The Nice Things People Say

Being the fourth Peace Corps volunteer in a community has its advantages and disadvantages, one of the latter being the insecurity that I’m just the last in a line of many, the final American girl to prance around the street of Sábalos talking health in imperfect Spanish. Perhaps I’m making a big deal out of nothing (a storm in a drinking glass as they say here), but recent comments from various people have made me think that maybe I mean as much to them as they do to me. For those of you who are disappointed or angry (i.e. Nick) with me for not coming home until the end of my service, perhaps this will help you understand why I am trying to squeeze out every last bit of my time here with my (occasionally) loving community.

First there are the normal comments, like from Norma, my soy cooking partner, who tells me everyday how much she is going to miss me or from Maria Jose, a member of my youth group, who insisted I write down my U.S. home address now, in case she forgets to ask me for it when I leave (in six whole months). Then last night, I was chatting with my good friend Johanna, the daughter in law of my host mother, and she asked me what I would like for a present. I told her that her friendship was enough but when she insisted, I told her to buy me something representative of Nicaragua, a recuerdo, which means both memory and a gift that inspires a memory. She told me she would buy me a gold ring and when I protested telling her that was too much; she told me she wanted to give me something so nice because she appreciates me so much and because I am her very best and only true friend in Sábalos. As I am slightly uncomfortable around open declarations of feelings (as well as anything involving mood candles or the musical stylings of Enya, which have nothing to do with the story at hand), I quickly told her my ring size so that we could move on. It was, however, a very nice thing for her to say.

Then there is Gino, the absolute worst student in my adult English class, so bad to the point that I think he is either dyslexic or was consistently beaten in the head as a child. In the nine months that he has been in the class, he has made not one stitch of progress whatsoever. But he’s a very nice man and the other week he asked me how much money I needed per month to live in Sábalos. I always try to avoid conversations about money and how much I make, my parents make, how much my camera cost, or how much I can lend to someone, but as I started to be evasive, he quickly cut me off. He told me he was asking so that he could start up a collection in order to pay my expenses and keep me in Sábalos teaching English for a few months after my service is up. I had to keep myself from chuckling at the fact that he thought a few more months might do what the last year hasn’t been able to, but again, it was a sweet sentiment and I was touched.

Finally, during a meeting with the public cleanliness committee, we discussed a plot of abandoned land in the middle of town that has become a sort of impromptu garbage dump and various solutions were proposed to clean it up. Antolin, my neighbor and member of the committee, put forth with a big smile his grand solution: we burn all the trash and then give the plot to Alexis to build a house and that way; she can stay in Sábalos forever! And as tempting as a burned garbage dump is for the site of my future residence, I let him down easily, explaining the necessity of returning to the U.S. to continue studying.

Given all the sweet offers being thrown my way (I know, the torched garbage dump really does top the list), perhaps you’re all wondering how I could ever leave Sábalos. I wonder the same thing sometimes for about five minutes until I find another damn scorpion in my house. I’ve found and promptly killed three in the last two days and the little suckers really freak me out. Then you add in the unbearable heat, the unreliable Nicaraguan counterpart situation, and the mold that has (oh yes!) reappeared this rainy season but this time on my shoulder, and I quickly find my motivation to head back to my homeland come March 2007. Great packages from home reminding me of all I am missing serve the same purpose. Thanks so much mom, Mrs. Jessica Kelley Garrett, and of course the reverend Jamie Gregorian. Early in my Peace Corps service I was given the advice that packages with written messages about God and crucifixes on the outside are less likely to be tampered with at Nicaraguan customs. I relayed this information to my family and they really took it to heart. I always get a kick out of picturing my family members (remember: we’re mostly Jewish and this is why this is so funny), tongues in cheek, carefully drawing crucifixes and inscribing Christian messages on the boxes they send me. However, Jamie just took it to a whole new level, creating his own church for the return address, adorning every flap of the box with crosses, and writing messages in Spanish such as, “No Christ? No Peace.” Sorry Sábalos, but no amount of gold rings, small salaries, or abandoned plots of land can beat a package like that.

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?”

