The Coast

Okay, so we left on Tuesday I believe. It really was about 7 hours on the road (we stopped for an hour to check out a museum and eat breakfast) and then an almost 2 hour boat ride to Bluefields. The boat ride was awesome. I doubt I've ever gone so fast.

We arrived in Bluefields and had lunch. The meal is called Run Down (pronounced Ron Don) and it is a series of more or less autocotonous foods. Several types of banana and some chicken. It tasted wonderful, which set the precedent for our time there.

That night I didn't really do anything. 9 hours of travel took a lot out of me. I basically moped, watched some TV and went to sleep.

The next day we went to our communities after a quick breakfast. I an eight others went to Pearl Lagoon. The other nine went to Orinoco (a Garifuna community). Pearl Lagoon is primarily Creole, and the people there speak English, Spanish, Creole and a smattering of indigenous languages (primarily Miskito). We learned quite a bit of the history of the autonomous (caribbean) region (incredibly distinct from that of the pacific region), and we ate incredible food.

We stayed in a guest house owned by one Mr. Westly. This man was one of the brightest people I've come across in some time (and I've come across leaders and intellectuals by the handfull lately). He was able to think and put ideas and concepts into critical and analytical frameworks like Pink Floyd puts words and music together to form wonderful things. Our first day we spoke with someone from the municpality - I never did learn what he did exactly - and we chilled out together in a group.

My initial observations surrounding the coast were a mix of shock at both the level of poverty - it was very similar to the Campo in that regard, and the seeming level of jolity among the populace, and a comfortable familiarity which I believe was born by the fact that everyone more or less spoke a language I understood. The town was small, it couldn't have had more than a few hundred inhabitants, but was the headquarters for the municpality (likewise called Pearl Lagoon). The houses were run down shacks of a similar construction to those in la Amancia save they were elevated off the ground a few feet (I assumed to avoid floods and/or unwanted animals). Some of the houses, however, were beautiful.

Why was this, you may ask. Well, when you put the 2 and 2 of the drug trade together, you get that the largest producer of hard drugs is Columbia and the largest consumer is (you guessed it) the US. When Columbian fastboats run the coke, crack and heroin up the caribbean sea coast, sometimes they get stopped by US anti-drug trafficking forces. These fastboats then dump their drugs into the water. Due to prevailing tides, winds and the positioning of the US anti-drug trafficking forces, these drugs ocasionally drift to where the fishermen from Pearl Lagoon and other Caribbean Coast communities fish. So now a fisherman has a kilo or two of coke (worth about $4000/kilo I've been told). So there are some nice houses. Also, there is now a terrible drug problem. When the stuff just arrives, free, on the shores, there is bound to be someone who tries it. The culture of drugs which was nonexistant almost twenty years ago is now in full force. It was estimated that half of the population of the town were involved with or addicted to drugs (and we weren't counting weed). This was depressing.

However, there was some motion going against that culture. Wheels are turning and committed people are actually working on resolving this issue, which gave me hope as opposed to the campo where people were committed to blowing smoke as opposed to working to effect change. You don't get anywhere by being the loudest, I've found, but by networking, organizing and confronting issues with more than just rhetoric. I believe our president, Ortega, Ahmadinejad, Chavez and the like are teaching the world this important lesson as they spout more and more rhetoric and less and less gets done for their people. Sorry, sidetracked.

The second day we had breakfast at the guest house and then I recieved a call from Guillermo, the academic director of the Revolution, Transformation and Civil Society part of the program and the husband of the academic director of the entire program. He sang me Las Mañanitas, a birthday song in Nicragaua. He is deaf in one ear and has only 60% of his hearing in the other, and so our conversation with my limited grasp of spanish and his limited ability to hear me was awkward and comical. We laughed about it when he picked us up on Saturday.

My birthday, which I had intended to pass without incident, was quite the affair. Many people called to wish me well, and I was able to access the internet that day from a local school and so read many of the emails I recieved as well. That was nice. The cake that night, however, I am quite sure was an assasination attempt. Someone wanted me to die by substituting my blood for sugar, and they figured if they put a large enough cake in front of me with enough icing to kill a polar bear (the death Al Gore did not forsee for those poor polar bears in his movie An Inconvenient Truth) it would do the trick. They weren't counting on the fact that I brought backup however, and together the nine of us, the Williams' and some neighborhood kids nearly finished the cake. There was still enough left over the next day for a bit of the hair of the dog (which doesn't work with cake). I had a great time, and kept my moping to a minimum.


I'm intentionally focusing on the cultural/personal observations I have here, because I've already written the academic ones a few times and it gets tiresome. So if anyone is interested in what I am doing academically, comment and I'll extrapolate.

We ate lunch and dinner at Miss. Cherry's (which is her name, not the name of her business). Miss Cherry is an incredibly large creole woman who forces one to reinterpret/add more adjectives to the English/Spanish/Creole langages due to the miraculous character of the food she creates (I wouldn't use such a banal word as 'cooks' for the process this woman goes through to arrive at such marvels of taste). Fish, shrimp, spaghetti, coconut bread and gallo pinto were regular fare, and yet entraoridnarily prepared in way that even I who has long been sqeamish in front of seafood loved this food.

The last night we were in town I almost went out with a few of the group to take a walk around town. When this walk around town became a walk to a country/reggae bar with music so loud (and bad) that conversation in any language was all but impossible, I escaped and returned to the guest house to watch the Blues Brothers. Well worth it. There are certain cultures that I'd prefer not to explore.

We spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday in Bluefields again. A group of Garifuna dancers treated us to a cultural dance exposition Saturday night, and then Ryan, Jake, Maddie, Ian and I went out with a few of them to a restaurant/club to eat dinner and, as was inevitable, dance. After we ate, they wanted to go out to other places, and so I made my way home, watched the end of Romeo Must Die - a Jet Li and Ashanti version of Romeo and Juliet, better for the fights scenes than the terrible writing- and moped and slept.

Needless to say, I am finally recovering and have put the moping, sulking and self-pity aside for the time being. This did take me an exceedingly long period of time, but in my defense I was rather deeply involved with my ex for the better part of the past two years. Anyway, I do need to complete an essay for friday as well as get my ISP hammered out before I leave for El Salvador next Thursday.

Until the next time I have an hour and a half to use a computer!