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!