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A Walk Through A Barrio
Breakfast was finally here and I only had eight minutes to eat to and to walk seven blocks to school. At school, while I was waiting for the teacher to show up who was a half hour late herself, I met Carolina from New Jersey. She is finishing her post grad research for her final dissertation for her doctorate in Comparative Politics. Her theme is about how CAFTA will affect the people of Central America and what their opinions are. That's ironic because when I was touring the skid-row district in Los Angeles in the year 2000 with Richard ___, the comptroller of two Texas hospitals, as he was living under cover in a drug rehabilitation program doing research for his doctorate dissertation on Third World Economics of the Inner Cities of the United States. Carolina's itinerary includes Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and I'm not sure where else.
Six years of studying the French language has helped her to learn Spanish and yet trips her up a little with French words popping up all the time in place of Spanish words. We both took the entrance test, she bombed it yesterday and I only got 65% on it today. While Lidia, our teacher, was correcting my paper we were told to chat in Spanish only. I'm slightly more fluent but she has a better grasp of grammar than I do so there are plenty of mistakes and the inevitable English words that slip in as we struggle to communicate. Carolina makes it easy because she is loaded with a continuous rapid-fire barrage of questions in an interview style so there are no embarrassing long silences. Lidia raises her eyes often to correct our flaws then lowers them examining my test paper like a dentist looking for cavities and she is finding plenty. The good news is that we are at the same general level neither of us is way ahead or behind the other. So we can work together in many exercises. The big difference is our language goals. She wants to sharpen her grammar and increase her vocabulary and I want only to work on the conversation aspect. The rest of the morning classes zipped by smoothly and both Caroline and I were dazed and slightly disoriented at the lunch break. As I walked we walked together to her casa we came upon an ambulance on a bridge and a large crowd of people watching five men pulling on a rope who were hauling an unconscious injured drunk up out of a dry river bed.
When I arrived home, Don Fred took me to his radio studio to meet two periodistas (news reporters) one guy did the program engineering while Alejandro Maltez Rodrigues gave ten minute talks about the problems and solutions of deforestation occurring in this zone of volcanoes where he is the head of sector that includes Granada, west to Laguna de Apoyo and north to the village of Tipitapa along the west shore of a Lago Cocibolca (Lake Nicaragua). They ask for funds from the government and donations of time and money from the listeners to use for planting tens of thousands of new trees. He is a very old man, thin and wiry, who had to put a another pair of glasses on top of the glasses he was wearing to help him to read his script into the microphone. The engineer would fade the music in for the listeners during which we would have ten minutes to converse. He showed me a map of a chain of five dormant volcanoes that march silently puffing steam though the surrounding towns. The map showed the areas of once forest covered slopes that now had no trees. The effects to animal habitat and even the weather are dramatic. The rains that were partly generated by the once thick jungles have diminished and the cloud forest on Vulcan Mombacho is receding up the slope and at the present rate will disappear in a few short years. His voice is as strong and passionate as his heart is. I asked him to autograph the map that he gave me and he also gave me his home address and telephone number. Then he talked about me over the radio, this north American named Kenny, who is very interested in their project. Tell me. Are you looking for something to do? Come to Nicaragua. You won't have to look very far for interesting opportunities to help out.
When lunch finally arrived it was at the very minute that I was supposed to be in the afternoon class. I was 35 minutes late, again! I missed much of Maryann's first one-hour attempt at being a Spanish teacher using us as her guinea pigs. She is from Holland and is a recent graduate from our Spanish school who is now volunteering at a nearby orphanage, working with one-year-olds. She was extremely nervous and made more mistakes than we did all under the watchful eyes of Lidia our very able profesora. She was teaching us irregular verb conjugations in the present tense.
Today's afternoon tour was to walk through a typical barrio where poor people live. To our tender eyes it was just plain shocking to see such poverty. To get there you had to walk by the ruins of an old hospital on a torn up dirt road. A road crew was digging trenches on both sides and installing solid concrete blocks for curbing previous to the scheduled blacktopping of a quarter mile section of the street. They don't have enough money to finish the last quarter mile. Maybe in ten years the other half will get done.
We passed by a street on the left that went down hill. It looks like a dry stream bed. After a rain they have to fill in the ruts that have been carved out by the run off water. There are no ditches or storm drains to protect the road surface made of dirt and loose stones.
The houses are mostly two or three room concrete boxes with the doors open, of course there are no screens on the doors or the windows and in this area there are few houses that have security bars on doors and windows. Nobody in this neighborhood had a car that I could see, they would not even have enough money to buy gas for a moped and certainly not for a car if they could afford to buy one. Goats, chickens, cows, bare bottom babies, busy mothers, unemployed men are all on casual display as our teacher guides the gringos through. Instead of lawns, there is dirt with nothing growing, it's contrasting to see women sweeping leaves and other foreign matter from the dirt areas in front of their houses, they don't have much but the are very clean. I was too embarrassed to take pictures but it will remain permanently etched on my mind. At the end of the wide part of the street was a deeply cut chasm with a trickle of a water lazily carrying a dragonfly downstream. Once a little stream a couple of feet deep this forty foot deep gulch was carved out in two days by a hurricane a few years back. Now the cliff-like banks serve as a dump for construction materials and trash. I asked why it didn't smell of garbage. Poor people only prepare enough food for one meal and there is never any leftovers or garbage. Skinny stray dogs would immediately fight over any scraps left in the open anyway.
Lidia, our teacher, opened the gate in front of a freshly green painted house with bars on the window and introduced her mother and father to us. She prodded us to ask them any questions we wanted especially about the war and the economy. Her father was poised, regal and distinguished as he took his time to carefully listen to and answer our sometimes ignorant sounding questions. As North Americans we get a sometimes distorted picture of the history of other countries. He set the record straight very quietly with few words. This was the highlight of our barrio tour. As we returned back down the street the evidence of poverty seemed to escape my notice as I recalled him telling the details a battle that was fought close to his house in which teenagers were shot. How does this happen? What can I do?
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Posted by Spreader on 2008-07-02 21:51:37 | Rating: | Views: 23
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