This should have been posted on Sunday...

Hello friends.

A brief introductory note: This blog posting was meant to be posted on Sunday but the power went out for the latter part of the day. Much has happened since. I met a vibrant 80-something year old who wanted me to stay in his house while he took my flight back to Canada (so if my airport greeting party (there better be a party) sees a crazy 80-year old spouting off Spanish jokes wearing my backpack... then I have taken him up on his offer. Don't worry, though, he said that he would teach you all Spanish), I tried unsuccessfully to photograph a frog feeding, I fell in love with the world's stupidest insect, and I witnessed the scariest cliff-diving demonstration that I believe that I will ever see. More on all of that later, though, because it is on to Sunday's blog posting. Doo doo doo doo doo doo (that's the "going back in time" music from the movies)...

As a part of my project, I have spent the majority of the last week in a couple of rural communities. This has been an incredible experience and I have met some really wonderful people and families. I could get sappier but I don’t imagine that that is why you read these things. For that purpose, leaving Estelí has given me a completely new set of experiences that I will dutifully share below. This is only a tease, however, as not only do I have two more communities to visit, but I’m running dangerously low on time devotable to blogging because of a rainstorm that washed out the road into and out of the last community that I visited (meaning that I had to stay a little longer than expected). But more on that later. Enjoy!

In every community that I am visiting, I am facilitating a workshop and then spending the night with a family in the community. I should clarify, however, that the term “community” has seemingly no relation to geographical proximity in these areas. In the first community, for example, the workshop went really well but people kept joking throughout the morning about how far I was going to have to walk to get to the place that I was staying. They would point to the top of a far away hill and say “bye Vicente, see you tomorrow!” I chuckled, thinking that this was like people in Canmore who point to the top of a mountain and say “Oh, we live way up there”, when in fact they live about five minutes up said mountain. After the workshop, though, as we walked and walked and walked straight uphill for what seemed like hours, I realized that perhaps I should not have chuckled. Perhaps I should have saved every ounce of energy that I had for the hike. When we finally arrived at the house, we were, in fact, frighteningly close to the top of the hill and, although the view was beautiful, I could barely breathe. I had sweat coming out of places that had never sweat before. I couldn’t congratulate myself for making it though, because my exhaustion made me a sissy, not a hero, because: (1) the kids in this family have to do this hike every day to go to school and (2) as soon as we arrived, with me passed out on a chair, craving a puffer or something, one of the schoolkids grabbed a shovel and started working. Incredible. Perhaps as a testament to my atrophying muscles and my poor physical form, my legs were aching for four days following the hike up and down.

The hike was made a little bit more exciting because we were quite literally racing the rain. I am pleased to announce that we won by about 3 minutes. The hike down was also exciting (read: terrifying) because I ended up doing it completely myself. I was going to go down with the school kids (who likely would have laughed at my sweat and exhaustion), but apparently I took too long saying goodbye because they had already left. The people on top of the hill made it sound like they left seconds ago and that a brief jog would easily close the gap. Not thinking about what might happen if I didn’t find the kids, I set off jogging down the hill. Either the kids walked way faster than I could jog, hid in the bush and laughed as I jogged by, or took a shortcut because I never saw the kids. Do you know what can be scary? Going down a mountain road in the hills of Northern Nicaragua by yourself. Why is this scary? Because (1) I didn’t pay much attention to the road on the way up, (2) the sweat burning my eyes made me scared of blindness, (3) there are so many hills that you can’t really see your final destination, (4) on an earlier walk, I was so disoriented that when I pointed to a house and said “oh, is that where you live, you know, to orient myself?”, my guides laughed and answered that they live in the complete opposite direction (i.e. my orienteering confidence was pretty low), and (5) I don’t watch enough Survivorman to know what to do should I really get lost. Don’t worry, though, because I made it!

Hey, fun Nicaraguan fact: Did you know that cats here only have 7 lives. I don’t know what happened to the other two. It’s too bad, too, because they could really use the extras given the abuse that small children (and grown adults) put them through.

As (another) aside, I don’t know if I have mentioned that the rains have started. Almost every night, and sometimes during the day, it rains with a vengeance (both in Estelí and in the communities that I visited). The rains here have a way of ruining conversations, because the sound of even a light rain on a tin roof is pretty loud and the sound of a sizable downpour is deafening. This really puts a damper on conversing. I must confess, though, that sometimes that break is well-appreciated on my part because the days that I spend surrounded entirely by Spanish (i.e. working in Spanish, talking in Spanish, listening in Spanish, etc.) are absolutely exhausting. Not sweating-exhausting like the hike, but I have no doubt that if my brain could sweat, my “all Spanish” days would take on a disgusting new dimension. As it stands, however, they just tire me out beyond belief, which is why at times I consider the rain to be a welcome excuse.

