Not Brave, Just Sick

I just happened to get really really sick in a place other than America.  I have been holed up in bed almost since my last entry with a horrible kidney infection.  I won't get into all the details but I had a few straight days of fever even the bed and clothing made my pain worse.  Today is the first day I'm really able to walk around again.  There is good news and bad news.  I'm told that if I were home days like this would have been passed in a hospital with I.V. antibiotics and whatnot costing a girl with no American health insurance thousands, instead the grand total in here: $60.  So that's the good news.  It was also possible when I was in the worst state of my agony to have a doctor come to my room in a matter of minutes.  She thought I had Dengue fever, which would have sounded a lot cooler, but no it is just something I could have ended up with in any old place.  I receive now daily injections of an antibiotic in my rear and try not to look around the dirty room they give it to me in.  I clench my hands while there, touch nothing, and then take off my clothes and scrub down as soon as I return.  In lieu of actual I.V. I drink a concoction called "Suero" I don't know what it is but it's flavored like coconut Tropical brand sun tan lotion and makes me wretch so now I put it in twice the amount of water that's recommended.  The doctor said no more tylenol, and lo and behold the miracle drug "product of Guatemala" cured my previously immovable fever.  That's when the rest of my pain subsided and I could finally say ah yes, those are my aching kidneys, they are right indeed.  My appetite has just returned although I've forced myself to eat, and it also helps I found a place here that makes a fresh croissant, anything other than rice and beans.

  I got a chance to talk with my family on skype today and it turns out my little brother Joey, 9, was worried about me.  Chris said to him, she was brave wasn't she?  To which he replied "Brave, no she's got to accept the consequences of going to this country".

  On an up note a little dream came true with the purchase of my very first surf board.  I met a really cool young American couple who opened a bakery in this town.  Eric and Stephanie tinted the windows of their Jeep Cherokee black, got a new suspension and then drove it down from Chicago.  They helped get me in touch with a trustworthy guy who led a surfing outing and sold me my board.  We went out about with 11 guys and myself, all from around the world on a little handmade pontoon like boat to a deserted beach unreachable by truck.  I'd like to point out that not even the 4 pasty white German guys got so much as tinted pink, me, I now look like a lizard with a horrible peeling sun burnt face.  They threw my board over first and I jumped off into the water and caught a wave on my belly into the shore, the first one to reached the untouched beach.

I know there are all sorts of gaps so far, where do I live? what's it actually like here?  Uh hem, Katherine, what do you do? and I will fill them in next time I promise.  My energy is lagging and need to leave enough to charge through 90 degrees and make it back to my bed.

My Second Monday in Nicaragua

Hello friends and family (I'm not famous yet, you're the only ones reading) first and foremost thanks for checking out my first blog.  I just had a bit of the where do I possibly begin?  So on that note I'm going to back up a few days with something I wrote on Monday jumping straight in and then I swear I'll keep it short and tidy in the present.  Included a couple of photos of the beach two minutes from where I now call home.

It's my second Monday in Nicaragua.  Yesterday was such a wash.  Scrawled pages of my journal show that my night was also hard.  I was lying so hot splayed on the dirty cement floor, overly caffeinated I believe in hindsight, and needing to be scraped up off of it.  Eventually I did make my way back to the bed after agonizing wakefulness most of the night.  I had jerked awake thinking I'd missed my alarm, but it was only the voice of a mysterious man coming into the house.  I fell asleep for one small blip spent in a place other than Nicaragua.  I thought will I ever be cold again?  Then remembered there was a recent time when I thought I'd never be warm again and suddenly I was soothed by Annie's warmth amidst all that dreary cold in Alaska.  20 minutes later my cell phone alarm went off and I was so quick on the draw I don't think it even got out a ring before I'd tapped that sucker at 5:15 on the dot.  I ate a most interesting breakfast precisely at 5:30 with Dona Martha gazing over me and my stack of banana stuffed pancakes.  She poured my boiling hot nescafe from cup to cup in order to make it a perfect temperature.  I felt like the wolf (were they wolves?) in the childrens story who finds not too hot and not too cold, but just right.  The breakfast was so awkward I held back a smirk and laugh by focusing on slow distinct movements with her eyes on my every chew.  Then 6 AM off to the taxi where I was met by la profesora.  We went to pick up Freddy for our first UNICEF focus group discussing la violencia and abusadoos sexuales in children and women.  Freddy turned out to be just the sort of partner I needed, 44, really nice and kind, one of sixteen siblings and well spoken.  I later learned on another day that he's the only psychologist in the region.

