ad astra

…our Nicaraguan adventure is behind us.  It’s weird – you spend so much time planning and thinking about a trip, and then all of the sudden your back home (“home”).  I’m certain that I’m going to feel the same way come next May; whether it’s ten days or ten months, time always seems to fly when you look back on it.

We left Costa Rica on October 10 and made it to Nicaragua without any problems to speak of.  While we did get delayed at the border for a couple of hours, anything less than four hours seems absolutely rapid to me, since when I was a student we stood in line for about that long.  When we got to Managua I was briefly concerned that we had arrived to the wrong city, since I stepped off the bus and was not greeted by a blistering wave of heat.  The two other times I’ve been in Managua I have barely escaped melting, so the cool air was a strange but not unwelcome surprise.  Apparently due to the hurricane which stopped over Mexico a few weeks ago Central America has been getting a ton of rain, which has caused the temperatures to drop significantly (I mean, relatively speaking; it was still probably 70 or something like that).  And although it is the rainy season which I have been living in for more than two months now, the nonstop day and night of rain we had in Managua still surprised me.

After a few days in the capital we all split up into smaller groups and dispersed into six different communities around the city of Masaya.  I went to a town (I mean town probably isn’t the right word, but neither is city, nor villiage, nor hamlet, nor really any word I can think of to convey it properly) called Veracruz and stayed with an amazing women named Guillermina and her children.  Five other LASPers and I stayed there for almost a week, not doing much of anything, which can be difficult for those of us accustomed to be busy all the time.

At about day three I told the students in my group that in a few weeks, they would look back on the Nicaragua trip and see it as some sort of strange dream.  Sometimes when you are in a community so different from your own, the strangeness of it all just hits you, and you have to stop and think, “What on EARTH am I doing here?”  During my last trip that moment occurred as I stood waist deep in a river holding live crabs in my hands and watching my host attempt to harpoon fish amongst the mangrove trees.  This time it was speeding down the highway in a motorized tricycle device, sitting on the edge, seeing the gravel speeding by inches away from me, and picturing my certain death every time we turned a corner.  Nicaragua es otra cosa.

The stated goal of our trip to Nicaragua is to form relationships with Nicaraguans, and that’s what the other students and I struggled to do over the course of six days in Veracruz.  I say struggle because the trip is definitely not an easy one, and for many not even an enjoyable one.  However, I love the trip because I do think that everyone comes back having learned something, even if that something is that they don’t particularly care for fried, hard, extremely salty cheese every morning (one of the many lessons I took away from the trip this year).

Another thing I started thinking about this time around is the tendency many people have to “romanticize” poverty (I don’t want to exclude myself from this category – I used to do the same thing and am still struggling to view poverty in a different way).  I often hear people say things like “They might be poor, but they’re so happy,” or “It’s so beautiful to live such a simple life.”  Some even claim that they wish they could stay and live like that forever.  However, and it may just be my cynicism talking, I wonder if people say things like that because they know they have a round-trip ticket for their trip to Poverty-land.  It’s easy to say how beautiful everything is when you know that you’re only there for a few days.  But would people feel the same way if, like they people we lived with, they had no way out?  I also think even more serious problem is that this romanticizing of poverty prevents us from recognizing the unjust global systems which make poverty possible.  When we tell ourselves how beautiful the poverty is, we don’t have to tackle tough questions like “Why is it that half the world lives this way?”  Unfortunately, as usual, I’m just stuck with a lot of questions and no answers.

So that’s our trip to Nicaragua in a nutshell.  Now I’m back in Costa Rica and all the comforts which my Tico life provides: gallo pinto with black beans instead of red, coffee without sugar (hallelujah), (luke)warm showers, non-crazy (relatively speaking) public transportation, and hours of TV watching.  It’s good to be “home.”