(This entry is sort of different than recent ones. Its philosophizings are the sort of thing I do a lot, and in this case result from a percolating mix of pre-trip conversations with Aja Acharya Thomas, reading of Charlotte Joko Beck's "Everyday Zen", a year of practicing meditation fairly regularly, and an ordinary lifetime of egoistic yearnings and frustrations. Thanks to all of them.)
Oh my brain. Oh my mind. I'm in Copan Ruinas, Honduras (site of a major Mayan archaeological site), deciding to stay another night even though I have nothing much to do here today except go to the "Enchanted Wings Butterfly House" and watch CNN in my twelve dollar hotel room. That's about it. Meditate some. I did that for twenty minutes this morning at 7:00. I find it hardest when I need it most, but at least I did that much. My mind running amok trying to think through the best plans and itineraries for the rest of this trip, whether to fly back from Mexico City on April 15 as originally planned or stick with new plan of April 21 to San Francisco. Too much thinking. Pros and cons. Finding myself depressed, feeling done with the trip, not caring about anything. On the one hand thinking when will I ever be back to Central America, I should maximize it, on the other hand just feeling done. Not caring if I get to the caves of Lanquin at all. The world's full of neat places, you'll never get to a fraction of them, or maybe you will but what matters is being YOU, being in reality, being in and of Love. Lanquin doesn't matter. Palenque *definitely* doesn't. What does? At moments like this I don't know. Connection. Love. But I have been incessantly trying to think with my mind what is the best route, and it isn't working.
Too much thinking, too little surrender, to little knowing that it is all just all good. Sometimes, yes. But running into that "nothing matters and what if it did?" feeling. And sad about various things. And feeling done with this kind of travel. Maybe domestically, as bike tour and hiking. But this? The peripatetic solitary Gringo? Done with it. I mean there's always my journalism, but I get tired of that too. But what then do I want? Life to just shower me with bon bons and swooning fans? Perfection without effort? Though I do know that all is perfection. I do know that. Meanwhile, the long process of actually growing up, waking up, realizing. Practice. Being with what is.
God, I know you are everywhere.
The difficulty of experientally realizing that the world is completely indifferent to my ego desires. The frustration, the anxiety, the annoyance, the egoistic petulance and judgement and temper, the petty ups and downs, and *self* judgement and recrimation, the instant and unconscious finding of lack in everything both outside and inside. But knowing and having simple faith that all is actually perfection, and the Self is in perfect alignment and reciprocity with all things. Faith but not hope. Hope means you think things are not how they should be and that somehow, someday you'll get there, to where they are all right and you are too: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes. But faith is simply knowing that God is. That creation is good, that in your truest being you are complete. Beyond whatever your mind hopes for. Hope is the product of the churning, scheming mind-machine. Faith is deciding to rest in what you know truly is. I would entitle a sermon "There is no hope. Thank God!"
God is. Creation is. What more do you want?
But then too there IS no God, if by God you mean some personage outside of you who will save you from yourself.
There is a power outside the *ego* though. This is the paradox. God is other than you and me, but not other than the absolute reality of things, including you and me.
The paradox of salvation is that no one, not even Jesus, Buddha, or any other enlightened teacher, can simply give it to you from "outside" yourself, but neither can you arrive at it just by some specific personal effort or ritual. The mysterious resolution of this paradox is something we call Grace, but grace is not simply an unbidden gift from outside. To speak or write of these things is to run into the limits of human language. There is no "outside" or "inside" of things, any more than there is an up and down in outer space. The seed that falls on well tended ground grows and thrives.
Watching cable news is instructive. Not of what is going on, for that you can just read the Yahoo News headlines. But to watch a 24 hour cable news channel is to witness the collective American monkey mind spinning its threads of unreality. The collective equivalent of the unquiet ego-brain storytelling, overanalysis, and fantasy-reality world-building. There is one mind. (If there was more than one, that would mean absolute separation and there is no such thing.) Who we each think we are is inextricable with the rest: all the stories, all the lives, all the interlocking, co-evolving house-of-mirrors house-of-cards subjectivity of the human world, the vacant colossus. Cable News (and most of the internet) are the chattering mouthpieces of the empty eyed Leviathan.
Across the street from my hotel an evangelical congregation is singing at the top of its lungs. They've found salvation. Is it an illusion? Are they happy because they are mistaken? I cannot say this. Only arrogance could say this. Krishnamurti said the truth is a pathless land (in his 1929 speech renouncing the World-Guru status his audience had placed upon him.) But each of us is yet on a path, and for many (especially in Latin America) the path to Truth is Evangelical Christianity. A practicioner's mistake is not that their path is not the Way, but believing that it is the *only* way, and if you're not on it you will burn in pain, maybe forever (and so by extension one must implore others to also follow this path. Not only evangelicals do this. Buddhists, ahtheists, scientists, and dog lovers all do too.) But a practicioner's actual lived experience just is what it is. That is ultimately what any path or practice is: life. One's *own* life. For these congregants, life includes lots of moments of swaying and singing "Si, Jesus Me Ama." But I cannot collectively or individually judge their (or anyone else's) path because I am not looking out through their eyes or experiencing their thoughts or feelings. And they can't judge mine. The Truth is a pathless land. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord.
