Monsoon/I'm Not Proud/The Things You Don't Hear

Monsoon.

Tonight the rains start in earnest. We get a sprinkling but you can see lightening in the distance - el rayo - and then the thunder starts. The sprinkle ends and it’s heavy, muggy. I am sitting around the courtyard with my roommates when the storm hits.

If you have never lived in the tropics you don’t know what a storm is, really. One minute is heavy, silent, the next moment the sky literally explodes with rain like bullets. It’s so loud we can’t hear each other from five feet away. In minutes the courtyard, the dirt part, fills up like a pond. It’s violent and sudden and all we all find ourselves scrambling to remove things from the line of fire - water is flying everywhere. It’s hard to believe in the midst of all this water that we spent most of the day in a water-out, with no running water at all. That water would ever be an issue here.

The roof leaks in places and to keep the outside lights from shorting out we turn them off. Rita lights candles. We line up the rocking chairs against the wall, away from the rain and sit in companionable silence watching the drops explode everywhere, listening to the thunder - el trueno - in the candlelight. Last weeks rain was just a warm up. This deluge, this meteorological bedlam, this is the real deal.

In some ways I’m glad my main music source is gone. It’s too tempting, on monsoon nights, to put on something sad and nostalgic and fall headlong into your own brain. The thing about living primarily with men is they don’t let me do that - A. will let me talk things through, J. will make appropriate ‘what a tool’ comments but for the most part I live with boys, in boy language. And Rita, who is new, is a creature of light and joy - she’s irrepressible, always smiling, always laughing, always making me laugh with her. Her thick Portuguese accent makes everything she says sounds musical. I’m not allowed to give into my melancholy. Instead the storm seems like a celebration, a quiet party and the candles flicker and water spreads over everything and we smoke cigarettes and watch and listen to it all while our clothes get damp.

Ask me again why I live here. Even after almost a week of house arrest. Ask me.

I’m Not Proud.

We somehow wound up with a kitten, a leggy orange thing.

I’d like to say I’m the animal person, I love this kitten, it’s adorable, I’m so glad it’s here.

In truth I find it a charmless little creature. It rubs against your ankles like a regular housecat but if you try to touch it it either runs or tries to bite you. Plus when I was here last time we had a few kittens - clinic refugees - staying here and it didn’t go well. And those were nice kittens. They made the courtyard - our living room - smell like a litter box, knocked over the garbage, peed on people’s beds. Lilly found them proper homes. This house just isn’t set up for cats. Plus we’re all essentially transients so this no place for a cat to be taking up permanent residence.

And as far as kittens go it really is charmless. It follows you around squeaking and mewling for food and then is picky with what it eats. It will only eat meat, actual meat. And it kills absolutely everything. We’ve watched it devour all sorts of bugs and geckos. The bugs I can live with. The geckos - with their adorable chirping and predilection for eating mosquitoes - I cannot.

There’s a lot of theories as to how the kitten wound up here. My roommate swears it came down off the roof. I originally thought some kids chucked it through our security gates. Now I think one of my roommates, maybe even a short termer, brought it in. It’s big enough now that it could leave if it wanted - it could easily make it up to the roof, but it chooses to stay. Everyone claims not to be feeding it but we’ve all chucked it a scrap of meat, some milk. It doesn’t tame down at all - it refuses to be touched - but it stays.

I decide it should be fixed and Nick comes over with a towel and a cage. We chase it around the courtyard for twenty minutes like idiots, my first serious exertion since getting sick. Finally we decide it will have to be trapped. I’m not up for that yet, particularly as the roof cats are still getting down and the last roof cat I got was a female. I’m still interested in fixing them, I’m just not at full speed yet and up for dealing with the massive cat trap.

Here comes the part I’m not proud of.

I’ve been under house arrest for a long time with being sick. Today I find the biggest bug I have ever found in my room - some sort of terrifying giant beetle. I call my roommate J. in to ask for an assassination.

Okay, I should be not proud of just that for several reasons. Needing a man to deal with a bug in my room. Immediately asking for an assassination instead of a catch and release. But it gets worse.

J. comes in and confirms that it is indeed a huge, terrifying bug. The thing is literally the size of the palm of my hand. He goes for the broom and dustpan to try a catch and release because he is much more decent about these things than I am.

