Masaya, tortillas, more on mosquitos, and pregnancy

Lots of updates. Masaya was great – I spent nearly the entire time shopping. Before I talk about Masaya though, I have to talk about the bus system here. Or mainly the bus stops.

At the more popular bus stops, people standing at the stop will accost the bus, wielding an assortment of food products and shouting about them. They’ll take advantage of any window spaces and shove their products up to the windows to catch the attention of the people in the bus. The people will either walk around with their arms almost completely vertical to have their food be eye-level with the passengers, or they’ll have bowls with their goods and rest them on their heads. (This is a really popular means of carrying things – I see people carrying stacks of wood on their head in San Ramón all the time.) “Onions, onions onions onions,” “Chancho con yuca chancho con yuca chancho con yuca,” (pork and yuca, tradicional Nicaraguan food)“agua helada agua helada agua helada.” The food will range from bagged produce (like onions, garlic, tomatoes) to prepared cooked meals and desserts. The first time this happened on the way to Masaya, I was in awe – one guy selling produce climbed on one of the tires of the bus to better grab the attention of the passengers. A bus employee tried to swat him off the tire but the guy didn’t get down until the employee pushed him off.
Some will enter the bus at these stops and then walk down the aisle selling their goods. Often they’ll ride the bus and sell their products for some amount of time and then get off at a random stop, whenever people stop buying their food.
I’m sure there’s other stuff to do there but I didn’t know of anything else, so after I found myself a hostel I went to back to the market, which I had discovered initially when I first got off the bus. The bus station is located directly behind it, so you’re forced to enter the market, which consists of corrugated tin and plastic bag ceilings and wet/muddy ground. I bought 10 pairs of shoes in this market, which is pretty ridiculous considering I was only traveling with my school backpack, so I had to shove all of them in there.
A 12-year old boy from a “gang” (okay, a group of about 6 younger boys) stole fruit from me on Saturday afternoon. I was walking back from shopping and had bags in one hand and then this weird fruit that looks like something from a Dr. Suess book. (The fruits are green and look like limes but have soft pink insides, and grow on branches. They’re sold in bunches so it looks like a bouquet of pom-poms on sticks.) This guy approached me and said, “Can I have a branch?” Before I could respond, he said, “Or the whole thing?” and attempted to grab them all from my hand. I immediately recoiled and grabbed the majority of the fruit back from him, but he was left with one branch. This was the first time I’d ever been “mugged”, and I had some alien fruit taken from me. This actually scared me, too! I would have given them the fruit (and I eventually did), but to have it forcefully taken from me offended my sense of self. This shock at being affronted quickly mixed with a sense of guilt – these boys likely lived on the street (which was confirmed when I left my hostel the next morning) and when anyone resorts to stealing food, it probably means they’re having some bad times. I didn’t even want the fruit. When I left the next morning I saw them sleeping on the stoop of the building next door, using cardboard as blankets. I dropped the fruit by the head of one of the boys, likely the one that had approached me the day before.
Going back in time, on Saturday night I wandered around until I saw a restaurant with a neon-light sign as I figured this was a sign of establishment. I wanted to live it up, be waited on, and not have people attempt to talk to me at dinner. It’s rather ironic because I ended up eating dinner at this Mexican restaurant with a fellow solo English-speaking traveler, who was using the money saved from graduating college a year early to backpack from Guatemala to Panama.
On Sunday, I went shopping and then left at around 9 am because I wasn’t sure what time the buses stopped running.

I got back at around 2 pm to find my host-mom sitting at the kitchen table with Chago, my host-brother who lives across the street, and a piñata. Or rather, the two of them were making a piñata of a traditionally-dressed Nica girl, except Marfa decided to make her a “chela”, with blonde hair and green eyes.

All of Friday night I helped my host sister, who’s a lawyer that works in property rights and workers’ advocacy, with a Power point presentation for a talk on Saturday about the benefits of unionizing, so I asked Marfa how it went and she said that no one showed up. Apparently this was one of the few jobs that my sister had received that gave her a paycheck, and because no one showed up she doesn’t get paid. This morning at breakfast I found out that her primary job, working as a land and employment lawyer for a farmers’ cooperative, is all volunteer. Apparently she couldn’t get to work yesterday because she didn’t have enough money to pay for transportation, which costs about $0.50.