I'm afraid I cannot tell you the name of this village. Lonely Planet only mentions it in passing, no listings for anything. That's kind of why I decided to stay here rather than the more famous town not far away. The more famous town has beautifuly painted houses and murals, and is also chockful of touristy handicraft shops and tourist hotels. But it's a good thing now and then to just wander into a town with no idea where you are going to stay, just hope something crops up. So many of us gringo/euro travelers march through Central America with noses firmly planted in the Lonely Planet book. But you learn after awhile that what you read in Lonely Planet is the opinion of one single person (for any given place) and that half the time the information (even in the new editions) is in some way outdated or just plain wrong.
So, about this town. The one I can't tell you the name of. It is the most beautiful village I have stayed in in all of Central America. It near the El Salvador/Honduras border. It might be in either country. It is on a mountainside. One of the highest mountains in all of El Salvador and Honduras rises pine clad above it on one side, on the other side a drop to a montane valley and more and more piney ridges. The houses are almost all painted in bright pastels, and most of the doors have a floral design painted above them. The are only two hotels, a crappy one with rooms like dark prison cells for 10 dollars, and an almost unbelievably nice one with airy rooms and a huge garden courtyard like a flowery dream, for 15 dollars. I'm at that place. Today I rode a local bus about 2,000 vertical feet straight up an astonishing series of steep curves to a tiny village perched on the edge of the world, and walked from there to the highest point in either El Salvador or Honduras. Oh how I wish the United States had a transportation system even half as good as the ones they have in these so called third world countries. Newsflash folks: these places are starting to surpass us.
They grow flowers up there, the kind you see in arrangements of tropical flowers. Lots of little farms of them. On the ride back down, an old man across the aisle from me was clutching an enormous bunch of them.
This village gets the best sunset you can imagine every night, west across the deep valley and the serrated ridges beyond. The people of the village, is it my imagination that they are totally laid back and casually friendly? So many places have a certain skeevy edge, people sizing you up with dollar signs in their eyes. None of that here. No bargaining on fruit with the streetside vendor, just a price that you know is actually the price. I think it is a combination of being relatively unexposed to gringo/euro tourists, and a greater general prosperity than many other places.
The schoolkids are, as always, out in droves in their uniforms. More so than anywhere since Jicaro, they greet me shyly but friendly, trying out "good bye" and "what your name?" Any greeting of "adios" or "buen dia" to the adults elicits a smile and a greeting in return.
Do they know they live in the most beautiful village in Central America? I don't know, though the way they paint their houses certainly exhibits a certain local pride.
Tomorrow it is back on the Gringo Trail, several buses and several hours to Copan Ruinas, a famous Mayan Ruin.
I don't mean to give the impression that El Salvador is simply some little Latino 51st state. Get outside the touristy spots (and even in them) and it is still full bore Latin America. The good and bad of it. Definitely more dollar rich than Nicaragua. In fact he US dollar is the official currency. A lot fewer bikes and horses. But by and large, utterly not North American, all the Pizza Huts notwithstanding.
I am in the city of Santa Ana, which I had never even heard of before this trip. Similiar architecturally to Leon but even less touristy. Just El Salvadoran, period. There is only one hostel in town, called Casa Frolaz. It is basically the house of a very friendly guy named Javier. And a very nice house at that. In fact I venture to say it is the nicest hostel I have ever stayed in anywhere. Marble floors, vaulted celings, hardwood banisters and staircase, idyllic courtyard garden with Avocado and banana trees both bearing nearly ripe fruit. Easy to stay longer than intended.
First, thanks to all of you who wrote to express concern about my having been held up at gunpoint in Tegucigalpa, and gratitude that I am fine. It was a crappy experience to be sure, but couldn't have been predicted (broad daylight, in front of a church) and hey, I'm alive and well and the guy only got 10 dollars cash, a lower-end digital camera, and the one thing I really miss, my sketchbook. Lived to tell the tale and all that.