We drove for one and a half hours where we stopped at an outdoor part of the school to meet our groups.  Initially I couldn't have felt more out of place or intimidated at the sight of these teachers and directors.  I didn't even think about dressing up, and felt like such a pink shorts wide eyed foreigner because that's exactly what i was, but not for long.  That's the good news about me.  I shrugged it off and before I knew it my interest in what they were saying trumped any nerves still left.  The flow of thoughts that followed followed went something like wow I'm really doing this, to this is just so interesting, I think I found my calling, to I can hook these people up to all my non profit connections back in the states, to I really am a well informed and qualified for this task, to images of receiving an honorary grad school degree whereby skipping another actual high priced round of school.  The great flow ended in something that strikes me often, I'm so hot I want to die, how about some water, a drink please.  I gazed for in truth an hour at the glistening parasite filled drinking fountain thinking oh lord please I want what my eyes see not another round of fresh squeezed papaya juice, but that's all I got.  It sounds wonderful but it is not.  It has large chunks but not like farm stand orange juice chunky it's more like Japanese soda chunky.  Papaya juice, like other juices is in the countryside is consistently served in a budget plastic baggy and tied around a straw with a rubber band, where I seem to be the only one who gets a hole in mine and then has pink sticky juice all over me.  I set it down because what fun would there be in remembering that fluid filled baggie will never stand upright, no matter how many times I try, and there is a pink pool forming and someone's notices.  Usually it's the stray dogs first.

Our first discussion group lasted nearly 3 hours long, and mostly I just read prepared questions but my greatest triumph was kneeling down and reintroducing myself and saying economia and gringos si, pero trabaje en Boston Childrens Hospital y la violencia and tratas son problemas universales.  In between the first group and the second group I sat with Freddie under the shaded raises cement platform and watched the children running around and stealing looks at me the blonde.  A mid sized dirty piglet wandered up.  I considered taking out my camera but settled on not because I was so exhausted and dirty and didn't quite feel like I had the energy to up the guard of yes I am just whipping out this grand camera right now.  I walked to the bathroom, a covered hole in the ground, and when I did a little boy spontaneously ran by and held out his hand and I held back for just a second before he ran off chasing his friends.  After I was sitting in the front of the platform with Freddy and a rice and beans sprawled out around us when before I knew it at once the children were lining up in front of us in their white tops and blue bottomed uniforms.  It was their afternoon role call and sing along.  They put their hands over their midsection straight and parallel to the ground, which know if the Nicaraguans beat us in the next Olympic Hockey match that is their salute to the national anthem to which they started singing.  I cried when their little voices hit me and I realized all 100 of them had their eyes on me so that I felt like I was being serenaded by angels.  Freddy said it was the first time many of them had seen a green eyed person in real life.

I really didn't have another 3 hour repeat of the first great discussion in me, but Freddy and I were joined by la professora, an old large woman with spectacles low on her nose, and nice, but not warm to me at first.  We sat this time in a small classroom.  This group consisted of women and one guy all about my age, and it turned into just what Freddy and la Profa had been after the whole time of focus group leading which were, in addition to big ideas, the hard names and addresses of guilty persons.  A woman told about a man leading a prostitution ring and suddenly the Profa was like yep, uh huh, and where does he live?  Then repeat that a few times for every bad guy mentioned.  After this second group discussion I talked for a long while with the ones my age while things wrapped up inside.  One girl asked me how old I was and was I married?  It's a question I field from Nicaraguans often and not from the men.  We both mused about how different cultures can be in modern times where she may be like me except married for 6 years with 3 children.  Feeling good on my Spanish I kept on talking and put in a plug for sane Americans and told them how we call all these gringos, old American men marrying really young local girls as dirty old men.  They thought that was great, and then made them my good friends when I added they're basically losers in their own country who can afford land and can find a woman to revere them only in Nicaragua.

I'm back now.  I returned to see the big family outside on the stoop, oblivious to a nice rain, and I told Dona Martha excitedly about my day in a few sentences and she smiled back but they were all in the middle of some gossip.  She told me to go take a shower and then she'd have dinner ready.  When I did I saw that my room was completely cleaned and made up.  Even where I'd thought oh I'll have to buy a dish for my soap and a holder for my toothbrush on the tiny of edge of the little sink, they'd already beat me to it.  When I came back to the living room Martha was scrambling to put the little table in front of me and serve me some fruit juice and spaghetti with rice and beans.  A life long skeptic of tomatoes, when I examined them more closely I realized they too were actually chunks of disguised papaya.  I laughed to myself at all this fuss feeling like if I learn one thing it's what it might feel like to be a scary alcoholic dad in a family, everyone just wants to please.  I can hear now for the first time this rainy season a hard down pour, and that's so nice to hear even though I'm a hallway away because I can only imagine how fresh it looks in the street tonight.  I'm really at a crossroads with what to do with all this writing.  Listen to me, crossroads.  I mean I should get more specific - there is a new societal blogging pressure and if that's something I chose then well I'm missing chances now.  I just realized in the most literal sense of the expression I'm not even looking forward to tomorrow.  This is a first.