Like a Donkey

It has been a hectic two weeks. My USAID funded “public cleanliness” project (this is what we say in Spanish. It is more euphemistic than “trash” project) is well underway, which means I have been working like a “donkey” or a “black” (this is what they say in Spanish. It is not at all euphemistic and quite offensive). I have literally been working 10 hour days, which is a lot for a volunteer of an organization whose 3 pronged mission statement focuses two entire prongs on cultural exchange (that is, chatting.) But it is all going quite well. We have bought all the materials for the project: trash barrels, signs with messages that say “Keep this area clean” and “Don’t Throw Trash Here,” wheelbarrows, rakes, brooms, machetes, and other various tools for the trash collectors to use in their daily functions, we will record our first radio message this week, and we are in the midst of planning our first big community cleanup.

We also gave educational sessions to each of the 3 sectors of my community with a total of about 60 people showing up. The sessions were imparted by me, the police captain, and representatives from the mayor’s office, a local environmental NGO, and Nicaragua’s Ministry of Natural Resources. We introduced the project, talked about the importance of classifying our trash, explained how the trash collection functions and should be utilized, and emphasized the necessity of paying for the trash service, taking care of the trash barrels in the street, and keeping our dogs, pigs, and cows from knocking them over and rooting through the garbage. At the end of each session, we raffled off a “basic basket,” which contains rice, beans, sugar, cooking oil, and soap. This prize, of course, was the main reason people came to the sessions and big thanks go out to my Aunt Barbara and Uncle Steve for helping to fund these baskets.

In order to invite the community to these sessions, I went door to door handing out invitations (about 100 houses) and got to see parts of my community I had never seen before. Granted, my community is small. We are approximately 1, 300 people and the majority of those are children. We only have one street with a bunch of cement walkways sprouting off of it. My community’s population exploded (relatively speaking) all at once and the result is a very disorganized layout, a city planner’s nightmare. I find it charming in a tree house city/hidden passages kind of way. Anyway, I know all of the walkways but I didn’t know all of the houses off the walkways, way off into the muddy abyss, accessible only by precariously placed wooden planks and platforms. Now I do.

In other news, the 14th and 15th of September, two of the most important days on the Nica calendar, are coming up. We celebrate Nicaraguan independence and the Battle of San Jacinto on these days with smoke bombs, parades of school children, and local marching band competitions. The marching band consists of drums and what I can only guess is the glockenspiel. My dear father, Hrach Gregorian, played the glockenspiel in the Watertown Mass. marching band and used to proudly tell us that he was the only one you could hear on the high notes of the Star Spangled Banner. Well, that’s all the band is here: percussion and high notes. Along with the band, a group of about 25 girls dance the palillona, a combination of baton twirling and dirty dancing with the batons. The band and the girls have been practicing twice a day since July and in the evening, they practice in our town’s multiuse court and everyone gathers to watch their progress (I personally haven’t been able to note any). But regardless of how well the band plays or the girls dance, it is exciting for the kids participating and the town rallies around them. In a place where high school football or basketball games with cheerleaders only exist in pirated DVDs from the US, it is nice that these kids have the opportunity to participate in an organized, coached, group event with the community supporting them.

This past Saturday, my best Nicaraguan friend’s baby turned 1 year old! There have been certain mileposts marking the passage of my service along the way but the fact that baby Joshua, whom I first met when he was still in his mother’s womb, can walk, eat solid foods, and had his first birthday, really drives home the fact that I have been in my site for a year and five months (and that I will be leaving soon). Turns out, first birthday parties are a big deal here, of course much more for the parents than for the child who won’t remember a single thing. There were typical kid birthday party aspects that reminded me of home like the goody bags and balloons, and then there were the slightly off aspects that reminded me that I was living in Nicaragua, like when I asked how to hang the streamers and was told to simply glue them to the wall. Just put Elmer’s glue right on the wall. Take the bottle, twist the cap, and smear glue all over the interior wall of a house. In the end, the party was a success as only one kid got whacked in the head with the piñata stick and the birthday boy cried only for about 80% of the party. He did look adorable in the little green sneakers I bought him, though.

Other than that, the latest inconveniences are that there have been country wide electricity cuts due to an energy shortage, which means from 4pm to 8pm every day we are without lights, my digital camera has broken for the second time in my service (word to the wise: avoid Nikon Coolpix 3200 cameras), and my “NGO worker” Swiss Army watch’s special plastic band has torn in two, forcing me to tape it together everyday with electrical tape and leaving me every evening with a sticky, tape residuey, left wrist. Turns out that leather watch bands mold, fabric bands get stinky, and plastic ones tear in two. What can you do?