I wish you a Central American

 

My partner and I lived in Honduras and Nicaragua for almost five years doing Cuso International development work in the 2010s. I concluded very quickly that if ever there was an apocalypse, I’d want to go through it with a small-town Central American at my side.

I’m feeling that more than ever in these eye-opening days of global reckoning.

Time and again during the period we lived there, I saw people in those countries come through with a quick fix for whatever unexpected weird thing had just happened. It was an ingenuity borne of centuries of certainty that nobody was coming to fix their problems.

They stepped up with little hesitation to help random strangers with their problems, too, because they knew a time would come soon enough when they’d need strangers to step up for them. It’s not just a nice thing to do down there, it’s smart and strategic. You need to be ready for anything, and living in a permanent state of pay-it-forward.

One day, the car we were in broke down on a quiet road past Leon, Nicaragua. Within 15 minutes, we were repaired and on our way after two strangers on a motorcycle pulled up and began scrounging up scraps of this and that from the roadside, and then used them to do something inexplicable but effective to the car engine to get it running again.

Such anecdotes are coming to mind more often these days as events play out around the world to remind me that nobody’s really got our backs.

How must the citizens of Israel feel to realize that their much-touted security systems were easily compromised? How do Libyans feel about all those decades of government ignoring dam maintenance? What do Americans make of the hard lessons first from Hurricane Katrina, and more recently in the Maui wildfires – that their emergency preparedness systems are in no way prepared?

How do we feel here in Canada, where successive governments were so wrongly presumed to be managing the work of making sure we’d always have enough housing? They weren’t even counting the number of new Canadians right.

How come we can’t access basic medical care anymore? How are 13,000 British Columbians dead from toxic-drug overdoses in the last seven years and we’re still bickering about public drug use?  How can governments be allowed to “step back” on fossil fuel use and the development of greener alternatives after the entire planet just spent a horrifying year seeing where climate change is taking us?

If I’d been born a small-town Honduran, I suspect I’d have known better than to believe that the big things of life were being taken care of by government. Honduras has no social safety net, minimal public health care, lousy schools, and wages so low that most people need two jobs and a side hustle just to get by. It’s a country where you learn early to take care of your own business.

But I was born a comparatively privileged Boomer in a peaceful, liberal democracy with a social and legal commitment to human rights and a better life for all. I just always figured everything was going to be OK, at least in Canada.

Ah, but there’s far less Canada in Canada these days. Free trade ties us to some of the world’s most fraught countries. With minor exceptions, we don’t make our own clothing, household goods, vehicles or parts. Ninety per cent of our medicines are made with ingredients imported from China or India.

We’re dependent on other countries’ supply chains, food production, human resources. When their wildfires burn, we breathe the smoke. When their people don’t come to fill our workforce, it’s our services that suffer. We're frighteningly dependent, yet still so blissfully unaware of that reality. 

For better and worse, the world has tied its fortunes together through intricate trade deals and border-crossing corporate entities outside the management of any government. No war, climate disaster, or economic collapse anywhere on Earth is far enough away to avoid a direct impact everywhere else.

And even though virtually everything tripping us up these days requires a long-term plan to fix, there is no long-term plan for any of it. Even when some government starts on a plan, it rarely lasts beyond the four-year election cycles that doom progress on the complex issues of the modern world.

This is the world we live in now. This is the world my grandkids will have to find their way through. If I hear that they ran away in search of cheap land where they could grow a simple diet, generate their own electricity and count on a handful of good neighbours who knew how to fix things, I will understand completely and cheer them on.

Develop your inner Honduran, kids. Things are going to get rough.

What would we hear if we listened?

Garifuna woman in Honduras prepares yucca bread, a staple of the Garifuna diet.

My Cuso International volunteer credentials have earned me the opportunity to present at a University of Victoria student symposium this Friday put on by the Centre for Global Studies. Here's what I'm going to be talking about. I thought I'd be able to post a link to the blogs that presenters have written in advance of the symposium, but they appear to be available only to those with a UVic sign-on. So you'll have to make do with mine alone, cut and pasted here.

***

The desire to help women in distant lands is a wonderful thing. We’re still a long way from gender equality here in Canada, but we’re living the dream compared to many countries around the world. Our sisters in less privileged parts of the globe could definitely use a little transnational solidarity.

