This is Normal

Since living in a foreign country for two years, my grasp on reality, already tentative to begin with, has deserted me almost completely.  This may not be a bad thing, at least for me.  Things are more fun this way.  A good example of how I have pretty much lost it, is to look at my approach to traveling.  My first site is pretty isolated, and for a while it took about ten hours to travel from there to the capital, Managua.  If I ever wanted to visit any friends who lived further up north, it was usually an overnight trip.  When the highway was finally paved, though, my travel time went down to about seven and a half hours, and then an even more amazing thing happened - my town got an evening bus.  Before, the last bus from the municipal capital to my town left at 3pm, this new bus left at 6pm, meaning that I could leave Managua at 1pm instead of the 7am direct bus, and still catch a bus back to my own town.  This opened up new a new world of travel opportunities for me, and I started to visit the north more often.  Every time I would travel back from north of Managua, I would try to "beat" Nicaragua.  If the 1pm bus from Managua got me to San Carlos in time to catch my last bus, I won; if the bus came in late, and I missed my last bus, I was stranded in San Carlos, and Nicaragua won.  Most people in their downward spiral to insanity fight with inanimate objects; I apparently fight with entire nations.

And so it passed, that one day, after a meeting in Managua, I traveled north for two and a half hours to spend the night in Matagalpa with my friend, Anna.  I was determined to make it home the next day, but I was also determined to fix a new leather bag that my cousin had bought me from Costa Rica.  Everyone in Nicaragua knows that if you want leather done right, the best place to go is Esteli, about an hour and a half west of Matagalpa.  I announced my plan to travel from Matagalpa to Esteli to Managua to San Carlos to my town pretty casually, but everyone around me looked at me as if I were crazy.

"That's got to be more than twelve hours of traveling," someone said.

"Yeah, but I'm used to it now, plus, it's a chance to beat Nicaragua!" I countered.  It made total sense in my head.

The next morning a little before 6 in the morning, Anna walked with me to catch a taxi to the bus station where I hopped on the next bus to Esteli.  At a little before 8, I arrived and dropped off my bag, then went and chatted with another volunteer friend until the 9:15 bus to Managua.  Two and a half hours later, I bought my ticket to San Carlos, and was on my way.  This bus has the advantage of being very fast, and we managed to make it a little before 6pm, when my last bus would be passing by...but it never did.  For some reason that day, the last bus never left, and I thought that Nicaragua would beat me.  I couldn't stand for it.  After waiting for about thirty minutes, I decided to take a taxi for the hour and a half ride back home.  By myself, it would not have been economically feasible, but luckily there were four other travelers who were willing to split the cost of the taxi, instead of staying the night in San Carlos.  So we piled in, and thirteen and a half hours after I started out that day, I made it to my front door.

When I went into the kitchen, I thought my family was having a party, seeing the huge amount of pork that my host sister had fried up.  My host family usually only eats meat on special occasions since it's a bit of a luxury, so I asked why we were celebrating.

"Well, you see, one of the pigs ran out into the street today, and a truck hit it, so we cooked him," she said.  "It's not like he got sick and died.  He was perfectly healthy before he got hit," she went on to explain, "it would have just been a waste not to eat him."

I agreed, and went to my room to call my brother.  I told him about my day, but when I got to the part about the pig, he stopped me.

"So the pig was hit by a truck?" he asked.

"Yes."

"So you ate something that was killed in the road?"

"Yeeees," I answered, seeing where this was going.

"That is the definition of roadkill, you do realize that you just ate roadkill?"

His disbelief at my actions, of traveling across the country in a day, of eating what was, yes, roadkill, seemed odd to me.  I'd done it all before, this had become my reality, and it didn't upset me one bit.  

So when it came time for me to answer, I said, "Well, I may have eaten roadkill, but it's ok, you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because I just beat Nicaragua.  Toma Nicaragua!!!"

