Cast of Characters
Thomas: My French/Belgian/English housemate. 26, skinny as a rail, smokes like a chimney, has been living on the island for almost a year now. He sells these beautiful postcards in sepia tones that feature photographs of people, which is nicer and more representitive of the country than, say, a gecko or a sunset. He also makes and sells chocolate. We are both pretty social people but have fallen into seclusion; on a given day we basically only interact with one another. We have therefore developed the closeness of siblings, or of an 80 year old married couple. For all our bickering and exasperation, we were fairly lucky to find one another, because we have many fundamental things in common, politically, metaphysically, counterculturally, culinarily. We are eccentric but not in the same way. We are currently both in the middle of reading a seminal postcolonial text written in 1971 by Eduardo Galeano, called The Open Veins of Latin America; it chronicles the rape and pillage of of Central and South America over the last five centuries. It is incisive, brutal, and bombastically poetic. We listen to a lot of Ravi Shankar and Edith Piaf, and trance music heavily featuring the digeridoo. Thomas likes to watch documentaries, generally of one of two kinds: David Attenbourough nature documentaries, or radical and incendiary anti-corporate, anti-capitalist productions. I have stumbled upon a large and disparate community of people who believe that society as we know it will collapse upon itself in the next 20 years and lead to a huge revolution of the oppressed and independent-minded public. This is a breath of fresh air to me, because the longer I am away from home the more clinically insane my country appears to be. But back to Thomas. He makes crepes about 5 times a day.
Leia: Thomas’s puppy, black and brown and big enough not to be a small dog in the bad way but small enough to be portable and discrete. She is very calm and respectful and spends most of her time sleeping. Every few weeks Thomas pronounces that she is going to die. Then she gets better. Whenever we leave the house, she comes with us and waits patiently outside for us to finish our shopping, or swimming, or visiting. At night she has begun to sleep in the pile of my clothes on the floor, which is incidentally also where the two tarantulas who live in my room sleep.
Martijn: Totoco eco-lodge’s volunteer coordinator. Seriously one of the nicest and most generous people I have met. Totoco has a little eco-farm that hosts volunteers; because Thomas used to volunteer there when he first came to the island and because he worked up as a bartender/receptionist at the hotel, and because he is Martijn’s friend, he goes to weekly pizza night at Totoco. And because I am his housemate, I go to.
Patricia: Martijn’s smoking hot Spanish girlfriend. Gorgeous, fierce, smart, hilarious, and just dynamite in every way, she spearheads Totoco Foundation’s philanthropic work in the community.
Josh: Recpetionist at eco-hostel El Zopilote. He’s a photojournalist and is travelling and writing a book on zero to low-cost travel. He hitchhiked here from the Mexican border, which is easier to do if you are male, huge, hairy, non-descriptly olive-skinned, and fearless. He’s one of those people who loves to talk about himself and blows a lot of hot air, which I find forgivable because he has done a ton of really cool things in his life. Like most of my friends here, he remains pendant of the revolution. Meanwhile a UFO magazine has hired him to spend the entire year of 2012 in the Yucatan peninsula documenting astrological phenomena, taking pictures of Haley’s comet, and slumming around archeological wonders of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations.
Arturo: Zopilote’s live-in carpenter. French, 24, disarmingly mysterious and handsome. We don’t talk much.
Christiano: Owns Zopilote, along with his dad, Bruno. Bruno is an 80-year-old-man-shaped conglomerate of disgruntled sticks. He putters around the farm in his Guatamalan flood pants making natural foods. They make lots of natural products, such as fresh bread, pizza 3 nights a week, chocolate, peanut butter, various liqueurs including honey and lemongrass, basil, and chamomile, nutella, chutneys and marmelades.
