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I began my epic voyage towards the discovery of more purpose than I've ever felt in my life awkwardly. Bill Calmbacher offered to drive me up to Plattsburgh from Schroon Lake at 10:30 Wednesday night. Not really wanting to make the trek alone, I accepted, and after a day spent sleeping in, going out for cappuchino, showering for an obscenely long time, eating chocolate-covered fruit and listening to lots of Tilly and the Wall, I went to meet him. I knew Bill was nice from seeing him around, but I'm not exceptionally skilled at the small talk, and it took a little while to warm up. My only apprehensions concerned the fact that I didn't seem to be worried enough about going to Nicaragua (the only people I spoke with before I left who had any idea what they were talking about told me to be very careful) and that I didn't think anyone would want to sit with me on the busride to Montreal. It is weird going to a foreign country with people you don't know, but who all know each other very well, and to be truthful, it's only now that the trip is over that I feel like the awkwardness has entirely dissipated. Hell, we're all planning to go to every prom ever with each other.
Luckily, in Montreal, most everyone was too tired to talk enthusiastically about mutual friends, and curled up in fetal positions on the floor of Trudeau and went to sleep. It was Ellen and Emma's New Year's refugee camp on a grand scale. I did not sleep, but rather listened to the French Canadians make fun of us for wearing matching t-shirts, sleeping on the floor, and checking 102 boxes of supplies. I had to tell several of them that I did not speak French. I'm such a sneak.
The gargantuan Air Transat airbus deposited us in Managua in an efficient five and a half hours. We piled into a bus that predated my existence, which was to be our primary mode of transportation for the week. The inside was plastered, and I do mean plastered, with pictures of Jesus, and sayings about Jesus, and some really funky rainbow-colored tape. It was ghetto fabulous. It was also upwards of 95 degrees, being midday on the equator.
This man is everywhere in Nicaragua.
Apparently in previous trips from the airport to our home base at Colegio Nino Jesus de Praga in Chiquilistagua, it was night, making it difficult to see the intense poverty prevalent in a country where the vast majority of people are unemployed. I'm no fan of Bush, but to even be griping about an unemployment rate that hovers around 10% is just petty and stupid when there are places with 70 or 80%. Dare I say I almost hope we outsource more? There were some billboards, but most advertisements were painted right onto the dirt. We got an unsettling view of the squalor- starving animals, houses half the size of an American sheds built slap-dash of cardboard and aluminum- in the noonday sun, as well as the official center of the city (which is, not surprisingly, a gigantic statue of Jesus.) The stunted and starving horses and occasional ox cart mingled with the cars, most of which would be laughable here. Paula's '89 Pontiac would be devastatingly sexy and modern. I had never heard of the handful of new cars that were around, the Prado for one, because American safety standards prevent them from being sold here. I can't say that I wasn't touched, but I wasn't gaping either. It all felt very natural to me, very real.
The one thing that did startle me was the barbed wire everywhere. Even around the houses that could barely be called such, there was the barbed wire. The really ritzy places, namely anything with a floor, also had high gated walls, with razor wire, broken bottles, or both on top. We later learned that the barbed wire was used by many people to tap electricity off the city lines, as they could not afford to pay for it. Not only, then, was it barbed, but also electrified. W00t.
We arrived in Chiquilistagua, where our two gun-toting guards opened the gates for us, and there was much rejoicing. All the security (there were guard dogs too) seemed rather like overkill, but then someone tried to break in the night before we left, and there were gun shots and dogs rioting in the streets, and it all made sense.
Our private little courtyard.
Unloading the 102 boxes from our Age of Disco schoolbus proved to be the last time the girls were called upon to do any grunt work. Anytime anything needed to be moved, people like Marty always called for "a strong guy," the chauvinistic pigs. Apparently I am a femininst. Not of the Marini breed, certainly, but in a country where 12-year old girls are still shunned and blamed for their rapes by family and classmates, you begin to realize these things about yourself. There literally was one girl who was beaten and raped as a 12-year old, and who is still suffering brain stem damage. The Mission assisted in prosecuting the rapist, but his family still harasses the girl, and her family and former friends have rejected her, because, you know, she brought it on herself. The Mission also helped her move to a different school, but her life will probably never be normal again. There's no social net in Nicaragua... none. There are no police in Chiquilistagua, or anywhere outside the city, no government outreach programs. Hell, the infrastructural damage from the Revolution, which ended in 1990, and from the hurricane, which was in 1998 I believe, has never been repaired, and probably never will be.
Yes, that would be the road, over a full story below where the road should be. Staircases are etched into the cliffside to reach the houses still standing. Some of them have antique cars trapped in the yard.
I was at first jealous when the kids started showing up in the courtyard, and all the people who had gone on mission before went out to meet their old friends. I didn't feel comfortable just walking around by myself trying to meet children I didn't have a language in common with, but I soon discovered it wasn't difficult (the fact that I kept instinctively speaking French rather than the few Spanish words I knew aside.) My linguistic ignorance was taxing for some of the kids at times, but I made out fairly well with a bastard mix of English, French, and Spanish, and a lot of pantomiming. And sometimes... nothing. You could be standing by yourself, and in the next instant have a child you'd never seen before with their arm around your waist. I averaged three to five kids during prime playtime hours, each one struggling to hold my hand, or even a finger. I feel like such a creep now, wanting to constantly hold these small children in a country where it's not socially acceptable. And it was weird, too. As you can see from the pictures, I looked particularly wretched all week (the climate and my skin being engaged in an epic battle,) and like the Pillsbury Dough Boy as per usual, and yet all the kids would whisper in my ear that I was "muy bonita" and things... and for the first time in my life... I almost believed it.