I was an extra day in San Salvador because no intercity buses were running on Good Friday. That turned out fine since Good Friday was very interesting. I spent Easter Week in Xela, Guatemala last year, and by the end of it sort of felt done with processions and all that. But I went into downtown San Salvador and they had some really nice and huge designs in colored sawdust and flower petals in the street by the cathedral. One of the designs was by the El Salvadoran Scouts and depicted a scout joining Mary in giving comfort and a helping hand to the crucified Christ. Then when I got back to the hostel, to my surprise the whole street had designs that neighborhood people did in front of their houses. This is sort of a boring middle class neighborhood, one street over from a boulevard full of Burger Kings and Pizza Huts, and I did not expect it. One was by a girl and her sister of the earth surrounded by animals and words that said "Senor, ayudanos a cuidar nuestra planeta" (Lord, help us to care for our planet.) Others were more traditionally of crosses, Jesus, the bloody crucifixion, the sacred heart, Mary, etc. All were completed just in time to be trampled by the Good Friday procession from the nearby church, then swept up. I have a proposal for Portland: instead of painting intersections with nice designs that get totally worn out in only a few months and have to be repeatedly repainted, adopt this Latin American Semana Santa practice (but in summer, and secularly) of creating designs in colored sawdust and flowers which get intentionally tromped over by a procession and then swept away. It is very like the sand paintings of Tibetans and Navajo, one sees the same careful attention by the people down on all fours creating the designs that they know will be erased in a few hours.
Lessons in not being attached.
Now I am in a town called Juylua in the western highlands of El Salvador. The town is nice but like El Salvador generally, seems awash in money and Americanized prosperity compared to anywhere else I've been yet in Central America. There is a big weekend food fair here, and the town is packed with prosperous daytrippers from the capital. It all seems very North American in a certain way, the vibe of very middle and upper class people on a day trip to an acceptably clean tourist town, lining up for 5 dollar plates of food-fair type food. The only horses were giving rides around the block to urbanized visitors and their kids. Interesting to see that, after Nicaragua where in a town of similiar size and setting, horses would simply be transportation for a certain income strata: rural people with enough money to at least have a horse and not have to walk everywhere, a step up from just a bike too, but a notch below a motorcycle and not enough yet for a pickup. And there would be no tourists at all in the Nicaraguan town, save the occasional crazy Gringo or European. There would absolutely not be 5 dollar a plate food fair food and streets lined with shiny sedans from the capital. Not that Nicaragua does not have a middle and upper class, but the overt glistening Americanizaton of the scene is mostly in Managua.
My feelings about Latin America continue to range across a spectrum. Getting mugged of course was an all time low, but other times I really love it. All this Semana Santa stuff for example. It really is beautiful, however much the Catholic Church down here may be dying on the vine with the vivid onslaught of evangelical conversion. Hopefully some of these cultural practices will survive. I love the funereal martial brass band that accompanies every procession. Last night late on Easter Eve they were blaring it from loudspeakers at the main church, then rang the bells repeatedly at 11:20 PM, then fireworks went off in the street. So much blaring noise and music in Latin America. On the bus, along the sidewalk, everwhere. Cd's all seem to be sold by sidewalk vendors with racks of discs and a portable PA speaker blasting out the beats. There are literally dozens of these guys all along the streets of downtown San Slavador. Fewer roosters in El Salvador though. The prosperity again. You hear them everyhwere even right in the middle of cities in Nicaragua, but even in this small town of Juylua I hear them only from a far distance out past the edge.
Equations of monetary prosperity to rates of personal ownership and use of animals for food and transportation. If the general world economy drops off (which it will, and is starting to) El Salvador may look very different in even 5 years. And so will the US.
Now I'm in San Salvador, El Salvador. There are three very interesting churches downtown, in front of none of which was I held up. Other than that, the city may be distinguished by the highest concentration of Burger Kings, Wendy's, and Pizza Huts I have ever seen. Also KFC, Tony Roma's, and Central American chains like Pollo Campero and Mister Donut. Actually Mister Donuts may be based in North America somewhere but I have never seen it before and there are literally dozens of them here.
But what happens to all the shine and mall-dom here when the general American economy tanks and the remittances sent home by family working in the US slow from a sloppy gusher to a trickle, is a good guess. I'm guessing it won't be pretty for either El Salvador or any other country down here.
The trip was all pretty much a dream until this morning when in broad daylight in front of the largest church in Honduras (the Basilica of Supaya at the edge of Tegucigalpas) some guy waved a gun at me and took my camera and my daypack. I guess Agnes and her Dad were right to warn me about getting robbed in Honduras. Weird.
I would hope this is my one statistical chance of being robbed.
Not to freak people out or anything. Of course I'm bummed but what can I do? The daypack had nothing of monetary value in it but did have my sketchbook with some nice tree sketches I did while hiking in the forest on Isla de Ometepe and above Matagalpas. Most of the photos in the camera had already been saved to a separate CD. I may or may not replace the camera. One way or another, I've gone through a lot of digital cameras.
The main thing that disturbs me about it is what it says or doesn't say about the meaningfulness of life in general, the sheer randomness. It felt similiar last year when the dog bit me in Guatemala and I had to get rabies shots to avoid a possible (if unlikey, but you can't know for sure) horrible death. For a mind like mine that thinks a lot about life, meaning, karma, and all that, things like this can throw it for a loop.
I am in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. It is a far more interesting city than I expected. I would describe it as some kind of a strange combination of San Francisco and Butte, Montana, with some Honolulu or San Diego thrown in. It has my favorite kind of combination of hilly geography and dense architecture, steep narrow streets and unexpected vistas. But the spectrum of economic strata as embodied in residential and commercial architecture is far wider and more complex than one is used to in the US. I don't quite know how best to put it. Take San Francisco, go 60 years into the past and 10 years into the future, expand the Mission District to cover most of the city, also expand the Tenderloin to cover the rest, but keep the dot.com high rises and Russian Hill mansions and Daly City, keep all the hills and add some, subtract the bay and ocean but add an enveloping ring of piney mountains, and add equal parts shantytowns and gated communities to the upper slopes at the edges. There's Tegucigalpa, more or less.
Well, the time has finally come to leave Nicaragua. Hard to give a final encapsulation of 6 weeks of such intense and varied experience. The cob project was the centerpiece and was really what made it. Not the fact of slinging mud every day (though partly that) but everything that came together because of it and through it. So many times in my Latin American travels heretofore (last year and this trip before arriving in Matagalpa) I have had the feeling of simply being a spectator but not really getting to know the local people or having any deeper experience or understanding of the scene swirling around me. Partly the problem has been language, and I am certainly finding that as my spanish improves (bit by bit, week by week) I am much more able to interact and have some understanding of what's going on. Some of this is as mundane as realizing that all that unintelligible jabbering all around me was really just mostly about very ordinary boring stuff, no different than what people yabber on about in any english language American setting. Human monkey chatter. And then to see real live monkeys doing the same in trees above me in the forest, really brings it home. But with our chatter is stories. Like I said before, all connected and multifaceted. Everyone's are ultimately just as compelling as the ones I encountered in Matagalpa, but being in someplace new and different to my sensibilities really helps to bring out the vividness and color.
At first up at the project site I felt kind of tentative, an outsider. This is maybe only natural, and then too I have been feeling in a place of social ackwardness. It can take me awhile to warm up to new situations. But the local workers and participants in the project were so hardworking and simply friendly that I could not help but come to love the experience every day, and more so as it went along. There were hard days, days Carey and Mary and I (the Portlanders) thought it seemed like the thing would never be done. And in truth the walls still need a bit more cob at the top that has to be completed after don Fausto and Oscar finish the roof. The roof is (and will be) a thing of beauty but Fausto is nothing if not a deliberate worker. By industrial standards he is downright slow. But he is getting a flat fee (based on his estimate) for his labor and he is doing it at the place he enjoys. His work is master craftsmanship and is obviously what he wants to be doing every day. I never once saw him in what I would call a hurry or stressed out or visibly annoyed or any of those other states we so often find ourselves in.
As the project went along I started singing little cob songs in spanish, prompted by Eliseo having taught me a couple of short Nicaraguan songs. Music is extraordinarily all pervasive in Nicaragua and the rest of Latin America. And most of it is really good. It comes in a variety of styles, and although nearly every song has the phrase "mi corazon" in it, the general musical quality is simply higher than most of what you hear on North American radio. Not that they don't also love Euro-American pop music, especially cheezy love ballads of the 70's and 80's and for some reason in particular the song "Hotel California." Now to contradict myself immediately, there is also plenty of Latin American music that just simply annoys me (regardless of its objective quality), particularly when blasted at deafening volumes on a crowded intercity bus at 6AM or on a sweltering afternoon. Quite often people (especially girls, but guys too) will sing along out loud to a favorite song when it comes on the radio.
I took my first foray into Spanish language song writing with a song I wrote and sang for the gang called "La casa de libros y amor." A cheezy little song, but people seemed to like it and Eliseo wants me to email him the lyrics so he can print them out and post them in la casa luna y estrella (the name of the building) when it is done.
Fausto says he is going to build me a guitar for when I come back so we can have a little song share and concierto in the library. With that enticement alone I will have to return. How can I not? The danger of having a more meaningful stay in a place is that you will fall in love with it and the people, and want to come back. But that is not a bad thing.
We had one more hike up to the pottery ladies' place, accompanied by a long term Matagalpa volunteer named Kendall Sparks who also helped us out a lot on the cob project. Kendall spends part of every day trying to mentor and tutor wild glue-sniffing street kids in the city, something I can only admire as beyond what I would want to attempt. But Kendall is a natural with kids and somehow makes it look easy.
