Nicaragua Redux: The Sarna Dog Chronicles

Watch This Space

2009-09-25T21:40:00.001-07:00

The laptop is toast. It's cobbled together enough that I am trying to rescue some of the Corn Island entries and photos I have on it and post them. This weekend I'm trying my damndest to endure the constant freezing-up and powering itself off at inopportune times to get the entries up. I am also spending a shit ton of money on coffeehouse Diet Cokes as I had this brilliant idea that I would have my wireless turned off so I wouldn't spend so much time in my abysmal dungeon of an apartment. But expect me to vomit up at least one semi-pertinent entry by Sunday night. Or else everyone can hunt me down and kill me, preferably by beating me to death with this shitbox of a laptop.

In the meantime, though, I offer a really unflattering self portrait of me exhausted in the La Colonia parking lot in Granada on this last trip. Observe Donna yelling at someone in the background.

And this gem:

The corpse of an enormous tarantula in the same La Colonia parking lot which is why I'm sitting on my ass in the car taking useless pictures while Donna loads the bags into the truck. That fucker is huge. When I pointed it out to Donna she waved it off and said cheerfully, oh, they just fall off the bananas sometimes.

Thus insuring I would not eat bananas or shop in that La Colonia while in Granada. Pali might be a dingy shithole but it doesn't have fruit infested with hairy monstrous spiders.

This is the sort of thing I take photos of.

A Granada Interlude: The Run Up To Bondo Planes and Boats From Hell

2009-06-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

**I mentioned before that there were going to be some entries out of order -stuff I started writing before I left for the islands that didn't make it up before the laptop bit it. Slowly but surely I'm dissecting the corpse of said laptop and picking out those pieces so there will be some backing-and-forthing, chronology wise**

Salon Letty is always busy. It’s on the corner of Martirio, one block over from one of the Cathedrals and it’s very Nicaraguan in that everything you get done there takes forever. A manicure and pedicure can easily take an hour and a half, not including the wait. A trim takes thirty or forty minutes. Letty has three or four women working for her at any given time but if you go in on a Saturday you’re going to wait. A long time.

That said, she has the best eyebrow waxers in the world. In the US I pay $12 for a mediocre waxer. At Letty’s I pay $2.50. And I love Letty’s – I love Letty herself, a woman with a shock of blonde Shakira curls and an hourglass figure who wears the tightest jeans in the universe and four inch heels and always talks with her hands, gesturing with a brush or a blow dryer to make a point about someone’s husband or what the neighbor did. Salon Letty is what American beauty parlors probably were like in the ‘50’s: stuffed with women, everyone talking with their hands and bitching about their husbands. It’s crowded and a little dark and the shelves are full of odd, dusty items and old mannequin heads but it’s perfect.

When I wake up on my first morning in Nicaragua I run some errands, walk around and then go to Salon Letty. I let my eyebrows get fuzzy just so they should re-shape them. As always it’s packed. Tonight is the Hipica, I’ll find out later, so there are more people in there than usual. When I walk in Letty recognizes me which makes me absurdly happy.

During the two hour wait I people watch. There’s a woman everyone is fussing over. She has three people working on her – one on her nails, one on her hair and one brushing eyeshadow on her and filling her brows with pencil. She’s obviously Nicaraguan but she speaks flawless, unaccented English with her teenage daughter and effortless Spanish with the women working on her. Both she and her daughter have the fair skinned, delicate Spanish features of the upper class and they’re both beautiful. It's the Nicaraguan version of the Beckhams. She holds court while they fuss over her, talking to her daughter, to Letty, to the other women in the shop. They've made her a little throne - moved a comfortable chair to the middle of the room. Though she looks haughty with her chiseled features and the ease with which she receives their ministrations, her ability to read a magazine while they brush gloss on her narrow lips, she’s not. She chats and gossips like everyone else. I’m fascinated by her and enormously curious as to who she might be to receive this treatment.

When they finish with her she is flawless, her bob cut swinging sleek and thick to her chin, her make up understated and perfect. There’s no evidence of the Central American penchant for kohl rimmed eyes and bright pink lips. She looks like she just walked off Fifth Avenue.

