First Impressions of Chinandega

 

First Impressions Of Chinandega

May 21 – 24, 2015

Iglesia Calvario, Chinandega, Nicaragua

We are making a four-day visit to our permanent site, Chinandega. We go back to our training towns for two more weeks, but then this will be our home for the next two years.

It is hot! Everyone told us how hot it would be and they weren’t exaggerating. We went out at 6:15 this morning to walk five blocks to the home of our landlords who are feeding us this week. We walked very slowly, but I was dripping sweat when we arrived. By the time we got back to our house about 11:00, after visiting the health ministry, the health center and the police station, I had to hang my pants and shirt out back on the patio because they were soaked through.

So the question is, is Chinandega, Nicaragua hotter than Sonaguera, Honduras where Deb and I did our first Peace Corps stint from 2005 – 2007. Deb says she is going to check the internet, but I say they are about the same. I remember sweating all day, everyday in Sonaguera; sweating all morning, coming home and taking a shower, sweating all afternoon, having another shower, sweating at night even with the fan blowing on us, getting up in the morning to shower before leaving the house. I think the routine here in Chinandega is going to be the same.*

We will be living in Barrio Calvario - Calvary Neighborhood – practically in the shadow of Iglesia El Calvario, a very beautiful Catholic church. Our address is “de Iglesia El Calvario 125 vrs arriba.” Which translates to 125 yards east of the church. All the old Catholic churches are oriented west to east. If you walk away from the back of the church you are headed east or arriba – up – in the direction where the sun rises

Our house is tiny and pink. We’ve been calling it La Casita Rosita, which doesn’t really make any sense in Spanish, but we’ll see if it sticks. It’s a railroad flat: front room, middle room, backroom, and bathroom all in a row. There is a back door to a small patio. Deb paced it off and it is roughly 8’ X 40’ or about 320 square feet. It reminds me of apartments in the East Village in the 60s or shotgun shacks in New Orleans. Of course those are now going for half a million and our rent is $120 a month paid for by Peace Corps.

For a while I have been romanticizing the idea of living in a tiny space. I’m drawn to magazine articles about radical downsizing and houses you can pull around on a trailer. This is going to be my opportunity to try it out.

Before going to bed, I was sitting on the toilet and noticed a three inch long scorpion on the wall across from me.

“Hey, Deb,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“There’s a scorpion on the wall.”

“Are you going to kill it?”

“Como no. Le gustaria verlo primero?” (We’ve been trying to speak Spanish with each other.)

“No.” (That could be either Spanish or English, but I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and say she was speaking Spanish.)

I wacked it with my Chaco sandal. Chaco gives Peace Corps volunteers a 50% discount. As I was cleaning up the remains of the scorpion, I thought, “This could make a great Chaco commercial!” (Chaco Sandals)

The city of Chinandega is the capital of the departmento (or state) of Chinandega. It is a good sized city. I’ll look up the numbers later.** It has three principal markets. The main one starts just on the other side of the church, three blocks from our house. It is an intense experience. It is crowded, noisy, and smelly. Any thing you can think of is for sale. Today we passed someone who had set up a stall consisting of a table with fish on ice and several buckets of live crabs. The vegetables and fruits are beautiful. Underfoot there is a paste of discarded produce and trash. The narrow streets and alleyways are clogged with shoppers, taxis, three wheeled bicycle carts and horse drawn wagons. Everyone talks loud and fast. Many vendors use microphones and big speakers to hawk their merchandise and blast Latin music.

Chinandega also has a few more historic churches, a pretty central park that is ringed by surprisingly good outdoor eateries, an airconditioned mall with a two screen cinema, at least two places to get decent espresso, a ton of community health centers, a beautiful, privately funded maternity center, a traffic circle where you can pick up a hooker, the highest HIV/AIDS infection rate in the country, a bunch of pre-adolescent glue sniffers who panhandle and flip off anyone who turns them down and a population of friendly, welcoming folks who seem to go out of their way to be helpful.

The Pacific ocean is a twenty minutes bus ride away. It’s on the route from Chinandega to Corinto, one of Nicaragua’s principal ports. If the driver is in a good mood, he’ll take the turn off and drop you at the beach, if not he leaves you on the road and you have to walk in for ten minutes. The beach is long and flat and lined with thatched roof seafood joints. You can get a fried fish lunch for $3.50 and beers for a dollar. They start cooking when you order, so you have half an hour to sip your beer, play cribbage and watch freighters pass by on the horizon. After lunch you can walk the beach, pick up shells and get wet, but you’ve been warned that the currents are very strong and that people drown frequently, so you don’t want to go in very deep at all. The name of the beach is Paso Caballo, which could be translated as horse path, but could also indicate something more poetic: horse’s footfall or easy there, horse, for example.

I’m anticipating an interesting two years.

*Deb checked the temperatures. Chinandega is in the high 90s all week. Sonaguera is in the low 90s.

