Life in Far Away Places: Nicaragua
After college I spent four years traveling and living in the developing world. A few months ago I returned to Long Island and started working for the Smithtown Messenger. This is the sixth installment of an occasional column about those four years abroad.
Growing up on Long Island I was taught that North and South America were two different continents but it wasn’t the type of thing I ever really thought about. While living in Ecuador I volunteered at a shelter for children living on the street and one of my main responsibilities was helping them with their homework, including some basic geography. In Ecuador, I, like everyone else in that nation, taught these children that “America” was a single continent with three distinct regions; North, Central and South.
When I returned home from India I remembered this three region concept. I had already lived in both North and South so I decided I would find a new home somewhere between the two. I flipped a coin.
When I landed in the capital of Nicaragua, Managua, I spoke Spanish fairly well and had a lot of experience teaching English. I was pretty confident things would go smoothly for me in the hemispheres second poorest nation. Managua really surprised me though. I had never before seen any large city with such an obviously crumbling core. It seemed dangerous and I left less than a day after I arrived. I went to Granada, and things actually went pretty well. The hotels were expensive but a man working in one of them offered to let me stay at his house for a few dollars a day, his girlfriend would even cook for me. There were a number of private English schools and they all seemed anxious to get me working with them; but after a few days I decided to leave. Granada is, as it turns out, a sort of tourist center for the country and I was trying to avoid that. I was consciously trying to avoid any place that a guidebook may recommend.
I asked everyone that would listen where I could go, sometimes picking random cities to see what people would say. Most people assume that all Americans want to go to the same places so they point you in that direction. Those places do tend to be some of the most naturally beautiful, but I find people to be more genuine the further off the beaten path one goes, and that was my real objective. There was one city that everyone told me to avoid; so I bought a one-way bus ticket there. Before I went to sleep that night I decided that my new home would be in Chinadega.
The city was in the north-west corner of the nation, about an hour south of the Honduras border and an hour east of the Pacific Ocean. It was fairly small as cities go, dirty and obviously poverty ridden, but what really struck me was the temperature. It was hot, really hot. It was the dry season when I arrived and it would be months until I even saw a cloud in the sky. Breezes that felt like they were coming out of an oven picked up the dust throughout the city. Nearly as soon as I arrived, and part of what made me immediately chose the place as my new home, I noticed ashes falling from the sky. This place was so hot; ashes were literally falling from the sky. I later learned that the ashes were from fires at the sugarcane fields that surrounded the city. Still, I was impressed.
I wanted to live as the locals did. I rented a room in a house a block away from the bus station and decided to try and find a non-teaching job (English teaching jobs in Latin America pay very well, much higher than most locals make). I got a job at a hotel in the cities center and started working 70 hour weeks for about $110 a month. I was making something less than 35 cents an hour and was determined to survive only off of that money. It proved very tough to live on that salary, though the actual job wasn’t all that difficult. I usually worked overnight, which meant that my responsibilities were minimal and I might even catch a few hours of sleep on the couch. The downside was that the days were so hot I could never sleep while the sun was up. I didn’t see a single house in the entire city with air-conditioning, but electric fans were abundant. Problem was that the electricity went out almost everyday. I spent many long hours in a hammock behind the house underneath a mango tree, too hot to do anything else.
The neighborhood that I lived in was known as one of the most dangerous in the city and I tried to avoid being out on the street much past sundown. I made some friends at a bodega two blocks away when I was buying food one day food and spent much of my free time hanging out on its front steps. Most houses in my neighborhood just had a thin metal sheet for a roof and inside baked in the tropical sun all day. After sundown the outside temperature dropped but indoors still held onto the day’s heat for a few hours longer. Taking advantage of the cooler night air, but wary of wondering too far, many people just sat on their front steps in idle conversation until the inside cooled off.
One night, walking the short distance home from the bodega on the dark streets (few of the streetlights worked) I was robbed at knifepoint. It happened about a block from my house and the two thieves walked off in the direction of my rented room. Without much thought I decided to follow them. I knew there would be a lot of “witnesses” outside on their stoops so I didn’t consider it very dangerous. They passed my house and I began yelling at them, cautiously following half a block behind. I was hoping to shame them into giving me back the cell phone they took from me. People watched us as we walked but did nothing. I followed them for two blocks, all the while yelling at them. Finally about three blocks from where I was robbed, the thieves walked right into a group of males playing soccer in the street. Hearing my yelling the game stopped as some of the players grabbed the thieves. Then all of a sudden it seemed like people came out of nowhere and a mob immediately formed. The mob held down the pair and gave me back my phone and let the thieves run off.
The entire mob walked me back to my house. The group that originally grabbed the thieves was a local gang. They told me that they had recognized me from the neighborhood and not to worry, that as long as I was in their territory I was safe. The two people that robbed me were from a rival gang on the other side of the bus station. The police never entered either neighborhood; they were both completely dominated and controlled by the gangs. They were also protected by them. It was a strange dynamic and one I don’t think I would ever be able to fully understand had I not lived in it.
Everyday was a struggle. The house I lived in had no running water and frequently was without power. I found scorpions in my bed and despite working more hours than I ever had before, I was living off of about $2 a day after I paid my rent. I had lived in modest conditions before but never like I did in Nicaragua. It was a really enlightening experience, though it was not always an easy one.
After a few months, I decided Central America was not a permanent stop. There were a lot of good things about the place but in the end I decided it was not for me; I left. I crossed the border with Honduras and continued north.