Hare-Raising Tales, Painting By Numbers, One Bad-As% Hombre

We love Don Leonel.  He is a supremely unique, hard-working, caring, personality, kind of like the Godfather, and at times possessing an accent eerily similar (albeit in Spanish) to Marlon Brando.  Conversations with Don Leonel can and do happen almost anywhere around the Rivas compound, but his favorite place to relax is in his backyard, underneath several papaya trees, swinging slowly in his hammock while listening to the radio.  On many occasions we have come upon him there, and quickly launched into discussions on any number of topics.  A recent conversation, typical of most in length and breadth, hit on the following disparate yet somehow connected subjects: sharks, constellations, gangs, horses, motorcycles, dogs, cats, Donald Trump, the invention of flight, Daniel Ortega, the Silk Road, the Nile River, immigration and crocodiles. Thishombre is a walking encyclopedia, adding new pages to his book every day.

But Don Leonel is more than a talker, and his wisdom has not been easily gained, instead slowly emerging as a result of a very difficult life; he definitely went to the school of hard knocks.  He was one of 9 siblings, all but he and his older brother Feliz have since passed away.  He grew up in El Tololar, moving to different locations within the community as they suited his growing family (8 kids) at any given time.  He worked long hours, clearing fields of sugar cane and cotton with only his sweat and a machete, walking to the fields (now most workers take motorcycles) for 1 ½ hours each way, every day.  His younger siblings slowly passed away over the years, succumbing to a usual set of infirmities and accidents that effect so many here; run over by a tractor, unintentionally shot with a gun, alcoholism, and kidney failure.  He has contracted malaria more time than he can count, and has been witness to most of the trials and tribulations that have hit Nicaragua in the past half century or more; earthquakes (the 1972 one killed 60,000), volcano eruptions, war.  In the midst of it all, Don Leonel has persevered, raising a family of amazing individuals who themselves are fighting to endow Nicaraguans with more opportunities - the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Don Leonel is still going strong, as evidenced by the way he nonchalantly decided to break his mare a couple weeks back. Seated sideways and behind her on a cart, he navigated through multiple fence lines and through several corn fields, his body jostling as pieces of wood flew off the back. The horse was frightened, and to heighten the tension, her foal kept running in front of the cart, threatening to spill the entire load of wood, including Don Leonel.  Somehow, he managed to steer her successfully to his house after his third wood-gathering trip. We can’t be sure but think we heard him let out a couple yee-haws as he rounded the final corner.

As scary as Miriam’s scorpion bite was, we recently heard that Aciles also once got stung by a big scorpion.  The injury produced the normal pain at the site, numb tongue, and in his case, dizziness and a headache.  Strangely, the prick created an additional side effect that must have been downright alarming at the time but when told by a healthy Aciles, came across as absolutely hilarious.  For a brief period after the sting, Aciles, despite his most strenuous efforts, evidently could only manage to walk backwards. His reverse ambulation and other side effects corrected themselves rather quickly, but stories of a retreating Aciles are now part of Rivas family lore.

Normally when you order a hamburger, you get a hamburger - not necessarily in Nicaragua. Here once you’ve made your initial choice, you need to further specify if you want your hamburguesa made out of beef (a solid option) chicken, or pork. Are we missing something here?

As the previous hambur-graph was being written, Aciles called us over to his house to see the zorro (possum) he had cornered in his tree. Different dictionaries we’ve consulted have alternately translated zorro as either skunk or fox, so finding a treed possum was a surprise.  Aciles, definitely a pacifist and someone who wouldn’t willingly kill a flea (or tarantula as we found out previously) explained that the Nicaraguan version has a pretty basic diet; chickens, eggs, and possibly kittens.  With our two chickens roosting yards away and our three baby kittens not much farther, we were ok with him doing what needed to be done, as long as we didn’t have to watch.

It’s kind of like clockwork – the rain starts and the electricity stops.  It hasn’t really started full force, but the evening of April 24^th we experienced our first rain since November.  It wasn’t a deluge, but it produced enough liquid to wet the ground, leak water onto Olle’s bed, and produce some beautiful lightning storms, which knocked out power for most of the night.  Here, the clocks also work with respect to bugs; the rain starts and the bugs start biting.  Over the last week or so, we have definitely seen the fly, gnat and even mosquito populations increase, some of them graciously joining us for our morning exercises (aww, you shouldn’t have, fellas), others landing on us during mealtimes.  The most invasive bugs are the ones that come out at night, congregating around our two patio lights and in our kitchen, as if it was some sort of insect rave.  Literally hundreds of little black bugs fly to the lights after even the slightest whisper of rain, get fried, and fall to the floor, where they make for crispy snacks for our two chickens. The other nighttime bug variety we call the kamikaze, a giant beetle with a faulty navigation system that somehow always manages to land in your drink, smack you in the head, or land in a plastic bag, where it produces a vibration so loud we often think we have a pet rattlesnake.

