I meant to write in this earlier, but several friends have been coming in and out of Managua on visits, and it's been hard to juggle everything the right way. Recently, I'd written about a trip into Ometepe, and I wanted to add a couple of photos from the trip.
This is a tree in front of the Morales family house in Las Pilas, Ometepe. This is the family whose children I live with in Managua. Past this tree, where my friend Devin is gazing out one coolish morning, is the village's central plaza, a large square of dirt with a couple of soccer posts and a pretty school at the end.
Devin, Mason and I know each other from university. They stopped in Nicaragua for about a week on a longer, Central America agriculture tour. (I hope you guys made it to Guatemala safely!) The family cleared out a bedroom for us that the three of us shared. "Bedroom" is an abstract word. There's the idea of doors, of walls, in order to deliniate spaces and provide a degree of privacy. But sound travels through thin boards and over the top. And the animals, including a large sow jokingly called a relative, freely roam in and out of the walled spaces.
All of our meals there were the same: sweetened coffee, beans, rice, cheese and plantains. Everything they eat comes from products they grow themselves on the island. Even the fish a nephew brings for stew or to fry comes from his morning's catch, which he sells to other villagers.

Here, my friend's mom squeezes the stuff that soon will become a salty, traditional Nicaraguan cheese. She makes every night when her husband comes home from their mixed-crop finca, bringing home about a gallon of fresh cow milk. The family grows several varieties of bananas, oranges, mandarins, cucumber and other fruits and vegetables — for export or internal consumption, via el Mercado Mayoréo.
You are easily in shape by living on Ometepe. Incer, one of the brothers in the family, used to live in my house in Managua, but returned to the island a month ago when he couldn't find a job here. Since then, he's lost a solid 10 pounds and his muscles are more defined. All you do is walk, and he walks fast. He hurried us (I had to beg for him to slow down) to and from his father's finca, about an hour away, up and down dirt paths, pausing to grab interesting fruits or tree "products" along the way: oranges, mandarins, tamarindo, these sponge things they use for bathing, a coconut-like fruit the size of a strawberry.
It was a good trip, and on the way in and out. The Kapuzcinski book has me thinking about doing journalism and writing about the world you see, and what it means or feels like to do that job now versus 50 years ago, when the famous Polish foreign correspondent did, or even versus a couple thousand years ago, when Herodotus did. Check this:
Man does not obsess about memory today as he once did because he lives surrounded by stockpiles of it. Everything is at his fingertips — encyclopedias, textbooks, dictionaries, compendia, search engines. Libraries and museums, antiquarian bookshops and archives. Audio and video recordings. Infinite supplies of preserved words, sounds, images — in apartments, in warehouses, in basements, in attics. If he is a child, his teacher will tell him everything he needs to know; if he is a university student, he will be informed by his professors.
Of course none, or almost none, of these institutions, devices or techniques existed in Herodotus's time. Man knew as much, and only as much, as his mind managed to preserve. A few privileged individuals started to learn to write on rolls of papyrus and on clay tablets. But the rest? Culture was always an aristocratic enterprise. And wherever it departs from this principle, it perishes as such.
In the world of Herodotus, the only real repository of memory is the individual. In order to find out that which has been remembered, one must reach this person. If he lives far away, one has to go to him, to set out on a journey. And after finally encountering him, one must sit down and listen to what he has to say — to listen, remember, perhaps write it down. That is how reportage begins; of such circumstances it is born. (p.75-6)
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I want to keep copying down the words from the book, but hopefully that gives you a good enough idea of what this is about. Travels with Herodotus is a book that is making me think very hard and profoundly about my job, about foreign correspondence in 2008 and beyond, in my place in the world.