NicaDayz - A day in the life

A Day in the Life of a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nicaragua by Joshua Berman Environmental Education, Nica 15, 1998-2000 La Trinidad, Estelí, Nicaragua

"You can't plant your trees today," explained the Directora of the school. "Someone found a live grenade in the cornfield and we're waiting for the police to come check the rest of the fence-line."
Well this was a new one, I thought. Plans often change in Nicaragua-in fact, if there is one thing "typical" about my life here, it is that things rarely go as expected. Flexibility, al suave, is key. But I can't say I'd heard the 'ole Grenade-in-the-Cornfield before. Apparently there used to be a Sandinista army battallion stationed on the other side of the fence during the war and the field-hand that helps with the school's modest corn harvest had come across a relic from the '80s. I had wanted to plant the trees (which a local bank had just donated) along the inside of the fence. Guess we'd have to wait. Too bad.

Cutting the black plastic away from the dark soil and roots, watching the childrens' hands delicately place the tree into the ground-this is one of the more satisfying activities I do. I get dirt under my fingernails and a new tree in the ground. The Simplicity of the act feels good. Instead, I would be spending my morning chasing down bureaucrats and the National Police, trying to get a de-mining team to the school. The Directora said she'd already called the cops, but I knew from nine months of experience in Nicaragua that it's best to follow up yourself on any job you want done. Besides, children were running unrestricted through the schoolyard and no one seemed to be taking the situation as seriously as me. I wondered if this was another of the "cultural bumps" our trainers had told us we would experience; that is, was my reaction to this event out of place because of something I didn't fully understand about Nicaraguans, or I was I correct to demand that we call the army down from Estelí to sweep the school yard with metal detectors?

"It was only a smoke grenade," said my counterpart in the Ministry of Education. "Don't worry. Go plant your trees."
Then he laughed and made a tiny circle with his thumb and forefinger, an obscene gesture making fun of my fear. He would be the first of three people to present it to me that day (followed by a teacher at the school and a policeman).

By now it was too late in the morning (too hot that is) to plant the trees anywhere-grenades or no-so I headed back to the casa for lunch. Unlocking my door, I walked inside and side-stepped the big puddle still on the floor from yesterday's downpour. The curved, red ceramic tiles that make up my roof were caving downward on a pine beam rotten with termites, and were admitting more water with each afternoon shower of the recently-begun postrero-the second growing period of the rainy season that starts in mid-August and runs through November-ish. My landlord told me he'd be arriving at 8:00 the next morning to replace the rotten beam, but I'd believe it when he actually showed up.

Right now I preferred to enjoy the greeting that my new kitten, Cobi-Dos, was giving me (another Simple Pleasure). (Cobi-Uno, in case you were wondering, escaped three days after she was given to me, never to be seen again). After putting down the cat, I walked through my spacious house to the bathroom. I live large for a Peace Corps Volunteer. My toilet flushes, my shower has decent pressure, my lights work, my dorm-fridge keeps my water and beer cold (but doesn't freeze), my hammock is wide, colorful and comfy, and I can check my e-mail every day from my laptop on the dining room table. I live alone in a house on the edge of town and I can hear the river from my bedroom. My rent is high compared to other volunteers in Nicaragua-the equivalent of $60 a month plus utilities-but they didn't all have the options that my site afforded me.

My buddy Rob, for instance, with whom I trained to carry out the same environmental education assignment lives just a few miles up the Pan-American Highway, but our living conditions could not be farther apart. His town of 350 people did not have any available real estate on the market when he moved in. He lives in a partitioned-off room in a stick-and-mud structure and eats what his Nica family serves him three times a day: rice, beans, tortilla and a chunk of tangy white homemade cheese called cuajada. Sometimes they give him an egg, cooked over a wood fire in a corner of the house stained black by years of kitchen smoke.

I thought about him fleetingly as I fired up my gas stove and ripped open a fresh box of mac-n-cheese that I had purchased on a recent shopping trip to the Super in Estelí. Nicaraguans don't hold to a strict siesta hour, but lunches are long and I had nothing planned for the afternoon. I sat out on my porch to eat. I was shirtless because of the heat, despite the threat of contracting Dengue fever from a daytime mosquito bite (it's the dusk-to-dawners that carry malaria but my chloroquine pills and the mesh womb of my mosquito net offer sufficient protection). I tolerated the usual flock of neighborhood children that gathered around me on the steps to chatter and watch the Town Gringo eat straight out of the pot.

