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Managua
August 16, 2006 ( Development )
History Tour
My first full day in Managua I walked around the city with a friend of Chana's quien se llama Shaggy. He works with a human rights organization and gives walking history lessons to delegations and volunteers coming to Managua. He gave me a huge and depressing history lesson of Nicaragua and its relation with Spain and the U.S.. It was one of those lessons that every U.S. citizen should have, to be reminded both of the U.S.'s poor history with supporting Democracy abroad, and of what "struggle" really is.
I'll post photos in Flickr soon enough, but really I wish I could just recreate the entire text of the tour, from the explanation of how an American "entrepreneur" took over Nicaragua to Aleman's redirected relief funding to his own pockets to the Pope refusing to bless children lost to the Contras because he was anti-Sandinista -- and getting booed offstage by a Catholic country.
That would have been Thursday. Friday was a day of work and learning the local neighborhood, beginning work on the computer systems in the office, and going to the nearby market.
Saturday and Sunday were spent at the Laguna de Apoyo, which I've already covered. Sunday night we visited another of Chana's friends who is the Deputy Director of the Nica Peace Corps -- Nica's mission definitely has it together much more than Ja I must say.
Descent
On Monday, I spent the morning with the computers, and then la luz se fue (we have blackouts basically every afternoon, and sometimes overnight, without warning or predictable duration). I then went with Chana's friend and an employee of Esperanza En Accion, to her community for a tour of it. She took me by her lunch spot, and her home to meet her daughters and sisters, and then to an adjoining community, La Chureca, which is a burning, dusty city dump where some of the most poor of the city have cardboard/tin/plastic sheet huts and sort the city's refuse for recyclable objects, and sell them. Most of the dump was smoldering or burning, and I doubt there are many other places on Earth more like descending into Hell.
After that, I got back to the EeA house and we reconvened to go to a party for some other members of the solidarity group, which turned into a wonderful and flowing conversation of amusing travel stories, depressing international relations/visa stories (not just for the US, either) and whatnot, in a constantly shifting cloud of English and Spanish and participants in each individual conversation.
When we got back from that, around 11, our key broke in the lock (it was a weak key), so we had to taxi over to the Witness for Peace office to crash until the locksmith could come the next day. This worked surprisingly well (showing up at almost midnight without warning looking for beds), until as we were putting sheets on my matress we noticed that the matress had been covering a largish dead rat. Disposing of the rat was not too difficult, but the room stank, so we moved the mattress out into the common area. The matress itself didn´t smell too fantastic, but it worked well enough if I slept with my head as far away from where it´d been covering the rat as possible.
I can only think that I am a rare case where living and working in a hot, dusty and smoky sprawl of a city that´s been continuously demolished by hurricanes and earthquakes, mucking around with old computers and punching down ethernet jacks with my CVS keyring card, and sleeping on matresses that smell like dead rats is a refreshing and centering experience, reminding me why I´m paying good money and effort to get my Master´s degree.
Posted by griffjon at August 16, 2006 10:21 AM
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