Directions

You have to give someone directions to get to your house. What do you do? In today’s age of smartphones and GPSs, you’d probably just give them your state name, city/town name, street name, and house number, right? It just makes logical sense to us to have a specific address that refers to a single location.

In Nicaragua, the system is very different. In Nicaragua you give your address relative to a famous location in your town. My address in my training town was how many blocks and in what direction I lived from the factory. My current address is the location of my house relative to the church in the middle of town. And no, I’m not joking. Most of the streets here don’t even have any names. Seriously, open up Google Maps and zoom in to a town in Nicaragua and you’ll probably see that almost none of the streets there have any names. To give someone directions to my house, I tell them which side of the church I live on, the color of my house, and the name of my host mom. If they can’t find the church, they would just ask someone where it is, and if they can’t find my house, they would give someone the name of my host mom and ask where she lives (or just ask where the gringo lives).

Of course people sometimes do this in the US, but here, in most places, there is no other option. There also isn’t a set point in each town from which all directions start; in my training town, my neighbor’s address was directions from the local municipal government building. Sometimes, when there are two famous businesses in a town, they will both give their addresses relative to each other.

I know that this system may seem inefficient to Americans, but here’s the thing: it works. Seriously, it totally works. People here just know where things are, they are more than happy to help you find them, and (here’s a major divergence from Americans) they never hesitate to ask for directions. Americans seem to have some sort of pride in the belief that they can find where they’re going without asking for directions, but Nicaraguans definitely do not. The Nicaraguan system may seem inefficient to Americans, but I would bet that the American system would seem unnecessary to most Nicaraguans.