From the Diary of Jane Venada

        I present herein a story that has nothing to do with the holidays, but that I've been wanting to tell for a while now.  As a disclaimer, none of the characters or happenings in this story are based on real people or events.  Please don't think this isn't fiction.  In other words, this is fiction.  Enjoy.

OCT 3
        I wouldn’t call Masaya clean, but I guess it’s better than some places.  Nicaragua has a trash problem that runs deeper than just not cleaning the streets.  I’ve seen mothers instruct their toddlers to throw juice boxes out the windows of moving busses...
        I know I’ll be a good mother someday.  I know how much of a difference good parenting can make in the life of a child…and what bad parenting can lead to…
        I’m glad I came down here though.  The work is on a small scale, but at least the health center is never boring.

OCT 10
  I moved in with a host family in a house across the street from the health center.  In the mornings I sit with my host sister Jessenia drinking coffee and watching people starting to line up outside.  They wait for the doors to open and the medicos to start attending.  We rock in rocking chairs and try to guess what’s wrong with them.
  The health center is staffed by 2 male doctors and a host of female nurses.  One of the doctors, Wilmer, is an alcoholic.  I’ve seen him arrive on his motorcycle and drink a can of beer from his backpack at 8 in the morning.
  The people that come to the health center suffer from a whole range of ailments.  Some come with simple colds, others have lost fingers in power tool incidents, others have dengue fever.  I mainly try to help out with the organizational problems…I’m working on my med school apps now…

OCT 13
        Last week an NGO in the city donated a computer so I’ve taken it upon myself to make a digital database of all of the patient info.  As it is, that info only exists on badly alphabetized index cards in Wilmer’s office.  I keep finding more boxes of index cards among the empty bottles of rum that accumulate in the corners like grime.
        And I think Wilmer is coming on to me…gross…I am not attracted to the smell of stale alcohol.

OCT 16 (7 pm)
  Today after the lunch hour one of the first patients admitted into the building was complaining of a high fever and full body pains.  It could have been anything really, but she was given the standard regimen of painkillers and told to go home.  I was in the back room working on the computer and I saw through the open door as the patient headed for the exit.  Just as she reached the door that leads outside she went into violent convulsions, fell to the floor and passed out.  It scared the piss out of me!
  Doctor Wilmer and I carried the woman (a young mother named Keyling) to one of the 3 examination rooms in the health center and proceeded to do a more thorough check.  When I pulled up her shirt I discovered some kind of bite on the back part of her left shoulder.  It didn’t look like any animal bite I’d ever seen.
  I asked Wilmer what he thought of it, but just then Keyling regained consciousness, groaning and shivering, feverish.  Through fits of pain she told us what happened.  Apparently she had too much pena to tell us before…she had to wait till after she passed out and seized…

  She says she was coming out of the latrine last night and everything was dark, a new moon.  The only light she had came from the screen of her cell phone...enough to cast a pale glow on the ground in front of her.  She heard stuttering footsteps and a strange raspy breath behind, and all of a sudden there was an icy cold and inhumanly strong grip on her shoulder and arm, a man she says, and she turned just in time to see him sink his teeth into her shoulder.
  She screamed and jerked, breaking free of the grip and ran to the house, tripping in the darkness.  She told her husband what had happened and he, having a bit of a temper, grabbed a machete and ran outside.  She watched from the doorway as her husband confronted the man who had bit her, now staggering towards the house.  The husband yelled at the man, asking what was wrong with him, if he knew what he’d done…in response the man lunged, arms outstretched, clearly an attack.
        In self-defense, she says, her husband swung the machete, cutting the man’s hand clean off—leaving nothing but a bloody stump.  The man didn’t even flinch…he just kept trying to attack.  Left with no other option, the husband gave a final two-handed machetazo right to the side of the guy’s head and he crumpled to the ground with a gurgle.
        Keyling and her husband ran inside and locked the doors and windows.  She showed her husband the wound and he washed it out with water.  With all of the noise, she says, her 2-year-old son had woken up and begun to cry, so she put him back to bed and fell asleep herself.
        She was in such a deep sleep that she didn’t wake up at all until 7:30 or 8 this morning.  By that time her husband had left for his job (agronomist for INTA) and she was alone with her son.  She got up and began the morning chores as usual, collecting water, putting on coffee, making breakfast, starting the laundry…  Suddenly, she says, she remembered the dead man outside.  She went out to look and found that her husband had pulled the body under a mango tree in the patio and covered it with 5 or 6 sacos.
        Around mid-morning she began to feel the fever take hold and by lunchtime it became unbearable.  She left her baby with a neighbor and took a taxi here to the health center.

        At this point in her story it was just Keyling and I talking in the exam room.  Doctor Wilmer had left shortly after she described how the machete was planted in the man’s skull, I assume for want of a drink.  I assured the girl, now wrapped up in a blanket, that we would take good care of her even though I knew there was nothing more we could do for fever, pains, and a bite on the shoulder.
       I asked one of the nurses about rabies shots and she told me that even if the girl could pay for them, it would take a couple days for them to arrive in the health center.
       I have her on suero now, IV fluids pumped right into the bloodstream.  She’s been lying in the exam room all afternoon and seems to be getting weaker and weaker and nobody knows what to do.  I think I’m going to stay with her…she’s too weak to move, too weak to go home.

        (8:10 pm)
        About twenty minutes ago Keyling’s husband visited.  He’s a tall guy for a Nica—mustache, baseball cap, early 30s.  He confirmed his wife’s story pretty much as she’d told it and was clearly very worried about her.  Keyling greeted him between fits of coughing, stutters, and shivers, her face covered in a sickly sweat.  She told him to take care of the baby, that she would call him tomorrow.
        I pulled him aside and told him I would take care of her.  He looked again at his bed-ridden wife and lowered his head.  His voice became hushed.  He told me that today at work he’d heard all kinds of rumors of strange attacks like what had happened to his wife happening all over Masaya.  There were other bites…and worse…and the only way to stop the attackers was to kill them.  I didn’t know what to say.  I still don’t…much less what to do…

        (10:40 pm)
        Keyling is not doing well.  She keeps slipping in and out of consciousness, moaning.  She’s sweating buckets.  All I can do is keep a cool compress on her forehead and change the suero bags when they’re empty.  I feel useless.
        I sent a text message to Jessenia, my host sister, telling her I’d be staying the night over here.  She hasn’t responded.
        The health center is 100% creepier at night.  The only light in the whole building is coming from the single pallid fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling.
        We’re completely alone.  The last of the nurses took off over an hour and a half ago.  Wilmer’s been gone since 5, surprise surprise.  I think I’m going to try and get some sleep…what else can I do?  Nothing says comfort like a plastic chair.