But after five years of working with Cuso International in Honduras and Nicaragua, I saw that there are right ways of expressing our solidarity, and wrong ways. Even on the issues that women around the world can generally agree on – eliminating domestic violence, equal pay for work of equal value, addressing societal and cultural factors that leave women so much more vulnerable to poverty – the most fundamental first step is to ensure women with lived experience are guiding every process, program and policy intended to help them.

One of the most common mistakes we make is to presume that women in other lands and cultures want exactly what Canadian women want, and that the issues we have tackled in our own land are automatically the same issues they would pick for themselves.

But they’re not us. They’ve grown up with different cultural norms, in different kinds of families, with different values. They’re not looking to turn their backs on the life they have, nor to have women from countries like Canada sweep in with pity in their eyes and a plan to “make things right.”

Yes, they appreciate the support of wealthier countries to improve what they know needs improving. But they’re the experts of their own lives. Approaches that presume to know what another population wants are not just patronizing, insulting and doomed to fail, they deny the tremendous strengths and strategies women in other countries have already developed to get by in an unequal world.

A small example from Nicaragua: International initiatives aimed at encouraging subsistence farmers to commercialize, rather than grow just enough to feed their families. It’s a great goal on paper as a means for getting more impoverished Nicaraguans into the paid economy, but let’s take a look at that concept from a rural smallhold farmer’s perspective.

First, that farmer is already putting in a very long day. She gets up sometimes as early as 3:30 a.m. to start making the tortillas that fuel her big family, and crawls into bed exhausted sometime after 10 p.m. She tends to the farm animals and the plot of land, cooks at least two or three meals over the course of the day – from scratch, because a subsistence farmer isn’t buying packaged goods – and does household chores without the benefit of a washer/dryer or dishwasher, or even running water or electricity in some cases.

She almost certainly has no vehicle at her disposal, or money to buy gas even if she did. She probably lives in a very small community along a very bad piece of road – that’s where land is affordable, after all. She’s accustomed to hitching rides in the back of a more well-heeled neighbour’s truck when she needs to get somewhere, but the neighbours aren’t often going to be travelling to the larger centres where the big markets are in the exact window of time when the woman would need to arrive and depart, let alone have room for her and her produce.

It’s also difficult, if not downright impossible, for her to be away from the family home for long periods of time. The family counts on her to prepare their meals, and both they and the community count on her to be the unpaid caregiver for aging parents, grandchildren, children with physical or mental disabilities, or sick neighbours or relatives in need. In a land without daycare, old-age homes, or any kind of social supports, you’ve got to be available to help others so that they’ll be there for you when the time comes.

So while the international aid community may have the best of intentions in wanting to launch this woman into the paid economy for her own good, she isn’t interested. All she sees is more work added to a jam-packed day, and impossible logistics.

Nor would she ever be able to earn much even if she could overcome the challenges. Without the greenhouses, fertilizers and irrigation systems available to large commercial producers, she can’t grow the kind of flawless produce that picky consumers in Nicaragua and abroad demand. And with climate change dramatically affecting the predictability of Nicaragua’s rainy season, she can’t promise the kind of consistent quantity and delivery of product that the stores and markets demand.

She also can’t get a loan to help her get started with commercialization. You need equity to get a loan, and in all likelihood this woman isn’t named on the title of the land she and her husband farm. That problem is partly cultural, because traditionally, only men are listed on title in Nicaragua, and partly systemic in a country that has no functional land-title registry.

What kind of development effort might actually improve this woman’s life? A project to build her a higher pila – a big sink – so she could wash clothes and dishes without stooping. Support to build an efficient cooking stove with a chimney, sparing her family constant respiratory problems from smoke inhalation and reducing the time that the woman spends scavenging for firewood every day. The development of water sources and distribution systems so her family could install drip irrigation and grow produce year-round. A decent and accessible education for her children to prepare them for better-paid work.

When we start with the premise that women are the experts of their own lives, we find ways to help that make sense. It’s the wisdom of women on the ground in countries of less privilege that brings the concepts of solidarity to life in meaningful and effective ways.

Cranky in Paradise: How life in a fairly perfect place makes us angry

     I felt a quick flash of annoyance during a swim this past weekend at Thetis Lake when a group of young people on a raft of floaties cranked up their music a little too much. I then felt an immediate and sobering flash of alarm that a bunch of mild-mannered young people having a little fun in the sun had annoyed me.

