Note: I wrote this post several days ago, but conditions conspired to keep me from posting it until now.
Well I’ve definitely seen two mice in the house now, and I hear them at night, scrabbling around. The idea of mice crawling on my stuff squicks me, but I guess I’ll learn to live with it. Or buy some poison. I don’t have any open food in my room, so the worst they could to is chew up my clothes to make a nest. Which would be pretty bad, actually. A nibble here and a nibble there, and my entire wardrobe is gone.
The family is really nice. Adilia seems willing to downsize my portions when I tell her that I don’t eat much (unlike Juliana, last summer). She’s a good cook. It amazes me that people can prepare and store food without refrigeration and not get sick. I’m just not going to think about it. I haven’t had any problems yet with the food, and I plan to switch over to drinking local water as soon as my bottled water runs out. The water in Managua is chlorinated, so it’s supposed to be safe, but I wanted to give myself a few days before trying it. This morning after eating all I could at breakfast, I took my plate to Adilia and said “ya no puedo mas,” by which I meant to say “I’m done,” or “I can’t eat anymore.” Apparently, although the phrase sounded good to me, it was not the usual thing to say in this situation. Adilia got a good chuckle out of it, and repeated it several times to Juan, shaking her head and smiling. I’m still not sure exactly where I went wrong.
At my mom’s suggestion, I brought a present for Ivi (the five-year-old). It’s a wooden car that I made with my dad when I was in third grade. Ivi absolutely loves it. He plays with it constantly, making up new games every few minutes. I like Ivi a lot. Sometimes it seems like kids’ imaginations are limited by the variety of toys that they own. This is not a plug for the glamour of poverty, but Ivi’s imagination is definitely intact. I made an origami balloon for him, and he played with it until it fell apart, then folded it in various ways and told me what he was making (a shirt! a pen! a box!). This lasted for 30 minutes or so.
I’m going to backtrack a little bit, and record the events surrounding my arrival in Nicaragua.
I was surprised and a little disappointed when I got to the airport and no one was there to meet me. I was expecting Lesbia at least, and maybe someone from Grupo Fenix. But no one was there, and I didn’t freak out, because I had considered what I would do in such a situation. I took my bags over to a payphone and found two cordobas in my backpack. Then I started to look for the piece of paper where I had written down all of my contacts in Nicaragua. As I checked and rechecked each pocket in each piece of luggage, I started to sweat a little. It was quickly getting dark outside, which for some reason made my situation seem more urgent. Finally, I decided that it was time to go to plan C (or D). I went out to the curb and asked a taxi driver to take me to the Best Western that was visible outside of the airport. As we drove, I explained to her what had happened. She asked me if I knew that Best Western cost $80 per night? I hadn’t known that, and she offered to take me to another hotel that was only $30. I was about to agree, but then thought I might as well ask her if she knew of a Casa Cuacer (Quaker House, a hostel that Shannon was managing last summer). At first she didn’t seem to recognize the name, but as I described it, she eventually asked if it was in Las Brisas. That sounded right to me, so she called a fellow taxista and got more complete directions.
We finally found Quaker house, and I was relieved to see two people coming to meet me at the gate. It turns out that I was extremely lucky. They were Witness for Peace volunteers who had just arrived a few days ago, and they were the only ones at the house. I hadn’t realized that the current manager doesn’t live at the house.
I explained my situation to Hope and Mateo, and they showed me Lillian’s (the manager) phone number. I called her, hoping that she would have Shannon’s number, and that Shannon would have the numbers of people at Grupo Fenix. No one picked up at Lillian’s. My main concern was that I didn’t want my homestay family to be worried when I didn’t show up (I found out later that Xiomara had told them I’d be spending the night in Granada with my friend). I tried making a collect call to Oklahoma to get some of the phone numbers I’d left behind, but apparently our number doesn’t accept collect calls, and AT&T wouldn’t take my Visa card.
I found Byron’s (a taxista friend of Shannon’s who I met last summer) phone number written on a note on the wall, and left a message for him (with his mother, I think) explaining that I was a friend of Shannon’s and that I was at the Quaker House. Later in the evening, after we had ordered pizza, Byron did call back. Unfortuntately, he couldn’t offer much except his services as a taxista. He had Shannon’s number, but she wasn’t home.
Eventually I decided to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. I enjoyed my evening with Hope and Mateo, and Amanda, who showed up later. She regaled us with stories from the protests in New York. In the morning I made it to the Grupo Fenix office, and Xiomara took me to meet my family.
The house is pretty modest, even compared with the house I stayed at in Granada. The bathroom is a concrete cell with a toilet and a faucet that serves as a shower. The wastebasket for toilet paper is outside of the bathroom, and I haven’t figured out how you’re supposed to unlatch the door (which requires two hands) without putting the used toilet paper on the ground. There are, of course, chickens in the back patio area, and sometimes they come visit me in the shower. I think I ate one of them for dinner last night. It was good.
It’s hot in the house, because it has a corrugated tin roof (as opposed to tile). My bedroom only has one window, and it doesn’t have a screen, so it was suggested that I close it at night to keep out mosquitoes. The fan does a good job of keeping me cool, but it’s so powerful that on its lowest setting, it’s still too windy to sleep. However, it does drown out the noise of mice skittering around on the roof. So it’s a tradeoff.
The people in the office seem nice, and I think I will like working with them. I’m the only extranjera at the office right now, which can be a little rough, since the office chatting takes place in Spanish, and goes too fast for me to follow. Yesterday the electricity was out for most of the day, so there wasn’t much that people could do in the office. I took advantage of this by interviewing Elieneth and Carolina (two of the engineers) with some improvised questions. It worked out well, but I know I’m going to need to interview/talk with people more, and I hate to ask people to put their work on hold to indulge me. I think that the “design process” is good, but it can seem a little foreign sometimes (doubly so, I’d imagine, coming from an extranjera like me). It is definitely tempting to just get started on the database. I’ve read up on Microsoft Access, and I’m ready to go! Actually, I did put together a functional database yesterday and today, although I’ll have to do everything over again after figuring out what the users need. I’m telling myself that I’m just doing it to practice some of the aspects of the program, and it has been very useful in that respect.
Elieneth has also asked me if I can help with the website. I’d be happy to do that, but it’s currently hosted in the U.S., and apparently she has no way of making changes to it. If she succeeds in getting it hosted by UNI, then maybe I can help.
I’m hot and very sweaty.
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