OCT 17 (4:05 am)
  I think Keyling is dead.
  Her convulsions woke me out of a fitful dream about 20 minutes ago.  I bolted to her side and eased her out of the seizure, holding on to her hands and pushing her dark matted hair out of her gaping eyes.  Through her pain she begged…
  don’t let me die don’t let me die by god don’t let me die I can’t please god don’t…
  I clutched her hands tighter and tried to reassure her, calm her down, but her breathing kept getting shallower and shallower.  I remember the horrible staccato rhythm of it--that’s what struck me…
  Every 4 or 5 lighting quick breaths were subdivided, cleaved, by a desperate swallow.  The amount of breaths between each swallow diminished as the minutes dragged on.
        breathbreath swallow, breathbreath, swallow, breath, swallow, breathbreath, swallow, breath, swallow, swallow, breathbreath swallow…
        It went on like that until the breaths stopped.  She died mid-swallow, her eyes wide, staring right through me.  I checked for a pulse on her wrist and neck and I couldn’t find one.
        I don’t know what to do now.  I want to cry but tears aren’t there.  I’m staring at her lifeless face, her limp hand lying in repose, bent at the wrist with fingers dangling off the edge of the exam room cot.
        I feel so stupid sitting here alone writing in this notebook.  The doctors and nurses always ask me what I’m writing…I always just say I’m taking notes,  I guess I am.

        (5:30 am)
        It’s starting to get light outside now.  I decided to sit with Keyling’s body until the first nurse gets here around 7.  I’m so tired…I won’t sleep.

        (7 am)
        I’m covered in blood.  My hands are shaking and I can barely hold this pen.  Why am I writing this?  I should be thinking about what to do next...
        The last 45 minutes have been the most horrible of my life.  I can’t explain why it happened—I can only describe it.
        Keyling was dead.  Is dead.  I saw her die, watched her breath stop, felt her heart stop pumping.  But I just killed her.  I bashed her face in with a metal stool.  Now she’s dead again.  I am looking at her form sprawled on the exam room floor in a pool of blood.  God help her.  God help me.  I didn’t even know I believed in God…I don’t know what I believe.
        I didn’t think I could fall asleep with a dead body beside me but I must have…I remember dreaming of something…I remember rotting fruit…it was sped up like time lapse photography—an orange, browning, shrinking, its vibrancy fleeting, gray mold running over the rind, then maggots, frantic hoards of flies…
        I felt a sudden grip on my ankle and jerked awake.  There was Keyling, not on the cot, not dead…moving, groaning, crawling.  She yanked me off my chair before I could gain my senses.  I screamed I think, hit the ground butt first and kicked, hitting Keyling square in the nose…her grip weakened and I was able to scramble away into a corner.
        She kept coming at me.  Her husband’s words were echoing in my head, the only way to stop them is to kill them…
        I looked around frantically and spotted the metal stool.  One of the ones doctors use.  Heavy steel legs.  Adrenaline pumping.  Tears welling in my eyes.
        Keyling was dragging herself nearer using only her arms, she seemed to not have use of her legs—they were trailing behind her.  I ran and grabbed the stool.  As Keyling lunged at me again I swung the stool in a kind of uppercut that knocked her backward but didn’t do anything to stop her.
        I hit her again.  This time she was knocked flat on her back, face up.  I took the opportunity to jam the heavy steel legs into her face.  I felt her cheek bones give way…I hit again…this time her jaw went.  Still she was trying to grab me, to bite me, to eat me.  I hit her again and again, crying fully now.  I barely saw what I was doing through the tears.
        Eventually she stopped moving and I threw away the stool, wet with blood.  I looked down.  Keyling is no longer recognizable.  Her skull is a pile of bloody mush, caved in and splattered all over.
        I am numb.
        I hear a noise at the front door of the health center.  I just looked out the window.  There are figures shuffling around in the street.  I can see a couple of them pounding on the front door and yanking at the gate.  Are they sick or are they dead?
        I guess I’ll just stay here in the health center for now and wait for help.  I’m scared.  I’m alone.  I haven’t even felt homesick in Nicaragua until this moment, staring out the window watching those nameless figures roam the streets.  I remember my parents, my hometown, my college, high school.  I can’t shake the feeling that this will be the last time.


        Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!  I swear I"m not always this macabre...it's a zombie story for goodness' sake.  That's right, I've considered goodness' feelings too.

La Vida en Contexto

Este es el primer poema que he escrito en español...ojalá que les guste...quién sabe si tiene sentido...

Tú eres producto del pasado,

responsable del presente,

e influencia del futuro.

     ya sabes.

¿qué hacías?

     ¿qué haces?

          ¿qué harás?

In English now...
This is the first poem I've written in Spanish...(it definitely sounds better in Spanish...)

You are the product of the past,

responsible in the present,

and influence of the future.

     now you know.

what have you done?

     what are you doing?

          what will you do?

Perrita Perdida: Trailer

Here at last, I have for your enjoyment the trailer for Perrita Perdida, the short film I made with my friend and fellow volunteer Jason Outenreath in Camoapa, Nicaragua.

For those who are interested in the title, Perrita Perdida basically means “Lost Dog,” or “Lost Puppy,” but a saucier translation might also be “Lost Bitch.” In Spanish, the title carries all of these possible interpretations at the same time.

The story is as follows:

Diethdrich, a fine upstanding young person, is looking for the puppy he owns with his girlfriend. The girlfriend vows to break up with Diethdrich if he does not find and return said puppy. Drama ensues.

As of this posting, the final cut of this little movie (5 minutes) is ready to be sent up north to Gringolandia for sound mixing and color grading. Stay tuned for more news and enjoy the trailer!

If you're interested in the music of the film, listen to the tracks I wrote for the film here.
--> The Music of Perrita Perdida

Also check out a previous blog post, a story from the production of Perrita Perdida.
--> Perrita Perdida: Production Slate

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 4)

Remember: this is a continuing series...if you haven't read volumes 1-3, I recommend doing that because
there is a developing argument and I refer to things I've said previously...enjoy!

So to be clear, I want to say that normalization is a process during which our feelings (or unarticulated meaning) become conditioned by sustained use of words to come to us already habituated to the form (that is, the specific meaning) of those words, and that this conditioning gives rise to thoughts (or articulated meaning yet unexpressed).

Normalization is what happens as babies acquire language for the first time, and similarly, as we learn a second language. For a baby, this process deals directly with raw feelings, in the normalization of feelings and words, and therefore is a deep and fundamental kind of learning that informs nascent modes of thinking itself.

The difference in learning a second language however, is that we are basing the acquisition of our new words (in this case the Spanish ones) on our understanding and competence with our old words (the English). Our feelings and words have already been normalized, our modes of thinking established, and now we are attempting to substitute our old words for new ones.

This kind of learning is not as deep and fundamental as with that of the baby—instead, this kind of learning seems to be lateral, almost shallow. Learning another language could be just swapping out old words for new ones without considering making amendments or adaptations to the underlying meaning. But I don’t think it necessarily has to be like that.

Here we begin to butt up against the role that culture has in this discussion of language and meaning. What I mean is, in order to truly understand a language, one has to be sensitive to the meaning and significance of words within their cultural context. For example,  I could know the literal Spanish translations of every English word in the dictionary, but I would still sound like a bumbling gringo idiot in a Spanish conversation without certain knowledge of cultural norms, speech patterns, phrases, idioms, inflection, and pacing.

So an important part of learning a second language is learning a second culture as well—in addition to the lateral movement of word substitution that exists on the surface, one must also take care to really understand the meaning and significance of new words within the second language. This contextual learning comes from an understanding of culture; that is, from an understanding of the attitudes and behavioral characteristics of a given social group.

