There are people who could write entire books on things you don't know about Nicaragua, in fact several people have, but I'm going to try to keep this (relatively) compact and mostly limited to things you probably won't find when researching the country.
1. Most of the country has running water, but in many places it only comes on at night, which means that a lot of it is wasted
Wait, why does that mean a lot of it is wasted? My host family has a large basin with a faucet over it. During the rainy season, when the water works, they open the valve at night, and in the morning the basin is full. The water usually comes on at 10(ish) and turns off at 4(ish). Of course the basin never gets full right when the water turns off, so it usually overflows for a while while everyone sleeps, and there's no good way for my family to solve this problem. What are they supposed to do? Have someone wait awake every night until the basin is full? Have a different person get up every hour to check the water level? They're not going to do that, and I don't blame them, so the basin just overflows.
During the dry season this wasn't a problem for my family...because we just didn't have any water. At first the water was on for just barely long enough every night to provide enough water for the following day, but then that stopped. Then we got water from the well down the street, but then that became dirty. Then a truck with a large tank on it started coming every day to fill up all of our buckets with water, but then it started only coming about twice per week, with no set schedule or pattern. Without a schedule there was no way to know how to ration water until the next delivery, and sometimes we still had plenty of water left, and sometimes we had been out of water for days.
The truly sad thing about my town is that not all of the town has this problem. My town doesn't have just one water system, it has several, and some are far better than others. Some neighborhoods get their water from one of the nearby towns or the nearby city, so much of my town almost always has running water 24/7, just not my neighborhood. The problem is really that the system is set up very poorly, and a lot of people suffer because of that.
2. Drivers honk, a lot
In the US, honking your horn pretty much means only one thing: “Get out of my way!” It's also occasionally used to say “hi” to a friend, but that's pretty rare. In Nicaragua it can mean pretty much anything. Sometimes it means “Get out of my way!” or “hi”, but it's also used by taxi drivers to alert people waiting on the side of the road that they have space. The worst use is as a way of alerting someone that you're coming. I find this use incredibly annoying because it means that some people don't look for oncoming cars before turning onto a road. Seriously, I have seen people make a right-hand turn onto a road without even looking left first, because they assume that if someone is coming, they'll honk. They figure out where other cars are by their listening for their horns instead of by looking (to be clear, the vast majority of people look, but not everyone does).
1. Most of the country has running water, but in many places it only comes on at night, which means that a lot of it is wasted
Wait, why does that mean a lot of it is wasted? My host family has a large basin with a faucet over it. During the rainy season, when the water works, they open the valve at night, and in the morning the basin is full. The water usually comes on at 10(ish) and turns off at 4(ish). Of course the basin never gets full right when the water turns off, so it usually overflows for a while while everyone sleeps, and there's no good way for my family to solve this problem. What are they supposed to do? Have someone wait awake every night until the basin is full? Have a different person get up every hour to check the water level? They're not going to do that, and I don't blame them, so the basin just overflows.
During the dry season this wasn't a problem for my family...because we just didn't have any water. At first the water was on for just barely long enough every night to provide enough water for the following day, but then that stopped. Then we got water from the well down the street, but then that became dirty. Then a truck with a large tank on it started coming every day to fill up all of our buckets with water, but then it started only coming about twice per week, with no set schedule or pattern. Without a schedule there was no way to know how to ration water until the next delivery, and sometimes we still had plenty of water left, and sometimes we had been out of water for days.
The truly sad thing about my town is that not all of the town has this problem. My town doesn't have just one water system, it has several, and some are far better than others. Some neighborhoods get their water from one of the nearby towns or the nearby city, so much of my town almost always has running water 24/7, just not my neighborhood. The problem is really that the system is set up very poorly, and a lot of people suffer because of that.
2. Drivers honk, a lot
In the US, honking your horn pretty much means only one thing: “Get out of my way!” It's also occasionally used to say “hi” to a friend, but that's pretty rare. In Nicaragua it can mean pretty much anything. Sometimes it means “Get out of my way!” or “hi”, but it's also used by taxi drivers to alert people waiting on the side of the road that they have space. The worst use is as a way of alerting someone that you're coming. I find this use incredibly annoying because it means that some people don't look for oncoming cars before turning onto a road. Seriously, I have seen people make a right-hand turn onto a road without even looking left first, because they assume that if someone is coming, they'll honk. They figure out where other cars are by their listening for their horns instead of by looking (to be clear, the vast majority of people look, but not everyone does).
This is especially annoying for cyclists, because we don't have horns, so sometimes people pull out in front of us because they have no idea that we're coming and we have no way to alerting them of our presence. A lot of drivers also seem to think that cyclists don't even have any right to be on the road, or at least that we need to always give them right-of-way, no matter what. If I'm biking on the shoulder of a road, and there's a car parked on the shoulder, I look behind me to make sure nobody is going to hit me, then I pull into the road to go around the parked car. Sometimes a car that is a good 50 feet behind me will honk when I do this, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. The only possible reason I can think of is that the driver thinks I randomly pulled into the road for no reason and I don't plan to go back into the shoulder, an explanation which is beyond ridiculous. Then there are some drivers that don't look for cyclists at all, and don't know we're coming because we don't have horns to honk, and who pull out in front of us because they have no idea that we're coming. Ok, that got off-topic a little, but the point is that driving and biking in Nicaragua is pretty dangerous. Thank god it's impossible to find a helmet anywhere in the entire country.
