Ins and Outs, Ups and Downs

The culture of sharing here continues to surprise me. Example: on Sunday I went to watch one of my friends play soccer and I brought him a Gatorade. He had a small sip before he handed the bottle off to one of his teammates, who also took a small sip before handing it to someone else, etc. The bottle never got back to my friend before it was empty. This happens with everything; clothes, food, shoes, etc – you need something that I have? Take it, it’s yours. At first, I got frustrated (and I’ll admit that I still do) because when I gift something to someone, it’s for them and their consumption and enjoyment, not for their friends or their friend’s friends. Sometimes I want to say something, like “Hey, I got that for you!” but that’s the USA talking, and I have to adapt and adjust to the nica culture, which is big on sharing. But the street goes two ways, and as easy as it is to focus on the giving side, I more often find myself on the receiving end. I went with some friends to the park last week and a friend of a friend bought an ice cream cone. It was passed down the row of nicas, with everyone taking a bite or a lick until it got to me. I took a bite, savored the delicious taste of friendship, and passed the ice cream down the line.

One of my best friends, Jonathan Malacarne, wrote a poem during training when we lived in Nandasmo and I just recently found it again. We had had a discussion during Spanish class about living in harmony with nature, versus fighting her and the implications and impacts of city-living and country-living. A day, or a week, or a month later he showed me the poem in his little brown book that he carries with him everywhere in his pocket that is reserved for the finished product: the poems that he has written and rewritten probably hundreds of times in his head and at least a dozen times on paper, and he has deemed worthy of self-publication, to be seen by (almost) no one but him.

Send the hippies to the city
Pave its streets with grass
Set them up in a bee’s nest
Plant the fences
Till the roof
Send the office workers home
Live from dawn till dusk
Stop separating life like garbage
Bottles and cans
Jobs and families
OR
Shine light on shadows of correctness
Proselytize
The glittering book cover
Scrap and claw
Lie and abuse
Light fires to move forward
Bury not treasure but the fallen
Say in the long run
“We’re all dead”
Whatever.
Choose.

A lot of weird things happen here, but one of the notably weirder things happened two weeks ago at one of my schools. I arrived about 30 minutes early and went straight to the teacher’s lounge to hang out until class started. I heard wild giggling punctuated by little squeals of excitement and didn’t think much of it because it was recess and recess can get pretty crazy. None of the other teachers even looked up from what they were doing and continued their conversations. The students squeals grew louder and more intense and I noticed little groups of them running around. I finally asked one of the other teachers what was going on and she replied nonchalantly that a crazy drunk guy was running around on campus chasing kids. Um, WHAT?! So, I went to look outside and sure enough, a boy of about 17 years of age (who had long ago dropped out of school) was drunk and perhaps drugged running around chasing the students, and yelling incomprehensible things. I was also slightly amused and assumed that he must not be a threat or else the teachers would have already taken action to dispel him and lock the gates. But then he started to throw rocks. And his antics grew more violent. And girls started crying because they were scared. All of the teachers but one are women and they locked themselves in the teacher’s lounge, screaming just like the little girls that they locked out. It was every man for himself, the men in this case being children between the ages of 10 and 16. The students continued to run from classroom to classroom, trying to hide from the intruder; it reminded me of the running of the bulls in Spain. The trespasser cut a girl on her face and the situation stopped being funny to me. The school has no telephone, the community has no police, there is no cell phone service and even if there had been no one had minutes on their pay-as-you-go cell phones to make a call. And so, the one male teacher tried to remove the crazy, drunk prowler from the premises by what looked like logical reasoning through dialogue, which proved to be ineffective (duh) and the charade went on for more than an hour. The drunken dude chased students, climbed trees, broke off branches, attacked students with aforementioned branches, threw rocks, yelled obscenities, made rude gestures and never appeared to lose momentum or stamina. Somehow the police in a neighboring town were notified and arrived. Before the police got out of their truck (which they were in no hurry to do) the inebriated young man ran out the open gate of the school and disappeared into surrounding corn fields.

Last week was Nicaraguan Independence Day which meant that Monday there was no class because the students were practicing for the parade, Tuesday and Wednesday there was no class because there were celebrations that consisted of said parades and civic acts, and Thursday and Friday there was no class because they were declared national holidays. Which meant that I spent the week attending various events, swimming in rivers, hiking mountains, drinking mojitos, going to dance parties, and general vagando en la calle.