Last night, I crawled under my mosquito net and discovered a mosquito waiting for me inside. I spent about 5 minutes attempting to kill it – it’s really hard once the net is set up because you only have soft vertical services to smoosh them against, and they usually fly away before your hand can even get to them. So once I couldn’t see it anymore I gave up trying to search for it. I quickly discovered I had bigger fish to fry –a beetley-pill-bug type thing clung to the inner walls of my mosquito net. I stared at it for a while and it didn’t look like it had wings so I tried to grab it to put it outside my net. It didn’t have wings but it jumped, and it jumped right at my head. I tried to smack it but instead I hit my face and quickly discovered I had given myself a bloody nose. All sorts of things happen out here.

The mom of a friend of mine makes and sells tortillas. Many women have microbusinesses in which they sell food here; they’ll make cuajada (a really popular cheese that from my experiences so far, you only eat with tortillas; my host-brother’s wife makes cuajada, and it seems like almost every other house sells it, too), tortillas (my next door neighbor makes tortillas, so every morning I hear her pounding out the dough), fast-food at night-time, etc. I found this out when I was working with another friend to create a new tour and she was telling me that the tour of San Ramón stopped at my friend’s house so that people could learn how to make tortillas. So yesterday we were supposed to do a run-through of one of the new tours that we had made but of 13 guides, only 2 people showed up so we ended up not going, but instead I went to my friend’s house and made a tortilla, which was pretty sweet. I don’t understand how they can work in that environment all day though – they use a wood-fired stove, which creates TONS of smoke. I could barely stand outside of the building because the air was so dirty, let alone in it. Her mom then fed me lunch, which consisted of a glass of Coke and two tortillas with cuajada.

We haven’t had water for the past week, which, for us, means that our hose doesn’t work. The ironic part is that we run out of water when it starts pouring –we lose water when water comes. The rain either moves around the tubes in the water purification center or the center has to shut off the pipes to reclean the new water. Either way, when we get a lot of rain, we don’t have any water. And I feel like most of the time, we don’t have water. The water that we currently have in the bathroom exists as a thin film on the bottom of the big green bathing bucket, which I have come to be sketched out by as I spotted little worms in there yesterday. I asked Marfa about the “little snakes” (I didn’t know how the word for worm) in the bucket and she nodded and said that they must be mosquito larvae, and nonchalantly said that she should empty that out. I think they’re still there. I’ve also made allies with a spider, who I am hoping will help me in my quest to kill the mosquitos in my room. In mosquito-related news, today was the second time I’ve seen a fumigation car go by. It’s this white truck with a giant motor in the back that spews out this gas to kill mosquitos. It’s really loud, but the sound of the truck is the only warning you have that they’re fumigating. I didn’t even know what it was the first time I saw it and Marfa essentially dragged me inside, telling me that it was dangerous to breathe the fumes. I wonder if everyone else outside knew that.

It seems like pregnancy is an entirely different thing out here. My host brother came over and was looking at pictures that I had stuck on my mirror, and there was one of me wearing a dress that came in above the hips (an empire dress?), standing with my family. He told me, “You look really pretty here – you look a little pregnant,” as if looking pregnant was a part of my looking pretty. I’ll blame the pregnant-looking part on the style of dress since it doesn’t curve into the waist. I thought it was interesting though, that in the US it’d be an insult for someone to say “You look pregnant in this picture,” whereas here it’s either a comment or a compliment. My host-mom was looking at pictures that I had and asked me if someone was pregnant in one of them. I laughed and was surprised that she had asked that since in the US, if the person isn’t pregnant someone could take offense at the thought. Yesterday I was wearing a shirt that was the same style as the dress, where flows below the chest. I was standing next to my friend Delenia (whose mom makes tortillas), who was sitting down, and she put her arm around my waist, rested her head on my stomach, and rubbed my belly with her other hand. I think I laughed and then she said that she heard the baby kicking, and pretended that I was two months pregnant. I had no idea what that even meant – I was learning about pregnancy from a fifteen-year old. I’ve realized that pregnancy is somewhat a taboo subject in the US, from my experiences here. It seems like almost everyone past the age of 18 either has a kid or is pregnant – I’ve started asking new friends that I make if they have any kids, since it’s so common.