~

I view my learning of Spanish in Nicaragua almost as the birth of my “Spanish-speaking self.” I have tried to think of my burgeoning language abilities as mirroring the same kind of development a Nicaraguan baby goes through as it picks up language for the first time. Sure, I base a lot of my learning on what I’ve learned as an English-speaker, to ignore all of that would be insane, but for many things, especially aspects of social life and custom, speech patterns and inflections, I try to forgo my American cultural inclinations and search for a new Nicaraguan base understanding.

In this way I’m striving to realize a process of normalization analogue to the deep normalization that establishes fundamental modes of thinking in babies. I don’t want to think that I’m replacing the modes of thinking I learned as a baby developing in America, but rather that I’m expanding those modes of thinking, giving them more dimension with the addition of new cultural and linguistic norms along with the new words themselves.

So, if in the future I happen to travel to another Spanish-speaking country or have the opportunity to converse with non-Nicaraguan Spanish speakers, I assume that it will be glaringly obvious to them that I learned Spanish in Nicaragua. I will have a Nicaraguan accent, speaking cadence, diction, etc because in effect, my Spanish-speaking self was born in Nicaragua. I am interested to see if it will be possible to adopt different Spanish accents in the future. Will speaking in an Argentine accent for example, always feel affected in the same way that speaking English with a British accent feels affected?

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4 ***
• Pictorial Supplement

Perrita Perdida: Production Slate

Recently I’ve been editing a short film. The piece, called Perrita Perdida, was written, directed, and recorded by my good friend and fellow Peace Corps volunteer Jason Outenreath here in Nicaragua. I thought it might be cool to share a little about the project and generate some interest even though it’s still not finished.

A little over a month ago I went to Camoapa (Jason’s site) with my camera and tripod and we shot this little movie in one long and tiring day. Jason had written the script and sent it to me some time before, so I had an idea of what to expect, but like any production, we had a fair amount of challenges to deal with.

And like any production, the biggest challenges were posed by the actors and the weather. We shot the first few scenes in the morning with minimal problems, took a break for lunch, and were planning to finish filming in the afternoon and early evening, which we did, but there was a period of time when we thought we might not be able to…

The script was short, thank gawwd (about five pages long), which meant that the cast was also going to be extremely small; there were only five actors involved, BUT, during lunch, as we were preparing to shoot the only scene that involved conversational dialogue, the girl who was cast in that scene called Jason to say that she didn’t want to do it. This was maybe an hour before we were scheduled to shoot.

Qué mala onda, right? Correcto. SO, obviously we were kind of pooping our pants for a while, scrambling to find a replacement. To be fair, it was Jason doing most of the scrambling since all of the actors were from his site and he knew them—I was just living the dream, along for the ride— anyway, he called our lead actor Diethdrich to see if he could help us out.

Diethdrich, playing the part of the smooth leading man on AND off camera, assured us that there would be no problem and that he could whip up a replacement easy. And sure enough, at the snap of his fingers (after he made a few calls of course) a replacement actress stepped out of a taxi and began looking over her lines.

Now when I talk about “actors” this by no means is to insinuate that these people had any kind of prior acting experience. I really just mean that for that particular day, they had to act in our movie.  This absolute lack of acting experience made the job of directing quite a challenge so I tried to help Jason out as much as possible.

Okay, so we have our two actors. They’ve rehearsed their lines a bit. We’ve got the equipment ready: the camera, the tripod, the microphones, the headphones, the cables. We set out for the location. As we arrive on the street corner Jason had picked out for the scene (depicting a chance encounter between the protagonist and a female acquaintance, perhaps ex-novia), we hear a loud thunderclap announce itself from the hills. The dark clouds advance quickly and a few moments later it’s pouring down rain. We take shelter under the roof of a nearby house, the four of us, maldiciendo our bad luck. There was no rain in the script.

We waited there by that house for a good 45 minutes, hoping for the rain to stop. It’s times like these, the apparent low points, which can really be the defining moments of a production and ultimately an entire project. You can let the setbacks get you down and watch as your negative attitude spreads like black ink in a glass of water, or you can look at the situation as an opportunity to exercise some creativity, improvise a bit.

We went for the latter. From the stoop Jason started getting some cool shots of the rain: the clouds, a kid on a bike, a guy on a horse, the water dripping from rooftops… We started talking about how to work the rain into the story. For our patience and tenacity, the fates rewarded us: a beautiful arching rainbow right over the house we were using as shelter.

So we changed the scene a bit. Instead of running into her as they both turn a street corner, Diethdrich walks through the rain and happens past the acquaintance sitting in the house. She calls him over and they have a short and awkward conversation. Diethdrich continues on. This all happens under the arch of the rainbow.

There were some other challenges later on that day…all the walking we had to do to the different locations in the city, the crazy dog we had to try and get to act, the race against the rapidly diminishing light in the evening…but the rain was definitely the defining moment of the production. I’m proud of the way we were able to spin a potentially debilitating setback in our favor, and hopefully end up with a better movie for it.

So right now at this moment I’m finishing up the final cut of the film. It will be the third cut (unless Jason has other crazy ideas he hasn’t told me yet, in which case there might be a fourth). Like production, the editing process is often times a big puzzle as well. I originally edited the film to this great salsa tune called Tu Cariñito but we realized that if we ever want to submit this project to a festival, we’ll either need to buy the rights to the song (on a Peace Corps budget??) or come up with some original music.

So I took it upon myself to write some tracks. For the last 3 weeks I’ve been recording these little songs on my laptop in the evenings. The featured instrument in these songs is a seven-note finger piano (kalimba) that I brought with me to Nicaragua, but I also used a simple thumb flute made of cane (which I also brought with me) and found items like a cracker wrapper and an old wine bottle. For the majority of the beats, I just kinda tapped on my computer.  You can listen to the tracks here.

The editing of Perrita Perdida will be finished for good in the next week or so, then we’re going to send that final cut to the States around Christmastime for sound mixing and color correction. We’re looking at getting the finished product back sometime in the beginning of February. We’re pretty excited to see how it turns out!

Watch the trailer on YouTube! --> Perrita Perdida (Lost Dog) Trailer
The premiere at the 2012 Palm Springs International ShortFest

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 3)

This is my vision—maybe my illusion; at any rate, this is how I imagine stuff works inside my head. There is an amorphous, amoeboid thing, a feeling, that emerges undulating out of some foggy corner of my brain, I know not from whence it comes; it is a notion, strangely-shaped with subtle topography—sometimes pockmarked, jagged, sometimes glossy and fluid—ridged, channeled, crevassed. Its hue is a sunset or a dawn, a tinge in variation, like an octopus changing its color. This feeling is complex—ineffably so.

Then the words come. They come like shipping containers; they come to package the feeling. Words are envelopes, packets, parcels, bags, boxes and crates—a whole diction of vessels of standardized sizes and shapes. With luck, there is a lexical package that closely matches the feeling’s multiplex form, fitting it as best it can. The better the word, the better it conforms to the feeling’s shape, thereby retaining and transmitting its essence.

