Lately...

I constantly flip flop. “I can do this, I can adapt.” “What am I doing here? I’m not even making a difference.” “This is exactly where I want to be.” “Is this where I want to be?” I have to ride the bus a lot. The people that I talk to on the bus want to know where I come from, why I’m in Nicaragua, what I think of Nicaragua, where I learned Spanish, if I’m married, if I left any boys crying in the US, how old I am and who I voted for. Sometimes I give English lessons on the bus, usually to boys my age who want to learn how to woo a girl in English so that they can “get passports.” When I’m not talking to people, I draft stories in my head that I never write down. I change the plot, the characters, the feeling, depending on how I’m feeling. If I’m having a good day the story might be about triumphantly overcoming adversity and the similarities of all humans that unite us. If I’m having a bad day it might be about soul-crushing loneliness and how each individual was born alone and will die alone.

I got sick last week. I spent the night trembling with cold and a fever of 103 degrees. I went to the health center as soon as it opened and they immediately internalized me in their emergency unit due to low blood pressure, 70/40. They ran a series of tests: urine, blood, feces, and after waiting in a one-room building for 5 hours, with an IV, no air-conditioning and no privacy, they announced out load that I had amoebas in my stomach, a bacterial infection in my lower intestines, a kidney infection, flu, and possibly dengue. The doctor told me I should not drink the water out of the tap. I asked the nurse when I might be able to leave. She ignored me. After a couple of hours they brought me some pills to swallow with a glass of water out of the tap. I informed the nurse that I was told by the doctor not to drink water out of the tap and was there perhaps any purified water? Absolutely not. I spent the day listening to babies crying, to telenovelas (Spanish soap operas) that the nurses and doctors were watching instead of taking care of patients, to nurses yelling at patients and at each other. People came in to visit family members and ended up watching me for an hour or two until they got bored. Strangers came in and touched me and got close to me and wanted to know all of my symptoms. I just lay in bed shivering and ignored everyone. I had to spend the night in the emergency room because my fever would not go down. I called the Peace Corps office the next morning and they told me to come to Managua so that they could monitor me. They ran a series of tests: urine, blood feces. They didn’t find anything. Maybe it was an anomaly? They ran the same tests again. Nothing. All I had was flu, after all.

I drink the rain water that runs off of the roof. I collect it in a plastic bucket and fill up my water bottles and add 4 drops of bleach per liter of water. The water that comes out of the tap is milky at best and brown at worst. The people here drink the water if made into coffee or refresco (juice, water, sugar) otherwise they drink soda. I have a hard time writing because my mood changes so often. I begin to write, inevitably have to put it down, and when I return I cannot tap into the same line of thought. I was walking to class yesterday, on my mom’s birthday, when a man started hissing at me to get my attention at a bar on the outskirts of town. He had his penis out and was shaking it around and yelling at me from across the street. I ignored him and kept walking. I usually don’t look or acknowledge when people hiss at me. It seems uncivilized when they could use language to communicate with me. Every time I walk by the police station the police officers hiss at me. Last week, I got hissed at by some men in a funeral procession. Some neighbor boys were calling me “lesbiana” whenever I left the house and they were in the street playing soccer. I ignored it for a week, hoping they’d get bored, but they didn’t. I went over and told them “Listen, it’s nice that you want to say hi when I leave the house but my name is Vanessa, not lesbiana. Now you can call me that, instead.” They were embarrassed that I had approached them and have now taken to calling me “chelita” (white girl) instead. Ok, we can compromise on that.