Rebecca and Michael: Came from California to babysit Martijn’s house and volunteers while he’s away in Europe for the month. Super new-age and down to earth. They may be my favourite people I have met so far in my travels: welcoming, smart, engaging, and relaxed. Rebecca feeds me Himalayan salt and green tea. They dress like pirates. Also, all the volunteers who were there have quit, so the nonplussed two of them have the farm to themselves. They don’t really speak Spanish, but they are building a pig pen with Pablo, the local worker and trying to explore the island in their free time. I run into them, either by plan or by accident, every two or three days.
Francisco: A local tour guide who I met through a series of random events. He’s 25 and is trying to set up a new tourist information center in Moyogalpa, the island’s biggest port town, in order to streamline and civilize the dispensation of information, hiring of guides and taxistas, and undermine competition in favour of unbiased and helpful information. He smiles as much as anyone I know, and wants to take me horseback riding everywhere. I suspect he hopes we will grow very close.
Roslyn: Along with Martijn she is one of the founders and investors of Totoco. I am giving her yoga lessons.
Tess: Tess and her husband Anton work at a hostel called “Little Morgan’s”, sort of a party place. She’s 28 and an occupational therapist. She does a lot of really great work with the women in Balgue. She teaches aerobics on Monday, yoga on Wednesday, and also lots of councelling and support group sessions. Apparently there are a lot of depressed and anxious women here who feel very disempowered by not only their lack of education but also by living in the patriarchal shadow of their husbands. Patricia also works with these women and the foundation helps some of them get microloans to begin their own business ventures.
Ben and Sarah: Own a delightful cafe, Cafe Campestre, in Balgue. I sell journals on consignment there.
Gary and Laura: Own a delightful cafe, The Cornerhouse Cafe, in Moyogalpa. I sell journals there, too, and every time I’m in Moyogalpa I ritualistically eat a huge slice of carrot cake for lunch there.
Tomasa and Alvin: Our lovely neighbours next door. They have a horse and chickens and three parakeets and two dogs; recently a baby pig has been added to the menagerie. Things that they lend us: shovels, rakes, the blender, the hand mill for grinding cacao, and the grater. Last night I told Alvin I don’t know what our kitchen would do without them, and he smiled and told me that’s what neighbours are for. One day he came over and asked if he could please look at our stove- the wood-burning tunnel one which we don’t use. He took some measurements, and a week later has built a perfect replica in his own kitchen.
Joasca: Tomasa and Alvin’s 23 year old daughter. She is so pretty it hurts to look at her.
Siry Lady: Joasca’s little sister. She just turned 11. They invited us over for her birthday dinner, and we had revuelto de pollo (chicken and rice with veggies, like a Nicaraguan stir-fry), pineapple juice, coke, and birthday cake while we watched Home Alone II (which was the highlight of my week, because nothing reminds me of my childhood like the wet bandits). Siry is really bright and adorable. On Saturday she takes English classes in town, and some mornings she comes over and I give her English lessons. This consists of reading a few pages of a bilingual edition of The Ugly Duckling. It is not only rife with spelling and grammatical errors in the English translations, but it seems be written with reprehensible carelessness as to what vocabulary words are useful and appropriate for beginners. When she doesn’t know a word we write it on a vocabulary list, and occasionally we stop for a grammar lesson when it seems appropriate. Although I was an English major and teaching is all strangers ever assume I am fit to do with my life, teaching it as a second language is something I was totally unprepared for. I am, however, trying my best and Siry keeps coming back, even though she doesn’t appear to actually be learning anything. Today she gave me a candy necklace and I almost cried it was so sweet of her.
Claudio: An aging French Canadian expatriate who lives with Tomasa and Alvin. He used to be an antiques dealer but now he is a farmer. He loans some of the land to other farmers, and seems to use the rest as a sort of grandiose ornamental garden. He is trying to avoid building, which is what most gringos do, in excess really, when they relocate to the island. Thus his living with Thomasa and Alvin and his lack of two-story house with a widescreen television and a refrigerator and lots of other things that most expats bring to their homes.