 But in every case on some level, the process of packing feelings into words makes the feelings lose their subtlety, their complexity, their absolute authenticity. Feelings are infinities, and words, by virtue of being finite units, leave something out that existed originally. Words are necessary however, because despite the net loss of meaning, once feelings have been jammed into words, we can think.

~

I imagine that this idea, this cramming of feelings into words, eventually feeds back into itself and stabilizes, and I think the feedback loop that emerges can help explain how we learn language and develop the capacity to use it as a tool to think and communicate, thereby gaining efficacy in the world.

 After a long period of using certain words to describe certain feelings, we grow accustomed to them; that is, our feelings are affected by the containers (the words) we pack them in. They emerge in our brain not as impossibly fluctuating dynamic entities, but as quietly undulating things pre-molded into the shape of their packages, into the shape of the words themselves. In this sense, thoughts and words become one in the same. I’ll call this the process of normalization, and it’s the birthing rite of thoughts.

 After sustained use of words our feelings are no longer ineffable infinities, they become verbal and thinkable—they become thoughts. After normalization we mean what we say and we say what we mean.

I want to mention here before moving on that I think genuinely new ideas, creativity, poetry, inspiration, innovation, all come from this pre-verbal place. These things are born of feelings, of pure unarticulated meaning. Es decir the Muse resides in feelings but must be tamed by thoughts, that is, by words.

In the next post we'll try and figure out how the process of normalization plays into learning another language...what fun!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3 ***
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement

Arboriculturalism

I've been strangely productive lately so please enjoy this extra treet...(sorry I couldn't resist).

As an environment volunteer in Nicaragua, I’ve been thinking a lot about trees. Not just about the need to plant more of them in order to protect streams, rivers, and watersheds, prevent erosion, and help reduce dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in the air, but also about the incredible variety of trees and plant life and the culture of the people that live among them. Needless to say, the culture surrounding trees in Nicaragua is different than in the United States. Trees mean many things to people here: shade, medicine, food, firewood, furniture, fence posts, animal feed…the list goes on.

For the last few months I’ve been drawing these trees poco a poco, working on them in quiet moments of repose…and now I’m finally finished! Since they seem to embody a lot of the significance of trees in Nicaragua, I thought I’d put ‘em up on the ‘ol blog and let the public devour them.

This is a real tree that I began drawing at Selva Negra in Matagalpa during my group’s In-Service Training in March 2011. It’s growing on a tiny island in the middle of a lake and at that time did not sport any leaves or flowers or fruit—but that didn’t stop it from being host to a myriad of other plant life. A great majority of trees in Nicaragua don’t just stand alone, but form the substrate for other organisms such as lichens, epiphytes, and fern species. These trees are truly ecosystems in and of themselves.

This tree was inspired by a grove that the bus passes on its long trek to Santa Lucia from the highway. The roots are exposed, yet they crush and crumble the rock in which they grow, and the branches are stretched out, pushed and pulled by the force of the prevailing wind. In the dry season when I started this drawing, most of the trees truly looked dead, but this is the great illusion of many plants in the summertime. It’s pretty amazing how trees can and will grow anywhere and with any conditions, even without water for 6 months and straight through a boulder.

This tree was inspired by the innumerable fence posts that line the roads of Santa Lucia. I’d say that the general fecundity of life in Nicaragua can be illustrated no better than with the image of the fence post tree. In order to make a fence post like this, all you need to do is find a branch from an existing tree, chop it off with your machete, and plant it about 6 inches in the ground. With some rain and sun a few weeks later it’ll start to sprout little branches and shoot out roots, and after a couple months it’ll be covered in leaves. Then you can begin chopping off the branches that grow off the top for more fence posts or even for firewood, and if you need a shady place for your cows to rest, just let the branches grow out!

I hope these images speak a little more deeply than would be possible using only words. The captions I put with them aren’t really meant to explain the drawings, but to just give them a little bit of context. If you have any questions or comments about trees or Nicaragua or drawings—or trees in Nicaragua—or drawings of trees—or drawings of trees in Nicaragua—please leave them for me, I’ll do my best to answer them!

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 2)

Since I am still actively learning the Spanish language, there are a few different levels of proficiency with which I can communicate, completely depending on the context and the content of the conversation, that is, depending on the words and phrases I’m required to use in a given situation.

At a fundamental level, the most effective level of communication, the Spanish words materialize with more or less the same fecundity as they would in English. For example, I can greet someone, introduce myself, comment on the weather, say where I’m going, and say goodbye with a fairly high level of competency and with a fairly low level of thinking about translations. In fact, at this level, the Spanish words and my thoughts seem to fuse together like they do in English. Unfortunately, not all of my Spanish speaking experience can take place at this fundamental level.

The next level is a level of searching, that is, trying to think of words and expressions that I know in English and making guesses about how to phrase or pronounce them in Spanish. It’s about using a network of associations to communicate and really represents the essence of learning. I think of my English knowledge as a kind of springboard that I use to launch myself into the realm of Spanish. Maybe I pull off a perfect dive and maybe I belly flop painfully. Sometimes it feels kind of like grasping about in the dark for gems.

For this reason, the searching level can be both very satisfying and utterly disheartening. It just depends on the rate of success. For example, I was once trying to describe a fork in the road, so I chanced the phrase “un tenedor en el camino” and I got some very strange looks. But other times I’ll guess right and get super pumped. The expression “to kill two birds with one stone” seems to translate directly (matar dos pájaros con una sola piedra). Those are the times I love learning Spanish.

But it’s just as important to understand what others say as it is to be able to articulate your thoughts. The problem can be illustrated thusly: I’ll be chugging along happily thinking I’m the best Spanish speaker in the world, talking about things I’ve talked about before and therefore know how to talk about…and then the topic changes and someone throws in a string of brand new words. My dreams of linguistic prowess are crushed, suddenly and without mercy, and I have to bashfully explain that I have no idea what’s going on. Sometimes I’m saved by the fact that the person with whom I’m conversing can dumb down what they’re saying and rephrase it using words that I know, but that doesn’t always happen. It’s made very clear at this level of communication that when learning a language, listening and speaking are really two sides of the same coin.

And I suppose there is a third level of communication proficiency after the fundamental and the searching, which can be characterized by absolute incomprehension, and which I will (accordingly) call the level of incomprehensibility. I don’t often find myself operating at this level of (in)communication in Spanish, gracias a Dios, but every once in a while, if I stop paying attention to a conversation, I will become utterly lost, be unable to contribute anything, and start looking for a way to leave.

~

So I find myself describing a few separate things here. There is thinking and there is speaking and then there are words. Thinking seems to be made up of internal verbal strands and speaking seems to be made up of external verbal strands. The building blocks of both of these kinds of strands then, are words (hence verbal strands). I suppose it might make sense to talk about words specifically as those elements of oral communication—that is, the constituent parts of speaking—but I want to talk about thoughts, those unspoken but nonetheless articulated elements of language, as being made of words as well.

I will unpack then, exactly what I mean when talking about “words.”

I want to appropriate words as being vehicles for articulating meaning. That is they can articulate meaning taciturnly as with unspoken thought, and lingually, out loud as with speech, and of course written down as well, but this is not an important distinction for my purposes here. To put it bluntly, thoughts are unspoken words and speech is spoken words. But there is something I’m leaving out in this relation between words, thoughts, and speech, and that is unarticulated meaning. What I want to find is the source of thoughts and speech, and this means thoughts without words, preverbal thinking, pure unformulated meaning. And I want to call this source, this unarticulated meaning, a feeling. My intuition tells me that a feeling precedes a thought. (don't worry I'm not even going to try to adress how intuition fits into this.........)

Stay tuned for the next installment as I dive into the main metaphor of the argument!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2 ***
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 1)

*Chrestomathy-a selection of passages from an author or authors, designed to help in learning a language.

I have been immersed in the Spanish-speaking world for over a year now and it still fascinates me to no end to think about what must be going on inside my head as I learn things. Have synaptic pathways been re-routed? Have my “normal” modes of thinking been qualitatively changed by the process of assimilating a new language?

My intuition tells me that they have, and I certainly want the answer to be yes since that would indicate progress toward my general goal of “learning Spanish,” but there’s a creeping doubt that comes to me every time I think hard on the topic of language. Have I really been learning Spanish, or have I just learned a bunch of Spanish words that I translate back and forth from English? Is thinking in Spanish a necessary condition for gaining fluency? Are there aspects of language that can only be accessed by native speakers? How much of fluency is cultural? Can a monolingual person ever truly become bilingual? This frantic line of questioning seems to spiral down to oblivion, evading satisfactory answers…

But here’s the million-córdoba question as far as I can tell, the one that really gets at the heart of the problem:

Can meaning be separated—that is, does meaning stand alone—from the language that expresses it?

It seems to me that learning a second language can help parse apart the nature of language itself and shed light on the relationship between feelings and thoughts and the words that express them. In this series of posts I’m going to try and clarify that hazy relationship (commenting on the ontological status of meaning along the way) by drawing from my own experience in learning Spanish as a second language.

~

When I speak English, my native tongue, it seems to me that during day-to-day conversation, during those commonplace exchanges about the latest gossip, what I’m going to eat, or what I did yesterday, there is no perceived premeditation in word choice—I don’t have think about the words before I say them. The fluidity and ease with which I can express my basic needs and wants, my nuanced ideas and subtle impressions, is a striking aspect of the effortless way I can exist in my environment when speaking my mother tongue. I have a thought, usually accompanied by some sort of mental image, and the words are simply there as if they were the thought itself. Indeed, the majority of the time I speak English, and not just in day-to-day communication but in more involved conversation as well, my thoughts, words, and what I say seem to be one in the same. It must be said however, that the deftness with which I can employ the English language only becomes noticeable in comparison to the embarrassing ineptitude with which I speak Spanish.

In sharp contrast to the fluid relationship between my thoughts and words when I speak English, speaking Spanish is a constant struggle. I think this struggle can reveal, however, something important about the ontological status of meaning—that is, where and how meaning exists.

This is the first installment of a continuing series called Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy. No one knows how many posts there will be in the end, but I'm working on a fairly long essay on this subject, and the post you've just read is the introduction. I'll try to post a new volume every week until I'm finished writing...hopefully this self-imposed deadline will give me the motivation I need to finish it! Don't forget to comment!

• Volume 1 ***
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement

Technology Education Part 2: Cell Phone Revolution

  Computers aren’t the only big technological change people are adjusting to in my site. Apparently there weren’t any cell phones at all in Santa Lucía until 2006. In the span of a few months, the people of this small mountain town went from a telecommunications environment resembling something from 1940’s rural America, to the cell phone-saturated, internet-age situation they’re in today. I’m told cell phones literally appeared overnight.

  Before 2006, the entire town, maybe even the entire municipality, used one telephone. That’s right, there was just one public landline in the whole town, and it had to serve at least all 5,000 residents living in the central town area (if anyone knows how to translate casco urbano better than “central town area,” please let me know).

  Five years ago, the majority of telephone calls in Santa Lucía were made to or from relatives living outside of the country. Nicaraguans have had a long tradition of leaving their country and families behind in order to find work, most popularly heading south to Costa Rica, and as a result, they’ve also had a long tradition of calling back home.

  The one telephone in town was located in the Claro office (Claro is one of the two telecommunications giants in Nicaragua; the other one is Movistar) and it was operated by a guy named Osmin. Actually Osmin still works in that office today, but now he has much, much less to do.

  Back then, Osmin manned the one phone day and night, fielding all of the town’s calls. The majority of those were from Lucianos working in Costa Rica or the United States who wanted to talk to their relatives still living in town.

  So Osmin would pick up, and the person on the other end would say, “I want to talk to so-and-so and I’m going to call back at such-and-such a time,” and Osmin would say something like “Dale pues, está bien,” which translates loosely as, “Alright, cool,” and then it would be his job to track down that family member and tell them what time to come to the telephone office to receive their call.

  If you can imagine it, the office was full of people all day waiting for their relatives to call. Of course sometimes they wouldn’t call and there was no way to find out the reason. If everything worked out and you were able to receive your call at the allotted time, you had to talk in front of everyone else waiting there in the office. Nothing was private.

  It is absolutely amazing to me that the ability to communicate freely with the outside world is just five years old here. The only thing that might tip you off that there was ever just one telephone in Santa Lucía is the true fanaticism people have for their cell phones.

        Everyone under the age of 50 has a cell phone. Everyone. No joke, I know people who live in houses made of clay and sticks who use Blackberry’s.

  There is only one thing that Nicas love more than talking on their cell phones: and that’s texting on their cell phones. Just like how in English we’ve invented the verb “to text,” in Spanish they’ve invented the verb “chatear.” I text more in Nicaragua than I ever did in the States and it’s because the Nicas have an apparently unquenchable thirst for chateando.

  But I digress…back to that period of unimaginable change that swept through in 2006…

  In that year Claro apparently undertook a large expansion into some of the more rural areas of Nicaragua in order to tap into a new market (a naïve and un-tech-savvy market that I’m sure the execs at Claro were itching to exploit) and Santa Lucía was on their list. They say that even before the big red and white cell phone tower was completed, (now a prominent feature of the town center) a fleet of bright red Claro microbuses with loudspeakers on top descended on Santa Lucía and basically gave out free cell phones.

  The salesmen didn’t have to work too hard to make a veritable youth army of cell phone carriers in a single day. The phones they gave out didn’t have the chips (SIM cards) they needed, but there wasn’t service so it didn’t matter yet. Claro didn’t even start selling the chips until there was service. So people started buying cell phones without SIM cards and without service just for the novelty of having a little screen with the date and time (which of course also functioned as a handy flashlight) and a couple of games.

  Once the antenna was finished and people could finally make calls, Claro continued their exploitation not only by charging for the SIM cards, but also exorbitant fees. All of Claro’s cell phone business is pay-as-you-go, and the more “minutes” you buy, the longer they last. That is, if you buy 20 córdobas worth of “minutes” (they use the world saldo here) they might be good for 2 or 3 days and then they expire. If you buy 50 córdobas worth of saldo it might be good for 5 to 7 days before it expires.

  Using a cell phone here is a constant game. Claro has promotions every few days where if you buy saldo on that day, it’s doubled or tripled, and you can save up bono (or bonus minutes). There are also deals where you can get free text messages if you send a certain word to a certain number. You can even send saldo to a friend so they can text you.

  Oh and there are two different saldo counts, one for calls and one for texts…and this is all just among Claro phones, so if you want to call or text someone who has Movistar, you have to pay three, four, or five times more. It’s definitely true what everyone says, the people at Claro are ladrones (thieves), and they’re always inventing new ways to exploit.

  So, the horrible greed-driven business practices of Claro aside, where there used to be an aching lack of communication there is now a profound surplus of it. Santa Lucía skipped over some infrastructural telecommunication milestones that much of the industrialized world had to pass to be as developed as it is today. To go from one telephone to thousands of cell phones literally overnight is quite a jump and the culture is still adjusting (maybe overcompensating) to the change.

        And in fact, I’m pretty sure there aren’t any landlines in Santa Lucía today…but they did just install 3G.

Technology Education Part 1: Virtual Faith

This is a special two-part post on technology in Santa Lucía. This first part is about my experience helping Nicas with computer skills and the second part will be about the town’s telecommunication history.

Sometimes I think about the fact that I can type like this: fast… I can almost type at the speed of my thoughts! And so I’ve found myself reflecting on how technology is implicated in the culture of my site…a place so rural in many ways but infused with a healthy smattering of the Internet age.

Recently I’ve been helping Nicaraguans (very informally) with basic computer skills, and it strikes me how much these skills have become, for me, second nature. For many Nicas, especially the rural schoolteachers I’ve been working with, the concept of doble clic is utterly new and foreign. It really puts into perspective the privileges I’ve had in having access to computers and technology all my life.

My dad has always had a computer…the first one I can remember was a Packard Bell raging a Windows 3.1 operating system and about 0 RAM. I was maybe 4 years old, playing around with the mouse and keyboard, delighting in the sights, smells, and sounds of the machine. That same computer eventually ended up in my room, and although it couldn’t do much, it could run Solitaire, Paint, and Oregon Trail.

(I was usually a doctor by the way, I started in May, and I always caulked and floated. Oregon Trail also taught me the words “grueling,” “strenuous,” and “cholera,” and that killing buffalo is easy.)

All throughout elementary and middle school we had to go to computer class. I can even recall that in 3rd grade, in addition to learning basic skills we were introduced to a brand new technology called “laser discs.” Later on in 7th and 8th grade we had actual typing classes. We were taught where on the keyboard to put our fingers and did exercises using a special program to develop muscle memory and typing etiquette.

  Not that my generation necessarily needed classes like that…

  As middle-schoolers we could run computational circles around all of the computer teachers, who for some reason always seemed to be in their 60’s. They were just so excited to be teaching young minds about this important new technology. What did it matter that they had to consult the textbook to change the desktop background from a picture of the band Korn back to the standard Windows blue?

  The point is, I’ve had so much experience with computers in my life that I didn’t realize how much of a complicated subject it can be for someone who hasn’t had any.

  Some things make sense of course, like the concept of drag and drop, but other things are quite counterintuitive, or at least subtly complicated. For example, why do you have to click on “Start” in order to shut the computer down? What is the functional difference between “Save” and “Save As?” One click or two? Left or right? How many “New Folders” can you make? (Apparently an infinite amount?)

  All of these things have been basic questions posed to me by the Nicaraguan teachers I’ve been working with. I admit that before helping them out, I had taken those things for granted almost as inherent knowledge—as something direct and sensual like seeing or smelling or touching—not something to be learned…and certainly not something to be studied.

  In watching and helping Nicas learn to use computers, I’m realizing now, on more than just an intellectual level, that what computer skills do is to essentially virtualize your otherwise very concrete experience. Your corporeality becomes transformed and translated; your fingers, hands, and arms (usually appendages that effect physical change in the world) become a dexterous and super-sensitive little arrow that flies around on a screen in a virtual space and does your virtual bidding. It opens, closes, cuts, copies, pastes, drags and drops.

  None of these incredibly evocative verbs does anything concrete however. Instead they’re an abstraction, operating metaphorically in an invisible substrate of 0’s and 1’s. I can only imagine how much of a paradigm shift in thinking it must be for these teachers, having to learn as they’re doing to believe in this virtual space.

  For my American peers and I (and now the youngest generations in Nicaragua), we never really had to transition from thinking concretely to thinking virtually. We grew up interacting with and thinking about computers; for us, our faith in the virtual isn’t really a faith so much as it is just another mode of understanding and relating to the world. But for the middle-aged rural Nicaraguans just learning computer skills, their learning experience must feel like quite a leap of faith.

  (As a side note, it would be interesting to do a study or something investigating the connection between faith in a religious sense and the kind of faith someone needs to have in order to learn to believe in the virtual space of a computer…)

Stay tuned for part two of Technology Education and learn how cell phones changed everything overnight!

• Technology Education Part 2: Cell Phone Revolution

The Nest

I wrote a short story a few days ago and made some drawings to go with it. Also, I just made a new title banner and background using pictures from Santa Lucia! Enjoy.

It sees everything. From its solitary vigil suspended above the dusty road, clutching to an electric line headed to the mountains and oblivion, the nest observes the bustling of humanity below.

It sees the men chopping down trees for firewood and carrying the logs back to the houses on horseback. It sees the women washing clothes in the river that winds its way through the valley below. It sees the shoeless children playing baseball in the street with a stick and a ball made of sewed-up scraps of cloth.

It looks like a drop of water on a clothesline, this lonely nest, distended, ready to drip. But it won’t. Made of scraps of reeds and straw woven together by peculiar birds called oropéndola, it hangs golden through the wind and the rain, watching.

This particular forgotten corner of earth over which the nest keeps its watch has been changing. The trees are less and less. They are disappearing, slowly consumed by fire. Fire that cooks, fire that clears fields, fire that claims the forest for the people. There used to be monkeys howling in the valley but now the only howl is the wind and the flames. Every time the rains come there are more corrugated zinc roofs roaring back in opposition to the pounding water.

But the nest has nothing to say—an unwavering observer, it just is. It has no voice, no opinion, no counsel.

~

One day a little girl who lived along the road that winds under the electric line came with her mother to sit and wait for the bus to pass by and take them to the city. The day was bright and new but the girl was in a foul mood, angry with her mother for dragging her along.

She sat down huffily on a stone and stared at her bare toes wiggling in her sandals, her elbows on her knees and her hands supporting the weight of her heavy head. An ant made its way towards her, navigating terrain that must have felt like an expansive desert, carrying a giant Ranchitas crumb on its untiring insect shoulders. Ants have it easy, she thought, they don’t have to take a bus into town. But she felt glad that the chip wouldn’t go to waste.

Floating down from the mountains came the bleat of the approaching bus. Several birds squawked in reply. The girl lifted her gaze from the world of ants and watched as the birds took flight, their black and yellow plumage flashing in the morning light. Following the trajectory of one of the birds, her eyes fell upon the golden honey-drop form of the nest, still and pendent on the electric line.

In that moment a thought seized her—or maybe it was more just a wordless feeling—she kept her eyes gazing upward. The great contradiction of the nest filled her up.

She saw it then as nature’s sentinel, gazing down untiringly upon the human world. She knew that it saw her petty anger and she felt ashamed.

