States. I had the
luxury of being able to leave the country after just a few days, and that’s a
luxury that most of the people living in poverty don’t have. I am trying to
think of ways that I can personally help out, since I noticed how much impact
even a small action can make. I thought of how the amount of cash that would buy
me one meal will buy Charita food for a week. I thought of how most of the males
in Samuel’s family expressed to him and me the interest of coming to Costa Rica
to work.
In the time I’ve come back to Costa Rica, I’ve
talked with Samuel a few times, and as thanks to him for his hospitality, I
decided to offer about two hundred dollars to him, to spend in the manner he
deems most appropriate to help his family. I told him he could pay it back or
not. My two stipulations were first, that he spend it to help his family and
second, that if one of the men in his family want to come here, that his family
discusses it before coming. I’d rather not be the reason for a family being
broken up, even if it is in search of a better future. So, we’ll see what
happens.
I’m not trying to make myself into some sort
of Ryangelina Jolie, but I’m trying to help. Maybe these blog postings—if you’ve
even managed to read this far—can also help raise a bit of awareness. The main
thing I didn’t want to do was to make an attempt at writing a humorous email and
trivialize what I saw. I also didn’t want to send a message like, “Well, these
people are just great; they may be poor, but at least they’re happy and they
have their music,” or some crap like that. They’re poor and they’re friendly,
but still, they’re damn poor, and there must be something we can do to help. I
know that Americans have big hearts, and that we give more to charities than any
other country, and that’s great. But maybe this email will motivate you to think
a bit more about other possibilities, or just to think more about the world
around you. We’ve got it pretty good, and maybe we could help some others out,
too.
Thanks for reading.