**The population of Chinandega is right around 150,000.

Our New Home

Next week we complete our training and on June 6^th we will move to our new home in Chinandega, Chinandega.  I am excited about this new home.  Here is a picture of the outside:

Ours is the little pink one in the middle.  We call it our “Casita Rosita.” Here is the floor plan:

The area is about 320 square feet.  It’s not very big to say the least.  We have been fantasizing about living in a Wee House so this is our chance to try it out.  For several years our son Jesse and his partner Lexi lived in a condo that was 550 square feet with their dog and two cats.  That was snug.  We will be snugger but have the advantage of not having everything we own with us.  Right now we have a bed (with mosquito net – it protects us from malaria and dengue and chikungunya which is really nasty - http://www.cdc.gov/chikungunya/), a refrigerator and a two-burner gas hotplate. When we return next week, we will tackle completing the kitchen and getting some living room and dining room furniture as well as some arrangement for our clothes.    

I almost forgot, we also have a fan.  Chinandega is really hot so the fan is a basic necessity of life.  In the short visit we had last week, I found I was most comfortable if I took a shower (we only have cold water which is just fine) and did not dry myself completely.  I then stood naked and damp in front of the fan and that felt GREAT!

Another unique feature about our new home is that the front door is in a direct line with the bathroom door.  When we are home, we leave the front door open to allow for more air circulation and close the wrought iron gate for safety.  If we forget to close the bathroom door (which we are prone to do), anyone walking by our house can see us on the throne.  We have our work cut out for us to change our relaxed attitude about toilet use. 

Water access is also interesting.  There is an outdoor sink with faucet for washing clothes and dishes and a small hand sink in the living/dining area.  There is no water access in the kitchen and no sink in the bathroom.  We plan to buy a water filter with a reasonably sized holding tank, which we can fill with tap water giving us access to filtered water for cooking and drinking in our kitchen. 

Hopefully within a few weeks we will have some pictures to post of our newly decorated and furnished home.  I am sure it will be a work in progress for the next two years as we accumulate more things.  John is already planning a mural for one of the walls and we have purchased some traditional and locally made masks to display.  We are very excited about this next phase.

Cultural Adjustments - Part I

 

As our training is wrapping up, Peace Corps asked us to reflect on three cultural adjustments we had made since arriving in Nicaragua. The paragraphs below are expanded versions of what I turned in to Peace Corps. I liked this assignment a lot and plan to continue it. Therefore, I think this is just a first shot at writing about the ways life in Nicaragua differs from life in the States.

The dog with the saddest eyes in the world anticipates the chicken bone I'll toss him.

1.     In the USA I’m a bit of a “foodie”. I like to cook, I like eating out, I seek out culinary experiences like finding a new, interesting restaurant, and, at times, I read about food and watch food shows on TV. Food for me is a social activity, a form of entertainment, and a kind of self-expression. None of that applies in the Nicaraguan context. In my host family, food is just about sustenance. Neither variety nor uniqueness is valued. What counts is eating something familiar – rice and beans, tortillas, chicken, cheese, eggs - and getting full. Eating the same basic foods many times a week is fine. Also food is not a social event. Typically, in my household, no one sits down to a meal together. People get handed a plate, at a time convenient for them and the cook, and they concentrate on eating. (Often I have conversations while I’m eating, but usually I’m the only one eating.) So, I have adjusted to a very different set of cultural norms about food and eating. (And I love Nicaraguan food!)

The family I’m living with is better off than the majority of Nicaraguan families. Peace Corps pays for my food, but everyone in my extended household eats three meals a day. For the country as a whole and especially in the rural areas, this is not the case.

This is Pedro's attire around the house, but he doesn't go out without an ironed shirt and jeans and his boots.

2.     I have modified my dress and grooming to meet Nicaraguan cultural norms. I am a very casual dresser, especially during hot weather. My summer uniform in the USA is a tee shirt, gym shorts, and flip-flops. Here, this is fine around the house. In fact, usually, the men don’t bother with shirts at all. However, away from home, Nicaraguans dress up. Back in the States, if the temperature was in the nineties and I was going somewhere without air conditioning, it wouldn’t occur to me to wear long pants, a collared shirt and closed shoes. However, I have adopted “business casual” dress for any professional activities, including language classes, charlas, and meetings. I also follow the lead of my hosts. If the father in my host family, Pedro, puts on pants and a shirt, I do too. Reyna, the mother in my host family, feels free to tell me if my dress is too casual.

Great importance is put on personal hygiene. I typically take two showers a day just because it is a way to cool off, but Nicaraguans are always clean and groomed. In the larger cities there is a small contingent of punk, intentionally disheveled kids, but this is far from the norm.

Wilma, me and Brigit.

3.     I have adjusted to being taken care of by domestic employees. It has been years since somebody cooked for me, washed my close, or cleaned my room. In the USA, Deb and I share household responsibilities in a fluid way that emphasis equality. We hire some work done in our home, but these are contracts for very specific jobs and the contract is strictly an economic one. In my host family there are two domestic employees who are very much part of the social structure of the house. In many ways they are family members, but with a lower socio-economic status. These women, Wilma and Bridget, take care of me. I think it is a significant part of their responsibility. It seems to me that it is important to them to do this and do it well. They are very warm and welcoming to me and seem genuinely concerned about my wellbeing. I think that the thing for me to do is graciously accept this care and let them know that I appreciate it.