3. People don't exercise
Okay some people do, but the vast majority of people don't, kind of like in the US. The main difference between Nicaragua and the US when it comes to exercise is that Americans who don't exercise don't do so because they're lazy (I welcome your hate mail!), but Nicaraguans don't seem to even understand why anyone would want to do extra work like that. Some people just stare at me when they see me running, and I occasionally get asked why I run. When I tell people that I run for my health, I frequently get stares of confusion. I think that a lot of people here think it's just some weird chele thing to do.
3. People don't exercise
Okay some people do, but the vast majority of people don't, kind of like in the US. The main difference between Nicaragua and the US when it comes to exercise is that Americans who don't exercise don't do so because they're lazy (I welcome your hate mail!), but Nicaraguans don't seem to even understand why anyone would want to do extra work like that. Some people just stare at me when they see me running, and I occasionally get asked why I run. When I tell people that I run for my health, I frequently get stares of confusion. I think that a lot of people here think it's just some weird chele thing to do.
4. People give out their phone numbers two digits at a time
If your phone number was 1234-5678, you would probably tell someone it was “one two three four, five six seven eight”, right? A Nicaraguan would instead say “twelve, thirty-four, fifty-six, seventy-eight”. But it's not always two digits at a time. Some people might say that number as “twelve, three, forty five, six, seventy-eight”. I have yet to figure out why some people seemingly randomly say single digits in their phone numbers.
5. There are supermarkets
There's a national chain called Palí which has stores in most cities. It's owned by Walmart, which is pretty disappointing, but it's better than nothing, and they're honestly pretty nice. Rivas even has a MaxiPalí that's air conditioned! There are also two chains in Managua, La Colonia and La Unión, which have a handful of locations elsewhere in the country, and which have more or less the selection of American supermarkets. They even have bagels! They're not very good bagels, but have you ever had a bad bagel? There's another place in Managua called PriceSmart, which I believe is owned by Costco, and which apparently has basically the same selection as a Costco in the US. I haven't been to it because you have to be a member to go in, but I know that they have Kirkland Signature products, and Kirkland Signature is owned by Costco.
5. There are supermarkets
There's a national chain called Palí which has stores in most cities. It's owned by Walmart, which is pretty disappointing, but it's better than nothing, and they're honestly pretty nice. Rivas even has a MaxiPalí that's air conditioned! There are also two chains in Managua, La Colonia and La Unión, which have a handful of locations elsewhere in the country, and which have more or less the selection of American supermarkets. They even have bagels! They're not very good bagels, but have you ever had a bad bagel? There's another place in Managua called PriceSmart, which I believe is owned by Costco, and which apparently has basically the same selection as a Costco in the US. I haven't been to it because you have to be a member to go in, but I know that they have Kirkland Signature products, and Kirkland Signature is owned by Costco.
6. There are rich people
Look at this mall:
Where do you think this is? Maybe Spain? Costa Rica? Panama? One of the touristy parts of Mexico? Wrong, it's in Nicaragua. Don't believe me? Google “Galerías Santo Domingo” and see for yourself. It is, to quote another volunteer, “the nicest mall I've ever been to.” Nicaragua also has Central America's only billionaire, Carlos Pellas, who owns several resort hotels in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, as well as some of the national Nicaraguan chains (yes, chains that are only in Nicaragua do, in fact, exist).
7. Ronald Reagan really did sell weapons to Iran to fund a war against a democratically-elected government in Nicaragua
The government was not originally democratically-elected, the Sandinistas first took power by overthrowing Nicaragua's Somoza family dictatorship in 1979, but they won an election in 1984 which many international observers called “free and fair”, but Reagan insisted that the election must have been rigged, and he didn't stop funding the Contras. Congress passed a bill ordering him to stop. He ignored it. Several people in his administration were tried, convicted, and sent to prison for aiding him in his effort to ignore the law and overthrow Nicaragua's democratically-elected government. He still didn't stop. He sold weapons to a country that we officially called a “state sponsor of terrorism” and sent the money from the sale to the Contras to try to overthrow a democratically-elected government. Now he's a beloved president with lots of buildings named after him, and some people even want to put his face on Mount Rushmore. The war only ended after Reagan was out of office and the President of Costa Rica negotiated a peace treaty between the Sandinistas and the Contras, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize. Shortly after the war ended, the Sandinistas held another election, which they lost. Reagan failed to remove the Sandinistas from power by funding a war that killed 30,000 Nicaraguans, but Nicaraguans successfully removed them from power without shedding any blood. No matter how much you know about Reagan's involvement in the Nicaraguan Revolution, you don't know enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment