The Best Kind of Friend

A lot of great, interesting, enlightening things have happened lately but the most wonderful to me at this very moment, is the return of my Danish friend, Sanne, to Boca de Sábalos. Sanne came to work with an environmental NGO in my community around the same time last year and when she left in November of ’05, she promised to be back to write her thesis. I held out hope for a long time but after months and months, I finally resigned myself to being the only foreigner in my site. Perhaps somewhere along the road of life, I accidentally helped a saint, a martyr, or a Hindi god, but somehow I’ve managed to build up some positive karma and this past week, Sanne finally came back! Tonight we had the opportunity to finally sit down (for four hours), put back some beers, and really talk about what has been going on in our lives (something we both needed to do). Normally, we speak in Spanish but tonight it was English all the way, more than anything to keep the nosy Nicaraguans at the nearby tables from hearing all the details of our fabulous lives. It was the best kind of night, with the best kind of friend. That is to say, someone who can truly understand where you are coming from and all the frustrations and joy that life in Nicaragua implies.

The biggest news in Nicaragua right now, besides my and Sanne’s fabulous lives and the upcoming elections, is an alcohol crisis (of sorts) in the northern department of Leon. Without ever having read a newspaper about the situation, what I know is that some people were brewing moonshine in Leon and using methanol as a main ingredient, which causes various physical reactions in people, the most definite and horrifying being death. So, dozens of people are dying in the north and I am pulling weeds from my “garden” when my landlord comes up and begins to help and chat about the situation. I tell him it is awful, a real shame. He tells me he’s not so sure he agrees with me. After all, he tells me, this is how life works itself out. I ask him to explain himself and this modern day Francis Galton tells me that with this new brand of moonshine, all of the drunks will die off. This, coming from a man who recently joined the local AA chapter and up until a few weeks ago could be found on any given night, teetering around Sabalos, telling his friends he is sleeping with their wives, which he is not. It must be said, however, that he is an excellent landlord. At the time, I couldn’t have disagreed with him more but recently had the opportunity to speak with a Spaniard who lives in Managua about the situation and he told me that not only did the anesthetist in the Leon hospital, after attending dozens of patients with methanol poisoning, drink the alcohol and die, but that also at one of the funerals for a methanol poisoned victim, the family passed around shots of the fatal liquor to all the guests. Perhaps I judged the opinion of my ex-drunk of a landlord too soon.

Two Mondays ago, we launched our STI/Condom Awareness campaign with a big meeting, cake, and disgustingly graphic pictures of infected genitalia. It was a success and the doctor with whom I’m working on the campaign and I will give the first educational sessions this week to the oldest high school students and the local chapter of AA. I always get excited to whip out my balsam wood penis for demonstrations, so I am as pleased as punch. In the afternoon of the same day, we had our first community clean-up for the public cleanliness project. I walked around with a group of about ten kids, picking up the garbage that litters the streets of my town. The grossest thing I picked up was a plastic bottle filled with urine, the most bizarre thing we found were 200 ant covered, mud encrusted ace bandages tossed behind the market, complete with ice packs that children were tearing apart and playing with. As I walked with my group of kids, they sucked on lollipops and drank colored sugar water out of plastic bags and then proceeded to toss their garbage on the very street we were cleaning! Of course I yelled at them but I think it demonstrates how very hard it is to change the littering culture. Step by step. Our group decided to cross the river to “the other side” in order to pick up there. There were two canoes waiting to take us across but the kids refused to go in any canoe that I wasn’t in. So, after playing musical canoes for about five minutes, we all finally crossed in one and the whole way screamed, “We are going to clean! Woooo!” with fists pumping and faces upturned to the unforgiving hot sun.

The 13th through the 17th was spent with my Peace Corps buds in various Nicaraguan hot spots. I also had the fortune to meet up with Kyle Whitehead on the last night of his vacation in Managua and briefly catch up. It was surreal but awesome to see a friend from home in Nicaragua. My fellow volunteers and I headed to Granada, the Laguna de Apoyo, back to Granada, and to Managua in our time together. I’ve spoken of Granada before (colonial city, beautiful, good restaurants, touristy, etc.) and it was a great break as always. The Laguna de Apoyo I had been to last year for a day trip but somehow had forgotten how incredible it is. It is a large crater lake with various hotels and hostels strewn around its edge and is quite possibly my favorite place in Nicaragua. If it hadn’t been for the annoying Canadian owner of the place we stayed at, who insisted that her hotel was nothing but a “tranquilo zone” when all we wanted to do was listen to a little music (and maybe shake our asses a bit), I may have never left. Because we couldn’t listen to music (although she thoughtfully offered us a guitar, which no one plays and which no one can shake their ass to), we had booze-fueled conversations about everything from missionaries to couples living together before marriage. The rest of the mini-break was spent in Granada (where you can, incidentally, shake your ass) and then decadently in Managua, eating at the nicest hotel in town. Every time I get together with the volunteers from my group, I appreciate and love them more and more.

Back in my site, we are organizing the household inspections and the next educational sessions for the public cleanliness project. Scraping the bottom of the health education barrel for what to talk to the kids about in the elementary school, I came up with First Aid and have been teaching them what to do in case of household burns and wounds. When I asked the first grade class what could cause deep wounds, I got the expected answers of machetes and knives, but had to admire their creativity when sharks also got put in the mix. The current batch of pregnant ladies in the Casa Materna is a lively and talkative bunch and we actually had a dynamic conversation about breast feeding. So, all is well in my little isolated corner of the world as I head into my final six months here. I’ve recently decided to stay in Central America for the holidays for many reasons, the main one being that every day I find myself wondering, “Where the hell did the time go?”