As she walks out she stops, examines my leg. San Judas, she says. Bella. Beautiful. Over the next two days I notice that somehow St Jude has changed my image. Whereas before I would just get stares and maybe some comments from men and the occasional undercurrent of hostility and suspicion from women – tattooed women in Nica are either prostitutes or gangsters. But good old San Judas Tadeo has made me approachable. Women come up and ask about it. Buen suerte – good luck. Old women come up to me in the market and pat my hands. Even the salon women, her retinue of drivers waiting outside stops, to put her hand on mine and beam. Bella. Muy bien.

St. Jude is the patron of lost causes, si. Do with that what you will.

Saturday morning I get up early. I don’t realize it’s early – my cell phone can’t get in touch with the universal clock so when I look it’s says 12. I think I slept until noon. It’s only when I power up my laptop at Euro café that I realize it’s 8 AM. And I had just eaten Asian noodle salad for breakfast. Go me.

It feels odd and good to be back, almost like I never left. At Euro Cafe the owner recognizes me and we chat for a bit. Walking down to the market the hisses and whistles start. If you’re easily offended don’t go to Central America. It’s just white noise, I don’t even really hear it. Halfway back to the house I register something going on behind me a “hey..” but I don’t even turn around until someone grabs my arm. I turn around to raise holy hell and it’s Oscar, my old neighbor. I didn’t know if it was you, he tells me, then I saw your arm. We hug, catch up on the neighbors. Everyone who’s lived in the house since “our” group has been lame. The secret bakery is still there. No one hears from Alan. I promise to stop by when we get back from Corn Islands. He thinks my Spanish is better. It’s not, I just can’t ask Jon or Linda to translate for me. In the square I run into Julio, who lives with Thalia and we chat for a bit.

Sunday Donna saves me from Hospedaje Ruiz, which is nice but loud and the cobweb population is starting to freak me out. Either there’s spiders in there somewhere – lots of them, from the amount of webs, or the whole place has been sprayed with industrial strength bug poison. I move into her upstairs. *

The New, Improved Casa Lupita/Bring On The Falling Horses

This is the Corn Islands line up: Dr Tom, who I’ve worked with since my first stint at Casa Lupita and who is the ‘home’ vet – he has a house in Granada and comes often, I think he helped found the clinic. Dr Terry, who has a house in San Juan Del Sur. I’ve worked with her before, there are pictures of her on older entries. Dr Dave, who looks familiar and is from Rural Area Vet Service in the US. Dr's Kathy and Andrea from World Vets. The other Dr. Cathy. Meg, a vet student from Georgia. Claudio, who runs the clinic in Granada and lives above it. He doesn’t do surgeries but he and Heidi see animals every Thursday there. Andrea, who volunteers with another program, a school I think, and got pressed into service when Heidi found out she couldn’t go. Norman, the other Dr. Kathy’s eighteen year old nephew who seems determined to kill poor Claudio by dragging him out to the bars every night. Me.

Sunday the vet group returns from a clinic in San Juan Del Sur and we meet to pack for Corn Islands. I am blown away by the clinic. Despite having been in regular contact with Donna she’s neglected to tell me that they’ve moved the school that was there to the old Café Chavalos building and the clinic has expanded to fill the whole space. What was the school room is now an exam room. The old clinic is now just for surgeries. And it’s beautiful, shockingly amazingly awesomely fantastic. The wall of kennels, formerly just cement, are lined with ceramic tiles, not only better looking but able to be sterilized. The back porch where the kids gathered for outdoor classes is lined with kennels. It looks like an actual, genuine animal hospital. I could cry. Claudio is living upstairs and he keeps the yard spotless.

To everyone who has sent donations from this blog: they were used and used well. We are so far from my first days in the clinic, with the one table and a few supplies and me trying not to barf in the garbage can under the table.

We pack and chat a bit. I fold and tape drapes in the old surgery room with the techs. In the next room the vets and Claudio put duffel bags on scales and pack them as full as they can. The Costena planes to the island are small: everything will be weighed as it goes on. Things are put in bags, pulled out, rearranged. Everyone buzzes, working well together. The San Juan trip was a good dry run, the group stayed in a house together, worked the kinks out of the system. I was sorry I couldn't arrive in time for it. Tom has built portable surgery tables, ingenious creations of PVC pipe and canvas. They are set up, cleaned, knocked down and bagged.

