To all of my fans and confidants, I apologize for my lack of contact over the last month...it has been a whorlwind that has taken me all over the map of nicaragua. I write to you all today from the cozy abode of my dear friend Jana in Oakland, California, which answers a pending question that many of you have probably had. Tomorrow morning I will be interviewing at the University of San Francisco's midwifery program. It feels odd to be back in the states, so normal, and yet so far from home. So now for a quick recap of my last month.
I have had the distinct pleasure to have shared my last month with my personal tour guide and companero Cody. With him we have covered various terrains, often far from the reaches of modern society such as computers and cell phones and tourists(read: this is one excuse for why I haven't written in so long!). Traveling with a man, particularly in a very third world area, has allowed gender issues that exist in Latin American to turn to a palpable level. The idea of women's liberation and rights is far behind what a woman would experience in Mexico, and even further from a first world nation like the US. Most women's first sexual experiences in Nicaragua are violations, and as a friend told me recently, their frequency can be determined by the radial distance that a young woman lives form her local well. For myself as a white woman, I find myself embedded in a world of men, one in which few women have the opportunity to engage. Good women in Nicaragua are wives that are at home with their babies, not out socializing...a Nicaraguan proverb is that a woman is married or looking for a husband, there is no in-between. Women may also be classified as "amigas" women who are promiscuous and have sex with many men, "novias" or girlfriends which means that they may be involved in a relationship with a man for 24hours or a couple of weeks, or "esposa", a wife who only has sexual relations with one man (understand that these do not define a man's role). So in this world men are often overly polite, not truly themselves, or they completely ignore me as I don't easily fall into their catagorizations. When I walk the street with my companero or am within a circle of friends I am treated with respect and curisotiy. When I walk the street alone I fall back into the world of fresh meat...cat calls and attempted gropings!
So to leave the social realm of what it is like to be a woman in Nicaragua, what is it like for ME in Nicargua...a quick review of my parts of my itinerary:
Day one: spend the night on a private island in the isletas by Grenada, flor de cana rum in hand, with a group of fabulously gay men, who wear knee high white go-go boots and blue thong swimsuits as tour boats weave in and out of the isletas for a nicaraguan experience.
Day two: catch a ride in a new toyota corolla from Managua to Puerta Cabeza. The road is one hours worth paved, 11-20 hours (depending on your velocity) worth dirt with pot holes. Get caught in a log bridge to be fished out by passengers of the "express bus" from Managua. Arrive 5 am.
Day three: take high speed panga (boat) on wild carribean sea for two hours with Miskito family. This is truly communing with the sea when you jump several feet into the air after riding a wave only to crash down hard so that your teeth grind together as you hit the water once again. HOld onto greasy bike and little girl to avoid being thrown overboard.
Days four through six: be treated like kings in Sandy Bay, a little visited area on the northern atlantic coast of nicaragua, where you are served bread fruit, chicken feet soup, quisquisque cake, rice, and plantains. Visit local midwive refered to as a "grande" who is at least 90 years old living in a brightly painted stilted home that lookslike it could have been plucked out of early century jamaica.
Day seven: take boat trip up to Laguna de Bismuna. Buy crabs and fish directly from the boats of fishermen. Arrive at small stilted community where you are welcomed into a traditional miskito home. Learn to make miskito tortilla, have miskito language intensive class at night in the dark (no electricity except at the church) in the hammock. Sleep under pinklace mosquito net in a room with 6 other beds. Eat like kings three meals per day: fish, bread fruit, yucca, rice, miskito tortilla. Bath in the river.
Day ten: return to Puerta Cabeza via fish transport boat. SPend half of the ride like the queen of the nile, and other half been attacked by a one ton tire as you ride over deep ruts in the road, envolped by a tarp to keep out the rain and keep in the carbon dioxide and cigarette smoke. After fifteen hours ass is numb and you know that now you could take ANY ride in the world, no problem. Arrive 1 am. 1 pm board the "express" bus to Managua. Arrive 9 am the following day. Bus breaks down just frequently enough to take pee breaks!
The stories could go on and on...just imagine amazing rides, beautiful scenery, stilted homes, deep black people speaking a language that is a blend of a native tongue, colonized english and spanish, where turtle meat is a major food source, where teal and pink are common colors for wooden homes, where horses are a normal mode of transportation, where people are disabled from the sandanista and contra wars, where only young women are seen selling tortillas and homemade chees on buses coyly batting their eyes, where we eat 5 pounds of lobster tails in one sitting, drink 6 bags of home made fresco/liquad juices per day, eat raw oysters floating in their black blood in the park in Masaya...basically where anything goes and our days are filled with enjoyment! Not only am I not dead, but I am fabulously alive and sucking the marrow out of life in Nicaragua!
more soon...volunteering with doroty grenada in Mulukuku. Hope everyone is well and making it through winter. The magnolias are blooming in California!
