desde nicaragua

more on a dirty city

A thought trapped inside this head, hitting and bouncing, turning and squirming, seeking air: What is wrong with this place? Why is Nicaragua so much poorer and uglier, more disorganized and tired than some of its neighbors? I haven't been able to push these questions out my head since I returned from San Salvador on Thursday.

This morning I woke my friend before dawn to watch the sunrise from a pedestrian bridge over one of the city's main highways. Managua appeared deserted on Easter Sunday, and from our quiet vantage point we could examine without harassment the details that make up this city's fabric. Managua looks green from up high. There are so many trees, so many weeds and plants in yards, along the roads, in the middle of broken sidewalks. In other places, this green is something city planning commissions strive for in order to meet lofty environmental and beautification goals.

Here the trees provide shade to layers of garbage and filthy water you can rarely escape from, and the barefoot, grime-covered people who live in it. Under a pinkning sky ambled a bearded man in plastic sandals, a mango that had fallen from a nearby tree slipping in and out of his mouth. I watched as he let it drop, his hand oozing with juice, then slowly swoop into the gutter to lift a wad of toilet paper. He wiped off his face with the dirty paper.

The act barely registered to us, filth and life among it such a part of the normal scenery. There are nice neighborhoods here, but there are more places overgrown with weeds and the trash my friends call the national flower, where somebody's livestock graze and somebody else searches for pieces of scrap metal to sell or meal scraps to eat. An earthquake struck here some 35 years ago and, because of the corrupt government at the time, the city never exactly recovered. People continued living here, slowly clearing some damage, slowly building on top of it. But order, a sense of continuity, a noticeable striving toward a better tomorrow? I don't see it.

I feel a wide and shared sense of frustration among the people who live here, a hopelessness that makes a day as far into the future as they let themselves look. We want work and peace, a new Sandinista theme song pronounces. Work and peace. Work and peace. In a way, the end of a devastating civil war here brought peace but also killed the hope that the 1979 Sandinista revolution awoke in most corners of this country. Fault U.S. foreign policy here, whatever, but the revolution failed to better the lives of most Nicaraguans, and the so-called democratic, neoliberal economic governments that followed did nothing better.

Part of this end result is disenchantment, is tiredness. This living in filth and fighting over it, as the recent Chureca fiasco painfully demonstrates. I know I sound ethnocentric or callous or unthoughtful or something dangerously naive, but there are moments here when I want to grab Managua, grab Nicaragua by its sunken shoulders and shake shake shake until it opens its eyes to the shit it finds itself swimming in. Cab drivers always ask me whether I love Nicaragua yet, and quickly follow my hesitation with a profound declaration that people here are just about the friendliest folks you'll ever met.

It's not enough that the volcanoes and lakes are beautiful or that the people are nice. People are nice everywhere in the world, and, honestly, I'd rather go to some lake in ho-hum Michigan that isn't contaminated and that I can safely swim in. Rise up! I want to be angry at that hand that begs — the hand that belongs to the wrinkled old woman with no legs, the glue sniffer asleep in a doorway, the harping legislators who bemoan the dreadful history that Washington slammed this place with.

I know it's more complicated than this so I won't say to get over it, even though I mentally bite back the words from forming into complete thoughts in my head. I know there is so much more that I need to read about poverty and global issues and corruption and standards of living. I know, and I know I will never know enough.

For now, to the streets, to the garbage, to the people who deserve more.

*** A story about why are some people in Haiti are nostalgic for their former dicta tor expresses a reality present in Nicaragua, where street cleaners and businessmen complain that Ortega is worse than the Somoza dictatorship he once helped overthrow.

Poverty crying in your face, begging on skinny hands and knees

                                                                            (city at sunrise)

MEXICO CITY — It’s sunset and I’m waiting at the Tlatelolco train station. A train pulls in and through its opening doors darts a tiny girl, maybe 6 or 7. I follow into a hot, standing-room- only car.