So very far away from the first days.

After we pack for a while we decide to take a break, walk out to Calzada and watch the hipica. Hipicas are a huge deal in Nicaragua and Granada has one of the biggest. The horses haven't started marching yet and already the streets are jammed with everyone. Granada and Managua folk in their finery, like the woman from Salon Letty and a million trendy young adults sweltering in polo shirts in the heat. The campesinos in to see the show, wearing denim, slighter statured and darkened from the sun. Everyone is wearing cowboy hats, shiny glitzy ones on the city people, leather ones with sweat stains on the people who actually wear them to work. Vendors are walking up and down the street selling them, straw ones.

The horses start down the street. To give the hipica it's full due I'll give it's own photo entry but it seems every horse in Nicaragua has been brought to Granada to skitter over the uneven cobblestones of the Calzada. The rich folk have enormous, well fed horses, strong and handsome with impeccably groomed tails and manes. They wear fancy costumes and stop in front of the crowds, make the horses dance, trotting back and forth. They're the crowd pleasers. Families march in groups astride their horses, matching hats and outfits. The campesinos march too - their horses are like them - almost pony sized, stringy with muscle and tough. These horses don't dance. They look intelligent and competent and next to them the beautiful prancing show horses look silly, excessive, like overweight women in tight dresses with garish makeup.

Somehow between here and there I decide I want to buy a cowboy hat. I don't, I just want to wander. I push through the crowds up Calzada, past the judging stand, bleachers full of VIPS. Past the dance stage blaring reggaeton that the horses all have to pass by, into the square. I stand on the stairs of the church with fifteen million of my closest friends and try to ignore the drunk men taking pictures of my legs. The road in the square is slicker and the horses skitter on the pavement, barely keeping their balance. Hundreds of horses, possibly thousands. As I watch a big, beautiful black horse, goaded to dance by it's rider, slides, slips, goes down, knocking into another horse which goes into the crowd. I'm pushed back into the church. The guy standing next to me snaps another picture. I turn the flash on and take one of him. Fuck off. Instead he finds this amazing. He and his buddies start posing, giving me the thumbs up, wrapping their arms around each others shoulders and smiling. They are drunk and silly and they make me laugh despite myself. With the parade stopped while they try to sort out fallen horses and injured pedestrians, I dart out into the street and make my way back down to the end of Calzada, back to the clinic and the group. The plane leaves early the next morning and we still have work to do.

* There is a two page entry about Hospedaje Ruiz that is trapped in the wreckage of my computer and probably likely to get me charged with libel anyways. Highlights: In which Donna comes to get 'the tattooed girl' and the owner, who had always been so nice to me, looked incredibly relieved that the neighbors will no longer think she is running a gang den/whorehouse: screw you, bitch**. A detailed inventory of the eerily empty spider webs in my room. A foaming-at-the-mouth-with-glee description of Donna's shower/water pressure that could only have been written after enduring two pseudo-showers in the impotent trickle of Ruiz's sad excuse for a shower.

Honestly, we're probably all better off for the loss of that one.

** The footnote within a footnote: I am not actually a whore or a gangster. See earlier in the entry re: the Nicaraguan assumption that all tattooed women are either whores or gangsters.

***Photo notes: Salon Letty as seen from across the street. St Jude as seen from an incredibly awkward angle (that photo made possible by yoga- I'm bendy!). Oscar & Xiomara dancing at the club - photo by our long lost Alan. If anyone sees a preternaturally calm, 40-something, chain smoking Briton please notify me or Jon Tonti. Flier from wall of renovated clinic. Piles of clean crates and built in tiled kennels in renovated kennels. On the carraterra, horses in town for the Hipica get ready to make the march to the square and down Calzada. ***

A Little Bit Of Foreshadowing/Welcome To Little Corn

2009-06-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

The first thing you notice about Little Corn Island - once the death fear from the panga has worn off - is how quiet it is. There are no cars or roads on the island. We hear rumors of six horses but don't see any of them. There's a cement boardwalk that goes up and down one side of the island, bordering the houses, a few restaurants, two dive shops, some hotels and bars but that's it. That constitutes the LCI business district.

When we get off the panga Scott Smyth and Compana, an island elder, are there to meet us. Why should you remember Scott?

