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.

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.