La Amancia

On Thursday we left for the Campo. I and five others were destined for La Amancia, the poorest of the three villages our group was split up into. We drove for almost four hours to Matagalpa from Managua in our tiny bus-van, which I will eventually take a picture of. We took a break at Matagalpa for lunch, then continued on for thirty or so minutes to the small "city" of San Ramon. At San Ramon we met with the smaller organization that aranged our homestays, the CPC (Centro Promocional Cristiano), breifly and then left on three pickup trucks for our communities. This was the first time I had ever ridden in the bed of a pickup without feeling like I was breaking a rule.

After almost an hour standing in the back of the pickup, being able to relax rarely when there was continuous road rather than a series of potholes that looked like no-man's-land between the trenches in WWI, the six of us arrived in La Amancia. A tepid welcoming comittee of a few members of each of our families were there, at what I later discovered was the house of the community leader, and I met my 'mom' with a traditional psudo-kiss on the cheek.

Brief cultural note, unlike the traditional European double kiss on the cheek, here they go about 90% and make the kissing noise. Close, but no skin. A more hygenic welcoming.


My host-mom in La Amancia's name was Meyling. I had always assumed that this was an asian name, but I was apparently wrong. She had a five-year-old kid named Martin after his father. Meyling was 22 years old.
Martin senior was 40. They'd been married for about 5 years. This was one of the many cultural shocks that was to greet me in La Amancia.

The first night I made tortillas with Meyling. When I finally got it right (about the fifth try), she, her sister Blanca, and Martin jr. clapped for me. That was funny. I made real orange juice. Cut the oranges in half, squeezed the juice into a cup, added sugar and salt, and spit out the seeds when I came upon them. It tasted wonderful, and I usually hate pulp. It was probably all the sugar.

Later that evening I began to feel a bit dislocated. I was out of my comfort zone, which in Managua was really a very small mental space that I could access only rarely and more by happenstance than intention, and so I felt like talking to the other gringos. I arranged for us all to meet at Dona Julia's house, the community leader, so we could talk about the day and what we were planning on doing tomorrow. The meeting was relatively quick, and I met my host-dad, Martin, on the way there. He was kind enough, but I wasn't in the mood to talk and so I said my polite introductions and assured him we'd talk more later.

Everyone was in bed when I returned at a bit after 7 (it had been dark for an hour), and so I laid down in the cot I was given (mesh and tin), in what could only be described as the foyer of the house, but was really just the few feet before the kitchen that weren't quite the parent's room and covered myself with my skimpy sheets (so great for the Managua heat) which meant I woke at 4:30 shivering like Luke before Han cut open that strange winter bipedal horse on the ice plantet Hoth and covered him with it's entrails ("and I thought they smelled bad on the outside"). Anyone looking at my grammar, that was certainly a run-on sentence.

The next day (Friday) I had planned on going to the preschool where Meyling taught to observe. She, however, wouldn't be going because she had a paper to write for class on Saturday. So I was to go with Tom, Hannah, Ian and a young boy from the community who had appointed himself our guide, Marvin, to a neighboring hacienda to see if we could do some work. Unfortunately, they didn't quite get the message that I'd be coming with them, and so left without me. Meying wouldn't hear of this, and so she pulled a neighbor's young girl out of school to take me on the bus and overtake them on the way (because they were walking). This young girl was chosen for two reasons. A) She was young enough that I wouldn't have to pay for her bus fare and B) Her father worked at the hacienda, so she could stay with him. I was much too bewildered and out of my league as far as the Spanish went to protest, so we went. We caught up with them after a fifteen minute busride (which means they'd been walking for a bit over an hour), and we got off and walked with them. For another half hour or so. In the midmorning heat. Which is considerable.

When we arrived at the town of Santa Emelia, where the hacienda was located, we had a brief drama involving the little girl. Apparently, her father had beaten her mother, and so she most fervently did not want to stay with him. Marvin asked if she wanted to stay with his aunt and uncle, but she was a bit to distraught to compromise. I payed her fare and she took a bus back to La Amancia alone. I was sketched out by this, but Marvin assured me that she was fine with it and that she had done it many times. At this point I was wondering if my mother had known about this relationship, and if so I hated her for putting this girl in this position. But the day went on. We met up with some fellow who offered us a ride to teh hacienda (about five minutes) and we then recieved a tour that lasted almost two rain storms, the Campo equivelant of about four hours. This was a coffee hacienda, and so we toured the coffee groves, saw the workers quarters, the kitchens, the bathrooms, the outdoor kitchens for the families, the beneficio (coffee processing plant), and all of their environmental safeguards. This would never happen in the US. We pretty much walked onto this hacienda, and were given a tour by one of the main managers which was more comprehensive than the Norton Anthology of Shakespeare. We picked some coffee and learned to use the machete to clear away the brush, but we didn't actually do any work. The highlight of our tour were the school and the health center that the hacienda had built for the workers and the community.

We got a lift most of the way back to La Amancia from the same fellow who had driven us the five minutes previously, and spent the rest of the day exploring the countryside, forest (though I'd call it more jungle than forest), and neighboring communities. In the end Ian, Marvin and I wound up at a far off community called Cuatro Esquinas (Four Corners) talking with an indigenous woman named Tomasa Cortedano, who reminded me rather vividly of Rigoberta Menchu in the way she framed her discourse, talking about workers and women's rights in the campo.

That night I came home and my host-dad was drunker than all of the characters in Animal House put together. He was beligerantly attempting to communicate, but with the drool, the smell, and the fact that he really didn't have complete control over his muscles, I didn't get much of it. He was being nice enough, but because of the drunkeness was more offensive to both me and his young wife than was usually accepted. At one point she hid her head in her hands in shame. Quite a powerful gesture in real life as opposed to something overdramatic and cliche on TV. Anyway, I got out of the situation and went to bed. Later that night I got to hear him throwing up and peeing in his room (there are mud floors, so I guess it's not that big a deal) which is something that will keep me from ever drinking heavily. Ever.

The next day I was too sick and uncomfortable to go to work with my dad, and so I went to a neighboring community with Hannah and Marvin. We spread the word about a meeting that was to happen later that day and hiked several mountains, crossed several rivers, and picked much fruit. It was a wholely relaxing experience, and I very much enjoyed hiking through the mud, concentrating on what passed for a path (more a slightly cleared away area the water ran down fastest when it rained), thinking about the countryside. And not thinking about anything else. We met a good seven or eight families up on the mountains, and then returned for the meeting. The meeting was, I had first heard, about sexuality and violence. Then I heard that it was about la trata de personas, or the illegal slave trade where young women were kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. When the meeting came, Tomasa Cortedano and Dona Julia were the organizers. A few more than thrity people came, many of them male. Th first part of the meeting was vaguely about la trata de personas, but quickly was shunted aside for the more comfortable topic of workers rights and the plight of the campesino.

That night my father was drunk again, and this time Meyling wasn't there to be ashamed. She was still at class. So he was belligerantly comradely and insisted we cook together and such. I begged out, saying that I had to meet with my gringo friends again that night, and eventually escaped the uncomfortable situation. That night he didn't throw up, though he was certainly considerably more drunk than the previous night, as he had off on Sunday.

Sunday was relaxing and Monday I got sick. I'm sorry to abreviate, but the power is about to shut off and I don't want to lose all of this. I was nauseus and feverish all of Monday and well into today (Tuesday). Last night I had some of the more interesting dreams I've had before, lying in a comfortable bed in Matagalpa after taking a real shower. I'll go into more detail soon, just know that I am recovering quickly and feeling emotionally balanced.