The girls discover that there are two Emilys running around the area.
My very first work crew of the trip was paint crew, where we touched up the school buildings. It wasn't too bad in some places, but on the sides of the buildings, even while under the eaves with sunglasses on, the sun was so bright working against the white paint that we had to work with our eyes completely shut.
Josh quoted Tom Sawyer's bit about painting fences to us in a hilarious Southern accent while we worked.
Our lunch break was interrupted with the sound of drums. Sometime between August and February, the school started a marching drum band for the teenage boys, and they were fantastic. One boy in particular, was so very into his instrument it was hot. Incredibly hot. All the girls I talked with independently brought it up.
Third from the left, with the red straps for his drum still on, was the hot one.
My disastrous second work crew was Rice & Beans, where we drove standing up in the back of an old and dilapidated pickup, migrant worker style, with backpacks full of food, to the poorest of the poor areas to distribute said food. This task involved crawling under, over, and through electrified barbed wire, hiking small mountains, the works. It was also one of the best things I got to do. Each family, or approximately five people, received two cups of rice and four of beans. This paltry amount, for which they were so grateful, was all the food they would have to eat that day, except for one family, which had a pair of iguanas hog-tied in the front yard for dinner. They were very proud of those iguanas. The mother tried to get me to pick them up. One family did not even have clothing for their nine or ten children, but they offered us a drink of water, when water was so hard to come by. That first Rice and Beans was one of the most appalling and amazing things I have ever, ever done. My car lives better than these people did in houses a third of the size of my garage, with dirt floors, no furniture, no windows, just a hole for a door, and each house with more than one family. One house (to be fair, it was about 3/4 the size of my garage rather than 1/3) had 12 families in it. 12. You probably can't imagine 12 families in your house, which is undoubtedly larger than these homes were, but try it.
Traveling in style to Rice & Beans
The landscape doing rice and beans.
Those are parrot houses in the tree.
Jesse holding a 2-month old baby at one of our stops.
This is a bit more extreme than normal, but this passes as a home for God knows how many people.
These are the houses we build, which should give you some sort of accurate understanding of how most of the people we work with live.
On the way back from Rice & Beans, standing up in the back of a pickup truck traveling at high rates of speed through a dusty, dusty country, and large piece of dirt or a small pebble flew under my sunglasses and into my eye, where it lacerated the inside of my eyelid. I faithfully tried to flush my eye out, to no avail. By dinner time, my one eye was swollen and red and watering so much that I was crying out of one eye. Keep in mind this was still the first day, so no one really knew me. I was not Emily. I was like Weird Eye Girl. I couldn't eat my dinner without dripping rivers into it, which I'm sure set me back in the monumental quest to stay hydrated, so I abandoned the task of eating and went back to flush my eye out again. The medical team stopped me, flushed and medicated me, and ordered me to rest. I had to get up again before the evening meeting to finish bathroom duty, which I'd been put on my very first day (I can explain what that entailed tomorrow,) so not a whole lot of resting transpired. I made it through the beginning of the meeting without much of a problem, but soon got to the point where I kept having to squint even my good eye for reasons unknown. Twitchy little beasts, eyes. The medical team again snatched me away, and barricaded me in the kitchen, where everyone quickly decided I was dying. Several of the students tried to come in to get water or see how I was doing, but only caught glimpses of me with a cold washcloth being held over my eyes by various members of the medical team before being shooed away to speculate about my odds of survival. The Nicaraguan doctor, Dr. Alvaro, was called in, and asked where the pain was. We had some fun explaining the difference between "corner" and "cornea," and then he fetched me some Nicaraguan eyedrops. My eye was patched up, and I was sent on my merry way. Josh's first words upon spotting me were, "Hot damn, girl, that's going to be one crazy tan line." And it was true. Oh it was true. I was all set up for a patch tan. And I laughed and laughed, and all was well once more.
This man saved my eye!
Adventures in Nicaragua to be continued...
Snow Day today, which was excellent. I needed that day off to ease my transition back to the first world. Really, I was only in Nicaragua for a week, but I honestly felt like I'd been there forever, that there was no New York. After six years, Albany still feels kind of alien to me. It was amazing coming back to luxury at first. I do love hot showers, for instance, but it's all unnecessary. I eat too much. I don't do anything. And I love my friends, but hearing about everyone's frat party extravaganzas all vacation made me feel like we were from different planets. There's no judgement involved in that statement either. People are free. I'm glad they had fun, but my complete lack of identity with the fun of everyone around me is unsettling to say the least. Maybe this is that fabled point where everyone's paths in life diverge. I've felt for a very long time like I don't belong in America, but had no basis for that feeling because I'd never really been anyplace else. Now, I think, I know.
Wanda was talking to Ben about the possibility of him staying in Chiquilistagua all summer. As she talked, I realized that I would love, beyond anything else, to do that, but it's just not feasible. I need to get a job so I could support myself doing something like that in the future. At least now I have something to work towards.