Where the rain is not welcome is when it wipes out roads. My planned one night stay in the community was extended because of the rains that made the road into and out of the town impassable. So impassable, in fact, that one of the residents of the house that I was staying in was on her way back from the big town at the bottom of the hill when the bus she was in got stuck. In the pitch dark, without a flashlight, she ended up walking all the way up the muddy hill in the rain (an endeavour that took her anywhere between 4 and 5 hours) to finally arrive unexpectedly at 10:30 at night. I didn’t ask why she didn’t turn around and walk the one hour back to the big town. I imagine she had a good reason.

When I was driving up to the community, I already had a feeling that this might happen because even without big rains, we had four river-esque crossings to negotiate. Unfortunately, someone (the government? Contractors?) has a tendency of leaving rural road projects abandoned at various stages – some have barely begun, others look near completion – and it is these areas that end up flooding or getting washed out. When the projects are not abandoned, they park huge trucks in the middle of the road, blocking the passage of cars on their way to various communities (but that is a rant for a different day).

Getting information in a community without cell phone coverage (and, for at least 24 hours, no power) is quite an adventure as well. Everyone had a different idea about whether the bus would arrive or not. One person was sure that the buses wouldn’t come until Monday, another said that the community was completely cut off and would remain so indefinitely, and yet another said that he had seen several buses rumble by already. I also have no idea where the information comes from. Someone can leave the house for three seconds to go dump out some water, not talk to anyone in sight, and return with a wealth of new information on the bus schedule.

The main source of information, the radio, (which unfortunately didn’t work when the power went out and stayed out) is also something that I have come to love in Estelí and Nicaragua. My favourite radio features are:
- The constant, never-ending reminders of what time it is. Before and after every single news story, halfway through songs, between commercials, and at several other intervals, the DJ happily announces what time it is. He or she often does so in a few ways in a single sentence, which in English would amount to: “It is three forty-five PM, quarter to four in the afternoon, three o’clock and forty-five minutes, fifteen minutes until we reach four o’clock of the PM”. That this method of sharing the time takes a full minute itself is of no concern.
- The huge number of birthday wishes (interrupted by time reminders, of course) that occur several times an hour. It almost seems as though every man, woman, and child in the country with a birthday that day is mentioned. If you have never before heard a birthday segment go on for 7 minutes, you don’t know what you are missing. It’s incredible.
- Interrupting songs to promote the radio station. At any point during any song, the DJ may throw on the “You’re listening to Radio ABC, the radio station that loves you most” recording. Ideally, this occurs during an instrumental section, but there really are no guarantees.

In terms of music in general, Nicaraguans are very, very musical. This is one of several characteristics wherein they and I differ a great deal. I consider music to be background noise. I enjoy having it on but don’t ever pay attention to it. As such, I don’t know many song lyrics, song titles, artists, or really any information about songs or music in general. Here, however, seemingly every single person knows the words to every single song. Whether this is a neighbour belting out “Si Yo Era Chico” at the wee hours of the morning or the bus driver and his attendants belting out some song about tears (lagrimas) while careening down a muddy slope, the love of music runs deep. It seems to defy most stereotypical musical categories, too, because young women sing along to ranchero songs while big, buff men are more than happy to sing along to sappy Enrique Iglesias-esque pop tunes.

In both communities that I have stayed in, I have stayed amongst a plethora of chickens, chicks, roosters, dogs, cats, and a pig or two. My favourite are the chickens. Particularly the catching of chickens. The speed and agility required to catch a chicken is something that I do not possess. It is also something that a few old gentlemen and ladies don’t possess (if you’ve never a four-foot something women chase a chicken, you haven’t lived.). The successful chicken catchers can catch, transfer, and release a chicken with the single swoop of a hand (e.g. from the living room into the chicken room). Also, if you have never seen a chicken with its legs tied together try to escape from under a basket, it is a sight to behold. He made it quite some ways, but was then transferred to a spot under a large pan. And then into the large pan. With veggies and herbs. A very natural progression. Also, if you are wondering why Nicaraguans are so good at baseball, it may be because the rural kids catch chickens by throwing rocks at them first. An exercise that would take me about four days takes them just a few throws and a few minutes.