     Could it be that Cranky Capital Regionite Syndrome is already upon me, a mere three months after arriving back on the Island? Please say it ain’t so.

     That pervasive air of easy annoyability that has always characterized CCRS in the region has been wonderful to get away from these last four and a half years in Central America. I thought I’d put it away forever at this point, but now I see that it has just been lying in wait for me back on the Island.

     It’s all got me thinking hard about what that cultural state of annoyance is really about. Why is it that I never got jangled by all the unpredictable happenings of daily life in Central America –noise, smells, traffic, gaping holes in the sidewalk, garbage, a constant sense that any crazy thing could happen at any moment – yet I come back here and find myself bugged by minor stuff?

     I’m not alone. I see motorists yelling out the window at each other over perceived infractions that not only didn’t cause an accident, but probably wouldn’t have even if imagined through to their low-impact conclusion. I see genuine fear in dog owners’ eyes when their unleashed dogs come bounding toward me and their owners brace for yet another tight-lipped lecture about leash laws and controlling your animal.

     What is it about this place? Why does it feel like we're looking for reasons to be angry at someone for something? My sense of it is that we have expectations of how our perfect day will go, and any breach in the plan feels like a personal affront. We’ve come to believe that with enough regulation, rule and law, citizens can be guaranteed a day where nothing untoward happens to them.

     Everybody’s going to drive exactly right. All bylaws will be observed. No dog poo will adhere to your shoe. The peaceful day at the lake you’re imagining will proceed exactly as you had hoped, and never mind that all the other people sharing the rocks with you have arrived at the same lake on the same day with completely different expectations of how the day will go.

      I guess with the bar set that high, we’re bound to end up cranky when life gets in the way of our elevated expectations for our day. Evidence of our pissed-offedness is everywhere: We shake our fists; bristle at our neighbour’s poor boulevard management; rap loudly on the hoods of cars stopped too close to a crosswalk; make angry phone calls to whatever regulatory body we think should be doing something.

     In countries like Honduras and Nicaragua, where my spouse and I have been doing long-term volunteer stints with Cuso International, there’s so little regulation that all bets of a perfect day are completely off. You don’t even bother thinking that way. You just step out the door and try to stay prepared for what might happen next. I’m not suggesting a war-zone scene or anything truly dangerous, just an environment that laughs at anyone’s expectations of a managed experience.

     The Victoria experience imagines that through regulation and law, we can control the environment to create a pleasant space for all, where unpleasant surprises are kept to a minimum. I think of it as a very European way of doing things. (I particularly appreciate such an ordered culture whenever I go bike-riding, an activity so risky in Central America that I wouldn’t dream of doing it there.)

     In Central America, it’s the environment that’s in control. You enter it knowing that you are about to have whatever experience it’s delivering that day, and that your wish to have a managed experience is neither here nor there.

     You’re going to walk past speakers so loud and distorted they’ll make your ears hurt. You’re going to step in garbage. You’re going to enter every crosswalk knowing it represents nothing more than white lines painted on pavement. You just have to hope that everything turns out OK, but there’s no saying that it will. (Guess that’s why religion is popular in such cultures.)

     And so you relax, genuinely relax, because you know there’s nothing you can do about any of it. Far from feeling hopeless, it feels freeing. You let go of every expectation and just go where the day takes you. A dozen things happen on your daily walk to work that would annoy the hell out of you back in Victoria, but you carry on without a flinch.

     I’m not saying that their way is better than ours. I do like that cars stop for me here in Victoria, and that green space is everywhere. I like not seeing garbage in the street. I like not having to dodge motorcycles driving down the sidewalk, or eye up every building I walk past for the possibility of a rusty metal pole sticking out of it at head height. I like knowing that if I wanted to, I could buy a small house on a quiet street with no fear that a five-storey, all-night disco might open next door in the following month.

    That probably means I’m not yet a full-on libertarian. But please, please, save me from CCRS. I don’t want to be that boring old lady railing against noisy kids at the lake and unleashed dogs on my street. I pledge here and now to stand on guard against any creeping sense of entitlement, to reject the (admittedly alluring) notion that the world ought to mould itself to my needs. Yes, my body is living in Victoria right now, but I will fight to keep my spirit Central American.

     Party on, gentle Thetis teens.

Still not sure whether climate change is real? Come to Nicaragua

   

Without irrigation, small farmers in dry regions like
Terrabona, Nicaragua wouldn't have had any crops in the last 3 years.