My pueblo is relatively big-about 8,000 people or so-but not quite big enough for paved streets. Still, the traffic in front of my house makes for good watchin.' Mounted campesinos with molded cowboy hats, Elvis-sideburns, spurs, and rawhide saddlebags filled with corn or mangoes; strong-legged, thick-necked women yelling out the contents of the baskets and colored plastic buckets on their heads-"¡enchilada!melón!piña!tamale!" Once a day the jingle-bells of the ice cream cart are pushed down the block, eliciting Pavlovian responses in me and whatever kids can afford an ice cold Eskímo. The streets also serve as pasture/slop-trough for various pigs, chickens, emaciated dogs and the occasional cluster of stray cows.

A few of my neighbors have old pickup trucks for hauling bread from one of the town's bakeries and these rumble noisily to life to start their rounds early in the morning. I watched the passersby, automatically waving adios to my smiley neighbors, and my thoughts wandered back to the bomb in the garden.
"Only a smoke grenade."
Just a little haze to confuse and stall the enemy long enough to make your attack. I sometimes wonder if that's what I'm doing down here-stalling, regrouping, killing two years and three months before charging out of the gray cloud and back into the rush of Post-Grad Twenty-Something America. I don't really believe this-I'm learning and experiencing way too much to diminish my Peace Corps service to a mere cloud of smoke. Still, the Otherworld Reality of it all-the foreign-ness of my surroundings, my life here-sometimes bursts through the routine of my day with a thudded explosion, the effects of which range from an ironic If-My-Friends-In-New-York-Could-See-Me-Now Laughter to a Lonely Longing.

I wondered whether or not to call the Peace Corps office in Managua to seek advice on the grenade issue. I decided to wait it out a little more, and give la policía a chance. As far as I knew they hadn't shown up yet, but NicaTime is a little more elastic, a little looser than it is in the states. After 1:00 or so, the day here begins to noticeably cool down, especially if building clouds also build an expectation of rain. When it rains hard, everybody clears out of my street to make way for the white-capped brown torrent which inevitably comes rushing down toward the river, carrying much of the town's trash on its frothy surface. Sometimes it is knee-deep and fierce, trapping me in the comfort of my house and ensuring a few moments or, if I'm lucky, a few hours of solitude-times that I savor. The concept of intentionally spending time alone is not well understood here. It's not that it's not tolerated, but most Nicaraguans just don't choose to do so. I'm lucky to have the space that I do to be able to shut myself in when I need to.

One of the reasons I joined the Peace Corps had to do with the solo time I knew I'd have in which to develop my writing, music, reading, and artwork-all fueled by the fresh, rich, novel inspiration I encounter every day. Still, sometimes the best, most well-intentioned of my Nicaraguan friends are not culturally programmed to understand my subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) cues that It's Time To Go Now.

I thought about which of my personal activities I would take on that night as I scraped out the last couple of noodles and went back inside to wash the dishes. Then I remembered that I had invited a couple of friends over to play music at 6:00 (in NicaTime that means they should show up around 7:30 or so). One of my compadres plays percussion in a Nicaragua-reknowned merengue band called Los Mokuanes. He makes a decent living playing at dances all over the country, and was bringing his bongos over since it was Wednesday and he didn't have a gig that night. My other buddy is a low-key guitarist war vet from whom I've learned many of the Nicaraguan revolutionary folk songs, Cuban testimoniales, and Mexican rancheras. In exchange, I teach him blues, country, and bluegrass pickin.' It's a ritual we carry out about once a week. I have a perfect porch for settin' out and we usually attract a crowd of kids who sing along to the tunes they know and play the egg-shakers and kazoos that I pass out. Good, I thought, looking forward to the evening as I cleaned, dipped and rinsed the last glass.

That's when I happened to look up and spot the suspiciously angled black hairy shadows pointing out from one of the roof beams above my sink. That's her, I thought. For weeks I had been waiting for my resident picacaballo to show itself again. This was my chance, I realized, as I slyly reached for the long-handled broom-my weapon of choice-that was leaning against the wall. Picacaballo means "horse-biter." It is a big mother of a spider with a flesh-eating venom that got its name because it can cause a horse's hoof to fall off. There are wild tarantulas down here too, but they are cute and fluffy creatures compared to the picacaballo.

I poised myself, the broom in striking position. I noticed a white egg sack bulging out from the spider's stomach and knew that this kill was critical if I was to live free from flesh-eating terror. I don't think myself a Hunter by nature. "Live and let live," I always tell the kids in my neighborhood. "Todos los animales son nuestros amigos," I explain to them, including the wasps hanging from my roof, and the beautifully-decorated cockroaches and oversized beetles scuttling around the house. But the parasites, the blood-suckers, the picacaballos-They Must Die, I had decided firmly. And so in an instant I struck, missed, followed my prey along the top of the wall, and with the second jab the kill was mine and I was shaking the squished corpse onto the floor. The legs still twitched and the egg bubbles lay splattered, destroyed. With one more swift motion, I swept the carcass out into the open patio where, within seconds, it was discovered and efficiently hauled away and devoured by a million tiny ants, absorbing the lifeless meat back into nature.