Moving Day

I haven't posed in a long time and I apologize for that.  It seems life has gotten in the way, and my brain hasn't wanted to settle down to put words to internet.  Anyway, an update: I moved.  Not back to the states like most of the forty volunteers who joined Peace Corps at the same time I did, and who ended their two-years of service in March.  No, that is for the sane.  Instead, I, loca that I am, decided to stick around for a third year as a regional volunteer leader, which means that half of my time I will travel around southeastern Nicaragua visiting other volunteers to make sure they have the support they need, and the other half working on a project with the Ministry of Health in the municipal capital.  To do that, I obviously had to move two hours away to the municipal capital, which was not as difficult as I thought it would be, since I had a bunch of people to help me out.

This is my host brother, Hector, posing by the third wave of things to be moved.  The first wave was my large backpack, and a smaller bag.  The second wave was three small bags.  As you can see, the third wave consists of three bags, my pillow, a duffle (on the bench in the back), and my bookcase.  The pig stayed behind with abuela.

Obviously, the bookcase was the most difficult thing to move, since I couldn't even lift it by myself, and needed my buddy Moneda to help load it up.  Everything else I was able to take on the bus with no problem, but it would have been a hassle, emotionally and financially, to transport that thing on a yellow school bus that has seen better days.  Thankfully, our parish priest, Father Cornelius, offered to take it in his truck, since he was heading to town the same day I wanted to move.

Thanks for being awesome, padre.

In the end, I moved two years of stuff in three trips from my old home to what will be my new one. I know it is only a two-hour bus ride away, but it feels like a more monumental move than that.  I'm moving from a town of around six-thousand to a city of about sixteen-thousand, from rural to urban, from friends to strangers.  It took me an entire year to feel comfortable in my last place, when will I feel that here?  I live in hope that it will be soon.  Plus, I think the fact that I have a real flushing toilet instead of a latrine will help with the readjustment.

The view from my old room.  Notice the pig barrier, to keep him from coming into my room and being his typical cochino self.

The view from my new room.  Notice the cats lounging, not giving a literal shake of their tails what you think of them.

Cradles and Coffins

This past Friday, I went to the casa materna to finish knitting a hat while watching Una familia con suerte with the women, when I heard the responsable, Yadira, mention that we had a woman who has just given birth resting in the back.  When I have enough, I usually like to give the hats or socks I knit to the women as an excuse to enable my knitting addiction, so I walked to the sleeping area, to where I assumed she and her baby were laying down, to give them the new hat. 

She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, with a pretty, round face, and her once full belly sagging like a windless sail as she lay on her side.  An older woman I took to be her mother sat on the bed across from her, and spoke in a quite voice to her and another pregnant woman who was in the room with them.  I didn’t see the baby, but assumed it lay behind the young mother’s back, hidden away and wrapped in blankets, with a bracelet to ward away the evil eye around its wrist.  It’s not unusual for me not to see the babies at first.  I said I had a present for the new baby, and asked if it was a boy or a girl.  The older woman told me that before he died, he had been a boy.

This isn’t the first time this has happened during my time here in Nicaragua, the rate of infant mortality is improving, due in part to increased prenatal care, which the casa materna helps to promote, but for women who live in the farther communities, it is still a challenge to bring them in for more than four prenatal check-ups.  Four check-ups before their birth is actually an exceptional number for some of these women.  Many factors keep them from coming more often, or from staying at the casa materna, such as inaccessibility, lack of education, and machismo.

My first month in site, a fifteen year-old ran away from the casa materna after her husband came to visit her and complained that he didn’t have any clean clothes back home because she wasn’t there to wash them for him.  When I went out with the health center staff to convince her to come back, riding an hour into mud-soaked hills, we found her in the river, the bulge of her seven-month belly swelling above the water, as she washed clothes on a rock.  After the staff tried to talk her into returning, explaining that she was a high-risk pregnancy, the girl said she was staying, that her husband needed her.  It seemed clear that her husband’s dominance over her only accounted for some of her actions.  She was one of the many who arrived at the casa materna scared and crying, this town an hour away from hers seeming as foreign and far-flung as another country.  She missed her home, and though she heard what a danger it was to her unborn child to not be close enough to the health center for regular check-ups, she could not have realized that death was a real possibility for her or her baby.  She wanted to be home, and we all have a hard time thinking of ourselves as anything less than invincible, or that these things don’t happen to us, not just to others.  For her to sign a consent form, relieving the health center of any responsibility should anything happen, I painted her thumb in ink, since she didn’t know how to write well enough to even write her initials for us.