Mitch: Is also from Boston! Therefore, we became friends immediately when Roxanne (Harrison’s sister) introduced us when we crossed paths in the street one evening. Mitch has been on the island for about a year. He started as a receptionist at Zopilote, and now he’s the volunteer coordinator for Finca Bona Fide, a permaculture farm with a great reputation. I will be moving there in a few days to volunteer. The other night, he and Arturo and I were out eating dinner in Santa Cruz and the Red Sox – Yankees game was on TV. I confessed that I had never watched a baseball game ever in my life, so Mitch patiently taught me (and Arturo because baseball’s not so big in France) the rules so that I could marginally follow the game. Mitch has an important and demanding job on the farm, but I also suspect that he is entirely addicted to busyness. He is probably wound tighter than any of my other friends on the island, and he still has dreadlocks.
Jorge: A jewellery artisan who lives in Managua, the capital. He and I met at Finca Magdelena when I was on the island for the first time, with Laura. He was one of the people who most strongly encouraged me to pursue the journals. I visited him in Managua, where he led me around on a 3-day shopping spree to buy paper and kitchen supplies. What a mensch. He lives in his aunt’s compound, where she rents rooms to students. He has a little medicinal herb garden that he feeds with food scraps, and he has a coconut tree. Jorge dotes on his little niece and sings her lots of cute songs on guitar, and then sings revolutionary songs when she’s not around. He is president of the national artisan’s guild and an active member of the FSLN party. He has a degree in sociology, speaks French, and learned to make jewellery when he lived on the street after becoming disillusioned with academia for a few years. Oh, and did I mention, he’s only 26. Jorge has a beautiful and wise life philosophy, and he is happy, generous, brilliant, and laid back. We went to the two huge markets in Managua, one of which is the biggest market in Central America. I ate beef-stomach soup. One night we made dinner and I found out that Jorge had breaded our fried fish with chocolate-corn breakfast shake powder. It was a new taste, but not so bad.
Harrison: Harrison began talking to me as I was walking down from Finca Magdelena one day. Oh, you live here. I had a Canadian volunteer live with my family for a while. She used to love to go horseback riding. Do you know Punta Gorda? We should go horseback riding there sometime. I’ll take you.
It’s hard to say no when you are not busy. This is an island where it is literally impossible to be, in the words of Lloyd Dobbler, indefinitely busy. You would have to be rude to refuse an invitation. Also, horseback riding is hard to say no to.
So we met on the appointed day, me hoping he would blow me off but unwilling to blow him off. And he had... one horse. I was not pleased. He is 24, single, and maybe five feet tall. And we had to ride the same horse together. It was an old mare who was ridiculously slow. He said we could go get the other horse in the pasture that likes to run, so we did, which was a fun journey farther east of Balgue than I had gone before. And the other horse was great, but Harrison wouldn’t let me canter much because I might tire him out. How lame do you have to be. Conversation was excruciating. “The other horse was slow, wasn’t it?” Yup, it was. “This horse is fast”. You bet. “You like that, right?” Mhmm. “You like it” I like fast horses, yes. I promise you this was not a language barrier issue because Jorge and I don’t have conversations that sound like this. I finally lost it and asked him what he thought about the upcoming national presidential election. I may as well have asked him to tell me his most embarrassing childhood story. He then told me he had had a foreign girlfriend. “Congratulations”, I told him bitterly. I proceded to tell him how I hate being a piece of ass. He said, but people tell you they love you. I said, Jesus, learn the difference between love and lust; you can’t love someone you’ve never met. He told me that gringas are nicer and prettier. I called him a racist. He manipulated me into coming home with him and meeting his mother, who I adored. All in all, I have to say that the date was not a success.
