Leaving was very hard, and I was very frightened. Sometimes the hardest part of missing people is realizing that they had secretly been protecting you all along and now they are not protecting you anymore.
I arrived in Managua late at night and crashed at a hostel. I had planned to leave the next day, but history would have it otherwise: Daniel Ortega was being sworn into a new term in office, a term bought with a constitutional amendment, at the Palacio de La Revolucion that afternoon. Two adorable Germans took me with them. The streets were swarming, and we tried on every pair of sunglasses for sale, looking for good imitation Ray Bans. They didn't let us into the Palacio because we didn't have our party membership cards, but we sat on the traffic divider and Ortega and Chavez waved at us from their car windows. Many other official vehicles passed by, and there was this music playing that sounded like a scene from an action movie when the good guys mobilize when they first strike back against evil. With police and official cars whipping by, I felt like I was in a blockbuster.
I went to Leon, a colonial city north of the capital. There wasn't too much to do; I went to an incredible art museum. Everything from rooms full of baby Jesus to art on an ipod touch. Great collection. I didn't do anything else in Leon.
Next I headed to Matagalpa, a city in the northern highlands. I stayed in a little family-run place where there was one other tourist, a sweet Japanese girl. We toured the chocolate factory. You can buy bars all over the country, and it turns out there are these three ladies in a tiny little factory making all of the chocolate. I knew quite a bit about making chocolate, but I learned more about their process and it was interesting.
The third city on my little whirlwind tour was Esteli, a cowboy city. A great place to do day trips from, but I was having tummy grossness and I was terrified of everything. You would think that I hadn't spent over 12 months of my life in Latin America, survived cliffs, public transportation, markets, poisonous catepillars, heinous room mates, dates riding horses in someone's lap, food poisoning, throat infections, cornea scratches, a month without running water, etc. You would think I had never left my bedroom. It was awful. So awful, in fact, that I cancelled my future destinations and went to the island.
I took a bus from Esteli to Managua, arriving in Mercado Oriental. The bus to the port town leaves from Mercado Huembes, so I had to take a taxi across the city. I am standing in the market talking to a cabbie about where I need to go. From behind, some guy grabs my ass. My jaw drops. "Do you know him?" the cabbie asks. "No." "What happened?" "He grabbed my ass."
Little did I know my cab driver is an ex-military badass nicknamed "el gato negro", the black cat, who survived the war of '84 and happens to hate sexual molestation with a fanaticism that not even I can compete with. All the police know him. He puts me in the car and disappears into the crowd for a bit of vigilantee justice. Meanwhile I am sitting in an unlocked car in the middle of the biggest market in Central America. Wonderful.
He comes back and we have a little bit of car chase action to the other side of the market, we sic the police on the perpetrator, the black cat drags me out of the car and away from my luggage to identify the man, on whom the police are strapping handcuffs. They stick him in the car and we start to drive to the police station. When I insist that I do not want to go to the police station, the black cat says that I MUST file against this man or else he will grope more North American women and then what will they think of Nicaragua? So we stop on the side of the road and the police take all my passport information. Then my taxi driver drops me off at the bus.
How did all this make me feel?
Stunned. It unfolded like an impossible dream. I didn't want any trouble, I just wanted to go to Ometepe and forget about it all. Which is funny, because every time men catcall me or whistle or say rude nasty things to me I always want to PUNISH them, I want cops to leap out of the underbrush and take them down with clubs. And then it happens, and it doesn't feel good or make anything better...
I've been at the farm for a week and a half now. It's great to be back. There are about twenty volunteers right now. It's an older crowd from last time, so people have done a lot more interesting things with their lives and conversations are usually fascinating. But it's a lot of people to live with day in and day out. I'm not lonely anymore, but I think I've hit the opposite extreme. Unfortunately, there is no better cure for miserable loneliness and fear of existential solitude than to be driven mad by the peculiarities of the twenty people on top of which you live. Yes, my nutty hippy friends have made the great void of god, death, uncertainty, whathaveyou into a comfortable and refreshing alternative to one more conversation about GMOs, mulch, herbal stomach remedies, or how we do shit around the farm. So I'm finding ways to spend more time by myself.
There are a lot of wonderful, endearing, strong, and eccentric personalities here. Last night we wanted to watch a movie and couldn't decide, so Yan broke out a computer algorithm where we could rate each movie choice on a scale of 0 to 5 and then it did math and told us which movie had the least restistance. It took an hour to pick out the movie. We watched "The Matrix". We're eating a lot of jackfruit seed, which is like a big garbanzo bean, and a lot of strange fruits that are like avocado but sweet and less delicious. Tons of rice and beans. We're making citrus soda and lemon ginger champagne.
I am working in the veggie garden a lot; it seems that's going to be my main project while on the farm. That's a good skill set to develop and is very transferable to other locations. Right now there are 3 of us on the garden and we spend most of our time making plans and passing our general ignorance around in circles. Do we mulch? Do we direct seed? Do we augment the soil?
The permaculture course starts next Friday, so about an extra fourty people will descend upon the farm. It's going to be an adventure.