A dry summer in Canada means our lawns turn brown. A dry summer in parts of Nicaragua means dead livestock and families on the edge pushed into full-on disaster. 
    It's been during these last four-plus years living and working here in Central America that I've gone from being passingly interested in the concept of climate change as a potential future threat, to being fully engaged and very alarmed by the impact that it's having right now in countries like this one, especially for farming families with few resources.

    A Cuso International delegation from Canada is in the country right now touring projects that Cuso supports through its volunteer placements. I went out on a field trip with some of the Canadian visitors this week to show them a project that my organization FEMUPROCAN has in the north with women’s farming cooperatives around Terrabona, Matagalpa.

    The region is in the fourth year of a devastating drought. In all of 2015, rain fell just twice. Not a drop has fallen yet this year. Desperate local farmers are counting down the days until mid-May, which is when the rainy season always used to start, and praying that this year it finally does.

    The trip into the village of Los Mangitos on Monday was almost apocalyptic in its dryness: Shades of brown in all directions, leafless trees, dust layered on everything. Here and there, groups of skinny cows and horses clustered around tiny bits of greenery that were the last remnants of anything edible in the arid landscape.

    The project we were visiting is a simple irrigation system installed three years ago with the financial and technical help of FEMUPROCAN, a federation of 73 women’s farming cooperatives in Nicaragua. (I do communications work for them as a Cuso cooperante.) The system pumps water from an underground aquifer to irrigate a 1.5-hectare plot owned by Ricarda Mairena and her family, transforming barren land into cool, green fields of tomatoes, corn and the pale, long-necked squash the Nicaraguans call pipian.

The aquifer is still producing, but the water level has fallen
dramatically after 3 years of drought. 

    And for three years, things have gone pretty well. Irrigation lets the family farm year-round rather than only during the brief three months of “winter,” the wet season. That has substantially boosted their food security and income, especially given that there hasn’t even been a real wet season since 2012. The commercial produce buyers that Nicaraguans know as intermediarios now pass through the village regularly, picking up produce from Ricarda to sell at the public market in Managua.

    But one more year without a wet season would be disastrous, says the family. They’re scared by how low the water level is in their well these days, and scared by the absence of pasture for their 5 cows. The animals are getting by on corn husks and spent tomato plants these days, at least until the sorghum is ready to be harvested.

    The 24 families that live around Ricarda’s farm are at least still getting drinking water from the municipality, once every day and a half. In a neighbouring village, no one has had water in their households for five months. The nearest community well is a kilometre away.

    A fellow Cuso volunteer in the north told me last week of families in one village outside of Esteli that are having to get by on deliveries of five litres of water every five days. Water for drinking, animal care, cleaning, bathing, cooking – all of it has to come out of those precious five litres.

    Nicaragua counts on small farmers to produce much of its food. But many women farmers associated with my organization aren’t even sure whether to plant anymore, as investing in seed or agreeing to rent farm land for what ultimately ends up being a failed crop can sink a family. Farming is a low-margin undertaking at the best of times, and a bit like tying a rock to your ankle and jumping into the sea in these years when the traditional rainy season can’t be counted on.

Producer Ricarda Mairena grows sorghum as a
"living barrier"at the edges of her gardens, both to
reduce pest invasions and produce feed for her 5 cows.

    These are desperate days, in other words. Down in the south, commercial banana plantations are dying for lack of water, with only the ones planted nearest to massive Lake Nicaragua able to survive. Water levels in the lake itself are significantly lower than usual, and the river that the lake drains into along the Costa Rican border is so low that local fishermen can’t get their boats out.

    In the municipality of Terrabona where Ricarda has her farm, locals believe that there are vast quantities of underground water waiting to be tapped into. FEMUPROCAN’s financial support for the bricks, mortar, pumps and large quantity of tubing and hoses that are essential to even the simplest irrigation system has been warmly received by women farmers because of that belief, and so far the wells that do exist are still producing.  Ricarda’s family is in the process of digging a second one.

    But even aquifers need to catch a break sometimes. The proliferation of heavily irrigated commercial tobacco-growing enterprises in the area make me wonder if anyone has studied how much underground water is actually available. Elsewhere in the country, treasured waterfalls in protected areas are drying up due to unregulated upstream water use and the lack of rain.

