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.