Wednesday January 24, 2007

Photos: I'm not sure what the man was selling, but he sure carried a large sword (left); basket-carrying on a road near La Concha; and a isolated mountain farming hut (bottom).

It’s a shame I’m leaving just as I’m feeling acclimated enough to gain tremendously more from my time here. I’m more confident, informed and willing to explore the city, people and country on a more intimate level. The wide-eyed me from the first night’s entry is very distant and my outright fear of cabbies has shifted to a healthy caution. I’ve viewed closely what those of privilege traditionally hold at a distance, occasionally read about in papers or throw a check at by way of their favorite televangelist charity. I’ve shied from the tourist route and blossoming American hotspots like Granada and San Juan del Sur, preferring a more natural immersion, inside looking out. I entered public health research for this opportunity, and I feel fortunate to have experienced this trip so early in my career. It has whetted my appetite for more, in the sea of suffering a search for relief and human truth.

I spent my final day hurriedly cramming my brain with remaining science information and images of Managua. I collected the necessary CDC paperwork to jump through the ever overreaching security hurdles with my human plasma samples, arranged my 5am ride, and enjoyed a final traditional Nicaraguan lunch with my professor and the lab. In the afternoon my house mother and her son joined me for a trip to Mercado Roberto Huemblas for my singular shopping opportunity. Upon first approach, the famous market’s facade appears like any bland American mini-mall, but entry reveals vast organized chaos, stretching indefinitely under a dim warehouse roof with narrow aisles and thousands of chirping vendors and shoppers bartering money for shoes, pottery, vegetables and t-shirts. Traditional capitalism, centuries out of place. Before dinner, I kicked the soccer ball in the street with the boys. Passing neighbors dodged our errant passes; we dodged passing cars.

Perhaps I love Nicaragua because it is a land of contrasts. Christ and cockfights, shantytowns and pristine beaches. It is beautiful and ugly, elegant and vulgar, sacred and profane. Perhaps I love Nicaragua because it was here where I first felt Western guilt and saw how the majority lives, unnoticed but resented, insulated by an extreme self-centeredness and entitlement of those in the land of the free, home of the brave.

Monday January 22, 2007

Photos: Crazy tarzan vines (left); Manuel, our guide, next to Manuel-sized leaves; and a standard farming family's home (bottom).

By 6:30 this morning I was in the back of a pickup on the road back to Managua. I’d stayed through Sunday night, to savor the warm showers and comfortably work on my lab presentation. It was striking how less struck I was by the sights of the capital upon my return; I suppose I’m acclimating myself more to the street-nameless city by the lake. This has certainly carried over and affected the ease at which I travel and talk to pulperia venders. (In Nicaragua, pulperia means convenience store, while in Spain it would translate as little squid shop.) I spoke for an hour about my lab’s microarray technology and why I was in town while my professor translated. It was received well and may have helped increase the lab’s vigilance for the good negative samples. One woman happily came forward with some inconclusive PCR results that may be evidence of a non-dengue infection.

I didn’t let the presentation stresses interfere with my Sunday hike through the mountains around La Concha. It was billed as a “morning walk,” which in British English must mean an hour drive deep up a one-lane dirt road in a tuk-tuk followed by a four-hour hike up and down mountain ridges. If so, I welcome more morning walks. This one happened to deliver all the good stuff you’d expect from a tropical mountain hike: dense flora, monstrous trees and vines, tropical birds, and the obligatory monkey family. What set this stroll apart was the glimpse it offered of the mountain farming lifestyle. Coffee is a great crop because it requires the shade of larger trees to grow well, so it keeps the woods woodsy. Unfortunately, the living one ekes from their little pitch of land with coffee and pineapples and this weird cactus fruit, can often finance little more than a plastic-walled shelter to house your six kids. I wondered how the farming family, replete with a full pineapple harvest, could possibly deliver their goods to market, several hilly miles away. Some must have the aid of pack animals. Others have six kids.

The contraception crisis is not limited to the farmers, but is rampant in the city as well, and six is a modest number. I’ve been asked to contrast the physical beauty of Nicaraguan and American women, but it is an impossible comparison to make because aging is skewed. American twenty-somethings are typically not burdened by the physical wear of repeated childbirths. They also tend to be unwed. An unwed, childless woman in her mid-twenties is a red flag here. She missed the boat. An American English teacher I met said of the 25 students in her teenaged class, four were pregnant and certainly on the road to marriage and more pregnancies. It’s difficult to address solutions to infectious disease and poverty without acknowledging the population explosion, a problem that can be blamed primarily on the dogmatic and unnatural suppression of unwed sex and women’s rights pitched by organized religion. Worse still, this is certainly not confined to Nicaragua.

Add it to the long list of needed projects. Nicaragua needs help, and deserves it, and the westerners I’ve met here are all bent on making it better. Unlike the Costa Rica crowd, full of Reggae backpackers changing their smoking scenery for a few months on daddy’s dime, ex-pats in Nicaragua have meaningful missions. The laundry list from people I’ve met: starting eco-hotels, teaching English, organizing Dow chemical company protests, transferring computer technology, building libraries, and aiding health care. Ideals are based on principles and principles must be adhered to, and as a result, the hippies play by the rules. This is the problem with hippies, and it does not bode well against the powerful, mendacious, and corrupt Halliburtons and puppet governments bent on breaking every rule to maintain the detrimental status quo serving the corporate interest. Rabble rabble!

Saturday January 20, 2007

Photos: Fellow travelers on the bumpy road to La Boquita (left), shaded huts with hammocks and rum, and a home-made beach umbrella (bottom).













I imagine world travelers of yore found much wonder in the man’s great creations, marvelous engineering feats and towering constructions conquering nature, but today it seems more remarkable to find beautiful country untouched by modern development, like La Boquita on Nicaraguan’s Pacific coast. The beach is reachable only by a 90-minute drive from La Concha over treacherously bumpy terrain through impoverished countryside. It very well may have been my most enjoyable beach experience, full of all the usual sun, sand, and surf of any coastline, but with several distinguishing features. I’ll return again to its desertedness, because being so pristine, it was utterly unbelievable to find it sans a gaudy Hilton or TGI Fridays. More incredible still was its lack of designer housing. No McMansions or condos. Just a few wooden shacks for the locals and a stretch of grass huts for the visitors to receive their drinks and food and recline in their hammocks. It went ocean, sand, jungle, stretching northward to the horizon. Incredible. It was a cloudless, sunny Saturday and, minus the waiters and boys peddling two-dollar horse rides, the beach population didn’t exceed 30 people, and certainly no other cheles. Instead of seagulls, there were flocks of stray dogs.

The journey itself was fascinating. For the final hour, once we navigated through the provincial towns, it was a straight shot to the coast, speeding and slowing and swerving to navigate the cavernous potholes, as all the locals from the isolated shacks looked on, just hanging out, raising their arms and cheering my passing camera. Children filled the potholes with dirt and flagged down our truck with outstretched hands, which we filled with cordobas. When they’re older they can haul dirt or stitch t-shirts from the local quarry or sweatshop, but until that lucky day their pothole tax is perpetual employment, because the next rain will undue all their work. Not too unlike mosquito-born diseases.

Friday January 19, 2007

Photos: An historic building in Managua controlled by military. I know that's a lame discription, but no one I met knew its name (left). Hotel Mariposa in La Concepcion, the proverbial getaway within getaways.

Judy is an older, ex-pat English woman, trying in her own saintly liberal way to save Central America in her retirement. She lives with her adopted, disabled Nicaraguan daughter in the country outside Managua and runs an eco-hotel and Spanish school. She grows her own produce amidst the tropical vegetation surrounding the hotel, serves only vegetarian meals, and runs the electricity and hot water heater by solar power. She pays local handymen and teachers livable wages to maintain the hotel and teach visiting students, and she adopts and nurses stray animals – dogs, cats, horses, and countless birds that don’t have to worry about being eaten. The chickens will be raised and distributed amongst local poor Nica families. She serves as caretaker, chef, guide, animal-mediator, and friend to the hotel and all under its hotel roof. I’m staying in her piece of jungle paradise for the weekend as a respite from the concrete jungle capital.

Before I continue about the tropical hippie haven, allow me to digress to the art of Managuan taxi patronage. Firstly, before I induce panic, let me assure worriers that nothing horrific has occurred to me during any of my rides and I haven’t been terribly frightened. Normal taxi behaviors need to be modified, however, to help obscure the flashing dollar sign hovering over my American head, because being white (un chele, aka gringo in Nicaragua) means I’m rich, and therefore more likely to be ribbed off or robbed. The stress is compounded because taxis are unmetered, poorly regulated, and buildings do not have numbers and streets have no names (the U2 song was referring to Managua, according to Judy). Also, using them is absolutely required because of the distances and abysmal bussing situation. When you hail a cab you first very confidently tell him where you want to go. You do not get in the cab. Since streets lack names, you give a direction by stating the barrio name, the nearest landmark, and how many blocks towards or away from the lake it is located. If he knows where it is, he’ll give you a price. This will always be way higher than is sanely reasonable. You very confidently counter his offer and if he changes his mind you can now get into the cab. Be sure to sit directly behind him and lock the door. If the price is bad, you send him on his way and hail another. Also, you need to say “Solamente yo,” or he’ll stop and pick up other people along the way, who may or may not be accomplices to aid in a robbery. You do not answer your cell phone in a cab, just as you wouldn’t foolishly work on your laptop. Every cab ride I’ve taken has been perfectly enjoyable, and most of these rules apply to after dusk hours. The reason you sit directly behind the driver is to make it more difficult for him to wield a knife and, of course, a final note - do not tip.