There is something about the pottery ladies and their place that I just cannot describe. I took lots of photos that hopefully will give at least an inkling. But there was more to it than that. The second oldest of them (86) has become ill and though she is still making pottery every day, the others think she is dying. They all have high blood pressure, but the youngest sister said that the real problem is that the ill one has become sad. It is apparently the same as what happened with the oldest one last August before she passed away. The time to go is sort of just recognized, and her condition worsens. Part of this one's sadness is no doubt about the oldest sister's passing.
So being there and seeing them working (and graciously answering our questions) but knowing that the sisters themselves think the next one is not long for the world, was very emotional. Their place feels like some kind of sanctuary, but even sanctuaries are no protection from the processes of life.
The youngest one (who is also Carmen the schoolteacher's mother) told us that during the war years, all around the area there was fighting, attacks by all sides, death. But right there in the immediate vicinity of where they live (but not beyond it) no soldiers, no Somoza Guardsmen, no Sandinistas, no Contras, ever came. It was as if they were invisible to the armies and soldiers. Thus many people hid out near their house, slept right under their workshop roof and among the boulders, and no combatants ever knew of or discovered them. I said to her "its a blessed place" ("es un lugar bendito") and she just smiled.
The Castro family (Dominique's friend Agnes) were very concerned to learn that I planned to travel through El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, which they consider to be very dangerous places. Her father don Daniel in particular expressed grave concern that I be be very careful, because I could apparently very easily be robbed or murdered by gangs or bandits in any of these non-Nicaraguan places. In truth they get most of their information about these other Central American countries from horror stories on the nightly news. There is some truth there, inasmuch as those three countries really do have more gangs, crime and murder than Nicaragua. But the danger for a traveler on the Gringo trail is pretty low. But I assured him I would be very careful. Mainly I was touched that they were so concerned for me and so obviously hoping that I might just decide to stay longer in Matagalpa instead.
Dominique left last monday for England to visit her sons and her grandson, and will be back home in Matagalpa in June to continue her inspired shepherding of Project jicaro. It was really a lesson to see how one person can materialize something very beautiful and far reaching in its impacts, simply through the power of their ability to interact with and build relationships with a wide variety of people.
Upon leaving Matagalpa I did a three day whirlwind of Leon, Esteli, Ocotal, before heading north to Tegucigalpas, Honduras, where I am now. Leon is sweltering but attractive and truly Nicaraguan. If you ever decide to visit and be a tourist in just one city in Nicaragua, make it Leon over Granada any day. They each look very alike (old colonial, etc.) but Leon has way fewer tourists. Some, just not swarms like in Granada. As for Managua, it is not a place to visit as a tourist. It was destroyed by an earthquake in 1972 and rebuilt as a sprawling no-place agglomeration that no one in their right mind would try to walk through. Just getting from one bus terminal to another when I transferred there was a 25 minute taxi ride.
It is usually the days you don't expect it that turn out to be amazing. I wasn't even really looking all that much forward to this day. We finished up the cobbing (except for some bits at the top where the roof needs to get finished first) a couple of days ago, and Otilia invited us to go with her on Friday to spend a day and a night with one of her sons who works for a Finca way out of Matagalpa. Of course we said yes, but I was pretty worn out from a month of non-stop heavy labor and didn't terribly relish the idea of a 2 hour bus ride at 6 AM to go swelter at some coffee plantation. But it ended up so much more than that.
The 5 AM wake up was a bit tough and the bus packed and the road rough as per usual, but the scenery east up and out of Matagalpa into the higher highlands goes from pretty to tropical-mountain paradaisical. By the time we all piled off with Otilila and Evette (her ever-enthusiastic 10 year old granddaughter) there wasn't even trash along the road. How is that possible? Belive me, you almost never see that in Central America. The bus dropped us right at her son Jaime's doorstep at 8:30 AM. I'd brought books to read, imagining a potentially do nothing day. In the best possible way, this was not the case.
Right off the bat Jaime greeted us cordially and we entered the modest wood frame house and immediately a small crowd of 8 country kids extended their hands to us then backed shyly to the wall or into the kitchen. They had apparently never seen anything like us. I asked Otilia if we were the first gringos to ever visit there and she said yes. I asked Jaime the same thing just to be sure and he said yes too. Actually the Finca he works for nearby is owned by Greeks, but they live in Matagalpa and do not count as gringos.
Immediately he took us on a tour of his little property. It is a tropical garden mini-paradise. In trying to desribe this day I keep coming back the the word paradise. From the house there are several acres sloping down to a clean and tree shaded riverside. Fruit trees, trellises, rows of beans and cabbage, bananas. Then after the family served us a breakfast of rice and beans, we walked over to his sister's place nearby for another tropical garden tour. Otilia made exquisite unsweetened lemonade from huge gnarly looking lemons that the boys knocked out of the tree with sticks. Then we feasted on fresh picked cocoa beans. To our surprise, they are big soft brown seeds encased within the soft white flesh of a tropical fruit the size of a large mango. Who knew? I sure never did. Both houses have Lorena stoves, the efficient and much less smoky type of wood burning stove designed originally by Ianto Evans the cob guru when he lived and worked in Guatemala in the 1970's. The stoves here were built as part of a government project that actually did some good. 32 families in this area have them. Jaime's sister is on the local board of the project. In the future we'll get one built at Project Jicaro.
Jaime cares for the cattle at the nearby Finca La Grecia. The owners came from Greece but mostly live in Matagalpa rather than at the Finca. Jaime says they are better owners than Nicaraguan ones would be. Whether that is true or not I cannot say, but he thinks so. Less bound by the ingrained traditions of a national ruling-class lording arrogantly over the peasantry. They let him take agronomy classes in Managua and gave him half the materials to build his modest but very neat wooden house. They like the fact that he does not drink. Like in many poor places, overdrinking (the only kind that happens at all) is a bain of life in rural Nicaragua.
The cattle at the Finca are very free-range and organic, as are the other things they grow. Most of the extensive acreage is hilly pasture and woods looking out over a spectacular and paradaisical (there I go again) landscape of tropical forest and peaks. After lunch Jaime, along with his 4 daughters (one is adopted) and three sons led us on an idyllic hike up to and all through the Finca. I rode his mule for a little while. It was an amazingly calm beast (so I'm told) for a mule. The views from up top made us wonder (although we already had) if we'd stumbled into some unwritten/unknown Shangri-La. Peaks, pastures, trees, golden sunlight, greenness upon greenness of shapely little mountains to all horizons. Very much less populated than the Guatemalan highlands. With Jaime and all 8 kids and us and Otilia and Evette all traipsing together up and down hill and dale, it felt like some Nica Swiss Family Robinson.
Best for last, he led us to a high hidden waterfall in the deep woods, in which we spashed and swam while monkeys leaped in the branches above. The kids hauled along drinking water in a bucket with ice.
The family fed us 3 meals altogether (one of which was a rich soup of chicken and vegetables) and made up neat beds for all of us. But get this: they not only made UP the beds, they actually MADE a bed from wood to accomodate us. As we got back from the hike one of the women was just cleaning up the wood scraps from having just BUILT a bed. Quite honestly, I cannot think when I have ever exprerienced quite such hospitality. Though decently well off by rural working class Nicaraguan standards, this is still a family of very modest means. When we offered to give them a bit of money to cover the cost of all the food they plied us with, they adamantly refused. We did manage to help out with shelling fresh red-beans in the kitchen. The kids were able to shell about three for every one that I completed. Shy at first, the kids warmed up a lot, especially once I started showing them the little mini-movies I made on my camera. There was one in particular of them clowning that they delightedly had me replay at least 20 times.
I've never been in a place that felt more like some sort of eden. To me, high mountain alpine wilderness areas are the definition of paradise, but in truth they are not humanly livable. They are snow and ice for 9 months a year. This place was a real eden, the kind that people can live in. The bus back to Matgalpa came by at 5:20 AM the next morning and the whole family was up to serve us coffee (rich, earthy, fresh from the bush it grows on) and see us off. Idyllic surroundings notwithstanding, their amazing friendliness and hospitality is what really made the experience.
The cobbing on the library is basically done. It has been a really amazing experience, of which I will write more. I will be leaving Matagalpa in a few days, since I need to head onward to my eventual flight home from Mexico City. I love Matagalpa though. It is not a tourist destination at all, and that may be part of it. I offer here a few observations from the past few weeks.