1) He started the whole Little Corn Island project last year - he was the impetus for this whole thing and put it all together.

2) He flew Minnow, the bald dog who liked to eat my flip flops, from LCI to Managua, got a car and brought her to the clinic in Granada last year to recover from her demodectic mange when the islanders were going to kill her.

3) He put this whole thing together again this year.

4) He and his girlfriend Kristine are Mr. & Mrs. Portia - they are they people that adopted everyone's favorite fat, one eyed monster and flew her to the states, where she lives a life of luxury, dog parks and Halloween pirate costumes in Fort Collins Colorado.

In short the man is a damn saint.

And I still get emails asking for a Portia update so I promise promise promise that we will do a reunion up in Fort Collins. Not only because I miss her fat ass but also because everyone should witness the most dramatic change in fortune ever to occur for a Nicaraguan street dog. And I saw a picture of her in the pirate costume and it's pretty damn cute.

The gear is unloaded - damp but unscathed - from the panga and we are all hauled up onto the dock - damp and deeply traumatized - from the panga. We got to a restaurant across the boardwalk and reconvene. People from Casa Iguana, the hotel on the other side of the island that has donated all our housing, is sending someone over with wheelbarrows to bring our personal luggage there. The dive shop nearest the dock is taking the clinic supplies to store since it's closer to the school and will make it easier for us to move and set up the next morning.

The Atlantic coast of Nicaragua is much, much different than the Pacific coast. Most of the islanders are more Creole than Latin and the dominant language is a lilting, Jamaican-esque English though everyone seems to be bilingual. Somethings, however, are universally Nicaraguan: it takes over an hour and a half for us to get our food - some sandwiches, a few tacos. While we wait Compana and Scott fill us in on the run-up that's been going on out here prior to our arrival.

At the school there's been an essay contest about why our coming and what we do is important and the eight winners will read their essays to the vets. Compana and other islanders have been working the barrios on the interior of the tiny island with a bullhorn, announcing when we will be here and where to bring the animals. Three different thank-you dinners have been planned for us. The island is plastered with flyers in English and Spanish announcing the clinic. Local volunteers have stepped forward to help us. The school has donated two of it's four classrooms - the two that actually have tiled floors - for us.

Most shocking is the power: the entire island is run off of one generator that runs from 4.30 in the afternoon to 4.30 at night. While a few businesses and individuals have private generators, this is the power source for the residents. To accommodate our clinic hours, they'll run the generators from 8.30-3.30 every day so we can have power for our lights and equipment. This will be at enormous expense and inconvenience to the island. The magnitude of this gesture really can't be understood by all of us who live in places where power is a granted, given thing.

In all the time I've spent doing this in Nicaragua I have never, ever seen such support for the clinic. Where I not a cynical, screwed up individual who is still recovering from nearly crapping myself on the panga I would probably cry.

While we're eating on the patio two dogs are playing in the yard. One of them is dragging a chain but they're the fattest, happiest third world dogs I've seen in my life. The people who own the restaurant and attached pulperia don't shoo them away or throw rocks at them. We did those two last year, Scott tells me, they belong to the restaurant owners. The littler one comes up to the table and sprawls on her back. These are not the cringing, sad creatures of Granada.

After lunch we walk the dirt path across the island to our digs, through the woods and to the other side of the island and down the beach. Scott gives us the tour. It starts to rain in big drops. We stop at the site of the eco lodge he's building. A little further down we stop at Carlito's, a hotel that's donated a room for two of our people. As we're walking by Scott whistles and a chunky, healthy little blond dogs comes zooming out from behind one of the casitas.

It's Minnow, the infamous blue dog of the Corn Islands who spent two months with us in Granada last year recovering from demodectic mange. I haven't seen her in over a year. She frolics around us for a second, nipping our heels and running on the beach and then goes dodging back to her hotel - she belongs to Carlos, who owns the place. I doubt she recognized me - if she did I doubt she would have been as happy to see me seeing as I shoved so many needles in her ass, but it's good to see her.