Daren and Ileene: My landlords. They are in their 40’s and own a bed and breakfast across the street. They are nice but obviously a little eccentric, which creeps me out only because I cannot put my finger on it. I guess it’s the way they talk to their dog, Dozer, who is slightly blind and deaf. He takes his job as a guard dog very seriously, but does a poor job on the uptake, so when he figures out somebody’s there, and also that they are way closer to the house than he should have allowed them to get before noticing them, he is a vicious sonofabitch. They speak to him like he’s a lobotomized human, “Dozer, Dozer, calm down. Dozer, relax. Relax Dozer. Friend. Friend, Dozer.”. Like so many aging hippy parents they seem committed to raising their young without the use of the word “no”. Occasionally Dozer comes over to OUR house and trots around like he owns the place, which to me seems extremely impertinent for an animal that takes territorial boundaries so seriously.
Charlie: A fat cane toad that lives in our yard, so named by yours truly.
Chronical of Events and Situations
The lines: Thomas and I have concluded that: We live above the poverty line. We live above the crepe line. We live below the water line. We live below the utensils line. We live above the starfruit line. We live above the book line. We live below the hygiene line. We live above the documentary line. We live below the protein and the balanced diet line. We live above the chocolate line. We live below the cultural events line. We live below the getting laid line. We live below the clean sink line. This is how we speak about our lives.
Water
The house in which Thomas and I are living was built equipt with five sources of running water. Two taps in the yard which run water directly from the Madronal water system’s pipes. One toilet, also hooked up to the system. One shower, and one sink, both of which get their water from a 500-gallon cement tank in our backyard, which has filtered water from the system. The shower does not work if the tank is less than half full. The sink does not work if the tank is empty.
It has been almost a month since the sink stopped working.
Where does the system water come from? As you know, I live on the side of a volcano, called Maderas (“wood”). Maderas has a large crater lake at its summit (I have seen this lake). The island’s shores will not see rain from about November to June, during a time referred to as either “summer” or “the dry season”. However, because clouds form around the peaks of the volcano, it rains up there every day, and even when its not raining there is a line above which everything is always wet because of condensation. In the dry season, while the monocropped banana fields and dusty roads are dry and dead, the slopes of the mountain are verdant with a cloak of trees and other green plant life.
Why am I telling you all of this? To drive home the point that Ometepe, in its magical geology, is never without water. The water system is a series of pipe that lead all the way up to the crater lake. Also let us not forget that this is a fresh water island and that I live a ten minutes’ walk away from the large lake in Central America.
However, during the end of the dry season water gets a little bit tight. The pipe is set up such that there is the main tube that runs off the mountain and like a taproot it has many little pipes leading off of it to supply individual houses and neighbourhoods. Quantum physicists are not sure that gravity really exists, but for the purpose of our discussion, gravity is what runs this water system and so therefore people at the bottom get more water pressure. When water is scarce, “the people in charge” don’t let as much out, and so now most of Madronal is out of running water. There is no organization of this system and no communication. Daren and Illene have water; we don’t. To be more specific, we can turn on the taps in the yard, which on a given day will yield from about a teaspoon to a gallon of a water every half hour. Due to a stomach-churning amount of visible sediment, this water is not drinkable. We use it to do dishes.
How does this water shortage affect our lives?
Drinking water: Daren and Ileene give us gallon jugs of water from their tap. These are kind of heavy but not a big deal, except for your fingers. It is therefore painful to carry more than one in each hand.
Showering: Daren and Ileene have been generous enough to let us use their shower whenever we like. This is nice, but not as nice as not having to walk 300 meters to your neighbour’s house carrying your toiletries and a clean change of clothes and a towel and several one-gallon jugs to refill for drinking water every time you want a shower, which in a 95 degree climate that is getting progressively more humid as the rainy season approaches is about constantly. Thomas and I also rinse frequently in the lake. Sometimes I fill a 2-liter bottle with lake water and put in the shower for if I just want to rinse off before bed or something. Hygiene has taken a turn for the worse.
