Don't Dengue. Just Don't.

It is the rainy season here now, which always sees an increase in diarrheal illnesses and dengue fever, as the rain water collects, and breeds mosquitoes and disease.  This year has been especially bad for dengue though, which for those fortunate enough to not know about, is caused by a virus passed through mosquito bites and leads to fever, intense headaches, joint and muscle aches, and if it is the hemorrhagic kind, bleeding from the mucosa, organ failure, and death.  My local area had twenty-three reported cases this past month, which is a pretty high number, considering how sparsely populated we are.  Many of my fellow volunteers have gotten it in this or past years, and say that it lives up to its other name of rompehueso, or breakbone fever.

The Ministry of Health has upped its campaign against dengue this year in response to the increased number of cases, which means that I've been working with my local health center to create education material that encourages the community to work with the efforts to kill the mosquitoes that transmit the virus, and to eliminate or clean any stagnant water reservoirs.  This also means that ministry staff have been going out into homes putting a chemical called abate in family cisterns, and fumigating entire neighborhoods.

It is a sound you can hear from about a block away, and sounds exactly like a leaf-blower, since that is essentially what they use to spray the air with a chemical cocktail sure to kill untold number of mosquitoes and little grey cells.  It causes people to flee to the streets, clothes covering their noses and mouths, trying to avoid the toxic fog. 

When they came by my street this morning, my neighbors ran for it, grabbing whatever was most important to them to save.  One of my neighbors grabbed her infant daughter, another her pet lovebird, another his drink.  I stayed where I was, not knowing my landlord (who I just found out spent a week in the hospital with dengue) had opened up his office below me, so the back balcony that I had assumed was safe, was actually filled with the fumes as well.

Nope.

I couldn't exactly go out my front door either.

Double nope.

I resorted to wandering around my place, a clean t-shirt placed firmly over my face, searching for the place that looked least like it had a fire burning in it.  Eventually I stood on my front balcony, waving at my neighbors as they milled around, hoping all of this would keep us all safe for the rainy season.

Here's to hope...and carcinogens.

An open letter to the rats in my room

Dear rats,

Our relationship has been rocky ever since I first discovered you in my room.  I know I didn't make you feel welcome when I first heard, and then saw, you rooting around in my trash.  You must not have taken favorably to me moaning, "no, no, NO," as I pulled the covers over my head, and pretended you weren't there.  Then I started hiding my food away from you, which I can understand hurt your feelings, since it is not something a good host does, but that's the thing - I don't want you here.  I've known rats (actually just one we named Annie) in the past; a sweet, clean, and clever domesticated rat who would crawl into my overcoat pocket and fall asleep.  You are nothing like Annie, you're her backwater cousins she tries to forget she has.  You are loud and rude and filthy and harbors of awful diseases.  You root through my trashing hoping against hope you will find something to eat, and when you don't you start gnawing away at anything you can find.  First you went for my crayons and I was like, ok, fine if you want to eat colored wax, yeah go knock yourself out, then you started on my books.  Then my clothes. Then my bag of warm-fuzzies, were I keep all the letters and notes my friends and family have sent me.  Then, most disturbingly, you left your stillborns on my floor to clean up.  If you wanted to start something, you sure as hell are going about it the right way.  This is war.  Prepare for battle.




Note:  I wrote this a while back, before I moved, but I never posted it, for fear that my mom would be on the next flight down to try to convince me to come back.  Now that I am in my new place, which doesn't have any rats, I feel like it is safe to post.  Oh, and there was war between the rats and me, and like all war, it was horrific and traumatizing even for the victorious.  I found three separate nests and had to do things that I'm pretty sure are against the Geneva Convention.  I don't want to talk about it.

I see your piropo and raise you a regañada

For female volunteers (and females in general) here in Nicaragua, street harassment is an unfortunate reality.  I don't think I've ever left the house without at least one man yelling something at me, here or in my last site.  The abuse can range anywhere from a slimy "adiossssss," to hissing, to spitting (after I ignored what was surely a romantic sentiment), to groping, to a man literally telling me, in English, no less, "I want to rape you."

It's infuriating, humiliating, and in the last two cases, scary as all hell; but for the most part, the best thing I can do is just ignore it.  Feeling all these emotions and strangling the things I would like to say is extremely difficult, but often the men are looking for rise out of you, either positive or negative, so even if you blow up in their face (as I have on a few occasions), they will just think you want to play.  One of the advantages of my position is that I've been able to talk to a lot of young men about piropoing, and how it can make women feel.  Some of my guy friends have countered that it is a complement (including the rape comment), but I've at least made it clear that if they want to hang out with me, they need to cut it out.  It's a small victory.

