So if you need or want to lose weight…. Nicaragua is the place to come. I mean you can’t drive down to the local McDonalds whenever you want. Almost every meal comes with a heaping of rice and vegetables and small meat portions. Although I have to admit, they have discovered French fries and serve them with every meal! I mean even when you order a Filet Mignon, it is served with French Fries. Hey I am a fan of French fries so no worries there.
Now when you add the fact that you walk almost everywhere here in Nicaragua, you can’t help but lose weight when you come down here.
When I first arrived in my little town of Pueblo Nuevo I was driving my little clown car 3 blocks to the local internet café. Typical American right?
Now I have turned over a new leaf and I have started hoofing it around my little town. Hell, you can throw a rock from one side of town to the other… well almost.
I like the little road to get to the Rancho… It looks like a jungle road with a small river to one side…but don’t get too hammered or you will end up in the river for sure! There is no curb at all… just a drop to the river below.
So my buddy Mike told me a story about how he was driving his truck one night with a friend a little… well… Let’s just say… a little inebriated. So he gets pulled over by the cops and not only does he not have a valid driver’s license but he didn’t even have license plates or insurance on the truck he was driving. Not to mention the fact that his Visa has been expired for over 2 years. Yeah… the Visa that actually allows him to be in the freakin’ country!
So after some careful deliberations with the cop, the “said” cop gave Mike a DUI ticket and sent him on his away. WTF? You get a DUI and they give you a ticket and let you keep on driving? Yeah you get a ticket for DUI here! Wow….
Mike now has a driver to take him everywhere he wants to go these days…. Smart!
The Peace Corps flew us to Miami for 3 days of orientation before our departure to Nicaragua. After arriving in Miami and taking a shuttle to the hotel, I opened the door and there was this young white kid in the room on the phone babbling in Spanish. I didn’t understand a word he was saying.
I got nervous thinking that I bet all the other Peace Corps volunteers speak Spanish! That would not be the case. When he got off the phone I introduced myself and he told me he was Craig. I told him how excited I was and how I couldn’t wait to begin this big adventure.
“Dude aren’t you excited?”
He looked at me rather strangely and said “I guess… why should I be”? I took Craig out to a bar that night in Miami and Craig got literally falling down drunk after 2 beers… no lie! Within just a few hours that night Craig got drunk, sobered up and got drunk again… I had never seen anything like it in my life.
Craig would end up living in a small town about 45 minutes north of my town in Nicaragua and we became good friends. He was the closest volunteer stationed near me and we had some good times. I decided to ride my bike to Craig’s house one day down the hairiest mountain in Nicaragua. More on that story later.
Craig would eventually learn how to put down small amounts of Rum and Beer but he never was a big drinker. Now, a big jokester…. YES!Craig would end up living inside a small bank in an even smaller town called Condega. You just can´t make this shit up!
So the next day in Miami I decided to go down to our hotel bar for a beer…. I’m seeing a pattern here!
Anyways, so I am sitting down at the bar at the opposite end from some random guy. I was wearing an SDSU T-Shirt. The guy looks at me and says “Hey did you go to SDSU?”
I said, “No” perhaps not even realizing I was wearing the shirt. Perhaps I should have followed up with some other conversation… but I didn’t.
The next day in my Peace Corps orientation I saw the same guy. It turns out that the guy who asked me about my shirt was named Mitch and he was also a fellow Peace Corps volunteer in my group headed south!
Mitch would become one of my best friends in Nicaragua and he would later tell me that he thought I was a major asshole from that first meeting! I suppose I never was good on 1st impressions!
Mitch… well his name anyways, would one day become the most infamous names in Nicaraguan history. Hurricane Mitch hit Nicaragua in 1999…basically destroying the Northern part of Nicaragua (Yes… my home turf). The funny part was that I was actually traveling in my Ford F250 from San Diego on my way back to Nicaragua when the storm hit! I was on the border of Guatemala when the reports started coming in. More on that story later!
Here is my F250 that has put in some serious mileage and offroading action... now it´s for sale...It has seen better days for sure.
So I am sitting there at this orientation with 12 other people that would make up Nicaragua Group 6. Or as we would later come to be called, Nica 6.
At some point the person giving the orientation looked around at the 13 of us and said… “Look around, at least 3-4 of you will marry a local person… those are the odds.”
I looked around and laughed at these suckers! Man… these guys are going to get married? Luckily it won’t be me!
I mean…. I had decided long ago that marriage and me were not even in the cards! Marrying in Nicaragua? Not even a remote possibility!!!!