Dishes: But nothing like the dishes situation, which is the most abject scorn for cleanliness and appropriate human separation from putrefaction of which I have ever been a part. When we were in our second week of getting mere teaspoons from the outside taps, it was difficult to wash our dishes because we were frankly drinking most of the water we got from Daren and Ileene. It turned into a sort of triage in which we only washed what we wanted to use, and the rest of the dishes rotted in a pile. I may not have mentioned that our sink is flat. While most logical sinks are a bowl that slopes down to a drain, our sink is a basin that encourages the buildup of foodscraps in remote corners. When your foodscraps are raw chicken that you have failed to wash off a cutting board for a week, life gets really difficult. When we got hungry, Thomas and I would generally cast a glance at the kitchen sink, sigh, pull a spoon out of a bowl of soaking crepe mix and wipe it on our pants, and make a cup of tea. Things are a little better now that we are getting up to a gallon of water from the tap. I have also requested that we only use one bowl for crepe mix, instead of rotating three through various stages of crustiness, and it’s been a hit. There’s nothing like running water, though. One night it rained really hard. We lost electricity and put all of our dishes in the rain, hoping it would help clean them and loosen the crud. It did, but the impact of the huge drops launched liquid soil all over the outside, and sometimes into the inside, of the dishes. I managed to clean them all by moonlight, but it was not ideal.
Laundry: In the lake. Which we sometimes did before anyway.
Going to the bathroom: Unfortunatley we learned that we lacked enough water to flush the toilet when Thomas made a lot of poop in the toilet and was then unable to flush it. Ever since, we’ve been going to the bathroom outside behind the big rocks. It’s like camping! For a month.
Here’s the thing. Thomas and I are first-world novices, and there’s been a learning curve; But the fact of the matter is that there are huge numbers of people who live without running water, or have almost no potable water, as a way of life. With global warming, more and more areas will see extreme droughts. Think about this.
Yoga
So at first I worked really hard to set up a business proposition with hostel Finca Magdelena so that I could become the yoga instructor there. I had business meetings (!!!!) and bought a cell phone, which I really didnt want to do, but whatever. I made a sign, I revised it, I translated it into Spanish, everything. I did the same for another hostel. Lots of hard work and walking around the island.
It failed. I am an optimistic person usually, but I have no hesitations in saying that this particular business venture crashed and burned like the best of them. I didnt have too many sunken investment costs luckily, though, and everything worked out. I was in Tess's yoga class one day and Roslyn hired me to teach her a private lesson. Now there's a group of five of them and we do lessons twice a week. I make mad bank, and its so great. They're engaged and enthusiastic, make lots of juicy noises. We laugh and groan, and they're at a good ability level. I have a lot to teach them, but they can also do a fair amount. Each class builds on the ones before it. I am in my element.
Maderas
I climbed the volcano! With Francisco and two travelers I met in Moyogalpa the day before, who invited me to join them. So it was an improptu volcano climb. We climbed 4 hours up, the first half dry and the second wet. Up toward the top it was so lush and green, everything mossy and muddy and just lovely. At the summit is a flat field (wierd after hiking through cloud forest and rocks the whole time) with a huge lake. It's always covered with mist, so it looks like something out of Arthurian legend. We had a picnic lunch up there and then hiked 3 hours down. I walked funny for the next week.
Journals
I have been making and selling journals in two cafes. It has been great. They have petroglyphs from the island on the cover, and are super well recieved. There were some major learning curves in getting everything figured out, but it worked. I'm almost out of materials, and I'm not going to get more, but it's been a good first excersize in entrepreurship.
Chocolate
We make a lot of chocolate to satisfy our crepe addiction. We buy the cacao beans fermented and dried already. Then we roast them to get the remaining moisture out. You do this to coffee, too. You then have to peel the beans and grind them. Thomasa lends us their hand mill for this. Once we left it outside and it got stolen. We asked Thomasa about this and she had an idea of who stole it. When Thomas confronted him, he said he didn't know. When Thomas mentioned the police, he said, ok, my friend took it and buried it behind your house. Thomas said where. He said, I don't know. Thomas said, show me. And so he did. Thomas unburied the coffee grinder and returned it to Thomasa. Anyway. You grind in sugar with the cacao, and then you have a paste. Let it dry, you have a bar of chocolate. Mix in some sugar, milk, and butter and you can heat it into a sauce.
