NicaDayz - Zen and the bus

Date: Sun, 16 May 1999 14:06:40 -0300
From: jberman@xxx.xxx.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Subject: Zen and the Bus

Breakfast has always been very important to me. More than that though, having the right place to go to for breakfast is essential. In East Meadow it was Bagelicious, in Providence it was Loui's, in Fort Jones it was the Fort Bowl Coffee Shop, and in Boulder it was the North Broadway Cafe. There's nothing quite like that slow Saturday or Sunday morning four-cups-of-lazy-coffee breakfast with a bunch of people with whom you were drunk the night before.

I don't quite have the options here in La Trinidad that I did in those other places, but I do have Don~a Carmenza's. The floor is packed dirt, it smells like smoke from the kitchen fires, and there are dozens of blackened ducks, cats, dogs and the occasional rat running around the stacks of bricks and other building material. Carmenza and her mother, daughters, and sisters are always smiling over the fires though, cackling at my joke attempts as they pound wet corn masa into tortillas. I just came from there with Jaime (HIGH-may, if you're just joining us is James Tong, my Peace Corps sitemate, a small business volunteer from L.A.), who has adopted Carmenza and her gap-toothed entourage as his local family. We each ate an overflowing plate of gallo pinto (rice and beans fried together), scrambled eggs, sour cream, avocado, nacatamale, cuajada (a homemade tangy white cheese), hot corn tortillas, and to drink: jicaro seed, milk and sugar. All of this for eight cordobas apiece, or about 75 cents american. Almost as good as the $2.99 number two special at Louis.

So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.

My stomach's full, I've got the afterglow from a shit-shower-shave session (it's the same satisfaction even with a bucket bath and pit latrine), and a fine coating of silvery termite wings is laid gently over my floor. Tomorrow's my big soybean workshop out on Don Valeriano's farm. It's part of the fundraiser project I did last December through the Nicaraguan Reconstrunction fund, and I promise a full report soon - especially for all y'all who donated money way back when.

In the meanime, check out the funky bus.

Zen & the Art of the Nicaraguan Bus by Josué Berman

"I think I'm tripping out, you guys."

I said this in earnest, turning my head through the thick, gray air toward my compañeros who were sitting next to me. The three of us-plus my adopted Nicaraguan mother-were crammed across the broken rear seat of a spaceship bubbled-back, patched-together jalopy of a 1960s yellow school bus which at one point in history (according to the faded letters along its sides) served the students of some Jefferson County USA. Each of my senses was being assaulted with a completely novel central american intensity.

"¡Agua!agua!agua!chocolita!leche-con-sabor!agua!agua!agua!agua!" The shouts of the aisle-vendors were loud, even though the shouters, many of whom were children, were hoarse from hawking their goods all day. At the moment, we waited in the heavy gaseous heat of a thousand exhaust pipes at the Huembes Mercado Terminale, glad to be sitting down, even if there were springs, broken wood, and decades-old stuffing sticking to our backs and swampy bottoms.

The vendors flowed as steadily and persistently as a line of zompopos (leaf-cutter ants, persistant and never-ending), starting at the old bus's entrance, and working their way back to the side-rear door in front of our seat, inevitably taking a few extra moments to stare at the moist gringos. Through the hot, distorted air, it could easily have been a hallucination.

Indeed, I was also a bit apprehensive about the tab of sketchy cheese that my mother, the kind Doña Mercedes had just fed me. We had received our diarrhea health charla that afternoon, and I tried my best not to envision various possible life histories of the spongy, salty chunk that had just ended up in my body. A sharp stain of flavor remained on the back of my throat.

Luckily, I was still in the "Honeymoon Phase" of my Cultural Adjustment Process, so such experiences as the Nicaraguan bus were still, according to the Peace Corps handout, "novel and quaint." Nevertheless, I was glad that my Shambhala Pocket Classic, Become What You Are (conveniently pocket-sized to read standing up on any third world bus) had just explained to me the power of detachment. That is, letting life "take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor to hasten the departure of things unpleasant." Not a bad thing to remember when you're crammed shoulder-to-freshly-vaccinated-shoulder, bouncing to the ryhthms of a poorly-paved, plastic-litter-lined highway and singing along with some outrageously out-of-place song like Barry Manilow's "Mandy" (the live version).

"Life," I once read in my lil' bus bible, "exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal." Now that was something to chew on for a few minutes-or at least for a few eternal moments-so I looked up from my book, stepped back into my crampled body, and was immediately soothed; the people around me were just as crowded and physically contorted as I, but they were all tallking animatedly, gesturing, whistling, and smiling at nothing in particular.

Then, studying the individuals in the crowd, my eyes stopped on an older man's baseball cap. Usually, the messages I see on third or fourth-generation American goodwill clothes are merely funny because of their untranslated and thus unnoticed irony-Tappa Kegga Bru, Itty Bitty Titty Club, and Oliver North for President are just a few I've seen so far.This time however, the words on the viejo's hat could not have been more appropriate: YOGA-Meditation.

The backdrop completed the scene: Through the western bank of open windows the sun had just set behind Volcán Masaya. The sky was orange, violet and black, and the silhouetted cone leaked a long cloud of gas that mixed, swirled and then faded with my thoughts.

I looked over at my patient friends, then turned to see my mother smiling up at me. "You're either on the bus, or you're off the bus," I remembered. And all at once, my body buzzed, reassured, completely content, and cramped up on a Nicaraguan bus.