desde nicaragua

quick trip to a hospital

Hospital Manuel de Jesus Rivera (La Mascota)
Barrio Santa Julia, Managua

Health care in Nicaragua is free, although there is no guarantee that you'll be attended at the hospitals or that the medicine you need is available. Still, since Daniel Ortega was sworn into office last year, assistance has poured in from his "brother countries" — in the form of Cuban medical brigades and Venezuelan cash/medical equipment. That has meant greater access to basic health care services for Nicaraguans.

To get an idea of health in Nicaragua, let's look at some numbers from a 2007 World Health Organization report:
* Life expectancy here at birth is 68 years for males, 73 for females
* A healthy life expectancy at birth of is 60 for males, 63 for females 
* The probability of dying under the age of five is 37 out of every 1,000 live births
 

A crammed waiting room in the pediatric ward. Again, no promises these folks will be attended today. But people looked patient, unhurried. Like the CPC rallies, it almost seemed like a social event.

A month ago, I interviewed one Managua hospital director who walked me through a construction site n the hospital grounds. There, Venezuela was building a center to house the high-tech machines it and other countries had donated, including new X-Ray machines and the CAT scanners.

All medical services using this technology are free.

"You asked me whether we would we have any of this without Venezuela's help," he says, looking over at me. "No."

En Argentina ...

Yesterday, Argentina's first lady was elected president.

(Andres Stapff/Reuters)

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, wife of current President Nestor Kirchner, won with some 45 percent of the vote, becoming the first woman to be elected president of the country. (Juan Perón's third wife and vice president, María Estela Martínez de Perón, took over after her husband died in 1974.) The next-strongest candidate was also a woman, Elisa Carrió, who captured about 23 percent.

Clarín, a centrist Buenos Aires daily, had a cool story describing how major media outlets outside Argentina covered the election. In pointing to a Spanish story, it reminded readers the positive fact that Argentina has celebrated its sixth presidential election since 1983, meaning the country has truly recuperated democracy after six decades barely legitimate governments and military dictatorships.

Jack Chang, of McClatchy News Service, writes: "If the first results hold, Fernández de Kirchner, a 54-year-old lawyer who has been in elected public office for nearly two decades, is expected to follow the center-left policies of her husband while inheriting tricky problems such as rising inflation and growing energy shortages."

The New York Times describes how "Despite approval ratings of more than 60 percent, Mr. Kirchner decided in July not to run for re-election, in what many analysts believe is a strategy to rotate the couple through the Pink House, the presidential palace here, for 12 years. Argentine election law allows a former president to run again after waiting four years on the sidelines."

The election results made the front pages of both major dailies here.

In other news, Nicaragua's leptospirosis epidemic has spread. (Check out La Prensa and El Nuevo Diario.) More than 1,500 people are showing symptoms, of which about three dozen have been confirmed to have the bacteria, and another nine people are dead.

(cutline) Mother believes young son is a victim of leptospirosis. (Róger Olivas/El Nuevo Diario)

Oh, and this side note in La Prensa's article made me laugh. Talk about finding and taking any opportunity to criticize a president you don't like.

Cataclysm
President Daniel Ortega described as a "cataclysm" the country's leptospirosis outbreak, which in one week has threatened residents in seven states. Since Ortega took over the presidency nine months ago, Nicaragua has suffered one hurricane, disastrous rains and now an epidemic.
(my translation)

Finally, some thoughtful commentary yesterday by Sarah Wilson in The Guardian (UK). Wilson works in Latin America and the Caribbean for Christian Aid, a religious organization that works to stop poverty "through providing emergency relief or long-term development." She writes about the relationship between policies imposed by international lending institutions and Nicaragua's energy crisis:

"As the debate rages over how we need to change to save the world from environmental catastrophe, the energy policies of the poorest developing countries have been largely ignored. In fact, it is in the least developed countries, which have the smallest carbon footprint, that some of the most appalling carbon-spewing projects are being initiated. Not by their governments themselves, but under policies which international organisations like the World Bank oblige them to adopt.

"It was in exchange for World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and debt relief that Nicaragua was obliged to privatise its electricity sector. Worst of all, the new system is reliant on oil-based electricity generation. This is not only absurdly environmentally unfriendly - when many alternatives exist - it is also exorbitantly expensive. Rising oil prices are a major factor in the spiralling bills for Nicaraguan consumers."

The comments below the story are even more educational to read, if you want to understand some sides of the debate about the role of institutions like the World Bank and IMF in development and poverty.

outbreaks

I learn about diseases here I'd never even heard of before.

Like leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that can cause high fever, bad headaches, chills, muscle aches, vomiting, jaundice, red eyes, and other bad things. It's caused by exposure to water contaminated with the urine of infected animals.

There's a bit of an outbreak of the disease in cities in northwest Nicaragua (get familiar with this map and look for Chinandega and León). More than 300 people have been infected and at least a couple are dead. The government is encouraging people to stop walking around barefoot and stay away from animals.

On a more personal note, the itchy red on my body had grown to an immense level of discomfort. I visited my witch doctor (what I lovingly call my favorite pharmacist here) for about the twelfth time hoping to get allergy medication, and he told me my diseases are now beyond his expertise. He gave me the name of a dermatologist.

In my head I'd been imagining tiny green and black creatures laying eggs in my skin. I have a twisted imagination and my friends told me to stop worrying, it was prolly just heat rash. But then in a real doctor's office, after stripping off my clothes and showing off my bumps, the nightmare became a confirmed reality: My body is a breeding ground for mites.

