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.

The Water Saga, Part II: Planning and Pestering

When Marcial, the president of the water committee, called me about an alternative to the well I jumped at the opportunity, since the well was becoming so stressful it was invading my dreams.  Then, when he explained his idea, it seemed so much easier than what we had planned.  One of the reasons that water didn’t reach the casa materna’s neighborhood he explained, was because it passed through a whole sector of the town before coming to ours.  If we made some shortcuts in the existing piping system, we could make sure that the water came more directly to both the casa maternal and the health center, while the other sector wouldn’t lose their water access, but just have a different schedule.

My super technical drawing, showing where the new connections would go.

So things were going well, the project was simpler, and the proposal for the funds was almost done, all we needed was the land deeds to the casa maternal and health center so we could be approved to build the pilas and install the new pipes.  The new director of the health center (this was in May, so much time had passed that we had a new one), said she would handle it.  Everything seemed to be working out, until she came back and told me, “Teresita, fijáte que…”  My time in Nicaragua has taught me to dread the phrase “fijese” or “fijáte,” because it is a way of telling someone bad news while not taking any responsibility for it.

It turned out there was a problem with the land deeds; that they were tied up in legal problems and that we would have to hire a lawyer if we wanted to figure it out.  My first reaction was to laugh hysterically, because honestly at that point it is either that or curl up in a fetal position and cry.  My second reaction was to be terribly stubborn.  I am not a very stubborn person in general, but when I put my mind to it, I can do it very well.  So, at my next opportunity I went to our department capital of San Carlos, and talked personally with the director of the health center there, who agreed to help me out.  He made a call, learned that he had to write a letter to asking for permission to even see the land deeds.  After waiting a few hours for the letter, and for his secretary to get ready, I headed out with her to our department’s health ministry headquarters.  There we were told we would have to wait until after lunch.  After lunch, we were told we would have to wait until tomorrow, and so on.

The director said he would handle it, but that didn’t stop me from calling to check in on the progress every few days, or asking my director to bug him about it, or cornering him when he came to a health fair in a nearby community.  I did my best to be a pleasant, but persistent bother, and became a right little terror for that doctor.  Eventually, one day I went to San Carlos’s health center to check in again, about three weeks since my first visit.  I saw the director through the window of his office, where he was having a meeting.  Thinking I would wait until he wasn’t busy, I started to walk away, but was surprised to see him leave the meeting to talk to me.  His face was set, and without even a preliminary good morning, he asked, “you’re here about the land deeds aren’t you?”

Afraid I’d finally pushed him to his limit I replied that yes, sir, doctor director, I was.  He made one final phone call, and three hours later I had the land deeds in my hands.  It was with a feeling of incredulous giddiness that I scanned and saved them, in case they spontaneously combusted; the way things were going, I did not rule that out as a possibility.  It turns out, all the trouble was because people couldn’t figure out which land deed belonged to which location.  Eventually the secretary took it upon herself to read through the documents, and figure it out herself, no lawyer required.

So we had it, the proposal, the budget, the land deeds, everything we needed to send to Peace Corps and USAID, and very soon after submitting it all, Don Marcial and I were approved to go to Managua to defend the project.  After so much trouble, things had to go easier from here on out.  If you’re good at spotting patterns, though, you might guess what happens next.

 

The Water Saga, Part I: The Death of the Well

Remember when I wrote about water over a year ago?  About how the director of the health center suggested we dig a well the casa maternal could have water?  There begins a saga that just reached its conclusion this August, and that I’ve just had the strength to write about now (I had to take a major mental break from the whole thing for a while, don’t worry you’ll find out why).  So here begins the first in a series of chapters detailing the whole epic, if you will.

Our water system before, fill up garbage bin, fill up smaller bucket, carry it to fill the barrels.

In retrospect, the second that the director mentioned the well we should’ve started writing up our proposal.  Paperwork for USAID, or any other federal funds, is extensive and requires much more time than you’d think.  I let it go for the moment, knowing that I couldn’t apply for funds until six months into my service, but it would’ve saved a lot of trouble if we’d had the whole thing planned and written out at my six month mark so we could’ve just sent it in then.  Instead, we waited until last November to begin the planning stage, which I thought would be fine.  A well is just a hole in the ground.  How complicated could it be?  Life was about to show me just how complicated it could be.

And then sometimes we would get down to just one gallon of water.

First, the director wanted the well to supply both the casa maternal and the health center, and to have an electric pump so that no one would have to spend time and energy hauling water.  That meant though, that the well would have to be deep, about sixty feet, so that we wouldn’t suck up all the water in one go.  From there came the problems since the deeper the well, the more expensive the project, and more difficult for our volunteers who would be helping us to dig, as the farther down you go, the more difficult it becomes just to breathe.  Not to mention that we would have to install piping from the well in the casa maternal to the health center, and build two giant water tanks, or pilas, in both places to store the water.  And, as people continually told me, there was no guarantee that we would be able to secure a reliable water source; we could hit an impassable rock, or the ground could collapse in on itself, ruining the structure or injuring one of our diggers.  We could have tried to prevent this by digging during the dry season, but since we had waited so long, there was no way we would get the funds in time to do that.

Our water system for the health center before.

I was quickly losing enthusiasm for the well, and trying to think of easier alternatives.  The health center staff wasn’t letting go of the well idea, though, in spite of the compiling complications.  In fact, one day the director called in the supposed well expert in town to do a revised estimate of the well, but not before he showed me his own well in his yard.  It did not inspire my confidence.  Nor when he brushed off my concerns about the ground caving in, even when I mentioned I had seen one of his wells that had collapsed before he finished it.

So I was in a foul mood as I watched him search the area around the casa maternal for water with two metal rods, and when an unknown number called my cell phone, I answered tersely, and when a friendly male voice said hello, and asked how I was, I responded even more shortly, asking who it was I was speaking to.  It was Marcial, the president of the water committee.  I immediately regretted my rudeness, and tried to remedy the awkward situation.  We had met a few months earlier after I was invited to a water committee meeting with a nearby NGO, and they were some of the first to point out the problems when next Marcial said, “I hear you’re still trying to build a well, how’s that going for you?”

I looked out at the well digger with his forked metal rods, and was suddenly reminded of how in cartoons the characters always look for water with a forked stick.

“Not well, Don Marcial.  It’s not going well at all,” I answered.

He told me that he had an idea that he’d like to run by me.  It would take our water project in a new, and eventually, better direction.