The thrill of the hunt still pulsing through my veins, I returned to my living room, carrying my requisite Nalgene bottle of agua purificada, and eased back into a rocking chair to do some reading. Venomous Spiders, Smoke Grenades, Revolutionary War Songs, Tropical Sweat on my forearms and chest-yeah, I was feeling pretty tough now. A hot 'n gritty Warrior of Peace just trying to get the damn trees in the soil. Or maybe just a Bored and Imaginative Peace Corps Volunteer trying to create some drama in an otherwise slow afternoon. Either way, I was enjoying myself.

After an hour or so, I headed up toward the MED office to see what, if anything had been accomplished at the school. I knew the grenade had already been removed from the cornfield (by whom, I never quite figured out, except that it wasn't anyone official). My argument was pretty simple-if there was one grenade, there might be others, right? I prepared to re-present it to the Delegado again, risking more "tight-ass" insults.

"Did you speak to La Capitana of the police?," I asked after some small talk about what we ate for lunch.
"Sí, sí," he answered, trying to look busy by shuffling some papers around his desk and avoiding my eyes. "She said she thinks the grenade was thrown over the fence by a pair of suspicious-looking characters that two of her officers questioned last week. They were spotted near the river last Thursday, looking guilty and carrying nets and fishing rods. La Capitana thinks they planned on using the grenade to kill the fish in the river, and when they saw the approaching police, they got rid of the it in the schoolyard."
I guess I was impressed by the explanation, but continued my argument that maybe they threw more than one over the fence.
"Don't worry," he repeated several times, "it's safe. Go plant your trees, Voluntario."

Not quite reassured, I went to the police station which was empty except for one uninterested officer, picking his nose and watching "The Dukes of Hazard" (dubbed into Spanish, of course) in the big empty front room, a chair and the TV the only furniture or decoration of any kind.

School was out for the day anyway, so I made my way back to the house, stopping along the way to talk with various neighbors about the impending weather, the upcoming Independence Day festivities, and about when my gringo friends would be coming again for a visit. This is always a minor thrilling event for the neighborhood-a handfull of colorfully-dressed backpack-laden sweatycheles marching into town for the weekend. We get together once or twice a month, my compañeros and I. We swap stool sample stories, explore the surrounding hills, and cook spaghetti sauce and listen to James Brown. Our time together is precious and necessary.

When I got back to my house, I had time to write a letter before my guests arrived (I promised myself never to let a letter go unanswered while here and I had fallen behind since getting e-mail). It's funny-I've been asked to describe a "typical day" in my life here in so many of the letters I've received from home, but not once had I answered the request. I never thought I could. I hadn't stayed in one pattern or pace of life long enough to adopt any "typical day." From the Pre-Peace Corps Buzz of excitement and goodbyes, to the high-intensity, fast-paced Swirl of Training, to the Transition into my site, to the still-unpredictable Settling-In Period which continues even after six months in La Trinidad. But last night, immersed in Arundhati Roy'sThe God of Small Things in my rasta-flavored hammock I read "that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to."

I set the book down on my chest and chewed on that for a while, thinking about the parts of my day that I've recently noticed repeating themselves with a dependable, typical regularity, things that set the background for extraordinary events like the Grenade in the Cornfield. The sounds are the most obvious. For example, there's the thick crooning of mariachi music, peppered with trumpets, that oozes out of the bar up the block for something like 16 hours a day (the same tape set to play on a marathon loop). This and other sounds and sights have grown so constant that they have become obvious, tangible and permanent parts of my day. As permanent and natural as the air, the hills around me, and the hot, hot sun. Things like the lyrical rhythms of the language, childrens' screams, the damn parrot in a cage in front of the house next door, the roosters-they have all started to seem incredibly normal.

I tried my best to explain this in a letter to an old high school teacher (I carbon-copy my letters into a big, bound black journal so I don't have to face the common dilemma of where to devote my descriptive energies). I wrote to her about the grenade and the rain, rambled about the personal changes I've noticed, and explained how accostumbrado I've started to feel. As I wrote, a light drizzle came and went and the evening descended, gray and cool. Where, I asked, would the process take me from here?

I left the question hanging, and as I was signing the letter, I heard familiar voices shouting from the porch. "¡Buenas!," they yelled, the standard I've-arrived-and-want-to-enter-your-house greeting, short for either "Buenas dias," "Buenas tardes" or "Buenas noches," depending on the hour. The word is half-shouted, half-sung, with a lyrical, two-toned melody to it: "¡Bway-nas!"I closed the book, got up, and grabbed my guitar as I went to greet my friends at the open door. "¡Buenas noches!," I shouted back, smiling broadly now. After all, it was only a smoke grenade.