Earthquakes, Beans and Rice
Gnats love mornings, and apparently afternoons. Thankfully they don’t like evenings, or at least not yet. This is just one of the lessons we are learning in Nicaragua.
Another one is that laundry is a whole nother ball of wax here. Take a typical Saturday morning. We sleep in a bit, until about 6am when the roosters have reached fever pitch:) We wake up and make coffee (what a delicious treat), accompanied by scrambled eggs, bread and fruit. Then, the next 4 hours are spent doing laundry (so far Miriam has taken on laundry duties), a process that involves washing each piece of clothing individually with a large bar of special laundry soap, rubbing it on a quasi-washboard surface, rinsing and wringing out, and then hanging in the sun on the nearby barbed-wire fence. This process, while laborious, works fine for the most part. But during the rainy season, you need to capture the fine balance of giving the clothes maximum time in the sun while being ready at a moments notice to grab them off the fence as soon as the first drops of afternoon rain start falling.
Doing laundry the local way also helps you realize why the old man on the bus wears an old shirt with the telltale holes in the corner from whatever barbed-wire fence deployed for drying in his yard. Two and 1/2 weeks in our clothes are still intact with surprisingly few holes, which is great.
Last Wednesday night we awoke to a pretty violent shaking of the house. Miriam quickly ascertained it was an earthquake, and our friend Tyler (his last night in El Tololar before returning to Baltimore) was at our door not long after, requesting that we exit our rooms for a few minutes per quake protocol. It took us a minute to wake up Harlan and Olle, who had slept right through the 5.8 magnitude tremor. Our neighbors (we are surrounded on all sides by various members of the Rivas family) had the TV on and let us know that the epicenter had been near Momotombo, a very active volcano to our south. No eruptions or increased activity were reported, so we were free to go back to bed. There were multiple follow-up tremors the rest of the night so sleep was hard to come by that night.
Saturday and Sunday afternoons have been about baseball and soccer. The baseball games - Big Papi and the Red Sox are very well known here - are all about the kids, with Harlan and Olle joining in when they can. The local boys are REALLY good at baseball, and seem to play all the time.
Soccer games are played in Don Lionel’s front yard. He is the 78 year old Patriarch of the family. His yard has a really nice volcanic dirt surface and is just the right size for a 4 or 5 on 5 game, with only a few banana trees, one huge grapefruit tree, and a deep water well as obstacles. We started playing barefoot but quickly realized our feet are supremely soft. Most of our local friends play barefoot or in flip flops – which seems even harder – and there are a few players who could thrive at the collegiate level. Soccer is a great way to learn and use Spanish, “aqui, aqui”, and our hosts are supremely gracious with our shoe-stomping style of play.
Across the road from the soccer field is one of many fields of peanuts where we run at dusk most evenings. It is one of the true pleasures of life here to run barefoot through a verdantly green field of peanuts, the field framed by at least 4 or 5 volcanoes and our runs punctuated by almost nightly lightning storms.
Getting a reliable internet connection at our house has been a challenge thus far, so most weekdays have taken on a regular cadence that revolves around getting access to a good wifi connection for the boys schooling. We take the 7am chicken bus to Leon – chickens do ride the bus but infrequently thus far – and arrive at the final stop just after 8. We then either walk, take a taxi or a 3-wheeled bicycle taxi to one of several cafes with wifi. We do school work till noon, and Cully usually goes grocery shopping during that time. We try to buy rice, beans, fruits and vegetables at the local market and can get them for a much better rate than the more international stores. Plus shopping locally is so omuch more fun.
It’s not easy for the boys to concentrate, and inevitably at least once during the internet school day they will have to deal with a car driving by the cafe, blaring out advertisements really loudly for a local product they are selling. Or, at one cafe a woman came in begging for money during math class for Harlan and language arts for Olle. We can’t say enough about how the boys are rolling with the punches and learning to live here. They also have a good understanding about how to both accept the challenges, and at the same time make space to mourn the fact that they are missing their friends and family at home.
After school we walk or taxi back to a different bus station, catch the 12:30pm Mariano bus (he’s the driver of the other local bus) and arrive back home at about 1:45. We eat a quick lunch and at 2pm we start our Spanish class with Professora Rosibel, normally finishing around 4:30.
Spanish is coming along, and we plan on taking lessons for at least 2-3 months. The best part of learning of course comes in those moments of asking for directions, or just sitting in our neighbor Adilsa’s front yard and talking about our days, the weather, and how good the local Nacatamales are :)
When you live in another country, don’t yet speak the language and experience new things literally every moment, life can be both challenging and really interesting. A few days back our neighbor proudly showed us two armadillos he had bought at the local market. We didn’t even know they had armadillos in Nicaragua! Then, we went family ‘machete’ shopping last Friday, as Olle has been fixated on getting his own machete ever since he saw Don Lionel use a giant machete to craft a piece of wood into a hoe handle for our garden.
Miriam has taken to teaching a Pilates-Yoga class to 3 or 4 local women after our run in the peanut fields. We sweep off our patio, lay down towels, and we soon hear grunts and lots of Spanish words for movement and body parts; espalda, tocar los pieds, alargar los piernas.
Beans take about 2 hours to make, and most of our dinners are beans, rice, and vegetables. Harlan and Olle are sick of them, but that’s what’s for dinner so they are going to have to settle :) The challenge with anything related to food is the ants. They are so prolific that if you drop one bean, once corner of a cracker, or forget to sweep up a dead cricket in the corner of a room, they will form a line many yards long and proceed to march to the food until it is all gone. Forget about it if you leave something really sweet like honey open or even not hermetically sealed in a Ziploc. Those little buggers will find it! If they don’t, either a chicken or one of the many local dogs will find it, the dogs not the least worried about breaking into your kitchen even after you’ve wildly waved a broom at them and snarled quite loudly.
Peace and Paz...Lundgrens
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