I try to tell myself that change, especially behavioral change, is slow, but that I'm working on making a small difference.  Some days it makes me feel better as the comments fly at me from the street; some days it doesn't.  Today was one of those days, and while shouting obscenities at men who piropo is never really effective, shaming them is, as evidence by what happened not a half-hour ago.

As I was walking the long way from the health center to my house, I passed a man who hissed and called at me.  It has gotten to the point that I just automatically block out most of these piropos, so it wasn't him, but a chocolate cupcake I spotted in a bakery window, that stopped me dead in my tracks.  I had completely forgotten him in my joy at beholding such a beautiful pastry, until I saw him walk into the bakery and stand uncomfortably close to me.  He then started whispering to me as I stood at the counter, basically telling me how awesome it was going to be when we were having sex tonight.  If I had followed my current path of open discussion of gender rights, I would have said something like, "excuse me sir, but your comments are making me very uncomfortable, and I would appreciate it if you showed me a bit of respect."

Instead I thought, two can play this shame game, and in my loudest voice I said, "excuse me, but DO I KNOW YOU?"  Everything went silent, and everyone turned to stare at us, as the man stammered and shook his head.  I should mention that this bakery is a annex of the local women's shelter and it raises money for their work to prevent domestic and gender violence.  Many of the looks he got were less than friendly.

"Chill out," he kept whispering as everyone continued to stare, "chill out, just chill out."  It was as if I'd bought an awkward pie, and forced it down his throat.  I know it's hypocritical to fight humiliation with humiliation, but sometimes it just feels so good.  Tomorrow I'll be better, I promise.

Check out this video:

Then check out the awesome cupcake I got:

Update

Isabella really liked her doll.

She was feeling much better today too.

Crafts for Kids, or How to Campo-Laminate

My landlord works right below me, and his five year-old, Isabella, sometimes comes up to visit me.  We end up either coloring or removing the cushions from the sofa to jump on them like a trampoline.  I plan on teaching her the-floor-is-lava game pretty soon.  A few days ago, as I was searching for something for Isabella to color, I came upon a print-out of a doll* I use to teach children about nutrition.  He comes set with eyes, clothes, shoes, and a leg-bone that I tape on him after he eats from the proper food group (formadores give him eyes and the bone, protectores give him his clothes, and basicos give him his shoes, while energeticos make him run around) until he is happy and healthy, because he ate from all the food groups.  It's a fun way for kids to learn the importance of eating a more varied diet, but it's also a fun activity for a bored five year-old.

Isabella really enjoyed coloring the print out, and then taking the photo to document her work.

She kept on trying to sneak out of my photos though.  This is the clearest shot I got of her.

Pretty soon after she finished coloring the doll, it was time for her to go home, but she left the paper with me.  Today, as I was leaving the health center, I ran into Isabella and her dad in the waiting room.  She had had a mild allergic reaction to something, and was getting an injection to help with the swelling.  I thought I would do something to help cheer her up, so I went home to finish making the doll she'd colored.

First, I cut out the doll and all the accessories she had colored, and then worked on "laminating" all of the parts.  Obviously, there really isn't anyway to do that professionally here, but thankfully I've learned a passable alternative that you can do with just some clear tape and scissors.  I call it campo-laminating.

Using a flat surface, just place strips of clear tape on the front of what you want to laminate, doing it so that a good amount goes over the edges of the paper.  Take your time, and be careful so you avoid making as many wrinkles and bubbles as you can.  Once you're done with one side, flip it over and repeat on the other.

Next, cut out the shapes, making sure not to cut directly next to the paper, but just a little bit around it.  By leaving a little border of clear tape, you'll ensure that both sides stay stuck together, protecting your laminated creation.

Once I'd laminated the doll, I could tape all its parts to the main body for the finished product.

Now Isabella can play with a doll that she colored herself, and that will last longer than it would if it weren't campo-laminated.

There you have it - a fun activity that you can do with kids, giving them a doll of their own creation to keep for rainy days to come...now let's see if Isabella likes her surprise when I give it to her tomorrow.

*It's adapted from the book Actividades Saludables, by RPCVs Patrick McGee and Angelina Zamboni, which has been of immeasurable help to me during my two years here.  I've simplified some explanations, and added some others to incorporate clothing at the request of my panzonas, who insisted that the doll was not complete even after eating a complete meal, since he was still naked.

This

These spiders really liked to hang out in my old room.

I put a pen next to this one so you could have an idea of its size.

Also, I'm assuming that is a sack of eggs on its stomach.

Yeah.

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.