As we walk out of my room to hunt for the missing dustpan we see the kitten.

I told you I’m not proud of this. But you can see the thought hit our heads at the same time. The kitten loves to kill and eat things. Should we? Yes. Yes we should. I have been housebound for a long time.

J. gets the bug into an empty cigarette carton. It is furious, banging around. The kitten is messing around in the mango trees in the courtyard. It stubbornly refuses to come over. J. starts knocking a bowl with a fork, making food noises, trying to entice the kitten over. It ignores us. Meanwhile the bug is getting angrier.

I should note that my roommate is an amazingly good guy who works with a non-profit that does microfinance. He spends his days in the barrios in Managua. He will cop to not being an animal person. I am the animal person here.

I’m the one who comes up with the bowl idea. We set the bowl on the ground. The cat looks up, interested. J. opens the carton and shoves the bug into the bowl.

People I have been housebound a long time. I know this is not nice. The bug does not deserve this.

Even the kitten seems shocked by the size of the bug. It stares at it for a minute. The bug climbs out of the bowl. The kitten bats it for a second. The bug dashes across the floor. The cat gives half hearted chase, chases it behind the propane tank. J. and I follow it there, watching. The kitten waits for a second then goes back to what it was doing in the mango trees.

Both J. and I are deeply, embarrassingly disappointed.

Transit.

When I say no one cares about Nicaragua, I mean it. The whole country could literally spontaneously combust and international press wouldn’t cover it. The only reason the Eric Volz issue got any press is because his parents immediately hired a press agent when he got arrested to paint the country in the worst possible light.

Which is why no one knows we’ve been under a transit strike that’s completely paralyzed the country for two weeks. The taxis and busses, the backbone of a country where no one owns a car, have been on strike. All the lorries have been parked as well, except for a few government subsidized ones. The main road through Nicaragua is dotted with roundabouts and everyone has had a barricade on it, lined with lorries and busses and cops to make sure no one gets hurt. Prior to being sick I skated through it for the most part, even though I was traveling. Using private drivers in unmarked cars. Gringo owned turista busses. But the country has been paralyzed.
Food isn’t making it to the mercados, the highways are full of pickup trucks with beds literally bulging with people, people like my roommate having to hitch rides to work in the back of those trucks. Prices have gone up on everything. Trying to get anywhere, because of the barricades, has slowed everything to a crawl. People haven’t been able to get to work. The roads, usually so loud with their million cabs with honking horns, have been eerily quiet.

One of my neighbors who goes to University in Managua has been out of school for two weeks. With the strike they just closed the colleges.

In a country where we all own our own cars it’s unimaginable for Americans to realize how this has devastated the country. Everyone here is union. For the most part their demands are righteous. But people here are also incredibly poor and their willingness to do this, to strike with no aid from the union to feed their families, speaks of the incredible strength and stubbornness of the Nicaraguan people.

Some gringos said this was going to get ugly, get violent but it never did. I didn’t think it would. I think Nicas, as a people, have seen enough violence in their country.

I love my country, don’t get my wrong, but the strike made think twice of how willing we are as a country to sacrifice for what we believe is fair, is just, what we deserve from our government. Ortega promised lower fuel prices for transit drivers - gas here is $4.50 a gallon - and didn’t deliver. We’re used to our politicians making promises and breaking them. Here, after a year and a half of Ortega, the drivers were not having it at all. It makes sense when you think of the fact it costs me 9 c. - about .50 - to take a bus to Masaya or ten c. - about .55 - to take a cab anywhere in town and the driver has to pay for the gas, the maintenance, everything.

The nice bus to La UCA, the University in Managua - costs me 20 c. - a little over a dollar for plush seats, curtains, and it only seats about 40. To make that work for you financially you literally have to drive that bus back and forth 20 times in a day to make a little money.

Supposedly it ended this morning. Things will be shaky for a few days as they get back to normal but still. It has nothing to do with animals, nothing to do with anything, really, but a whole country, a country four hours plane ride from most places in the US - was paralyzed and I’m sure none of you had any idea.

No one cares about Nicaragua.

Side note: did you read this whole thing to see if I mentioned you in it? I have a sneaking suspicion you did. I really do. See if that whole situation wound up in here. You should know better.