It's decided that Norman and Claudio will take the room at Carlitos. The rest of us are lodged up the beach a bit at Casa Iguana, who has donated six casitas for the rest of us. Andrea, the tech from Arizona, and I are roomed up together in a little cabana with a futon and a bed and a little balcony that overlooks the Caribbean, complete with hammocks. Holy crap. There's a gourmet restaurant, a bar, and a beautiful beach on the premises all linked by a serious of raked sand paths bordered by palms, pineapple bushes and flowers. Welcome to paradise.

That night we have all a welcome dinner at the Casa Iguana restaurant. Aside from having been up since 3 AM, this whole gig thus far seems like a cake-walk: everyone wants us here. The generosity and support is overwhelming. The island dogs we've seen thus far, from the restaurant dogs to Minnow, are chunky and happy, not skitzy or sickly in the least.

I unpack my scrubs, lay them out next to the bed.

A cakewalk.

Photos & notes: 1st - one of the numerous flyers up on the island announcing our arrival. 2nd - island dog lounges in front of one of the restaurants on the boardwalk. 3rd: halfway up the beach when we were getting our tour, local fisherman asked us to help them get their boat out. The fishermen, Scot, Dr. Tom and Norm roll the boat down the beach using logs. Last photo: Minnow, no longer blue or requiring needles in her ass, gets chin scratches from Scot.

Where the hell are the rest of the entries? I don't know if it has to do with the fact my 'puter got wet or what but I am having serious technical difficulties with the frickin' thing overheating. As my pictures and whatnot are stored on it, I'm working on these but it's taking forever to try and get stuff off of the piece of crap before it overheats. I'm sorry.

Bondo Planes, Bottlecap Boats: Getting There/ An Ode to Norm

2009-06-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

“Dude, that’s bondo. That’s totally bondo.”

Norman, Dr. Kathy’s 19 year old nephew, and I are standing inside the boarding area for Costanena contemplating the plane that will be taking us to Big Corn Island. It is boxy and smallish, patched and riveted together with different sorts of metals and sporting what looks suspiciously like a large patch of Bondo holding the tail on. To say it looks old would be an understatement. It looks like something Snoopy’s World War Flying Ace would be flying. I really wish I had a leather cap and goggles.

Or that I was sitting on a goddamn dog house with a talking bird pretending to be about to fly this thing and not actually about to get on it.

In describing the plane to Andrea, the other vet tech, Claudio said something to the effect of “they are old planes, old Russian planes, like sixty years old, that Russia didn’t want any more so they gave them to Nicaragua. Because Nicaragua takes everything”.

My trepidation is over-ridden by the fact that I am so glad – so fucking glad – to have made it to the boarding area. Last year I made it to the airport; I even made it onto the scale and had a boarding pass in my hand. However before I could board a huelga – a strike – on Big Corn Island shut down the airport there as the fisherman started burning tires on the runway. Instead of going on this trip last year I spent three days sitting in the Managua airport, babysitting seventy five pounds of medical supplies the team was waiting for and watching flight after flight get cancelled.

This year was another near miss as Costena very nearly blocked us from our flight – all nine of us – for nonsensical Nicaraguan bureaucratic bullshit. How I understand it is thus: Donna had bought our Managua/Corn Island flights online and we had online tickets, printouts from the website.

No bueno.

Costena flies to a bunch of different places in Nicaragua, all of whom are selling tickets, none of whom seem to have any connection whatsoever to the other offices. The website is connected to no other entity. Thus the only way to really get on a plane, completely regardless of what the website says, is to go buy a ticket – a handwritten one – at the airport.

No handwritten tickets, no board. In theory we could walk our printouts over to the Costena office, two doors down, and exchange them for handwritten tickets but the office opened at 7. Our flight left at 6 AM. And the ticket counter people were just not having it. After endless discussions it was decided that seven of our nine people would be allowed to board, thank God for Tom’s endless patience and Claudio’s ability to deal with this crap. The two left behind would be sent on the later flight with Donna and Lilly and all our supplies that had randomly been denied due to weight. The first two draft picks for staying behind were me and Dave, the large animal vet from the States. I volunteered to be a good sport. And I have a relationship with the Costena airport.

At the last minute though, weight and the possibility of future bureaucratic fuckups saved my ass: Claudio, the Nicaraguan tech with his native Spanish and uncanny ability to unravel these situations, would be staying with Dave. At the last minute I am handed a boarding pass and pushed through security.

