Monday, May 29, 2006
Finally!
I am way behind on blogs, so I think the next few entries or so will be sort of stream of consciouness entries about cool interesting things, rather than a running commentary on everything that I am doing.
In a nutshell: Car is mostly working fine now. Work is good, but the one bird we want to put transmitters on wont refuses to be captured. Bugger. Kim the assistant left. Julia the new assistant arrives Jun 4th. I won a Fulbright and am staying until July 2007. I leave for Emilys wedding soon, and am stressed, and have not planned for this at all. I do not have too many bites and did not get too fat, so I should look decent for teh wedding. My family is great, and we have fully loaded electicity in our house, sufficient so that we can watch DVDs on my computer, which makes up for the television they bought now working. Fine with me because Telenovelas get on my nerves. I am sort of dating some one, nothing serious, but he is nice and cute. That is all I am going to say for now, so dont even ask:) I went on a last minute trip to Honduras with my good friend Sadie, who is fabulous and MORE. We are noe Open Water Scuba Divers. I am going to go for my Advanced Open Water in the Corn Islandsa in Nicaragua in October...anybody want to come?
Helpful ID list
Isabel: nica mom. President of women´´s cooperative, memer junat directiva, UCA Miraflor
Don Fran, Don Chico: nica dad
Their kids, in age order: Henry (wife Xania), Francisco/Fran/Pancho (wife Lesbia, son Brian works for me), Otoniel (plays in a band with Rogelio), Ana (boyfirend is Cristian), Eliza, Araceli, Kevin.
Dane: younger sister Isabel. Mother of Gerald y Linda Antonia. Lives in Esteli house with Ana, Eliza, Henry, Exania, y Otoniel
Nelson: works for me, wife Noemi, kids, Nelsito, LisKaren, Noelia
Roberto/Beto: works for me, nephwe of Isabel
Santos Ubeda: works for me, brother of Lesbia
Agusto: works for me, brother of Ulda
Ulda: married to Santos Viallreyna (different Santos), Mother to Yasser and Saydi.
Santos Viallreyna: Son of Don Julio, who is brother in law to Don Fran. So Pancho and Santos are cousins.
Marlon: secretary of farmers cooperative in Sontule, married to Mayra, father of Marlon Mauricio. good friend
Mayra: Good friend, sister to Elda, who is married to Darwing. Mother Marlon Mauricio
Danelia: wife of Ivan, mother of Ivancito. Sister to Nelson. Good friend.
Rogelio: worked for me last year on insect ID. Sontules own Don Juan.
Esther: mother to Minor, Valeska, and new baby Maria Jose.
Juanita: married to Jorge, who made my furniture, and mother to Bianca.
Martina: English teacher in Puertas Azules y La Pita. Previously in Cebollal. Very cool
Ethan: current English teacher in Sontule. Also works on organic garden and ecostove projects. Mellow and cool
Sadie: past English teacher/volunteer in Coyolitos and Sontule. Awesome lady:)
Junaita/Jane: previous english teacher and volunteer in Sontule. Now pregnant in England with Leos baby. Leo is a nephew to Don Fran.
Jeni: French Canadian volunteer who was here March-May
Sandra: Fench agronomy student working in Esteli and Miraflor. Shares Esteli apartment with Martina. Very sweet and funny.
Ok, I think thats it for now, I will add on as I remember too.....
Darwing: son of Doña Candida (runs pulperia), and worked for me last year.
and now, the vingettes:
THOUGHTS…….
There are certain images that come to mind when I think of Nicaragua, although these images are often true for other parts of Latin America as well:
Little girls dressed up in party dresses, sometimes new looking, and sometimes a bit raggedy around the edges, as if they have been washed many, many times. These dresses are always too big, and hang off of their small frames in a haphazard sort of way, with the puffy sleeves sliding off, or the neckline hanging down too low. They are always tied with a sash that seems to be the most important structural item of the dress. One gets the impression that were the sash to come undone, the dress would fall off. The thing that amazes me is that these little girls can be seen wearing these dresses for any number of occasions, from visits to family members, to trips into town, to selling mangoes, sweet corn, or sweets on the street. These are the same girls who ften stare at me on buses, and meet all of my smiles or attempts at chatting with a blank, open mouth stare. I have decided that either I am the most beautiful woman they have ever seen, that I am one of the few white people they have ever seen, or they are thinking, bedecked in all their party-perfect glory, “god, what IS she wearing….”
Completely exhausted men at the end of the day, stretched out across bus seats, shirts removed and pulled over their heads, as if this is the first sleep they’ve had in days, or more to the point, the only sleep they will get that day. You can also see them laying down in the backs of big trucks, sleeping on top of cargo they no doubt loaded onto the truck. This makes me sad, because no one should have to work THAT hard just to maintain (barely) themselves and their families. One guy I know works nights on the weekends at a bar in addition to his day job in construction, so he works from 7am to 5 pm on Fridays, sleeps for a couple of hours, then works again from 8pm until 2am in the morning, and starts off again at 7am on Saturday morning and works straight through until 3am Sunday morning. Needless to say, he sleeps all day Sunday before he goes to work again in Monday morning. And I have seen him sleep like that on the bus.