    An acquaintance from back in Canada commented to me a couple weeks ago that he still wasn’t sure “whether to believe all this climate-change stuff.” Any doubters, come on down. It’s real and scary in lands like this one, with so much more at stake than nice green lawns. 

Thanks for supporting our work in Central America with a donation to Cuso International. Here's our fundraising site. 

When all the smoke clears and you see

The median family, before the little girl on the right broke her leg

     I’m just back in Nicaragua after a couple of weeks in Canada hanging out with my family, and going through one of those re-entry things where I’m suddenly reawakened to the many sad stories in Managua.

      Mostly, people cope down here, and with a smile on their face. But when you re-enter after two weeks of happy family time with all your healthy, well-fed and extremely well-tended grandchildren and their many friends, there can be this brief period where you see the place as it compares to where you just came from. And that can really get you down.

     First thing I saw after I hailed a cab near the airport Wednesday night was a motorcycle accident in which the stunned driver sitting on the roadside appeared to have his lower leg nearly severed. He sat bleeding and in shock as a huge crowd of people tried to wave down people with trucks and vans who could take him to hospital.

     The ambulance will come, my taxi driver assured me. But all I could think of was the legion of first responders who would have been all over that guy back in my land. And what will happen to him once the ambulance comes? There are good hospitals in Nicaragua, and the people tell me there are decent public ones. But the life of a young Nicaraguan with a serious leg injury and a long recovery ahead of him will be difficult well after the hospital work is done.

     And how will he work? Because if he can’t, there’s nothing for him other than to depend on his family to help him. There’s a form of social security here for people of a certain age who have had many years of steady employment in the right kind of jobs, but other than that there is very little for anyone who can’t pay their own way. No worker’s comp, no unemployment insurance, no income assistance, no special help for people with disabilities. I suspect we sometimes forget that ending global poverty isn’t just about wages and access to work, it’s about state-managed social support and a sense of responsibility for the welfare of all citizens.

     So that leads me to my next sad story, of a four-year-old girl with a broken leg who begs with her mother in the median near one of the malls not far from our house. I met the family when I took their photo playing Monopoly on the street, and now that I know where they hang out, I am finding them in my view much more often.

      I brought some Value Village toys back for the kids from Canada. There are four of them, and they look to me to be roughly ages 13, 11, 8 and 4. They live near the bus station down the road. I think the oldest three go to school, but the mom is always on the median until about 5 p.m. with the youngest one, who broke her leg in some accident while under her aunt’s watch, the mother tells me. The mother has the girl on her knee and an empty paper coffee cup in her hand, hoping the motorists will toss a few córdobas her way.

     The girl is on her third full-leg cast. I feel like it’s taking really long, and today she looked quite listless and jaundiced. But unless it’s someone like me who steps up – and what exactly am I even proposing to do? – a family like that will just have to go along and see where it all ends up. They will accept the care they’re given and get by as they can, even if the next generation of median beggar is being born right at this moment, inside a little four-year-old girl who at this moment has a broken leg that just won’t heal.

     OK, so now imagine that whole scene again if they lived in Canada. And there’s the sad moment right there. It wouldn’t happen that way in Canada. But it does in Nicaragua and around the world, and sometimes it just gets me to see such a blatant statement of how unfair life can be.

     A good Canadian can end up paralyzed by Western guilt and pity at moments like that. But really, a better reaction would be to take the hit of sadness, think about how a society even begins to change some of that stuff, and then point a little well-aimed wealth from richer countries toward getting all of that happening in countries that are struggling.

     As for you and me, I guess our role is to elect governments that feel the same way while opening our eyes to the quixotic and cruel ways of the world, and doing what we can when we see a problem unfolding in front of us. Act locally, think globally.

          Because if all we do is fix our own country, we leave a whole lot of people behind solely because they were born in the wrong time, wrong country. What with all of us dependent on the other in so many ways in this modern world, that’s got to change. “Somebody has to do something about that, and it’s incredibly pathetic that it has to be us,” as Jerry Garcia once said.

     Anyway. Go hug a happy child – yours or someone else’s – and thank your lucky stars you are a Canadian in 2016. Then maybe just let the sadness come for a few hours and see what it tells you to do. That's what I'm going to do. 