As the Bondo-plane lurches, gathers steam and speeds up Tom turns around and tells me 'hey Finn, you might actually make it this time'. Don’t curse me, I tell him. I’ll believe it when we get there.

The plane flies low over the country, low enough that we never really lose sight of houses and cars beneath us. We fly east, over the interior of the country. After a bit you see no roads, no real towns, just the tiny dots of cattle in fields and the faint lines of dirt roads. A lot of Nicaragua, interior Nicaragua, is agricultural and untamed bush. The fields are laid out in meticulous grids, like crop circles with their precise irrigation lines cutting through. I take picture after picture. Oh, Dr. Suess said, the places you’ll go.

The plane touches down first in Bluefields, on the Atlantic coast, for a moment. From above it looks like a picturesque fishing village, a postcard. From what I’ve read it’s a frontier town, buried under crushing poverty, inhabited mostly by English speaking Creole and Miskito and forgotten by the government and aid agencies.

After ten minutes we take off again and head out over the ocean. Twenty minutes later we drop into Big Corn. The perfunctory swine flu screening in the offloading area and five minutes later we are piling the gear we managed to get on the plane out the door, looking for a cab, two cabs, and headed for the ferry dock.

I will not sugarcoat: what I see of Big Corn looks like a shithole. I know there are pretty parts of the island – I’ve seen pictures. But what I see in the four kilometer drive between the airport and the ferry dock can only be described as a godforsaken pisshole. Ramshackle buildings and barely paved roads and litter everywhere. Scabby stray dogs look at us balefully as we drive by, as if wondering why we’re passing them by. Despite having two cabs our driver shoved all our baggage into the trunk of his hatchback and left it open. Every time we hit a pot-hole, which is often, the trunk swings down with a whump and the whole lot of it threatens to dump onto the ground. The ferry dock, such as it is, is not a dock as much as a single deck out onto the ocean with two or three large rusting fishing boats and what appears to be an ancient twenty person uncovered motorboat sitting dangerously low in the water.

Meet the panga, the boat to Little Corn Island.
The elderly, decrepit fishing boats look like the goddamn Love Boat next to it. I look covetously at the cabins on them. The panga looks more and more like an upside down bottle cap with an engine on it. Jesus Christ. Have I mentioned I can’t swim? And I’m packing a laptop? Are you shitting me?

Norman comes over and looks off the dock at one of the fishing boats. “Oh, that isn’t so bad”. I point at the panga. That’s ours. He looks at it with an expression of disbelief.

“Oh shit.”

We have an hour to kill in Big Corn. Tom, Andrea and Meg wander off to get food. I try to find a Coca Cola Light. Terry and Norman wait with the bags and the others go to explore. I look around a little bit. It’s dirty and kind of dusty, with only one nicer-ish restaurant by the docks. The rest is shacks housing pulperias and the odd house and home.

Almost no one takes cards and by the time we figure out how to get to the only cash machine on the island it’s time to board. There’s no cash machine on Little Corn. Cash-wise, I’m fucked. Thank god Casa Iguana on Little Corn comped our casitas.

Boarding the boat means making a jump down from the piling into the bottle cap. This requires a bit of timing as the boat moves towards and away the deck with the ebb and flow of the waves. I don’t feel good about this.

Sit towards the back, an overly talky ex-pat from Costa Rica tells us, otherwise it gets rough. The back is about ten feet from the front so I’m unsure of how big a difference this is really going to make but the two guys herding us into the boat are loading the back rows first anyway. I get squeezed between Terry and Tom, clutching my laptop in its supposedly waterproof case and hoping for the best.

If you read Moon Handbooks guide to Nicaragua they make some comment about the panga drivers liking ‘speed records and big air’ or something to that effect. What does that mean? It means the minute we get the ropes off the boat takes off like a bat out of hell, going so fast the front is actually higher than the back by a good seven or eight feet. You can’t see over the top of it. We are literally skimming over the waves, almost surfing them.

Scary shit.

As the boat gets into deeper water we start to bounce off the waves – the front goes higher and then we are slammed around as it dumps into the trough. Bam, bam, bam, up and down. Water is pelting us from the sides. Every now and then we go into a wave so big the engine goes silent as it’s lifted out of the water – the whole thing essentially going airborne. Those quiet moments are followed a second later by epic slams as the panga falls back into the trough of the waves.

