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.