But wasn’t the nest dependent on humanity as well?

It was anchored to a manmade trellis after all, an electric line surging with the energy that drives insatiable human consumption. But only for a lack of trees was the nest want to clutch to a cable suspended over a road.

The bus pulled up, interrupting her reverie. Her mother called to her brusquely and she climbed aboard. In her seat squashed against the window, she craned her neck and watched the nest as the bus pulled away.

The nest, hanging as always, watched back.

A Passing Thought

Sometimes I think that I've doubled my net knowledge since I've been in Nicaragua.

But then I think that the idea of being able to quantify knowledge into a net value is flawed.

Then I go cut something down with my machete.

Puberty

A few days ago I observed a sixth-grade class in the (relatively) large school in the center of the town.

This particular school is called Francisca Garcia Elementary and it is one of four primary schools where I work in my site. It’s also one of two pure-grade schools (the other two are multi-grade schools where 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades are with one teacher, and grades 4, 5, and 6 are with another). I’m still not officially teaching classes right now but my plan is to start getting into that in early May.

Anyway, I arrive in the school in the morning—less than a ten-minute walk from my house—say hello to the principal and walk to the 6th grade classroom. When I get to the doorway, all the kids shout Buenos Dias, forgetting completely whatever it is they were doing and jump to their feet to the sound of scraping desks. Then it is my duty to say siéntense, and they all sit down noisily, clearly savoring the interruption.

I greet the profesora quickly and take a seat. I always try to observe the Natural Science classes since that is the class I’ll be teaching. This particular day the lesson is on the reproductive system, and specifically the discussion is about puberty.

I can’t remember exactly when my first sex ed. class was, but I think I was in middle school…7th or 8th grade. It strikes me that many of these kids are a few years younger than that…

The teacher calls upon three girls by name to come to the front of the classroom and stand. The three girls gingerly get out of their chairs and exchange shy smiles. They walk to the front and face the rest of the class, leaning on the chalkboard and fidgeting with the skirts of their school uniforms.

The teacher then poses the following question to the whole class:

“What about these three girls is different?”

It takes me a second to realize that this is actually happening. The teacher had chosen girls who are obviously in different stages of development and had asked the rest of the class to point out their physical differences.

There are shouted comments to the effect of:

“That one’s got bigger boobs!”

and, “That one hasn’t gotten her period!”

Obviously I’m a little surprised at this teaching tactic, but I stay seated and quiet, observing. The teacher proceeds to wrangle the rowdy class and lead a noisy discussion about secondary sex characteristics using the three girls as explicit models.

To my surprise, it seems to work; the class is asking questions…the material is being presented in a familiar context and the three girls do not seem to be embarrassed or emotionally wracked by the 25 pairs of eyes analyzing their physical development.

I can’t help but imagine this same scene taking place in an American 6th grade class: the tears, the parent phone-calls, the legal action…

This experience seems to indicate a fundamental difference between American and Nicaraguan culture and society, a difference I have been noticing as I become more and more integrated. In America we are first and foremost individuals, but Nicaraguan culture is defined by a sense of community. In other words in Nicaragua you are a part of a community first and an individual second.

It seems to me that most Americans would think that singling out certain girls and drawing attention to their bodies in front of an entire class of students would be extremely inappropriate. There is an assumption in America that we have a right to absolute privacy when it comes to our bodies, at least in any social setting. It’s a form of American individualism.

In America you probably won’t be told to your face that you look/are fat. You also probably won’t get comments about your zits or offers from friends to help pop them. In Nicaragua it happens all the time. That sacred personal space we have imagined for ourselves in America simply doesn’t exist here.

In Nicaragua, people don’t harbor personal insecurities about their bodies in the same way they do in the States. Sure it was a little uncomfortable at first to witness what seemed like abject rudeness, (and what seemed like extremely inappropriate comments about 11-year-old girls) but now it doesn’t phase me. I realized that people here simply don’t get offended by fat comments…and why should they? I find it extremely refreshing that people don’t take themselves so seriously as to be offended by something so trivial. I’m trying to adopt the attitude myself.

So, I feel fairly safe in saying that the social mechanics at work in Nica seem to operate on a different level than they do in the States, but I haven’t yet figured out exactly what that level is or how exactly it’s different from American individualism. My hunch is that it has to do with the more important sense of community that exists here. The community protects and accepts, scolds and rejects, and much of the responsibility of the individual seems to be downplayed because of it.

It’s a complex problem—describing how this cultural sense of community works—but luckily I have the next 20 months to think about it. I’ll be revisiting the theme.

Leadership, Affinities, and The Self

I wrote this when I was feeling discouraged.

_________________________________________________

I’ve been worrying that I will need to change myself radically in order to become a good Peace Corps volunteer…or worse: that I won’t be able to change.

Everyone always talks about how they “just aren’t that type of person,” or that they could never do a given thing because it goes against who they are. They draw clear lines around their “self,” bounded by likes and dislikes and notions of proficiency, what they are good and bad at.

I find myself thinking that when it really comes down to it, there is no such thing as this “essential self”. It’s a fiction we create to be comfortable. I came to the Peace Corps, in part, to test out this notion of the essentiality of self, to see how far I could push myself, and to see how moldable my “self” actually is. I have a feeling that by putting myself in a variety of new situations and in the company of a variety of new people, I will change me. It’s an exhilarating thought.

Right now, as I work on the ongoing project of integrating myself into the community, I find myself going through phases—highs and lows—a kind of emotional aftershock which I hope points towards the fact that I am indeed changing. This aftershock seems to come primarily out of the disparity between my expectations and often times radically different realities.

When I talk about my expectations, I’m talking about my vision of a good volunteer, ultimately my goal for myself. This vision has been informed and influenced by things I’ve read about Peace Corps, current volunteers I’ve met, impressions I get from the Peace Corps staff in Managua, and the stories I hear from people in my site about previous volunteers.

I’ve heard countless times that a good volunteer is a leader and a self-starter. This in and of itself doesn’t worry me, as I suppose I am a leader in a number of ways…what seems to push me into fits of guilt, self-pity, and worry is the thought that my interpretation of leadership may be different from the people who will be evaluating me on it, and that I will fail to make a difference by failing to adapt and accord with the interpretation of leadership that matters.

I came into Peace Corps thinking that I am best as a leader when it’s through tacit example. I try to live in the simplest and most honest way that I can. When left to my own devices, I am a fairly private person by nature and I try to radiate my love of learning in the hopes that it will inspire others to search in themselves for that same kind of drive.

I don’t have a background in the brand of leadership that requires you to captivate and dictate to large groups of people. I am uncomfortable with the power that comes with this kind of leadership. It seems so direct and assuming, so arrogant. There is no room for deep thinking, for second-guessing.

If there’s one thing I love doing, it’s second-guessing. My natural mode of thinking seems to be the questioning of norms and rules, and therefore, I am uncomfortable with the idea of taking them up as my mantle. I can imagine someone reading this and thinking that I sound like a very young and naive person. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps I just haven’t grown up yet.

Maybe my Peace Corps experience will force me to grow up. Maybe a big part of it will be nagging failure and making a fool of myself. But I also realize that failing and making a fool of oneself is a great way to learn true humility, and I suppose humility is a quality just as important as leadership, if not an essential part of it.