That is a drawing of a mite. A scabies mite. It sounds like a pirate disease but in fact it's a little guy who as I type is hatching from eggs in my skin. Sexy.

con campesinos cafeteleros

This morning I took a couple buses into Matagalpa, a city in the interior of northern Nicaragua. It is a coffee-growing region and I came to learn about the causes and effects of out-migration. Wages are very low here, and food prices are increasing every day. So in order to provide for their families, coffee pickers leave for Costa Rica, El Salvador and the United States, legally and not. This might mean there aren´t enough workers to pick coffee beans this year.

One of the first people I met is Reina Godínez, a 31-year-old woman who lives with her husband and three children in a tiny brick building they share with another family. The families live and work on a coffee finca on a road that winds through the lush, green mountains around Matagalpa. The men work from 6 am to 2 pm and get paid in terms of how much coffee they pick. These weeks it's 52 córdobas per day, which is under $3 U.S.

They´re paying so little for coffee right now. We earn enough only to eat, sometimes for school supplies for the children, never to save money.And lately it hasn´t been enough for the food. And food is always more and more expensive, every day it´s more and more expensive.

This is the neighbor´s daughter, who didn´t speak and may have been mute. Her parents can´t afford to feed their children more than beans and rice. Small pieces of meat are a rare luxury.  Because the price of beans has nearly doubled in the past several weeks, the family buys less beans and more rice every week.

We met Petrona, a 32-year-old woman, walking down a dirt mountain road with a woven basket wrapped around her waist. She and a small group of women were walking to a different part of a small hacienda, picking mature coffee beans. Her hands moved fast over the branches, seperating out the bright red beans from the immature green ones. Beans go bad if they aren't picked as soon as they´re ripe.

Petrona, who has two children, sees her husband once every three weeks. He too works at a coffee plantation, but it is more than two hours away. Like Reina´s family, they are landless peasants who work for haciendas that offer housing.

What we pick is a misery considering how much they pay. Maybe it isn´t even worth it but I can´t leave to another place where they pay more because what will I do with the kids? I can´t just abandon them here to earn more. But this pay isn´t enough, isn´t fair, for a whole family.

I was with a taxi driver named Julio. We stopped at this tiny shack on the mountain to visit a family he knew. At least seven people lived in this tiny room. The mother is a Sandinista, and her house was plastered in Daniel Ortega posters.

This is Julio, talking with a woman inside making tortillas. I rented us a motorcycle and he sped me up and down the mountains that surround the city for four hours, stopping when we saw campesinos picking beans or in front of the shacks that lined the road. He doesn´t have faith in this government.

I realized I left a notebook on Reina´s step so we returned. The men by this time had returned from picking coffee. We met her husband, Antonio, who is 60. He has been picking coffee since he was 12. He has never owned a house. He never went to school. During the first Sandinista government he was ´alphabetized´during a literacy campaign.

I asked him what he expects from his children.

If God gives me strength I will keep encouraging them to stay in school, little by little. I´m not sure but if they put in the effort then when I die I will know I´ve done what I could to orient them a little. They will probably pick coffee.

He wants to be one of those people who migrate somewhere else to earn more money. He can´t because it costs money to leave, at least 1,000 córdobas.

Clearly it would be great to leave for another country, to find a different scene because things here in Nicaragua are awful. We´re working only to eat a mouthful.

I wanted to know whether this government helps the poor.

Some, not all. It doesn´t help us.

first proof i do real work

Busy week.

I overcame skin fungus, skin allergies and a skin rash. Got rid of the cat that was causing me so much grief. Rode into Managua four times this week for interviews, university adventures and La Prensa tagalongs. Had my first "chicken bus" experience when I realized I didn't have enough Córdobas to catch a cab. Made friends.

And yesterday the first edition of The Nica Times with my stories inside came out. I want to share this with people but you have to pay to be a subscriber, and even if you can log in you must download a PDF of the paper to see what's inside. Kind of weird.

I wrote a story about a slight shift in migration motives since Daniel Ortega took office in January. After the Sandinistas first came into power in 1979, thousands of families moved for political reasons. Many professionals and business owners left in protest of property confiscations, and others left during the mandatory draft a few years later (during the civil war, when the US backed the Contras). They moved to the United States and Costa Rica.

About 5,000 of those families who'd moved to the States returned when the Sandinistas left office in 1990, often opening businesses and reviving the private sector.

Massive migration has continued since then, although for economic reasons. It's a different group of folks leaving. People leave to find work that pays. Unemployment and underemployment is around 50 percent here.

But when Ortega took office again in January, that group of people who'd left for political reasons and then returned in 1990 got anxious. Many have left, and many are looking for ways out.

If you're interested I'll send you the PDF of the paper, just let me know. Otherwise, I had a story about abortion and foreign investors seeking assurance the government wants them here. I feel good about what I'm doing.

water cures the pain

Within days of arriving here I start noticing itchy and tingly little bumps on my stomach, inside of my belly button and crawling up my chest. It was most frustrating at night, and I'd lay in bed focusing on the painful sensation instead of sleep. Eventually it would appear randomly on my legs, inside my elbow and along my fingers.

A pharmacist told me I have heat rash. A lot of travelers here get it, and it lasts anywhere from a couple of days to a several weeks. A friend of mine who has been here for three months said it only recently went away for him.

I have a topical cream that sort of relieves the itching, but what's supposed to help the most is taking lots of showers in order to unclog your pores.

I love taking showers, so this sounds like the perfect solution. But there's a major problem. Nicaragua doesn't have running water most of the day. On weekdays, the water stops running around 7 am and returns after 4 pm. Luckily it stays on most of the time on weekends.

I still don't really understand why Nicaragua has water shortages, and the three-hour daily power outages are quite another story. Francisco Rodriguéz, the Sandinista party representative for Granada, said at a meeting with foreign investors the other day that Hurricane Felix might have helped alleviate some of the problem by raising water levels in lakes.

We'll see.