The trip to school isn’t nearly as enjoyable as the trip home, although I could walk the same route to get there that I do to walk home, it would be 100% in the sun and I’d have to leave early and skip the tasks I usually do in the morning (including working on this blog!). So I take the bus. To get to the bus I have to walk about a half mile through the outdoor market. It’s always filled with people and there’s always a taxi trying to force itself through the mob. It’s a little nuts. The smells lean a little to the putrid side as all the meat and produce has been sitting in the sun all morning. The fruit is fine, just a little warm and I usually pick up a couple of mandarinas to eat while at the school.
crowded market
A young girl in the market decided to pose
The stand where I buy my fruit every day
Just the other side of the market is the bus “station”. It’s really nothing more than a gravel parking lot where the buses queue up to haul folks off to their destinations. There is ostensibly a schedule but really the busses take off when they’re full and if they leave early or late - no importa. When I say full I mean FULL. They jam them way past the “official” capacity and cram people into the aisle until no more will fit. They force everyone to the back of the aisle to make room for more. Every day I tell them that I will get off before everyone else so I want to stay near the front of the bus - but they don’t care. I wind up in the back of a packed bus and have to fight my way to the front before my stop. And I really mean fight because most Nicaraguans over 35 have absolutely gigantic butts and they refuse to move them to allow you to pass. I have to body slam my way through with a few “disculpemes” (excuse me) to make it seem polite that I’m shoving their large bottom out of the way.
The dreaded chicken bus
A standard load on the bus
My stop is not a standard one so I have to tell the driver that I want to get off. I have to get to the front in time to warn him. One day, two unusually large and stubborn butts prevented me from getting to the front in time and I had to scream for him to stop. He wound up passing my stop and I had to hike back quite a way. It’s always a bit of an adventure. One regular stop is a junk food stand. Nicaraguans put Americans to shame as far as junk food consumption goes. It appears that the bus drivers have a deal with the stand - if they stop so the riders can purchase crap through the bus windows, the drivers get theirs for free. Once I get off at my stop I have about a half-mile hike to the school in the blazing sun. Fortunately I have a wide brim sombrero that I bought in Mexico that rescues me. The kids call it “el sombrero de los abuelitos” (the hat of the grandfathers) but I don’t care - it keeps me cool and not sunburned.
March 26th, 2007
**Please read the comments at the end of this post by Angel Saenz-Badillos, one of the directors of Las Casas Esperanza, that correct some factual errors of my original post.**
One of the things I will remember most about this trip is the walk home from the school. It’s about four miles and takes a good hour so I don’t do it every day. On the days I don’t walk I take the bus or hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck. Everyone here hitches and everyone with a pickup picks people up. You just jump into the bed of the truck and knock on the body of the pickup when you want to hop off. Anyway, when we walk (I walk 2-3 times a week) it takes us through the neighborhood where the kids we teach live. All the houses are built of whatever materials they can find to cobble together the walls - usually pieces of board and scraps of metal. The roofs are all made of the corrugated tin that is so common in Latin America.
A typical house
A man sitting in his house
A house on a hill with an unusually nice roof
They are technically squatters on the land because it is owned by an American investor who will eventually develop it into a housing development once the road to the lagoon is completed. They are building a major road to carry people to the yet undeveloped side of the lagoon. They will build a luxury hotel and several elegant houses and at that time the American investor will bulldoze all of these homes to build nice homes that he can sell for a fat profit. To his credit, the developer is just letting the people live there until he starts building. At that time, they will become homeless. There is a sister organization of La Esperanza called Las Casas Esperanza and they are doing something like Habitat for Humanity. They have bought two tracts of land and are helping the people of La Prusia village to build simple new homes on the land. The do microloans for the materials and volunteers help the owners with the construction of their homes. It’s a great thing for the people currently living in the path of the impending development but there’s another problem. As soon as the current residents move out, new ones will move in to occupy their homes. When the development starts there will still be people getting put out on the street. There’s no way you could build enough homes to eradicate the problem.
The road through La Prusia village
The people in the village are super friendly and now that the kid’s know me I regularly hear “Hola, Michael!” and see a little hand waving at me from a window or doorway. The adults all say hello and people occasionally stop to ask me what brings me through their neighborhood. One day a group of kids stopped me to ask questions about English which they are studying in school. They also wanted to know about life in the US and had some very good questions - not the standard “how much money can you make?” stuff. They wanted to know why it’s colder in Chicago in winter than Nicaragua and I explained to them about the equator and the tilt of the earth. The people here are very different from the people of Granada - more open and simple.
Junior, a boy with severe learning disability that we work with, and his Grandmother
A boy playing with a ball in front of his house.
That’s not to say that I haven’t met some nice people in Granada but in general people are more closed to foreigners; probably because they see so many of them coming and going on a daily basis. Another nice thing about the walk home is that you get a couple of beautiful views of Granada in the distance. As you get closer to Granada you begin to run into kids from Las Camelias which is another of the schools La Esperanza works with. They are a little different because their neighborhood borders the city and they are a little more like the residents of Granada. Once you hit the edge of town the whole ambiance changes. The edge of town is decidedly not touristy so it’s still very Nica but the people do have the city attitude towards gringos. I generally arrive home a little hot and tired but glad I walked.
The good, the bad, the ugly and a guest walking home
Comments by by Angel Saenz-Badillos:
here are two or three short comments or small precisions to your “The Walk Home”:
1) the owner of the land where the slums are built at el camino de la Prusia is not an American (two or three of them are endangering the whole area, you are right), but the Granada City Council. And they have promised not to move from there the present residents. (How long? Impossible to say!)
2) you say our work (Casas de la Esperanza) is ismilar to that of Habitat: yes and not. They require people owning a piece of land, and we help to build to the families that do not own any land. And our houses are almost half the price of the houses of Habitat, tah have to be paid at prices that are impossible for the La Prusia people. By teh way, we are dealing with Habitat for the people owning some land in La Prusia (about 20%).
3) you allude to “another problem”, people coming to live in the old places abandoned by the people that go to live in our project. We are aware of the danger, but it has not happened until now: we go immediately to the City Council when a family leaves for our Project (there are only 4 families living in the new place), and the City Council avoids that new persons come to the abandoned slum.
Well, we do our best. Thanks for you interesting comments about the area and for the references to us too.
All the best
Angel
March 16th, 2007
Eva, our previous team leader, is returning to Belgium with her husband. I’ll be taking over as team leader at La Prussia school until I leave at the end of March. At that time Christy, Eva’s predecessor, will be returning to take over from me. The team leader acts as a liaison between La Esperanza and the school and is in charge of coordinating the activities of the volunteers at the school. It doesn’t demand a whole lot of extra time and I’m glad to do it. We have a good team at La Prussia school and working with them will be easy.
It has gotten even hotter here the last three days. The last couple of weeks we had a little reprieve from the heat - if you consider 93 instead 103 a reprieve. The nights were not so stifling during those weeks and there was a bit of a breeze off the lake. The last few nights there has been no breeze and the heat has just hung in the air all night. It is a little rough sleeping on nights like that but I have a good ceiling fan in my room that makes it bearable. The days are just plain hot but if you stay in the shade it is bearable - I’ll take heat like this over the freezing cold ANY day… the heat just doesn’t bother me that much. Hopefully by the time I return to Chicago in April spring will have started.
March 1st, 2007