Let’s return to the happy hippie hotel, its lack of cabbies, and its general quiet peacefulness. The furnishings are not luxurious – simple wooden furniture, all constructed by local craftsmen, of course – but it’s far nicer than my city arrangements, and you sure can’t beat the hot shower. I have a private room, towels, blankets, and fancy ceiling fan. $25/night well spent. After dinner a group of us shared wine and celebratory champagne for a departing student at the end of his three-week stay. Judy shared good reads from her library. We chatted foreign policy, immigration, and world history. I listened closely, soaked in the starlight, contributed my bit to the discussion, and melted peacefully. A bit of gentleness in the eye of the world’s storm.

Thursday January 18, 2007

Photos: Moises and his house, (from left) before his shot, the doorway, and backyard with Lake Mangua in the distance. Children from the lakefront barrio (bottom).

Managua real estate is strange. The city borders a gigantic lake surrounded by breathtaking, dormant volcanoes, but years of massive industrial pollution left the water toxic and, as a result, the lakefront remains ignored by developers and left for the most destitute. I got to visit one of these barrios today.

I was escorted by a nurse and the PDVI program director to take a blood sample from a convalescent boy, named Moises, who lives with several women and several related children in a one room shelter in one of the most poor regions of Managua. Incredibly, I was granted permission to photograph the neighborhood and inside Moises’s house. Most of the floor space was composed of various bed pieces and cushions to sleep its several occupants; the rest of the dirt floor was reserved for the family chicken and an emaciated piglet. The least-decayed bed was reserved for an elderly woman, who lay motionless during the entire visit below a swarm of black flies. Strings of ragged clothing hung inside and out, and garbage was strewn throughout the backyard, which reaked of urine. We were offered drinks, a salty Tang-like brew, which I foolishly accepted, bringing all my lectures on tropical gastrointestinal parasites flashing back. The pig continuously squealed. I was later informed that this family is not even at the lowest rung of the ladder, because the beds and walls weren’t cardboard-based and the hose in the backyard actually brought a form of running water. A visit to a second patient, who’s house resembled my own humble arrangements, clearly distinguished Managua’s middle and lower classes, however deficient the middle ground may appear by developed standards. While I was overwhelmed by Moises’s situation, the other American’s that have lived in Managua for at least several months appear jaded by its normality.

After my day at the health center talking with doctors and familiarizing myself with the patient flow I visited the mall in el Metrocenter to complete my sweep of the economic spectrum. It was the type of scene to observe over some tea. Here was Western commercialization budding its beady little eyes out of the Nicaraguan landscape, poking upward, riding the profitable hopes and quarterly projections on the city’s famous first escalator to the glass display of a Radio Shack. Earlier today the water wasn’t running at the children’s health clinic, but 100,000-gallons of it towered upward from the mall’s rotunda fountain. Misallocated water flows alongside the misallocated dollars, away from Moises and his family and into the corporate coffers. The rich get to tote status-filled shopping bags, the status quo marches on. There’s water for my tea.

Wednesday January 17, 2007

Photos: modern art, Nica door-style (left), and Hospital Infantil. Children like their hospitals brightly colored.

I visited the bedside of a young girl hospitalized with dengue fever. She had been painfully sick for five days prior, but was accompanied by her mother and well on the road to recovery and away from the road to serious complications. Since the happy ending was in sight, I can look upon the episode selfishly as a nice legitimization of all my molecular and analytical research on a disease no one in America feels.

As I toured the pediatric hospital with two young doctors, I was bestowed a respect I would never receive in the self-gratifying halls of an American medical ivory tower. The medical and skilled professional classes of Nicaragua have suffered as their economy has suffered, and doctors, as a result, frequently take two jobs. They do not receive the pay or respect in their home country that would be afforded them if they studied or worked abroad, self-perpetuating the drain on their health care system. The best, brightest, and most ambitious leave where they are most needed. This is a medical problem plaguing much of the developing world. As a result, I was only a student, but American-educated and, therefore, undeservedly afforded a certain level of authority, on peer level with experienced young doctors who treat seriously sick children daily. Another Berkeley graduate student, who has spent several months here, tells me she is treated like the boss, and often reminded she doesn’t need to ask permission for her requests. The humorous benefit of this undue authority is that the American students and faculty running the studies can actually get the doctors to heed instructions and take the appropriate patient samples and data. A foreign-educated doctor recently joined the Children’s Hospital and, because he’s foreign-educated, is causing waves by doing as he pleases.