Holy fuckballs. There’s no way this piece of shit is going to make the thirty kilometers of open ocean across to Little Corn.

I’m jesus-mary-and-josephing. Kathy looks like she’s going to puke. Tom is completely Zen about this – he leans over and again mentions that he thinks I might actually make it to Little Corn this year. The more the little boat slams around the more I doubt this.

At some point in time Terry and I get so freaked out that we get punchy, joking around and laughing so hard we’re both crying. I am so going to volunteer building stucco houses next year, I tell her as the boat slams down again, soaking us. Fuck this shit. Nice little stucco houses. Some place dry.

Against all odds the boat makes it to Little Corn and then it’s a jump up onto the dock. Somehow I manage this, clutching my laptop in it’s now moist bag, my sunglasses coated with salt. Once safe and confronted with dry land all I can think of is how I really want to do that again. It’s like the best roller coaster you’ve ever been on in your life, made even more exciting by knowing that, unlike real roller coasters, there’s a genuine chance you might actually die.

But Tom was right, I made it this time. Despite a bunch of near misses and some seriously dubious transport, my feet finally hit Little Corn Island

Photo notes and then some other notes:

Photos 1) Dr. Kathy T & Norm walk out to the plane 2) Dr. Tom patiently waits by our stuff while the Costena folks check everyone else in and decide what to do about us. There are no photos of me waiting patiently because I was either outside smoking, pacing, or surreptiously trying to take pictures of people wearing surgical masks. 3) Agricultural areas east of Managua as seen from the plane. 4) Dropping into Bluefields. 5) The only shot of the panga I have which came out really screwed up, light wise. It's the only one that came out like that leading me to believe it's FUCKING POSSESSED. 6) on the panga with about eighteen other people, looking wistfully at fishing boats docked nearby. Grey hair is Dr. Terry, guy in glasses is unnamed guy from East Germany who kept popping up all over Little Corn island and was perfectly nice except for he started every sentence by saying "RIGHT, RIGHT.." in the loudest possible voice which was highly disconcerting. 7) The promised land: Dock at Little Corn with fishing boat coming in. 8) Norm chills with a recovering Mama dog in the second clinic room on Little Corn. (below)

A note on chronology: things are going to get kind of out of whack here as I have some Granada stuff I didn't get a chance to post before we left. So there'll the odd Granada interlude in the midst of Corn Island stuff. I just wanted to at least start putting Corn Island stuff up. Also: my computer is overheating badly, dying after about twenty minutes so posting is a lot more slow going than I had hoped. Add into the mix constant and persistant power outs - we were mostly out yesterday - and things are going to be coming up slower than expected. That's also why I'm not being great about answering my emails, I can only real work on my laptop in twenty minute spurts.

A note on Norm: I could do a whole blog entry just about Norm. He had no vet tech experience, had never left the country before and was a 19 year old chef from Detroit. His aunt, Dr. Kathy T, invited him on this trip. He rapidly became one of my favorite people in the world - if I could adopt him as a little brother I would. Norm is universal. No matter where he went everyone loved him and he fit in like a native, despite not speaking a word of Spanish. He cooked with the chefs at the resort. He played baseball and basketball with the islanders. He danced at Cafe Nuit. He chatted up everyone. At one point during clinic I looked outside and saw him holding up a little kid by the ankles and screaming "give me your lunch money, give me your lunch money" while the kid squealed with delight. Honestly. He spent hours playing with the island kids. He was a great ambassador for this project in terms of integrating with all the concerned groups and amusing the hell out of everyone.

All hail Norm.

Just Back In Granada....A Pig Fever Interlude

2009-06-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

I'm finishing the serious blog entries and they should be up tonight and tomorrow. In the meantime, though, I present these photos from the Nicaraguan Department of Health's swine flu posters.

I hope they paid the woman in the bandanna extra for doing a love scene.

I generally try not to take photos of people and post them on my blog without them knowing. That said, I offer it as a public service. Anyone renting a car at the Managua airport should be gratified to know that the car rental guys are not breathing on your steering wheel. Or your paperwork. Or anything for that matter. I have no idea at what point renting a car becomes a high risk activity, health wise, but rest assured that we are all safe.
In all fairness they knew I took the picture because I was slick enough to forget to turn the flash off before I took it. I asked them if they minded and they said no.