Miriam and Cully recently read an article in the La Prensa newspaper as we drove home on the 4:30pm bus.  The article’s headline was that some seventy percent of Nicaraguans want to stay in their country, and not immigrate to other destinations, the two most popular being the USA and Costa Rica.  The article went on to say that in fact almost 75% of those polled like Daniel Ortega, and think he is managing the country in the right direction.  Unless you have been residing under a rock, if you are living in Nicaragua you know this is not accurate.  It is interesting, though, that Ortega won this past November’s elections with a similar ratio of victory.  But really, it’s not hard to achieve such great polling #’s when your family owns (or has close ties to) virtually every major, successful company in the country, including the entire Fourth Estate.  What can we do? At the very least, question authority and power, for where they reside, often so does their cousin, corruption.  Ask the tough questions, and force those in control to be accountable for their actions.

We all love paint, don’t we? It can transform the most lackluster wall or ceiling into a work of art. In the states we general don’t think much about what paint actually costs but here in Nicaragua, it can actually be the single most important determining indicator of wealth.  That’s right, your blue, yellow or green house means you have more money than your neighbor.  In El Tololar, it doesn’t mean you are rich (no one is) but it means you have at least some disposable income.  We live in a yellow house (at least on 3 sides) and so we are rich, not that this was ever a question.  Adilsa painted half her bathroom with a 3-times, watered down mixture of water and red paint, her lavatory sporting a dull, peach color that still brightens things up.  So she has more than some of her neighbors, but not much more.

But the income/wealth/poverty scale doesn’t end with colors.  The next step down is the house made out of brick, but then covered with concrete, often a luxury for finishing walls.  Farther down the local housing spectrum is the brick and mortar homes with tin roofs – there are many – followed by houses made from slabs of corrugated metal.  The poorest of the poor live in shacks, cobbled together with metal, pieces of wood, and worn plastic tarps.  Families in these houses definitely live on the edge.  In fact, Aciles’ two beautiful daughters, Gabriela and Cindy, live in such a house with their mother, not far from the secondary school. A variety of events took place, some of them due to a corrupt legal system, which led to Cindy and Gabriel living in such abject conditions. And Cindy, the youngest, lives in fear. She has recurring nightmares. And why? Several years back, a drunk man in El Tololar entered a house by cutting through the thin plastic sheet that surrounded it. He kidnapped and then killed the child; and so Cindy is scared.  She wishes instead she could live within the safe, concrete walls of her father Aciles' house.

One of us, not mentioning any names, recently got sick, like really sick.  The infirmity started innocently enough – we all pegged it on a fish taco. The first night the fish all came back up with a vengeance, but that wasn’t the end of it.  The next three days were spent fighting through a variety of daily activities (including hiking a volcano), the gut’s ability to fend off waves of nausea strong enough to mitigate the worst effects, but never quite kicking the bug.  Three nights after contraction (if in fact it was the fish taco) the flood gates opened late one Sunday night.  The experience gave new meaning to the term “coming out both ends,” and was exacerbated by the fact our victim had to break a sacred rule; don’t poo in the pee bucket.  In fact lots of hygienic rules were breached that night and into the next day, including rule # 13: don’t let the chickens and dogs in your garbage pit after dumping your full buckets of puke.  But we made it through to live another day.  Our three baby kittens, still sequestered under a bed with eyes closed, may have found the whole evening terrifying, however, wondering what in God’s name the big wide world had in store for them when they finally left the safety of the cozy, under-bed area.

Cully took a walk to our friend Elio’s house last week.  Elio is the Cuban man who married a local woman from Tololar about 13 years ago, and has been here ever since.  He is a very generous man, and because he lived in the states for many years, he is better off than most for sure.  He owns a truck, enough said.  But he has helped many, using his truck to take very sick people to the hospital in Leon, helping to start agricultural cooperatives, and sharing his own brand of Nicaraguan/Cuban hospitality with many.  On Cully’s walk to Elio’s home that fine morning, he counted more than twenty Guadabarrancos, the beautifully adorned national bird with an insanely long tail. For comparative purposes, that’s like walking to the corner store and seeing 20 Bald Eagles chirping at you, in the span of 20 minutes; holy Moses that would be cool.

Everything is connected, here and where you are; take the story about water we told recently.  We neglected to mention one additional problem related to the water here – or lack thereof.  In addition to the changes to the local climate, the copious, illegal use of water with impunity by a few local wealthy families, and the corrupt practices embedded in the local water committee, there is the problem of contamination.  Insecticides and fertilizers that are spread on the local crops are just looking for somewhere to go when they have done their sterilization and killed off the pests.  Naturally, they seek water.  Some pozos(wells) are protected with an outer core that prevents groundwater from getting in, but the process to protect them is expensive, and most are not covered.  Thus chemicals seep into the wells, people drink, people get sick, and people die, often from kidney disease, affecting it seems every family in El Tololar.

