A land without water, without electric

Right so, some have expressed interest as to how people make it through the day with no water after 8 in the morning and no electric for a large part of the day.

Some of my fellow estadosunidenses friends have no running shower, or just get up too late to use one. So they bath out of a bucket, which they say is like getting a slow massage with warm water, and although it takes a while they've insisted it is quite relaxing. I get up early enough to take shower, and the water is always freezing, which isn't always as welcome as I'd like. The shower thingy where the water comes out is pretty gunked up, so I get a pretty steady dribble of water with the occasional spray. It is certainly enough to wash by, even if it is less than comfortable. Throughout the day the toilets are flushed by either filling the tank of the toilet with water from a bucket or pouring water into the bowl itself.

Washing clothes is very interesting. So every house around here has a large cement pila. A pila is part cement basin/sink and part washboard. When I figure out how to, I'll post pictures. Before you use the pila, you soak your clothes for a few minutes in soapy water in a bucket/basin. Then one by one you take out your articles of clothing and rub a kind of bar soap on them to get them soapy, then you add some water and rub the clothes against the cement washboard thing and against themselves until you need more water. Repeat until the water draining from the clothes is clear (as opposed to soapy white). This takes me hours. Unfortunately I haven't gotten used to washing my clothing daily or even every other day, so I wash all of my clothes at once, which is a bad call.

Watching TV is relatively new in Nicaragua. It became popular during the 90s as the neoliberal reforms of the Chamorro, Aleman and Bolanos administrations made things like TVs available in wide supply and things like healthcare and education pricy available to those who could afford it. Almost every family with a house has a TV, and they spend much of their free time in front of said TV. This said, the power goes out every weekday at 2 or 5 (usually obscuring prime time). So, when the power goes out, there's really nothing to do save talk to one another and try to conserve candles.

Readig by candlelight, while reminescent of Edmund Dantes studying under abbe Fariah in the Chateau D'if and thus totally cool, is difficult. My eyes aren't quite ready for it. Also, the romantic image of a candle lit dinner has been ruined for me as every dinner here is candle lit, and I've found that it just makes people slightly harder to see.

One of the things about Nicaragua is that when you have that feeling that something is crawling on your skin, rather than swatting at nothing as in the US, you usually do have something on you. This makes sense as the houses are made of concrete and such and are thus riddled with holes. Bugs generally run the place, and I have given up many firmly held beliefs about basic sanitation and food care. That said, when the candle's flickering casts scurrying shadows along the walls, I usually jump. Thankfully, I have yet to have my fears of man eating rodents leaping from the crevaces in the walls confirmed.

However, there was this cricket that looked like it could easily take a cockaroach in a fight. He was half jumping half flying around the room while we were watching 50 First Dates (in Spanish). I wasn't really worried that this monster would attack me, but I did make the half joke half serious inquiry as to if these crickets travelled in packs and foretold apocalyptic situations.