Street vendors, women walking with tubs of good things to eat on their heads (how they balance it I will never know), and men pushing large carts, calling out their wares in nasally elongated syllables “ Elote, wirila” “Ajuacate, Ajuacate”, “Quesillos, quesillos” “Cajeta, alfanyique”. I think about how much time and energy goes into producing these foods, and they walk around in the hot sun, selling what they can, pulling in just a few Cordoba a day I imagine.
SALSA DE TOMATE
Why do Nicas love ketchup so much? I can’t say, but “salsa de tomate” (not to be confused with what we would call tomato sauce, the sort of rich flavorful sauce you put on pasta, that my household decided had “too many spices” when I made it) is a favorite among Sontulenyos. What could taste better than rice and beans, than rice and beans with ketchup? Of course who could pass up the yummy treat of ketchup and tortillas? And when I say, “no that’s alright, I don’t want ketchup on my food” I am given this look that seems to imply that not only must I have a stomach ache (for what other reason could there be to miss out on a chance to eat ketchup), but that I am disrupting their notions of what white people like to eat. This reaction is only second to the reaction that I got when I said I don’t like mayonnaise. That was one of complete disbelief. Of course, I don’t like mayonnaise much anyway, but when it is put on top of soup, where it floats in little white oily droplets, I definitely will not eat it. I have seen a man sit down with a plate of fench fries, rice, salad, and roasted chicken, and just drown the whole thing in ketchup. I have seen Kevin ( Isabels youngest, 5 yr old son), grab the bottle of ketchup and dump in on his plate, and just scoop it up with a tortilla to eat. They put ketchup even on traditional foods like repocheta and enchiladas.
NIC-GUYVERS
Nicas have an indefatigable ability to make the best of what they have. I am constantly amazed at the sheer cleverness of the guy I work with. You can tell them “I need to find a way to get up tino a tree 8 meters high and pull down a branch without disturbing a nest, and within an minutes they have worked out a complex pulley-rope-ladder system using bits of string and some wooden planks. They are like the Macguyver’s of Latin America. Women are champions of personal grooming and clever use of accessories, so that they always look 100 times better than me when they dress up in the one pair of nice jeans and one of the three good shirts they have. While I have newer stuff, I haven’t yet mastered the ability to have flawless toe and fingernails, perfect iron creasemarks, and completely color coordinated accessories.
THE TERRIBLE CAR EATING HOLE OF ESTELI.
Yesterday I drove a friend home, but the roads were really bad because the city has been installing drainage pipes to drian all of the “agua negra” which is dirty water that fills the streets and makes everything really muddy, but the worst part being that it is water that has run through countless latrines, since in the poorer barrios of Esteli, there is no central plumbing. To be sure MOST of Esteli does not have central plumbing, only in the center of town. Health hazard aside, the city is doing a bang up job of creating road hazards: As I was driving along, I ran over a plastic sack that was covering a giant hole in the road. No warning tape or stakes or anything. Well, My truck, a Nissan Pathfinder, had one front wheel completely sunk into the ground and only held up by some very weak looking rebar. I thought I was going to lose my truck further down the hole or have to call a tow-truck (do those even exist in Esteli?, I am not sure). But as soon as I ran into the whole, the crowd began. You know, the crowd of people, mostly men, especially when it involves a car, all standing around and looking. Well, after some consultation back and forth between me, my friend Otoniel, and the many men on the street, we decided to try and lift the car with the jack. We couldn’t get it high enough. Accidents and mishaps are what nicas love best, they can talk for hours about a problem, who it happened to, and why, and then, in the case of concrete problems, like a car in a hole, they can talk for even longer about how to solve the problem, with everyone throwing out different suggestions, to replies of “no hombre”, and then more suggestions and then “si, hom”. Mostly these suggestions are thrown out rather simultaneously, with rapid talking and hand gestures, until I was not actually clear on what was decided until Oto looked at me, and said “get in the car, they are going to push you out”. SO about 8 nica men, each apparently with 1/8th the strength of superman, lifted my Nissan Pathfinder out of the hole, and pushed it back. While I was in it…steering. Kind of surreal, but again, proof of how ingenious and helpful nicas are. Problem solved. The best part was, a man who had helped push said “another car did the same exact thing this morning”. As if it was almost expected another car would drive into the hole, so I shouldn’t feel too bad. Then I thought as a half-joke that maybe these guys left the hole in the road as a kind of neighborhood amusement, taking bets on which cars would fall in, and then seeing who is the best man for getting cars out of holes. But then I saw a couple of the supermen cut some warning tape from another, well marked hole, and two more men arrived with wooden stakes, and they began to cordon off the offending car-eating hole. Leave it to the barrio residents to do what the city should have done. As Oto got into the car, and we drove away, he said very nonchalantly “There still are good people in the world”. And he was right. And that made me happy.