Walking down the main shopping street of Matagalpa on a weekend afternoon is a jarring experience. There's just so much noise. There are a pair of electronics and appliance stores across the street from each other, and they each blast music out onto the street and across at each other from huge speakers placed right next to the sidewalk. There is obviously no noise ordinance here. Down the street comes a little van with a pair of enormous megaphones on top blasting advertisements or funeral announcements or announcements of the impending arrival of Christ. Five minutes later another megaphone car. Meanwhile meters away on a side street a guy is tieing a horse to a streetlight post to head into the Supermercado or the casino. He quite possibly has a cell phone. In Nicaragua It honestly sometimes feels like a combination of 3 different centuries, 19th, 20th, and 21st. On some roads you see more horses than either cars or motorbikes. Up at the Project Jicaro jobsite horses and occasionally oxen go past laden with firewood or lumber or tanks of water. In other cities you see a very large number of bicycles, but the streets of residential Matagalpa are just too steep for there to be more than a few bikes. I mean seriously long steep hills on all sides, the kind that if Portland was that way, it would not be Bike City USA. The amazing thing though is to see kids playing soccer on these streets. They basically just play uphill toward one common goal. And the ice cream cart guys will haul their carts up hills that would kill the average American just walking. There is a baker who walks up to the very top of the Barrio of Tule (at the top of which is the cob library) with an absolutley enormous basket of bread balanced on his head, selling loaves and rolls to the women doing their chores. To give you a sense of the scale (at least to Portlanders) I'm talking about hills as high, and with generally steeper streets, than most of the West Hills of Portland, but in all directions. Not surprisingly there are also a lot of Taxis, and they are usually shared with other people going the same direction. Nicaragua is also where all the old Toyota Landcruisers seem to go for another 20 year lease on life (along with the usual 1979 model Bluebird schoolbuses.) There are new vehicles too of course. The range of incomes here is enormous. On the same street you might see houses that are little more than shacks and gigantic mansion sized dwellings with razor wire atop the garden walls. The majority though are basic attached houses with all the usual middle class comforts once inside: tile floors, TV, garden, pics of the family on the wall. No hot water though. Never seen it yet in Nicaragua. Probably in the mansion houses.
Practically everyone outside the central city (and many in it) have chickens and roosters. The roosters crow all day and much of the night, competing with the dogs for kingship of cacauphony. The dogs hang out on the streets and roads all day, usually benign though sometimes menacing. But unlike Guatemala there don't seem to be packs of feral street dogs running around. The dogs mostly appear to belong to households. But they are usually not "pets" in the way we think of. . Some household have a froofie little pet fluff dog, but most of the dogs just hang out and as far as I can see receive almost no attention or doting affection. They are basically guard or bark-warning dogs. They are generally ignored unless they try to attack an innocent passerby, in which caes they will be berated and swatted.
The streets are mostly paved in the central city, but the pavement on a street usually gives out once you climb the hill about 2 or 3 hundred feet. And when it gives out, it really gives out. No wonder that so many people from the upper areas ride horses. Hence also all the old Toyotas. And often you will see a fairly ancient (circa 1980's vintage) Japanese pickup proudly painted and tricked out. You don't see any American makes of vehicle for the most part, other than old school buses. During the trade embargo years of the late 80's, Japan was one of the only non-communist industrialized countries to still do business with Nicaragua. All the new-car dealerships are Toyota and other Japanese makes. I have not seen a single US automaker dealership.
People hang out in front of their houses. The streets are almost always very alive in that way. Walking every day to the work site, kids (and adults) regularly call out "good bye." They say goodbye for hello because they learn it in school as the translation of "adios", but Adios is actually an all encompassing term of greeting that can be given in either coming or going or passing by. It took me awhile to realize that the very literal meaning of adios is "to God", so as a term of greeting it is something akin to the Sanskrit "Namaste."
If you have a light complexion you will be called "chele" (chile.) This is not a derogatory term. It is just what they call light skinned people, whether foreign or Nicaraguan. Dominique's friend Agnes gets called chele although she is Nicaraguan born and bred. I have been staying since my first week here upstairs in the spare room of the house where Agnes lives with her mother, father, sister, husband (when he is in town, because he is usually working in another town) and two sons. Her Dad's name is also Daniel so they have taken to calling me "Junior." He watches the Nicaraguan sports channel every single night (mostly baseball and soccer,) and also old American movies dubbed into Spanish. Many an evening I have sat for an hour or so with him watching boxing (of which he is a huge fan) or some old Clint Eastwood movie. The spanish language dubbed version of Clint's voice sounds just like his real voice, only in Spanish.
All in all, Nicaragua to me is a very appealing place once you get past the trash and the noise. It's something to do with the way it seems to be a place displaced from ordinary time, sprawling both languidly and hectically across 3 different centuries of culture and technology. Guatemala in comparison is much more modern and economically globalized. Queztaltenango had 3 McDonalds, 2 Burger Kings, KFC, Pizza Hut, hypermart shopping malls. In Matagalpa, a city of similiar population, there are no such things. All the same, it is not as though they don't aspire to get there. They are well on the way. Nicaragua is and always has been a capitalist country. Or rather, part oligarchic mercantilist-capitalist, majority subsistence campesino, with a dogged and enterprising commercial/intellectual middle class in between. The blinkered self-interest of the first of those classes over the past 150 years has kept the latter two from realizing the ordinary stable prosperity that they have long sought to claim. The legacy of the 1979 revolution was mixed, and its failures cannot simply be blamed on Reagan and the Contra war. The country today is still the potentially volatile but endlessly fascinating patchwork of interests and classes it has always been. And if you drink coffee or eat tropical fruits or have any personal connection to San Francisco (which was built on the gold mined by 49ers who nearly all traveled to California not across the plains in covered wagons but via the Rio San Juan and Grenada, Nicaragua) you are implicated, for better or worse, in the history and reality of Nicaragua and the rest of Central America. I'm one of those nut cases who needs to get a feeling for these things for himself.
