Friday, July 29

Jeremy is still not happy doing lessons on his own, so I took my second lesson and we went with Jeremy’s teacher off to Jinotepe to check out a playground there. Jami had told me it was much better than the park in La Concha, which is just five minutes up the hill. So we waited 10 minutes for a microbus, rode 25 minutes to Jinotepe, walked ten minutes through Jinotepe to the park (which instead of having one pyramid style slide and one set of swings had maybe three sets of swings and a metal slide as well as a pyramid style one). We spent ten minutes at the park, with Jeremy begging for sweets from the stand nearby the entire time. Then I carried Jeremy for fifteen minutes through the Jinotepe market and we took a very slow microbus back. Kind of an exercise in futility all around. I’ve got to figure out better ways to keep him happy: he really misses his friends, especially Libby, Andreas, and Linda!

Yesterday morning, I went to order some maracas from a man in San Juan who makes them. He starts with a jícara fruit, cuts off the tip, makes the inside into juice, then hollows it out and leaves the shell to dry. Then they put in the sound-makers, attach a stick to the end, paint it red and black (Sandinista colors), and cut designs through the paint. He was just amazingly fast at cutting the pattern! He produced this design in the space of about a minute! He lives in a neighborhood called “Chorizo” (the sausage), perhaps because people are so densely packed in.

Thursday, July 28: Volcán Masaya

We were kind of thinking that Mombacho would be the highlight of our trip, since the cloud forest was so amazing, but Volcán Masaya was really a showstopper.

The views from the visitor center were truly panoramic…

But the volcano itself was just amazingly deep and colorful: not quite as bright as the Grand Canyon, but subtly varied and impossibly deep.

The original volcán was immense: the national park defined by its boundaries stretches for 54 square miles. In its current form, it includes two distinct volcanoes—Nindiri and Masaya—and each of these has more than one crater. The most explicitly “active” volcano is Santiago, one of the three craters on Nindiri. We started there, climbing up to the cross (replacing the one) set up by the first Spaniards to encounter the volcano, which they took to be the gates of hell. Somoza is supposed to have had the National Guard throw his opponents into the volcano from helicopters, partly confirming the association, if you ask me.

Then we went over to the smaller Masaya volcano and climbed past one crater: it was smaller than Santiago, and the last eruption was in the eighteenth century, but geologists say it may be more likely to erupt than Santiago, since Santiago is constantly venting gases, so heat and pressure don’t have a chance to build up.

At the top of the ridge, the views in all directions were just amazing.

Then we came down from the ridge and drove down to a hut where they gave us hard hats and flashlights, and we went to investigate the caves. We walked some 180 meters into one cave, down to the place where indigenous people made offerings to the deity they imagined inhabiting the volcanoes. We switched off the lights and stood for 15 seconds in silence, and it was pretty eerie. It would have taken guts to go make offerings there when the volcano was active. Still, a chilamate tree has sent roots all the way down through the tunnel: omens of life’s insistent persistence.

The second cave we visited was much smaller, and we went just to see the bats swirling around the entrance. Our friend Chris got a great shot of the bats, and also recorded this sound video of their wings buffeting the air. Jeremy was very proud of how well he did with the cave walk and the bats.

Finally, we went to a lookout that’s in the process of slowly collapsing, so they don’t let you drive near the edge, but you can walk over to a big concrete N and peer past it down into the crater to try to get a glimpse of the red lava in the depths. The camera saw this tiny bit of red better than I did!

Wednesday, July 27: Friends!

This afternoon, we went to visit three of James’s English students: Lea, Maria and Dulce. Dulce lives with Lea and Maria lives just next door. Lea and Maria each have three children. Lea and her husband have Alondra, Leo, and Josué Benjamin. Josué had heart surgery about 6 weeks ago, and he’s doing remarkably well, considering. An American foundation did the surgery for free, but his dad had to go work in Costa Rica for a month to make enough money for the special food he has needed, and for related costs. Maria has Celeste (who was very taken with Zoe), and two others: both boys, I think.

They gave us enormous glasses of purple pitaya juice and then took us to visit Lea’s father on his farm nearby: “you like to walk, right?” they kept asking. Jeremy wanted to be carried, which led to a discussion of mamita vs. papita children. Our kids are mamita (mama’s boy/girl); theirs are papita. On the way, they gave us a fresh coconut to drink the milk from (harder without a straw! You put your mouth to a thinly shaved hole in the side of the coco and suck out whatever you can: I gave up about half way through and handed the coco to Alondra. Ten minutes later, Maria had somehow broken off a piece of the shell and was using it to eat the meat out of the rest of the coco). Every few minutes, they would point to or hand us another kind of fruit: coco, mango (oh, the strings in the teeth!), piña, pitaya, papaya, banano, guyabara, and so on.

