This is how people in Managua give directions: De la farmacia La Vida en la Centroamérica, 2 c. al sur y media abajo.
In English: From The Life Pharmacy in Centroamérica, two blocks south and half down. The other night I got an explanation from a cab driver. "Al lago" means north, "al sur" means south (obviously), "arriba" means east, and "abajo" means west. I should have looked it up on Wikipedia months ago. They explain it like this:
Directions in Managua are unlike most you will ever encounter. Earthquakes have left the city without a reasonable (or used) street address system, so most addresses are given based on landmarks and with the directions al lago. (That's Lake Managua, for y'all. Polluted and ugly.)
My house is the one on the left, the one with the brown stripe, black gate and all those dudes sitting in front. To be totally honest, I don’t know how many people I live with or what their names are. Until yesterday I mistakenly believed the short, built guy I'd been running with every morning is named Incer. That's apparently another brother who is just talked about often. My running compañero is Marlon. Besides Marlon, and another brother named Incer, there's my friend Igmer (their sister, who is in my history program at UNAN), her Guatemalan boyfriend Menchú (yeah, like Rigoberta), Menchú's mother (who lost two sons during Guatemala's civil war, and escaped in the 1980s with her family to Nicaragua only to find herself in the middle of another civil war), an aunt and her son, two cousins and another nephew at last count.
Marlon tells me two more brothers are coming tomorrow. There are nine siblings in the family, which hails from "the island," or Ometepe. That's on the other lake, Lake Nicaragua. Also polluted.
They come to Managua looking for work.
It's one thing to learn in an anthro. or geography class at university about urban migration; it's quite another to be living it, to groggily step over it every morning as I scour the kitchen for a pot to boil water in for coffee. They sleep on thin foam mattresses laid out throughout the house, do the cleaning since they can't afford rent, and spend the daytime hours pacing the city streets looking for work.
Incer got lucky this week. Marlon is getting desperate.
He has reason to. Unemployment and underemployment are near 50 percent. In 2006, the average monthly household income was 2,328.60 córdobas, according to the country's Central Bank. In dollars? $123.09.
Economic indicators like this help explain why there are so many men sitting on street curbs all day. They might just have nothing better to do when a girl passes by then to try to attract her attention. Mind you, I am not more sympathetic to them; I still menacingly clutch my keys in fist and wait for one of them to cross the line so that I can dig into his eye socket. I still use more swear words than I even knew existed before coming here.
And yet there is something desperately sad about the fact so many men who equate work with dignity go home every night with empty pockets, unable to feed their children more than rice, unable to afford soap to wash their meager clothes. Maybe these men, this man, can't look his wife in the eye. Maybe he gets drunk and abuses her.
It's not an unlikely story, (read about machismo and the legacy of sexual exploitation since mestizaje here) and it doesn't excuse a violent patriarchal society.
But every day I learn about another shade of gray. And in this house two blocks south and a half block down from The Life Pharmacy I'm learning about the meaning of family, about struggling, and about the pursuit of dignity.