It helps to have a resident genius of some kind of construction skill when you're doing a project like this. Our resident genius is Fausto, lifelong resident of Jicaro and all around master of woodworking. Dominique hired him to do the roof and it is an amazing thing to see him at work. He is the sort of person unaffected by the electric currents of modernity, who is thus utterly steady, deliberate, unflappable, entirely relaxed in his motions but the next time you turn around he has whipped together exactly the scaffolding we needed (and were worried how we would construct) from some pieces of old lumber laying around the site.
He hand selected the timbers for the roof-supports from trees on a friend's land in Jicaro. He and his apprentice Oscar stripped off the bark and assembled the post and beam structure with no nails, just perfectly positioned y-branchings of the trunks and well engineered cuts. He uses no power tools. When he needs a drill, which is not all that often, he uses an old hand crank drill. At his house in Jicaro he deliberately has no electricity. He basically does not want the modern world, and in this proud lack of a certain kind of aspiration he is definitely an anomaly. Nicaragua is mostly like anywhere else, in the sense that although there are many poor people, they aspire to the same material success and glitz they see on TV and all around them in the culture. Don Fausto is no richer materially than most of his neighbors down the hill, but he knows what he likes: working with wood and enjoying life. FIfteen years ago he decided he wanted to learn how to make guitars. I asked him if he took a class and he raised his eyebrows in this way that he does and said (in Spanish) "No, I learned it by doing it." But we're talking about making guitars! Clearly the man is kind of genius. He sells them to order.
Don Fausto's mother was the oldest of the old pottery ladies of Jicaro, who passed away last year at the age of 94. The daughter of the youngest pottery lady (age 77) is Carmen, the teacher at the Jicaro Primary School. Thus Fausto and Carmen are cousins. They were both the only children of each of their mothers, and neither of their mothers ever married. They chose to always live together as sisters. Dominique says she once asked Carmen's mother if she didn't miss having a husband (for whatever material support and comfort he would have provided) and she just laughed and said "oh no, what would I have needed a man for? I have my sisters."
In a country where schoolchildren are regularly turned away for not having proper uniforms or materials, Carmen never turns a child of Jicaro away from school. If he or she needs time, or a little extra help, Carmen will make sure that something works out so they can stay in school.
Last week a group of the kids and their mothers came by the site for an afternoon. Many days there will be some kids helping out, but this was a deliberately larger event. We had them make batches, and before too long it was a hilarous free for all cob fight, but in the end the cob did manage to all get on the wall.
Our most indefatigable worker is Eliseo's 11 year old nephew Jerry. His level of entusiasm for cob is actually a wonder to behold. He spends half of every day with us and would spend all day every day but we realized he was skipping school to be with us mixing cob. He mixes cob, hauls endless buckets of soil and sand, tears around with a wheelbarrow that he calls his "Toyota." It might be child labor, but we literally cannot stop him from working hard on the project every day. He does get distracted sometimes too, like today when he spent half an hour making a clay-sand batch and carefully molding it into balls, on the top of which he inserted leaves so they would look like apples and other fruit. He had been doing gardening part time for someone else and he loves plants. The site has a bunch of mango and other fruiting trees and he wants to help with them too. Dominique intends to take a permaculture design course the next time one is offered in Nicaragua and she hopes to bring Jerry along on a scholarship.
Jerry´s younger cousin Evette (Eliseo's niece, Otilia's granddaughter) is also a playful and sometimes entusiastic cobber. Her enthusiasm was dampened when she stepped on a nail a week ago, but today when Otilia herself (who usually keeps with apparent contentment to the kitchen making endless torillas) put on a pair of big rubber boots and came out to stomp cob, Evette was back into it with a vengeance. Imagine watching Grandma stomp cob without joining in!
Eliseo has been accepted into a program to be certified as a basic librarian. This will involve 2 classes per week in the morning, in addition to his all day weekend secondary school program and his daily work on Project Jicaro.
Today at the site he taught me two short Nicaraguan songs, which was fortuitous because my homework for my next class session at the Matagalpa Spanish School (where I have class 3 mornings a week from 8 to 10) is to find a song in spanish and learn the lyrics.
It is impossible to relate the full texture of this experience. Carey Lien and I plan to do a slide and video presentation in May in Portland, hopefully that will help to give some more of an idea. I will keep you posted.