Lea’s dad was a real character: a Sandinista during the war, a supporter now. He was hard to understand, partly because he spoke Nicaraguan, partly because he was talking about things in unfamiliar terms. I wish I could remember some of his expressions. He’s selling a part of his farm because he’s now 77 and he’s got a lot of land for one man to manage: two manzanas? (I think). A manzana is evidently the size of two football fields. One of his children moved to Costa Rica, but he had nothing but disdain for people who go to Costa Rica. “They just want quick money: farming takes patience. You put in a piña in and you have to wait 18 months to get one fruit. People with no patience have no stomach for it.”

Coming back, we came up a narrow arroyo, cut by the rain. It was a slippery slide down the hillside to get to the bottom of the arroyo. Lea’s dad came with us to the bottom, then told James: “This is where we stood when the Somocistas were coming up. We had to really plant our feet, hold the rifle firm.” He acted it out in body language and it made the war very vivid: one could almost see the soldiers coming around the curve.

Lea and Alondra took us back on the microbus, and left us with a bag containing some 5 peeled coconuts, 8 mangoes, 4 pineapples. Just overwhelming.

Zoë and Isabel continue to keep each other entertained with cards during breaks...

Video game frogs

No visuals, but here are the sound effects:

Hiking (James) & healthcare (Betsy)

Tuesday, July 26

Talking with the teachers here makes we want to go into health services of one kind or another. Partly, it’s a matter of seeing how many people have been deeply affected by physical ailments—their own or others'. Johanna, my teacher this week, lost her 13-year-old son last year from a sudden fever: he died within two or three days of being very well. So now she has a ten-week-old baby, which she conceived quite deliberately not as a replacement for her lost son, but as a reason to keep going. She lost her mother when her youngest siblings were 8 and 9, and five of the seven siblings still live together. She’s the eldest, so she’s their second mother. In addition to her baby boy, her household includes a sister (31) with three children (16, 10, 6 months); a brother (30); another brother (24), severely injured in the running of the bulls—he broke his femur and a bunch of ribs, completely lost his jawbone and had to have 18 reconstructive surgeries—and still suffering the results; and a sister (23). They share a small house: three of the five siblings have work. The injured brother works in one of the sweatshops (Zona Franca) run by Koreans and Taiwanese in Nicaragua. He works twelve-hour days, four days on, four days off; for each four-day period or 48 hours, he makes $35. I think that works out to 73 cents an hour. Johanna worked in the sweatshops for eleven years: “It was hard work, but I was able to buy my house. It’s a small house, but it’s what I needed.” She works both as a teacher here, and as cook and a cake-maker to keep making ends meet.

Elisa lost her mother at age 3, from (in Nicaraguan terms at least) leukemia (“cancer of the blood”) caused by “aggravated anemia.” Evidently, in Nicaragua, people talk about three levels of anemia: the first is mild and easily treated; the second is more severe and complicated by malnutrition; the third leads to “blood cancer” and is considered largely irreversible. (???) I really want to know if there’s a way to translate this into something that would make logical sense to me. Again, families stick together: Elisa’s sister paid the fees that allowed Elisa to get her diploma from high school, and she desperately wants Elisa to move to Costa Rica to live with her.

(Elisa doesn’t want to because she doesn’t like the prejudice of Costa Ricans [Ticos] against Nicaraguans [Nicas]. Within a few months of moving, most Nicas change their accents and their way of speaking to blend in, but on a visit of five months, she refused to change. The change is big. Most Nicaraguans use the form “vos” at work, at home, and in the street: they only use “tu” with us foreigners because they know we like to use it. But Ticos only use usted, which must seem terribly foreign to a Nica.)

Back to health care: Johanna told me today that her sister gave her baby Tylenol for a fever at two months of age, and the baby had a convulsion and turned purple, and when they rushed the baby to the hospital, the doctors told them a) not to self-medicate and b) that for babies, Tylenol had to be mixed with milk or it would cause convulsions. Pardon my skepticism.

Health care is free here, as long as you have the time to wait until you can be seen. But at least it’s something. And the children are all vaccinated: even during the war, the Sandinistas were happy to declare a week’s peace to enable all children in a particular area to be inoculated against polio. Polio was eradicated in Nicaragua in the middle of a civil war. Betsy the nurse went on some vaccination rounds with the health care center where she was volunteering and evidently all the parents could produce their children’s vaccination records (puts me to shame!). Aubrey said that Nicaragua has an unbelievable 98% vaccination rate—and the 2% could just be parents who can’t produce the written record.

During our “grammar class” today, Lana (a lactation specialist) and I went to visit Jami’s 6-day-old grand-daughter, to see if Lana could help the 18-year-old mother breast-feed more effectively: the baby kept pulling off and wailing. Lana works in a hospital where 48% of the births are to mothers who only speak Spanish, and so she has most of the terminology down in Spanish. It was really interesting to watch her work—and to see (with people skills eyes) how much people say in their silences: she’s fine during the day (means… but not at night); the mom keeps nodding about the idea of freeing one hand from holding the baby to position the breast but doesn’t do it, because she doesn’t feel the baby is secure.