Contamination of water sources can also happen when the local public water system is down, and people need to haul water up from their natural wells.  They often use a team of bueys (oxen), tie a rope to a bucket, and direct the bulls to walk away from the well, pulling the bucket up to the surface.  During the process, the oxen poop on the rope, and the poop goes back into the water on the next haul.  Feces and water shouldn’t mix, and waterborne health problems persist.

When cute, fuzzy animals change their happy tune, it can be really quite scary.  Take our frustrated rabbit Rainer.  We have had Rainer for close to seven months, and all that time he has lived without a mate.  For some time we thought he would get by as a loner, and as noted previously,  he has tried his darndest to pretend our cat Mimi is a rabbit.  Last week, however, Rainer's libido problems finally spilled over into violence, his full wrath being directed at Cully.

 It started with a few, relatively innocent nips to the feet one morning, followed by a more aggressive feint at the legs several minutes later.  Then, soon after breakfast, as Cully was walking into his room to feed the cat, he turned around to see a large white bunny, airborne and with teeth bared, literally flying at his left leg. In that split second, Rainer managed to both claw Cully's foot and make a good-sized bite into his leg.  The action was so seemingly random that a first thought was that we had a rabid rabbit.  Harlan and Olle quickly sequestered themselves in the room, while Cully, now holding a broom handle, found himself stuck in the kitchen. Every time he tried to get out the bunny was there, jumping and biting at the broom.  He finally crawled out the window with his broom, and walked into the field near the house.  Our Neighbors Don Leonel and Belkis heard the commotion. They came over and like everyone else since (except Cully) had no problems with the conejo (rabbit), petting him one minute as he charged Cully the next.

The bunny attack was certainly magnified in Cully's mind due to the fact that he had worked at a rabbit farm as a teenager- which had only big white bunnies with pink eyes (like Rainer) - and thus there was clearly some PTSD happening. In the end, the PTSD manifested itself in several ways.  At different times throughout the day, Cully could be found either sitting on top of our dining room table, cowering in a corner or once, jumping onto Miriam's body and almost knocking her over, nearly breaking his finger in the process.  As of this writing, we are oscillating around our next move, giving Rainer away - so Cully doesn't have to live in constant fear of another rabbit mauling - or finding an embra(female rabbit) so that Rainer can finally sew his oats.

Last Sunday, as we walked by Miriam and Carlo's house (his name is Carlo, not Carlos as we have been writing), we saw a mid-sized pig sprawled out on a table in their front yard, her neck slit.  We naturally inquired a bit more and found that this dead pig was the last of the brood of five that Miriam's pig Carmello had given birth to back in December.  Miriam had since sold the other four, and was in the process of fattening this one up to sell at market, where at its current size she could have gotten about $55. But this little piggie will definitely not be going to market.

It turns out that the pig had gone for a morning walk - they are all largely free-range pigs here in the village - and never came home when Miriam rang the noon lunch bell.  She went looking and found her, lying on the ground, strangled by her leash which had wrapped itself consecutively around and around a small tree and a banana plant in Adilsa's back yard, choking her to death.  It was really sad but Miriam took it in stride.  Then she, Carlo, Wilmar, and their cousin spent the rest of the afternoon getting the mini-sow ready to eat.  This included pouring boiling water on her skin to loosen the bristly hairs prior to shaving off, cutting holes to string rope through her legs, hoisting her up a nearby mango tree, slicing her skin into sections for dried pork skin, and cutting her meat into portions for consumption.  It was a long, pretty gross process.  But that's how you dress down a pig, and later that night, we had more pork for dinner.

Harlan recently joined the "I got stung by a scorpion club", making him the fourth and final Familia Lundgren entrant into the exclusive group. He had just got out of the shower, a rare soothing hot shower as we had just checked into a hotel on the island of Ometepe (more to follow next update on this beguiling place).  He used the towel that hung nearby to dry, and then as he went to put it around his waist, got stung on the elbow.  His response indicated something bigger and badder than a wasp or a spider. Sure enough, a dark spot on the flip side of the towel revealed a scorpion.  Harlan's elbow swelled, he had trouble closing his hand, and had a bit of tingling on his tongue.  At the time of this writing, he seems to be improving, but remarked that he officially no longer likes scorpions; neither do the rest of us

Earlier this week, we had the chance to be a part of another computer give-away ceremony at the El Tololar Secondary School.  This Tololamos project  started in 2011 and has been an instrumental motivator for students and their families in El Tololar and surrounding communities.  Each quarter, Tololamos gives out a computer to the top, performing students in the school. So few people have access to computers, and receiving a refurbished computer with all sorts of software (including Rosetta Stone for English) is truly a gift.  We were honored to participate, and watching one father of a computer recipient stand up to speak and then break down in tears said so much about his gratitude and the real value of the project.  Harlan and Olle felt a little weird standing up in front of a courtyard full of students staring back at them, but the ceremony provided a real-life education to them about the value of computers as tools of education; it turns out they are not just for gaming, who knew?