Now the girl is on her hands and knees, and she is crawling slowly — pathetically —around people’s legs. She stops at the feet of men in black shoes and begins smudging a bare-thread rag against them. Then she looks up with shiny saucer eyes, doesn’t say a word, just a tiny moan, and waits.

Nothing.

The men look at a fixed point somewhere above her head, or grimace openly. When she drags her skinny body to the next pair of legs, I pick my way toward the door to avoid looking her in the eye.

There is no moral to this story because we all have to live with our own decisions, feel comfortable with who we are, who we have become. A few months ago in a moment of anger or frustration I lectured an ex-boyfriend on a crowded Managua bus about how U.S.-dictated neoliberal economic policy in places like Mexico has led to widening incomes gaps between the rich and the poor, and urbanization, and migration, and a dilution of culture. But even though I believe this I am not prepared to confront the issues head on or maybe I’m moved into silent taken-abackness instead of action. We can’t all do everything, I understand, but I don’t understand, and maybe none of us ever truly do, what I am supposed to do.

For now I will tell another story.

Last week we went for a walk, my parents my brother and I, from dusty and quiet La Joya to an equally quiet and dusty mountainside village called San Juán de Peña. We walked for hours through desert-like terrain under a hot sun, no real destination in mind just the general thought that walking is good for you.

We get to the "town." I put this in quotes because I want to imply that it is only a tiny collection of scattered houses, a pair from which sell candy and beer and bread. We pass by a house with flowers hanging near a neat set of stairs in the front, where a woman is now sitting in order to watch the oddity of us walking past.

If you know what my dad is like you know he talks to anybody and everybody about anything and everything. So he starts telling her the flowers are pretty and, boy, there must be prettier ones just past the front garden. She says of course, and other plants and trees and chickens and rocks. And he says he'd like to see them. And she opens the gate.

In we trounce. Within minutes we're gossiping about the people who need gossiping about in this town my dad used to come to when he was 16 to look for girls. We meet the aunt and grandmother and cousins and deaf uncle who never married. They say they'd like to feed us meat but they can't afford it so we'll have to settle for beans, tortillas and nopales (a kind of cactus that is delicious when cut up with tomatoes and onions, and no spikey parts of course).

Then we meet a boy named Jesús who is 3 years old and has a head that weighs 7 kilos. He can't hold it up and his mom can't pay the medical bills. Her husband works illegally somewhere in Texas, in construction, and he sends what he can't but it is not enough. The doctor that delivered the baby didn't want to give it to its mother because he knew she wouldn't be able to afford him.

This the mother has told us animatedly, alternating her words with hiccup sobs. Did she expect something from us, from the moment we — four unfamiliar people in a village where she can see everyone's business from her patio — walked past?

Does that even matter?

* * * * *

I wrote that last night before leaving for New Year's Eve adventures with someone I'd just met. (We ended up leaving an elite club party for fresas to down enormous shots of my dad's favorite tequila and listen to mariachi music at Garibaldi, then back at the hotel for further drinking with strangers until 6 in the morning.) I'm in the Zócalo now on New Year's Day, tapped in to free Mexico City Internet, carefully but trying to look discreet about it grabbing the sides of this precious machine whenever tough-looking men pass by. It's sort of unnecessary, as there are a ridiculous number of cops and guards on every street corner, walking past every few minutes and nodding at me.

Another day is ahead, here in this city I know I will leave enamored with. The art the architecture the life the movement the traffic the pollution the food the temperature the juxtaposition of ancient and modern the amiability of everyone I meet all combines to staggering heights that take my breath away. I don't regret not exploring this earlier or choosing tiny Nicaragua instead of this. But I'm happy to be here now.

                                          

(mummy in Guanajuato)

 

                                                                 (metro in Mexico City)

                                                       (eating tamales in Tarimoro)

                                                      (my favorite street graffiti yet)