The following is the first of a series of "to the world" letters written while on a prolonged experience in Nicaragua in 1984, done as part of an independent university internship. I would click these letter out on a battered portable manual typewriter and send them up to my sister Rose in the U.S., who would copy and send them out to a network of friends, students and professors. Put into context, they represent an intense and important part of both my life and the history of Nicaragua during that time.
I’m sitting in the living room of my house at about
six-thirty in the evening on Sunday the 29th of April, 1984. I started to sit down about two hours ago to
type this letter, but alas, the gringo’s typewriter is a very popular item in
this house.
I’m living now in an Esteli neighborhood called “Jose Santos
Zelaya”. The neighborhood is named after
a famous Nicaraguan leader which, coincidentally, is also the name of the son
of my Nicaraguan host “mother”, who died fighting against Somoza’s National
Guard. My host mother’s name is Carmen
Montenegro. She is around fifty years
old and is raising her grandson Jorge, who is now six. Also living in the house are Carmen’s
daughter Imelda and Imelda’s daughter Maria Elisabeth.
I just took about a fifteen minute break from writing –
supper was served. Meals here have
varied greatly in quantity and type.
Tonight’s supper was a plate of mashed potatoes, coffee with milk and a
glass of water. The standard fare for
breakfast, lunch and dinner are rice, bean, potatoes, occasional eggs, cornmeal
tortillas and (praise be!) on yesterday and today some beef and chicken. I’ve already had the mandatory bout of
diarrhea that comes from a change in diet and germs. Deciding to get on with it, I’ve been
drinking the water and spent a day lying in bed feeling miserable. While it only lasted a day it was quite
intense and, in a black humor kind of way, had a funny ending: I started with a really high fever around
four in the afternoon and headed for the bed.
I woke up at about midnight in the pitch black, disoriented by my
newness in the house, somewhat out of it from the fever, and with a growling
stomach that was a pressing and immediate sign of oncoming diarrhea. I stumbled to the back door to try to get to
the outdoor latrine, trying to not make noise and wake up the rest of the
household. When I got to the door, I
found it barred and had no idea how to open it in the pitch dark. The unavoidable accident happened. I went back to my room, cleaned myself up as
much as possible with that day’s newspaper, and spent the rest of the night
placing additional sheets of newspaper on the (fortunately) dirt floor of the
room to contain a bit the recurring bouts of germ ridden sickness. The following morning I had the awkward job
of explaining the messy situation to my host mother Carmen. I struggled for the right Spanish words to
describe what had happened. I was
embarrassed. Yes, that was it! “Señora, estoy muy embarazado…” She laughed and told me that she didn’t think
that was possible, as ‘muy embarazado’ would mean that I was very
pregnant. When we finally came to a
common understanding of what had happened, she assured me that she had raised
enough children to know how to deal with sickness – no problem.)
Okay, back to a description of the house I am living
in. Aside from the already mentioned
members of the household, there is also Augusto, Carmen’s alcoholic son who
lives elsewhere, but shows up frequently to eat and/or sleep off a serious drinking
binge. There is also Cristela, Carmen’s
other daughter who is married and living in a nearby house with her
husband. Both daughters are in the
Sandinista army. There are also a vast
multitude of kids who come in and out of the house all day until the doors are
shut at night. It’s an incredible feeling! I don’t know that I have ever in my life been
in the middle of such activity. The day
starts at about five in the morning. As
I lie in my bed, the first sound I hear (apart from the crowing of neighborhood
roosters) is Carmen making the day’s tortillas – a steady “slap, slap, slap” as
she forms the ground corn meal into flat round shapes before placing them on
the clay pan for toasting. Soon the rest
of the household gets up and the radio goes on – LOUD! Usually it’s the Sandinista run “Radio
Venceremos” (Victory Radio) with a strange mixture of Nicaraguan music, Mexican
mariachi and the ever-present American disco.
The music will switch for traditional Latin music to an English language
version of “Hang on Sloopy”.
The neighborhood here is one of the newest and less
developed in Esteli. The streets are
dirt and stone and, from what I have been told, will turn to mud as the rainy
season starts. Carmen’s house is made of
brick and is basically made up of three, dirt-floored rooms. Two outer, street- side doors enter into a
small living room containing a wooden table, two benches along the wall, a
small bed and a foot-pedaled sewing machine.
There are two bedrooms on either side of a narrow hallway leading to the
back. The smaller of the two bedrooms is
for me – a privilege granted due to the fact that I am the only adult male in
the house and, surely, to the fact that I am a foreign guest . The rest of the family (Carmen, her grandson
Jorge, her daughter Imelda and the granddaughter Maria) all sleep in the
slightly larger other bedroom. I offered
that young Jorge could sleep in my bedroom with me, but for now it is a no
go. While this privileged status makes
me uncomfortable, to be truthful I’m really not going to protest too
strongly. Having a room to myself is my
only retreat to occasional solitude and this is not really very much as the
door to the bedroom consists only of a piece of cloth that doesn’t quite cover
the opening. The walls to the room don’t
quite reach the ceiling and are made of a few wooden slats that are filled in
with tattered pieces of cardboard and newspaper.
The rear door leads to an overgrown back yard. To the right is a semi-enclosed cooking
space that consists of a few sparsely placed wooden planks, topped with rusty sheets
of zinc roofing. Inside is a wood
burning, open faced clay stove and a wooden shelf/table along one wall, with a
hand turned corn grinder attached.
Cooking utensils are hung along the wall or left on the stove or
shelf. On the left of the patio is a
cement sink for washing dishes and clothes.
Beyond are overgrown fruit trees partially hiding a latrine and
shower. It took me two days to figure
out that there was a shower in the house!
On my first morning, I asked in my dictionary bound and pidgin Spanish
where I could wash (lavar) instead of where I could bathe (bañar). Of course I was directed, quite logically, to
the sink in the middle of the open patio next to the kitchen, where washing of
face and hands was common. I stupidly
thought to myself “this family is so poor that they don’t even have a shower”
and spent the next couple of mornings in middle of all the comings and goings
of the predominantly female occupants of the house, standing in a pair of
shorts in front of the sink, trying to discreetly wash my private parts under
the elastic band while the rest of the family looked on in disbelief (maybe
humor) at the strange gringo contortions and customs. Finally, Carmen asked me why I didn’t use the
shower in the back of the yard, which was effectively hidden by the overgrown
trees….
The shower itself (and the nearby latrine) are made of
roughly nailed together wooden slats. It´s
cold water, concrete toilet seat, gigantic cockroaches: All of this, while sounding bleak by North American
standards, is not really too bad.
Which leads into the first of many political statements I
will probably make in these letters:
By pre-revolution standards, these people have a lot more
now. The government is providing health
care to the poor. Many of you may have
heard of the literacy campaign that was successfully carried out during the
first year of the revolution – many who before were illiterate have learned to
read and write. Families may have
little, but they don’t go hungry. Much
of the problems and the shortages that folks are experiencing are caused by the
blockade being carried out by the United States government. Valuable and scarce national resources have
to be funneled into defending the border with Honduras. The people here believe that if the North American
government would stop its harassment of the Sandinista government, efforts
would be made to upgrade the standard of living...
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