Well, the joke turned out to be on me! Out of our group of 13…. 3 didn’t make it past the first 3 months… and out of the remaining 10 volunteers in my group 5 ended up marrying local people… myself included.
When our plane arrived in Nicaragua, I remember walking out the door of the plane and the hot humid air blowing into my face…overwhelming me. I started sweating profusely at that very moment and I don’t think I stopped sweating for 3 months!
Back then they wheeled the stairs up to the plane and I remember walking down the stairs and looking around thinking I was on another planet! Then when we managed to make it through customs and immigration and finally get into our bus… I realized that I was not on another planet....
I realized that I was not on another planet but that I had really just been transported back in time! The airplane I had been on taking me to Nicaragua must have really been a time machine. A time machine taking me back to a time in history that I had only read about in text books.
On our bus taking us to the city of Granada, we passed oxen pulling carts of firewood, we raced past horses and mules. The cars on the road did not look like any cars I had ever seen. It turns out that they were really old Russian cars left behind from when the Russians and Cubans were working with the Sandinistas in the 70´s.
Our bus took us to a hotel in the small colonial town of Granada. Granada is a now thriving tourist town on the shores of a large lake. People take enormous amounts of pride in the city. It has very cool interesting colonial style architecture. An American named William Walker sacked the city in the 1800’s and then burned it! He would later go on to proclaim himself President of Nicaragua. Americans have basically been fucking this country ever since!
When I arrived at my hotel in Granada all I remember was the heat. We had arrived in the hottest month of the year. High 90’s with the same degree of humidity! Tropical hell! I remember taking a shower, getting out, toweling off, getting dressed and then being just as wet as when I got out of the shower.
The heat was unbearable and the pitiful A.C. in our hotel room just barely passed as a fan. I began losing weight that week and it was a steady progression for the next 3months. The Peace Corps nurses would eventually pull me to the side each time they saw me and make me hop on the scale to see if I was going to completely melt away!
So the coffee measurement came up a tad short of the 4 manzanas… so we had to go back to the negotiation table… more fun…. We got it all sorted out and now they are cutting back the weeds on the property as part of the deal. Everything should be finalized on Friday. I come home the conquering hero for making a great deal, well hopefully!
I’m listening to Bob Marley right now…. I’m back at the Rancho a few days after my last blog. I listened to a lot of Reggae when I was in the Peace Corps. I mean a lot. One of my buddies lived on a small Caribbean Island called Corn Island on the East Coast of Nicaragua. Man he had it made! I mean the clearest blue waters you ever saw. Everybody listened to Reggae on the Island. The Caribbean side of Nicaragua has African slave descendants that American and Europeans brought over to work the Banana plantations and extract hard wood in the area way back when. So it has the Jamaican Caribbean vibe. Tim ended up turning me onto a lot of Reggae that I had never heard. He also ended up extending his Peace Corps service an extra year… Smart!
One of the nicer houses in Pueblo Nuevo....
People are once again rolling into the Rancho, just a few. Hey, it is Tuesday after all. I guess people come here to eat too!
So as new Peace Corps volunteers we began going to meetings each day, all day. We were learning about the culture, language, social customs, etc… In the evenings we went to the local bars and drank! One night we went to a circus that was in town. I remember being slightly frightened! The sights, sounds and smells were all new and unique.
The first big question all the volunteers had was where would we all be living for our first three months of training. All we knew is that we would be living in some part of Nicaragua with a Nicaraguan family and we would be studying Spanish and the culture for 3 months.
After much secrecy and meetings and back and forth…Finally they told me I would be living in Masaya. A major city… Yes! But I would be living specifically in Monimbo a small “hood” where the indigenous population lived. One of the last ancestral Indian cultures of Nicaragua. Basically they were putting me in the freaking ghetto of Masaya… nice! Not only that… this is where the Sandinista uprising took hold. Great!
The local carpenter and his shop...
Taking a break...
So now after living for a week in a “nice” hotel with shitty air conditioning and receiving all my meals from a restaurant I was being driven to Monimobo, Masaya to live with a local family. Can you say nervous? I was so freaking scared. I was leaving all my friends and my safety net. This was it!
They dropped me off with my Nicaraguan family said a few words and away the Peace Corps went. Bye have fun!
