Sunday, July 31: Horses and volcanoes

James is on the mend today, and he’s terrifically relieved to be feeling better. We had a rough night with Jeremy, who kept crying in his sleep, so we’re having a slow start to the day, but we’re going to try going for a ride as a family on the second shift.

Back now: Jeremy did wonderfully well surviving a three-hour horseback ride. He walked, trotted, and even cantered—and on the first half of the ride he was reasonably happy with all three paces; trotting was his favorite. Noel took us up a different route so that instead of seeing the volcano from the ridge, we were looking at it from the top of another small mountain. The views off all sides were incredible. It was so kind of him to think of exposing us to more than one view, even though I think it was a longer ride.

Jeremy liked the "magic wand" grass, and we had a little duel. He died violently, but recovered to fight another day. And another...

On the way back, Jeremy was a little less happy about cantering; by the end, even trotting upset him, but Noel was very patient with us. We just meandered slowly, walking with an occasional trot, and we were lucky that the rain held off, giving us a gentle splatter instead of a total drenching.

Laguna de Apoyo, take 2

We had meant to go for a walk with Lea and Maria’s families today, but James came down with a bad stomach bug overnight, so I took a microbus out to tell them we couldn’t come. Microbus to calle 8 (which is actually a neighborhood, not a street), then walk to the first coco (coconut tree). What a charming address! Actually, all the addresses in Nicaragua are kind of like that: no street numbers in the whole country! Nicaraguans are kind of amused that foreigners find this difficult.

Then we latched onto a trip people were taking to Laguna de Apoyo: some people took public transport there, we rode in the back of the camionetta to a place called the Monkey Hut, which was not great for the children, since there was just a dock for diving off of, so I started off walking with the children to San Simian, where we had been two weeks earlier. Jeremy did very well: we told a story about mama squirrel and baby squirrel to help the 2k walk go faster. Mama squirrel was terribly whiny and kept wanting to stop, but baby squirrel encouraged her and sang to her and helped her keep moving.

Zoe had a nice time on the kayak and Jeremy “coached” Jackie on his dives. The warmth of the Laguna meant that everyone spent the best part of five hours in the water.

Over dinner, Lisa tried to coach us on working with Jeremy. James keeps asking for advice on setting boundaries. I think we need to make things more fun….

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.