Life is so vulnerable here, but social ties seem correspondingly stronger. Johanna’s family and neighbors clubbed together to pay for her brother’s artificial jaw: an unbelievable $750. Remember that a teacher makes about $250 a year…. Together, they find the strength to go on.

Monkeys!

Monday, July 25

Lots of new people arrived today (or on Sunday), including a family with a twelve-year-old girl (hurray for Isabel!) and a two-and-a-half-year-old (Amelia). Our personal family fortunes immediately started looking up: it makes a huge difference to have people near your own age to hang with.

The most photogenic moment of the day was undoubtedly the monkey feeding.

Sunday, July 24: From the grotesque to the sublime.

Poor Jeremy got home from Mombacho and threw up all over the floor of our room. We were all taken aback. Another couple of episodes in the middle of the night, and then the worst was over—but he had a fever most of the day Sunday and a little on Monday morning. So Zoe and I got to go horseback riding and James stayed back with Jeremy—after Jeremy had a little time to get used to the idea of sitting on a horse.

The ride was quite the experience: mostly trotting and cantering, walking only through the steepest, rockiest part of the trail. You come up through this incredibly narrow trail mostly cut by the rain through what’s effectively a cliff, and suddenly find yourself on a ridge overlooking an immense valley and the grand Masaya volcano. The wind really whips you around: it’s incredibly exhilarating. Note the spume of gas from the volcano.

Then, after an appropriate period of awe-struck admiration, the horses race you all the way home. The guides let us go first, but they come behind, making that popping “bo bo bo bo” noise, and occasionally backing it up with a swat with a stick, so the horses just hightail it for home. It’s a little like I imagine riding a racehorse must feel: the horses nudging each other out of the way as we canter rapidly around a tight corner. I was on poor Cappucino: fourteen years old and having to canter the best part of four hours straight.

Aubrey the epidemiologist regaled us over supper with stories of effectively founding the field of tropical influenza in her first year of graduate school. What a great storyteller!

Betsy adds...

Jeremy was a little trouper throughout the day--as were the heroic men who carried him.


As you can see, Betsy was very happy.








James took this lovely shot of the "tunnel" through the rock.



We thought of Jacob as we stopped to investigate cool-looking bugs.








At the top of the volcano, a little deer (venado) nuzzled up to Jeremy, and I got trigger happy with the tiny flowers at the edge of the craters: how do they withstand the sulfur fumes?

Mombacho

Zoë’s version of the story

So, climbing up and down a volcano is all in a days work, right?

Maybe not.

We arrived at the volcano to discover that if you went for the whole thing, (admission, $3, ride up, $12, lunch, $7, and ride down $12) then you would be paying $34 per person. Not going to work so well for a family of four, right? We decided to go for the cheap way, and had lots of snacks that we had brought for lunch, and to walk up and down.

When we had barely even started, I began to get out of breath. That part is what, on the way back, we thought a good description would be flat. When we were almost at the halfway stop, I decided to use my inhaler, just in case.

We all walked the first half, which was reasonably steep, but for the second half my mum, Jeremy, Maro and Ceel took the truck, since Jeremy had been carried most of the way, and refused to go without a parent, and Ceel was getting pretty tired.

I think that they were the smart ones.

When we were halfway up the second part, we saw two male howler monkeys. It was really cool. Sadly, my mum had the camera. We might try to get a picture from someone else. Finally, when we got to the top, I was exhausted, and the people who had gone up in the truck had disappeared. We went inside the rest stop to have lunch, and when we came back outside, they were there again. Apparently they had gone on a very short walk while they were waiting for us to come back, and we had been faster then expected.

The next part was amazing. We walked through the cloud forest.

It was really beautiful, and we saw all sorts of cool plants. Lots, in order to get more light, live on the trees, and you can barely see the tree because of all of them. We went to some of the lookout points, and we managed to see the crater once, but the rest of the time we could only see cloud.

On the walk back down, Ceel decided to catch the truck again, but it was a long wait, so everyone else walked. There was a great moment when we all sat down in the road, and everyone wanted to take a picture. They had just set up their cameras on the timer, when we heard the sound of a truck. We got the cameras safe just in time. The second time around, there were no trucks, and it was really funny seeing everyone press their buttons and leap over the cameras to get into the picture. We took a picture of the cameras getting set up, too.

Soon, a pickup truck came by, and gave my mum, Jeremy, and a few other people a ride. By that time, even the experienced climber, Chris, was doing my mum’s knee-saving technique of walking forward for 20 steps, and backwards for 10.

The rest of the time was fairly uneventful, except that at the middle rest stop, my dad found a book full of engineering news from 1899. He was very excited.

We made it down to the bottom. I climbed up and down a volcano in one day at age twelve. I’m proud, but I have a feeling that I’ll be VERY sore tomorrow.