Garbage
There is no way to dispose of your garbage in Ometepe except to burn it or bury it. Hacienda Merida has a program where they will pay you a few cents if you bring them a two liter waterbottle stuffed compact with trash. They use these as building materials for houses, sheds, etc. So Thomas and I spent a couple of days stuffing 3 months of accumulated trash into bottles with a stick of rebar. It was disgusting. Not only was there rotting butter wrappers and milk containers, but also piles and piles of cigarette ash. It's good to take responsiblity for your own trash- I bet if everyone had to put all their trash in water bottles, they would think twice before buying so much crap.
Insects
Insects exist to fly around and die. The empirical evidence is littered all over the floor. Over the course of my time here, the insect swarms have had a flavour-of-week type of turnover. It began with little flies, shaped like mosquitoes but smaller, that were sometimes so thick your eyes would plow into them while walking and you’d have to fish squashed bugs out from your eyeballs. Every morning a thin dust of them accumulated on the floor. These were a mostly nocturnal phenomena. During the day we had little wasps that land and crawl on everything but especially humans. Thomas and I tried to determine whether they were more attracted to body odour and sweat or perfumes and toiletrie scents. My conclusion is that they flock to me indiscriminately. Although they are wasps they are totally non-aggressive and they only sting when you accidentally pinch them in your armpit or your kneepit. They don’t mind being swatted at. Thomas once had one in his coffee and it bit his tongue. Then there was another fly, almost identical to the first, but this one was so small it could get in between the holes of my mosquito net. And bite me. For a few days I wondered if I had fleas or hives, because this swarm began the night I was delirious with fever and vomiting, so I didn’t know if I was imagining the little bites or if it was bugs. The next wave was cicadas, but amazingly they made no noise. Leia loved to catch and eat them. Then the rain came back. The island had been a steady 95 degrees and sunny every day since I arrived. We are now moving into the wet season, and get at least a few minutes of rain every other day, and have had a couple earnest thunderstorms. It is delightful to see everything coming back to life. A carpet of little sprouts has sprung up in the yard. And with it have come crickes, grasshoppers, and every insect imaginable. At the moment we are swamped with brown beetles the size of lima beans. Leia doesn’t even eat them they are so fucking big and repulsive. Also we have houseflies which have the maddening habit of not only landing on you but returning back to the same spot again and again after you shoo them away. But the magical thing is that the fireflies are in bloom. Yes, there are fireflies back home. But not like this. You look into the darkness and it sparkles. Fireflies like the darkness and so they do not come into my house; therefore they do not die there, so they are in my good graces in every possible way.
Spiders and scorpions are not insects, they are arachnids, and arachnids seem to have no come-and go season. Likewise, mosqitos, which are an insect, are always present, but in pretty manageable numbers. Our house provides a home for a handful of tarantulas, none of which are quite so large as my hand. They like to sleep in my clothes when I am not wearing them. Sometimes there are scorpions on the walls. And there are many smaller spiders which barely even make blips on my radar anymore, especially since the category of “indoors” no longer exists for me. “Indoors” is something that happens in America.
Then there are the trooping ants. Usually they are a moving river no thicker than your thumb. But sometimes they are a delta with estuaries and ponds flowing into one location, and this is when you can hear them. All their little legs moving over dead leaves makes a sound like rain. Occasionally they invade our home for an hour or two, and then we have to leave, but they only eat dead insects (of which we have an abundance). What eats our foods is a rodent. It looks more like a mouse than a rat, but it is a mouse the size of a remote control. Really the only problem with the trooping ants is that they bite viciously. It is the kind of biting that hurts so badly you can’t tell if you have more ants on your feet biting you or if the same bite is just still stinging. If you walk through an ant trail, they will redirect themselves within seconds up your foot and sting you. So you have to just keep an eye out where you step.