I drank Coke from a plastic bag today. The family serving lunch was especially attached to their bottles, so a coke-to-go became a coke in a bag tied off around a drinking straw. It wasn’t the easiest thing to carry. Gallo pinto is served at every meal, and I’m already sick of it, but madura will be greatly missed when I leave. It’s similar in color, shape and texture to a banana, but sweeter, excellent fried, and a good side for just about everything. It was off the menu tonight, however, which was good, because it might not have been the best accompaniment to my housemother’s lasagna; similar to the Italian version, but more watery, and using a bitter Nicaraguan queso. I had two helpings.

Tuesday January 16, 2007

Photos: Restaurants naturally extend from family kitchens (left), and dudes like their carts brightly colored.

Running water and towels are luxuries – not necessities – and I should probably grow accustomed to washing myself with water scooped from a 50-gallon plastic garbage can and drying myself with a t-shirt. The lack of conveniences makes every street sight prime photo opportunities – fathers push sons in wheelbarrows on roads shared by rickety buses and mule-drawn carts. The sensational to me is mundane to locals and hopefully my photo-inquisitiveness won’t draw their ire. Which leads me to my happy moment of the day. When I returned from lab, the household boys, upon encouragement from their mother, escorted me around the neighborhood to provide accompaniment from ladrones as I took photos. The boys saw the commonplace as I marveled and tried to photograph, without their notice, the barefoot street soccer games and women carrying baskets on their heads.

The line between restaurants and living rooms is thin and at lunchtime a lab member lead me down an alleyway and into a family’s living room where they set up tables and dished out food. I pointed at different pots, selecting a full helping of rice, pork, and plantains (madura) to go for less than two dollars. I ate in the lab building, and chatted with Christiano in half English half Spanish about my studies, his country and mine. Fifteen minutes after meeting him I was invited to Granada with him and a friend on Saturday. It’s a warmth and openness only seen in a country where you’re not taught to prematurely fear your neighbor. Apparently though, according to Christiano, Nicaraguans are taught to prematurely hate the Costa Ricans, though he doesn’t really remember why.

A 68% literacy rate doesn’t leave much chance for bilingualism. People who know absolutely zero English include every member of my household and almost every person of the lab. Fortunately, I spent most of my first day with Matute, a young, long-haired Nicaraguan who knows enough English to run me through the serology procedures and answer most of my English-Spanish hybrid questions. Luckily, much can be communicated without words.

My biggest difficulty so far – greater than the whole language barrier thing - is finding a bathroom with running water, soap, and towels with which to wash my hands. Water and electricity are unreliable, even in the National Lab. Combined with the 85 degree heat I always feel just a little dirty.

Monday January 15, 2007

Photos: Inside my apartment (left), and an extinct, lake-filled volcano from the descent into Managua.

Landing in Nicaragua means throwing away my American conveniences, like my plush apartment and ability to communicate with people around me. Jilma, the exceptionally nice Nicaraguan abuelacita seated next to me helped ease me into the language and culture by sharing family photos, assuring me su casa es mi casa, and insisting we exchange phone numbers. She was adamant I visit her grandchildren in Nicaragua and Virginia. Pretty nice start. The exchange helped reopen the Spanish-language part of my brain, partly relieving the language apprehension, which was promptly restored upon arriving at my host family’s house.

My $12/night room and board consists of two small rooms attached but separated from a few other small rooms shared by two older women and two young boys. Their names and relation were lost in translation, but I’m pretty sure one of the women works at the National Lab. The Archangel Gabrielle and Tweety Bird posted above my twin bed covered in yellow flowered sheets are supposed to protect me from danger, but I remain focused on the thin deadbolt between the noisy outside street and me. The adjoining room has a few chairs around a small table with a shrine simultaneously worshipping the Blessed Mother and miniature ceramic cats. An outdated 2005 San Francisco tapestry wall calendar momentarily returns me to my famous corner of the world. I share the bathroom with the world’s largest cockroach, but, per our agreement, not at the same time.

The nighttime drive through Managua from the airport found me witness to skinny stray dogs, corrugated tin, low-lying dwellings, and shirtless, tan young men riding bicycles and dirt bikes under an orange, fluorescent glow. My wide, inexperienced eyes rapidly sponged the surroundings, a sensory overdose. This is without a doubt the least developed land I’ve visited in my privileged years of privileged travel and I’m brought back to the niceness of Jilma to tell me what matters most in the sphere of human existence.

I may stand out, and I need to become all right with this. Ideally, smiling, expressing genuine interest in the language in culture, and being open to suggestions by my host mother of eating tongue and intestine can minimize this. Pero no pescado, por favor. Let’s not risk any allergy disasters.

There’s an element of helplessness so far. From that you build and grow, right?