A big Native American looking man and a pretty blondish Spanish looking lady greeted me. I noticed a baby swinging lazily in a hammock in the living room. They showed me my room that was actually kind of nice. It had a small bed and a dresser and it was all mine. I dropped off my luggage and then went to the living room where we began a pathetic attempt of communication. Basically I didn’t understand a word they said and my Spanish was atrocious. This is when I realized that my 4 years of High School Spanish and 1 year of college Spanish was basically a pile of shit and good for nothing!
All I remember in our first conversation was me having to pee so bad I thought I would bust. I remember trying to talk to them but really just having to go! I finally tried to tell them my concerns in Spanish that I needed to get to a toilet fast...but my attempts were to no avail and finally making some hand gestures that were abundantly clear to all present they thankfully pointing me in the right direction.
The next 3 months would prove to be extremely interesting and at times somewhat dangerous and life threatening!
So they booted me out of one part of the Rancho because there is a big meeting… Although they put me in one of the little Ranchos that seems perfect for me.. better light and an electric outlet for my computer. Life is good! Oh man… I just found out that they are having an AA meeting… no wonder they are hiding me way back here! I should have known when I saw then busting out the coffee maker! Man… I should ask them when the next meeting is!
Eric Donaldson is one of the Reggae bands that Tim turned me onto. Man… one of my all time favorites!
So let’s talk about getting some perspective.
We get so caught up in the running around in the States that we sometimes forget to sit back and get some perspective on life! We are like little rats running around a maze occasionally we get into the wheel and go around in circles. We sometimes are stuck in a rut and fail to progress.
It seems we are always striving for the almighty dollar. This is our main objective within the maze. Find the dollars… and when we actually do find them, we want to find more! Thus, we wage the epic struggle which is the pursuit of money. Hey, I’m in the same fucking rat money maze too. I won’t lie. I want that money too!
I think we all realize that money is not everything. However, we also are smart enough to realize that money can make our lives a hell of a lot easier! Therein lies the dichotonomy.
Therefore I think it is imperative for all of us to find a way to step back, and find some sort of perspective on what is important to us in life. We need to find some sort of semblance of reality. And within this reality we are allowed to visualize that which makes us truly happy! Or so the philosophy goes… I mean I just studied all that right brain shit in college. What do I really know?
Regardless, I personally search for these brief moments of clarity when I visit Nicaragua. Here I am able to clear the various cobwebs from my brain and if for only a brief point in time, I am able to leap over the walls of the money maze and wander freely within my own beliefs, my own happiness and my own feelings of love and hope.
Yes, here in Nicaragua I find my personal freedom. Here I am Kevin… the ideological young man with the same spark for life that I once possessed when I decided to join the Peace Corps many moons before! Man this is getting sappy!
The local Western Union...
GIVE ME THE MONEY NOW!
Well… I must admit, in the beginning when I first returned to the United States after living in Nicaragua for 2 ½ years, I did not relate to anybody.
I mean I had just returned from an extremely mind altering experience. Kind of like tripping on acid for 2 and a half years! Now how do I co-exist in this strange world that I left behind?
The Peace Corps had tried to prepare me for re-entering the United States. They told me that there would be aftershock. They told me that I would not be able to relate to people when I first returned. They told me I would have various feelings of longing for my adopted country of Nicaragua. They told me that I may not feel that I belonged in the U.S.
Well they were right! Fuckin’ A they were right! When I returned to the good ol’ U.S. of A I felt like I had once again been transported back to another planet! A strange and distant planet that I had trouble relating to!
I felt like I could never view the U.S. exactly the same. Basically I felt like Ozzy Ozbourne in the epic song… “I’m going off the rails on a crazy train”. Do you like how I tie heavy metal into my writings??
Now many years later I am rocking to that same song and finding parallels in the words?
So I am 15 years old and my buddy John says hey Kevin let’s go see a Punk Show tonight. Well who the hell am I to say no? So we go up to the local show one night at Wabash Hall. We had both snuck out of the house that night. Black Flag was the band for the night! I remember there was a little stage and all these crazy looking people all around.
Then out of nowhere some crazy drug addict looking guys came walking by John and I and then they jumped on the foot high stage and started just screaming their lungs out!
Turns out they were Black Flag… They just starting going off! Everybody starting slamming and I was scared out of my wits! Eventually my buddy and I jumped into the mayhem and began throwing our bodies around in sync. John continues to be one of my best friends today!
John made a pilgrimage down to Nicaragua with me at one point! Props to him! I was able to show him my other world.
I think everybody needs to journey outside their realm of comfort in order to find meaning. Life is more than money and running through a maze. Life is about finding purpose...
Maybe... right? But then again, what do I know?
No comments:
Post a Comment