These are the streets I know: A commuter's journey from Los Robles to the far side of Bolonia

    Join me on my one-hour walk/bus to work in Managua through these 19 photos of the people and sights that I see most days as I walk along. It was a fun exercise collecting the pictures, as I'd never asked people's names before when I passed. Using the excuse that I was doing a "project" for my friends and acquaintances back home also made me feel more confident about just boldly asking people to pose, or letting me take a photo of their watch-goose.
    As seen on Facebook. But hey, not everybody's on Facebook.

This is Ricardo, one of the two security guys who work the gate outside our little complex of four houses. Ricardo alternates 24-hour shifts with Guillermo. Security work pays really poorly, so Ricardo has two other jobs.

The billiard hall next to our house, Pool Ocho. Our landlord told us it was a well-run, non-noisy place with no disturbances, and she was right. It's super-popular and every cabbie in the city knows Pool Ocho, but we never hear one bit of noise or trouble coming from the place.

Three of the many delivery guys who do pharmacy deliveries at the general store and pharmacy near our house. There's always so many of them hanging around that I presume they get paid at least a little just for showing up, as well as additional for each delivery.

The quirky stoplight where I now know that the best time to walk is when the little red man says I shouldn't, or wait until the little green man has counted down from 80 seconds to 35 seconds. Otherwise, you're in danger of being run over by cars turning left. 


Cuban restaurant Mojitos, which cooks its meats under the hood of this old shell of a car. It looks a little better when it's open and there are tables out, but not much. We're going to go there one Friday night, when they do a whole roast pig.

Escarlet, the woman who sells me baked goods, usually on my way home. One of my faves are the "encarceladas," which are thin squares of pineapple jam spread on a cookie pastry and covered in lattice pastry (the name means "imprisoned.)





Watch goose at a photocopy store with the owner's house in behind. The owner cautioned me that the goose might bite, but then invited me to open the gate for a better shot. I did get one, but I thought Mr. Goose looked more engrossed in his role as watch goose in this one.


The equivalent of Elections Canada, and the bain of my existence every Wednesday morning, when there is a standing protest against the government outside that is now met by a vast force of riot-ready police. I can't pass through this street on Wednesday to get to my bus because the police won't let anyone through. The protesters contend Nicaraguan elections aren't free and open.





Overpass across the busy street where the buses come and go. I feel slightly vulnerable on overpasses, but it is damn hard to cross the four lanes of busy traffic otherwise












Veronica, who makes the best and most gigantic sugar doughnuts to sell at the bus stop. She charges 11 cordobas each, about 50 cents










The usual scene at my bus stop, where a bunch of us await the arrival of whichever buses we're bound for. My walk to get here is about 30 minutes, then maybe 20 minutes on the bus before I get out for one last 4-block walk. 







And now I'm on the bus, heading toward my office. A good day today - seats for all.









I get off the bus here for the four-block walk to my office. This is a fast-food chicken place, and they are always washing the parking lot and the restaurant floor, including sometimes pulling booths out onto the street for a big washing.

Man and dog recovering from a rough night. While I don't always see this specific guy, or dog, sleeping at this specific place, it does seem that the four-block stretch to my work is home to enough serious drinkers that I will always run across at least one man passed out cold. Sleeping on the street here isn't about homelessness, it's about alcoholism






Jovani, who is an odd duck with a drinking problem who greets me enthusiastically as I go to and from work, pretty much every day. First we said hi,. then we shook hands, now he has taken to hugging, which I'm not too fond of. But hey, so it goes.



Carmen, the cart lady who I help out from time to time. Just before we left the country last year, I gave her $35 for new wheels for her cart. Recently I bought her some basic groceries - rice, beans, oil, salt, coffee. She walks a crazy amount with her cart, collecting bottles and anything else she might be able to sell for a few cordobas or salvage. She has a husband, kids and grandkids - sometimes she has her 5 year old grandson with her.


My office. As is the case with many, many offices in Managua, it used to be a house. There's been a middle/upper-class flight out of Managua's centre to flashier outlying neighbourhoods, and many of the older 'hoods have been converted into office space for NGOs, embassies and the like.


Inside my office. That's Rosita on the right, who is kind of the Jill of all trades for our organization and does everything from staffing the reception desk to making us lunch, maintaining files, running work errands, etc. And that's Ericka the accountant in red.