Bat Remedies and Surprise Visits

There are bats that fly around my house at night. They poop and pee on my floor, and more ironically, on the closed lid of my toilet. Sigh. It’s nice to see that their hearts are in the right place at least.

~

Every once in a while, right after sunset, I’ll be eating dinner or something and turn to stand up, and a bat will dart around a corner from nowhere, wind under my arm, and shoot away. I never feel or hear anything, since they’re almost completely silent and they never touch me, so I’m left trusting only my sense of sight. I would want to question their existence entirely if they didn’t empty their little bat bowels on nearly every flat surface in my house.

It’s important to understand that all houses in Nicaragua are built such that there is anywhere from a 3 to 10-centimeter gap between the tops of the walls and the roof, and my house is no exception. The roof is made of sheets of corrugated zinc, the roofing material of choice, and there are 3 or 4 mango trees whose branches touch and extend over the top of the house, making quite a racket when the wind blows.

I think the bats enter the house by way of these branches, although I suppose it could just be their advanced powers of flight and echolocation. I like to think there’s something I can do about it though, and thus I have settled upon the explanation of the trees. I have plans to chop down some branches to see if the bats go away.

~

Now I know you’re probably thinking, “Why don’t you ask what everyone else does about bats, surely they have the same problems?”

Well, fictional concerned reader, I have asked multiple Santa Lucians about the bats (they’re called murciélagos in Spanish), and indeed it is a common occurrence to be paid a visit at night. But it seems that the common remedy for ridding a house of the winged rodents is to “put something red in there.”

Now as much as I want to believe that this could work, I’m forced to be a little skeptical since a significant portion of the walls in my house are actually painted red and the bats are very obviously undeterred, but maybe I’m not understanding the intricacies of the treatment.

Another common remedy I’ve heard from multiple sources is to hang a bunch of garlic in the house. I have a sneaking suspicion that this too, is not going to work. As far as I know, these bats are not vampires.

(As a corollary to vampires, I was thinking the other day that the high number of machetes per capita in Nicaragua is going to make for an interesting situation once we’re faced with the zombie apocalypse.)

~

So I really don’t know what to do about the bats, but with my burgeoning language skills I’m learning that having conversations with neighbors and strangers alike is pretty fun and often times quite entertaining.

The other day I was visited by a neighbor, a woman who lives about a block away, who arrived on my doorstep asking for a cooking pot she had left with the last volunteer in Santa Lucia whose house I am living in, and which I still had in my kitchen. I invited her in and got the pot.

Then she handed me a strange sticky bottle. It smelled kind of like cheap fruity chapstick—like LipSmackers or something. The woman told me that she didn’t know what the bottle was, but that the previous volunteer, a female, had given it to her before she’d left. I took the bottle, gave it a tentative sniff, and read the label (in English, which the woman couldn’t read). The label boasted such qualities as “Never Sticky!” and “Tastes Great!” Turns out that the other volunteer had given this woman a bottle of raspberry-flavored lube as a parting gift, and had not explained what it was.

I couldn’t restrain myself and let out a short laugh at the absurdity of it all as the woman went on to explain that she thought it was some kind of skin-care treatment. I struggled to keep my composure and eventually worked up the self-control to tell her what lube is for.

“I’m pretty sure this is for having sex,” I said, handing the bottle back to her.

She didn’t seem all that affected by the news. She nodded her understanding and went on to request that I sell her my gas stove when I leave in two years.

~

It didn’t really hit me until a few hours later how hilarious that encounter was, and I’m realizing now that some of the more mundane everyday experiences I’m having in Nicaragua ought to be shared. That is why I’m going to try and keep up with writing down these experiences as much as possible. And please notice the clever opposing directions diction used in the previous sentence, just one more reason you should continue to read this blog.

Ant Souls

I wrote this piece in early January 2011.

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I’ve finally moved into my little house in Santa Lucia, 2 blocks from the police station, hopefully the place where I’ll live for the next 2 years. It’s definitely an adjustment living alone…accordingly, sometimes I feel pretty lonely. So far though, I am much more content here than I was living with my 6-week host family. But feeling the freedom to do as I please is both a blessing and a curse.

I’m taking on a lot of new responsibilities at once right now. I’m learning how to buy stuff in order to support my basic needs, like soap, sugar, toilet paper, and toothpaste. I’m learning to cook, little by little, one experiment a little more complex than the last—I made mandarin juice today, fresh-squeezed even. I’m learning how to plant a garden, for real this time (as opposed to training): how to find tools, how to prepare the land, how to lay it out according to the kind of space there is, how to build a fence, how to make organic pesticides, and on and on.

        
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Most recently however, I’m learning how to deal with an infestation of ants. I’ve been obsessing over how to get rid of the ants for a couple days now, and I think I might be developing a bit of a complex…I dreamt about swarming ants last night, somehow coupled with the idea of the difficulty of learning Spanish, and it made for a bit of a restless night. It doesn’t help that the house has three or four Salvador Dali prints on the walls left by its previous inhabitant…

The ants show up in the house very punctually at 6 o’clock every night, just after sunset. At first I freaked out and tried to sweep them out immediately, stepping on many of their crunchy bodies in the process. But the little automatons just came scurrying right back in, despite being swept what must have felt like a mile away for them (proportionate to their body size). Yesterday though, I remembered that ants follow pheromone trails and this thought made me change my plan of attack.

I actually find ants to be fascinating creatures when they aren’t invading my home. Their brilliance as a species has an intensely interesting emergent quality to it. In their mindless swarming there exists a mechanism that allows them to do really intelligent things as a collective hive through the trial and error of those thousands of essentially unintelligent drones.

Ants leave pheromone trails behind them when they explore, chemicals secreted from some tiny gland hidden away in their exoskeleton-encrusted bodies, which is used kind of like a trail of bread crumbs to follow back to the nest. But pheromones also act as a trail towards the place being explored, so the more ants that happen to follow the trail, the stronger and more irresistible the pheromone marker becomes, turning the path into an ant superhighway.

Well, my house is not a superhighway, ants. And that is why I bought a can of RAID and you will all soon be dead.

As much as I think it is wrong to kill living beings, I also think that they come in different degrees of souledness. That is, depending on soul size (or the quality of consciousness), there are varying levels of acceptability in killing. I understand that this goes against many notions of egalitarianism and is therefore a kind of incendiary idea, but I’ve thought a lot about it, and it seems to make some sense.

For example, I would never kill a dog or a cat or a pig because they have relatively large souls, i.e. well developed consciousnesses (consciousnesses that more closely mirror our own), but I would kill and I have killed countless ants and mosquitoes without a second thought. Should I still feel some moral turbulence for doing this? Or am I correct in devaluing certain life forms on the supposition that their capacity for consciousness and therefore suffering, is inconsequential. At any rate, the idea of large and small souledness is taken from a book called I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter—check it out.

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So in the case of this particular ant infestation, I had no qualms about spraying insecticide all over the place. The ants as individuals really do not have souls in a meaningful way and I can kill them without feeling guilty. I am glad I did too, because now my house is pretty much ant and cockroach free.

The bats are another story though.