The next I heard of her was from Yadira two months later.  She had been brought into the health center with labor pains, but when the doctor checked the baby’s heartbeat, she immediately sent her to the hospital in San Carlos, from there she was sent to a better-equipped hospital two hours to the north.  We weren’t sure if the baby was still-born, or if she died shortly after being delivered via c-section, but the baby was dead, and a relative was coming by to pick up some paperwork before riding back to the community in the ambulance to prepare the burial.  Apparently they had taken the baby girl’s body away from her mother before she regained consciousness from the surgery; a practice that I learned was common in the states as well, until they realized that robbing a mother of the opportunity to say goodbye to her child is often more traumatizing than having to see her child dead.

When the relative came by the casa materna, she left a cardboard box on a chair out on the porch where I sat before she entered.

“The baby girl’s in there,” Yadira said to me, nodding her head towards the box.  I looked at it.  Printed all across it were pale orange lettering and a little girl’s face, proclaiming it to be full of top-quality cookies.  The family had obviously asked for it from a store where the shipment of cookies had come in.  As the relative came out, her hands full, I offered to carry the impromptu coffin to the ambulance for her.  I don’t remember thinking that it was especially light or heavy, just that it did have weight - solid and slightly off-centered – a weight that made it all terribly real.

And now, twenty-two moths later, I sat across from another young girl who had lost her baby boy, the knitted hat still in my hands, and I wondered what they had done with his body.  I gave her the hat anyway, I’m not quite sure why.  Maybe it was to try to give her something tangible instead of trying to open myself to her emotionally, something with which I have always struggled.  Maybe it was to give her something to say goodbye to.  Or maybe, as I reconstruct the events in my head, it was to give her something of hope.  Hope for her and hope for all mothers, that one day they and their children can go through this journey of passage into the world with less fear that this journey will take them into the next.  

I want that to not just be my own reconstruction.

Sos Muy Gorda

When preparing to come to Nicaragua and then enter into service, all Peace Corps Volunteers inevitably do a lot of reading up on its culture, and one of the things that all this literature stresses is how Nicaragua, like many latin cultures, is one that is based on subtleties in interpersonal relations.  Instead of coming out and declaring a grievance with you, nicas will instead grow cold, leaving you to "read between the lines," if you will, to figure out what it was that you did wrong.  While this is certainly true in most social and work interactions (there was a day when one of the women I work with refused to talk to me, because I chose to use my own poster papers for a project instead of her torn and stained ones) it is also paradoxically not so with certain topics, especially physical appearance.

In the U.S. we are often sensitive when it comes to this topic, especially in regards to weight and race, so much that we can become very circuitous in our descriptions of people.  Not so in Nicaragua, where people will call it as they see it, describing people by the color of their skin without blinking, and telling you to your face if they believe you have gained or lost weight.  This is often painful for many female volunteers especially since the Nica diet of excessive oil and sugar tends to pack on the pounds, and we come from a culture that prizes thinness as the pinnacle of beauty.  It hurts when someone tells us, after gaining just one or two pounds, that we are fatter than we were last week.  Oh, and they notice.  There was a time that I went up probably just three pounds, but a community health worker thought it enough to tell me, "Teresita, when you came to Nicaragua you were thin, now you're fat!  You're so fat!"  It stung, especially because, seriously?!  Three pounds.  Three pounds!  That's not enough to go from thin to fat in my book, but in a culture that deals with subtleties all the time, it was at least enough for comment.

Thankfully I have since learned that these remarks are rarely made maliciously, and are often meant as a complement, since women are considered more attractive when they are rocking more curves.  Like I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the word, "hermosa," which means beautiful, is often used to describe big women.  Since being here, I have become much more comfortable with my body, so now when people say I'm a little fatter, I don't take offense, in fact I tend to enjoy it.  My favorite example was when a few medical students from Holland were doing a week of practicals in my town.  In the U.S. they would have been models probably, they were pretty, and had the ideal height and body size for the job, but the women in the casa materna kept on commenting on how they were too tall, and too skinny.  To emphasize this point, one of the women said, "yeah, they don't have what Teresita has," as she patted my thigh, right below my butt affectionately.  After everything I have learned, it made me feel pretty loved.  Thanks ladies.

The Water Saga, Part V: Si Se Puede

If the last part of The Water Saga was all about the negative things about that project, then this is about all the positive things that made it possible.  After the students and other people failed to help with the ditch-digging, I decided to call in a few friends to help out.  Since July I’ve formed an English Speaker’s club that consists mainly of male university students.  Strong university students who apparently have nothing better to do on a weekday than come out and help a gringa in distress.  First came Richar (spelt without the “d”…yeah, I know) and then after lunch we called up another English speaker, Carlos, and convinced him to show up, without telling him why.

“Aw, man,” he complained when we revealed our devious plan, “and I’m wearing my nice shoes, ‘cause I was gonna see my girl after this.”

“What girl?” scoffed Richar.  The last time we checked, Carlos had a total of zero girls.

“Which one you mean, eh?” he winked.

Oh, boys.

Carlos, Richar, and Cirilo, the water committee's treasurer, who came out to help dig

Chico and Justo helping out

Before we had started digging, the staff warned me that exactly where we were digging was where they bury the placenta after a woman gives birth.  They had apparently forgotten to tell me this during the planning process.  The boys weren’t fazed until I told them what a placenta actually is…and then we came across one.  I am not very squeamish with visual grossness, but olfactory grossness is another matter, and this was a recent enough one that it sent me and the boys running until we finally gathered enough courage to quickly dig a new hole to bury it in.  Just wanted to share that pleasant story with you all.  We came across three more that day.  There ya go. 

Our ambulance driver, Eugenio pitched in too

The next day, despite supposed work conflicts, and still-sore war wounds, three men from the health center helped me dig the remaining few yards to the proposed pila site.  Then another amazing thing happened when the man Don Marcial found to build the pilas finished his work in a mind-blowing three days.  Pretty soon, the pipes were installed, and the moment of truth came when the schedule moved around, and we had water.

Our cleaning ladies, Luci and Juana, were very happy

Don Marcial and me, he does smile occasionally, I swear

Yadira, a few of our pregnant ladies, and me with our pila...they also smile occasionally as well.

 And so, after more than a year in gestation we finally have two big, beautiful concrete babies, that fill my heart with joy.

 

The Water Saga, Part IV: Worth the Fight

Months before beginning project, the high school principle wrote a letter promising that their oldest students would help us dig the trenches necessary to install the new pipes.  These students needed volunteer ecological hours anyway to graduate, and since this project would count, it was a win-win for everyone involved.  The first day a bunch of students turned out and did great work, but towards the end of the morning, one of the boys ended up busting an existing pipe, causing water to spout like a fountain out of the ground, and giving the road a striking resemblance to a chocolate milkshake, not to mention leaving that neighborhood without water for the day.

Digging in front of the casa materna

So I was frustrated, and let them know, especially after they started laughing and playing in the water, but in the end we were joking about it.  That’s why it came as a shock when no one showed up the next day and I learned that the students had written a letter denouncing supposed abuse by the water committee, and refusing to work on the project any longer.  What really confused me was that the students who signed the letter weren’t even there for the pipe-breaking incident, which is when they claimed the abuse took place.  It turns out that when one of the men from the water committee came to fix the busted pipe, he started bad mouthing the students, as he is wont to do.  He’s the type of person who will bad mouth anything from a rock in his shoe to the weather; he doesn’t mean anything by it.  But someone heard him talking, and that someone told someone who told the students about it, and that’s when all the bad things started happening.

 

Before breaking the pipe

Even after I went to the school and gave a rousing speech about how the best way to get back at someone is to prove him wrong, and show him all the good work you can do (to which all the students responded excitedly that yes, they would help out again) besides a group of four who took pity on me, they never did help with the digging beyond the first day.  Meanwhile, the health center staff were also refusing to help with the digging, one man even going so far as to refuse to help, and then sit nearby, criticizing various aspect of the project design, especially the proposed location of the pila, saying that it was all just the gringa’s strategy to make them work more.  Remember he said this as I was digging in the Nicaraguan sun, and he was sitting down in the shade, and after we’d consulted the rest of the staff as to where they wanted the pila to go.

There was no want of critics beyond that man either.  It seemed that everyone who talked to me about the project would passionately tell me how everything, from the size of the pipes to the digging tools, was wrong.  Don Marcial wasn’t free from this criticism either as many people asked him in a horrified tone, how he could let the gringa do manual labor by herself.  This wasn’t fair to him either, as he was busy running around, organizing the pipes and the pila construction, all while trying to keep his own business afloat.  All this negativity is why I’ve waited so long to write this up, because it hurt so much, and it still hurts as I write it up now, because so many people who promised they would help didn’t, and people who I thought would be happy about the project seemed to be genuinely upset at me, and there is at least one student who still refuses to talk to me.

The worse part of it was that it was making me lose sight of why I was doing this project.  After waiting for the students for the second day in a row, I left the casa maternal, saying to the ladies that I was off to put up a fight, but I paused to complain that I don’t like to fight.

Us, with the uncompleted hat.

“Yes, Teresita, but sometimes it’s worth the fight,” responded one of the ladies, nodding her head in encouragment.  She had been at the casa maternal for almost a month, and was pregnant with her sixth child.  She cooked and cleaned, and went to the river everyday to bathe without ever complaining.  I had tried to go through this process without complaining, but obviously hadn’t succeeded, and here she was, like me, far from her family and friends, and she didn’t complain.  You know what she did instead?  She crocheted me a hat; an absurdly cute hat, complete with a flower on top.

I looked at her, and thought of all the other amazing and strong women who I’d met in my year here, and said, “You’re right; sometimes it is worth the fight.”

 

The Water Saga, Part III: And Then I Had a Thousand Dollars Down My Pants

When my project counterpart, Marcial, and I went to defend our project in front of a panel in Managua, things could not have gone better, mostly because I said about ten words total.  Anyone who knows about SPA (small project assistance) grants knows that this is a very good thing, because it means Don Marcial did almost all of the talking, proving that the community is taking an active role in the project, and has the capacity to see it thought.  He answered all the difficult questions so clearly and knowledgably that I just sat there, and let the panel be impressed.  It was awesome.

About five weeks later, after all the various paperwork from D.C. and Managua was settled, our check arrived in the Peace Corps office.  Now ladies and gentlemen, this is when I inform those of you who do not know me about how absentminded I am, which would explain how I neglected to bring my passport with me to open a new bank account to deposit the check in Managua with the help of Peace Corps staff.  Instead, I would have to return to my town, get my passport, and open the account at my local bank. 

So much to the chagrin of everyone, I took the nine hour bus ride back to my town, with a check worth more than a thousand dollars stuffed down my pants in my money belt.  At the end of the trip, that check looked as if it had seen better days, as I’m sure it had; being next to my sweaty abdomen for that long would be a traumatic event for anything.  To his credit, the super cute teller at my bank didn’t say a thing when I presented him with what was surely the most wrinkled and worn check he had ever seen, and in the end we had the money in the bank, ready for our project.