Can you imagine walking past cages of puppies every single day and not being able to buy at least one to take home? If I didn't know first-hand how difficult and expensive it is to export a dog from Central America to Canada, I'd be tempted. There are three or four dog sellers who sell on one of the streets that I walk home on. They claim the dogs are purebred and sell them for $100 US each. That and another $1000 or so Canadian to get all the permissions, vet papers, and ridiculously expensive flight costs will let you bring one of these sweet little guys home

The wheels on the bus: Sometimes they roll, sometimes they squeal, sometimes they throw you from side to side

Photo by fellow bus veteran Paul Willcocks

This morning I took the city bus that makes a loud thump somewhere around the rear axle every time it stops. Yesterday I rode home on the one that has three seat backs broken off, which I’m fond of because nobody but me takes those spots and it means I always get a seat.

Spend more than an hour on Nicaraguan city buses every work day and you start to get familiar with their idiosyncrasies. Their personalities emerge. They drive up to your stop looking the same, but then the door clatters open and you realize it’s this one or that one, each offering their own distinct experience.

There’s the one with padded, comfy seats that must be a retired long-distance bus; I’ve only been on that one once, but its cheerful yellow and black seats come to mind often when I’m being bashed around on one of the more typical molded-plastic ones.

Then there’s the bus that always has good tunes playing, and usually a girl curled up on the engine cover near the driver. (A lot of the drivers like to bring their girlfriends along, and I sense a certain status comes from being the woman who gets to sit where no other passengers are allowed.)

I’ve learned to avoid the bus that has had a bunch of seats taken out to create more standing room, because it doesn’t have enough handholds for a rider to stay stable as the driver rockets around corners and lurches to sudden stops. But I’m always pleased to board the one with dark-grey, military-feeling seats- old army bus, maybe? - which are sturdy, fitted, and wide enough that you rarely feel your fellow passenger’s meaty thigh pressed into yours, as is the case on every other bus.

Bus to San Carlos

If I time my commute right, I miss the peak of the rush and get a seat, or at least get a standing spot ample enough to take a wide stance and keep my balance. On the worst days, we are crushed three deep in the aisle, and I am helpless against unpleasantness turns of event like a tall man’s sweaty butt pressed into the small of my back, or a short woman’s head prickling under the arm I’ve got raised overhead to clutch the metal support bar.

(Even seated, you'll likely endure some uncomfortable moments when travelling by bus in Nicaragua. One of my grandsons had a woman’s very ample, bare belly pressed into his cheek for a good while on our trip to San Carlos.)

Everyone puts their bus face on during transit times, and I’ve come to do the same. It’s a kind of checked-out state of being – not blank, exactly, but not really there.  It lets you survive the various indignities of bus rides at peak hours without, for instance, saying something rude to the woman who just tore your shirt by squeezing past you with her giant, bejewelled purse, or going all Peter Finch on the pushing, roiling mob that is fighting to get on and off the bus at each stop. When you’re wearing your bus face, it’s like you’re plankton in the ocean, uncomplaining and accepting as the waves buffet you here and there.

The rules for giving up your seat are obviously more complicated here than in Honduras, where any woman getting on a bus will always find a man willing to jump up to offer her his seat. Here, the only ones guaranteed to be offered a seat are women with babies in arms, or super-old and rickety people. Personally, I really feel for short people, who don’t have the arm length to grab the overhead bar and hold on for dear life, and thus get knocked around more than most if they don’t get seats.

But while the scene can be a bit chaotic on Managua’s city buses, the system itself is smooth as glass. There are loads of buses covering dozens of routes, so you can get yourself pretty much anywhere within five or 10 minutes of arriving at your bus stop, presuming you can figure out the rather busy bus map. The system uses cards that can be preloaded at any big bus stop; I throw $5 on mine from time to time and then just tap it on a machine as I enter the bus to deduct that trip’s fare.

And what a deal: You can ride any route from one end to the other for 2.5 córdobas - about 12 cents. My walk/bus combination trip to work every day costs me $5 for an entire month, which is what I would pay in just one day if I went by cab.

So for those kinds of savings, I guess I can handle a stranger’s hot butt plastered into my back once in a while. I can live with having my breasts crush into the ear of a seated passenger while I'm being squeezed airless by an unruly stream of people working their way to the back door of the bus. I can stifle the scream when I see a vendor with a teetery platter of sticky coconut sweets cram onto a packed bus and push their way through the sea of people, selling as they go.

I’ll just put my bus face on and roll with it.