And for those that were wondering, there are in fact pigtails on Big Corn Island. And they are important enough that they merit their own sign.
Now I will probably come down with swine flu as I have bad swine flu karma from being so damn snarky about it.

What I Learned At School Today

2009-06-11T16:58:00.000-07:00

Because we are working in a school - they donated their two of the classrooms - in a four classroom building - to us.

1. Tapeworms can get up to two feet long. Over two feet long. I saw Claudio pull one out of the ass of a dog that was like Rapunzel's hair. After the first foot and a half I turned away. Some of the vets got cameras and took a picture of it. I am screwed up, I am not that screwed up. Nor am I a vet, thus negating either need for any photo of a gargantuan tapeworm. There will be no tapeworm photos.

2. Pigs make a horrifying noise when they are either being sedated to be castrated or castrated. I did not look outside to see which of the two was happening. The theme of today was "don't look". There are a lot of photos on this blog that have compelled people to email me just to tell me that it almost made them vomit. If I can't look, that says something.

3. I suck at writing short, photoless blog entries. Particularly after three days of wicked hard work and with the ever present threat of internet cut off looming over my head. I also suck at being social after this, too. I want a nap.

4. The music of choice out here is either reggae or new country. This makes no sense. It does, however, make me enormously happy I own an ipod.

We finished our last day of clinic today. Tomorrow we hang around the island in case anything goes wrong with any of the animals we worked on, then head back to the mainland Saturday. One guy who brought in two of his dogs has a fishing boat and he's taking us out snorkelling and fishing tomorrow as a thank you. Even with the panga-ride-from-hell in the back of my head, I'm still tempted.

Off to save the world. Or go back to the hotel and write an overly wordy, long, real blog entry to bore the shit out of everyone when I post it later.

Fallen Off The End of the Earth/ Watch This Space

2009-06-10T17:02:00.000-07:00

Good news! I made it to the Corn Islands. More good news! We've done about seventy animals in the past three days. Even more good news! I have five full blog entries and about a million pictures, including some of the Nicaraguan Health Department swine flu posters. These have absolutely nothing to do with the project but feature five of the absolute worst actors ever to grace a public health campaign.

Bad news: Little Corn Island is hella more remote than I ever thought. After dragging my laptop an hour across a choppy sea in a small boat I discovered there is no wireless on the island. I also discovered there's about five computers on the island that have internet at all, via satellite dish. A very unreliable satellite dish. It's gone out twice in the twenty minutes I've been online and this is the first access I've had since Monday morning when I went to the Managua airport at 3 AM to get on a plane to Big Corn.

The gist of this whole thing: there are blog entries but I can't post until I get to someplace where I can get a signal. Then I will start talking and not shut up. This project is undoubtedly the coolest, most remote and hardest one I've ever worked on. We have no running water. We have as many supplies as we could haul over an a very small, very scary boat. But the island elders are awesome, there's so much support for this, I'm covered in wormer and dog vomit and this connection is about to bite it.

More soon.....Don't plan on getting any work done at the office on Monday as I'm going to toss all the entries up Sunday or Monday....

An Ignomious Beginning:A Non-Dog Related Prelude With Irrelevant Photographs.

2009-06-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

(Just a quick note: there is no clinic stuff in this entry. Today has been sort of an orientation day - I haven’t done anything clinic-y aside from showing up at Donna’s house to find no one home)

Don’t Worry Kids, There’s Enough Houston For Everyone.

No matter how early I check in I get the shit seat. I have shit seat karma. I don’t know what the hell I did in a past life to deserve this but I am now wedged precariously between two very large women, one in the aisle and one next to the window.

Two things you should now about me:

1) I am very leggy. Not in a sexy way, in a “I don’t think that woman has a torso” 34 inch inseam sort of way. Mutant giraffe leg girl.
2) I am claustrophobic. No, I’m not going to urinate on myself or freak out and be led off the plane in cuffs. It just stresses me out.

Being crammed into an aisle seat, the best possible option, stresses me out. Being crammed in the middle seat between two large women, a mother/daughter duo with thick Texas accents, on very little sleep and with dubious plans on where I’ll be staying tonight, sends my stress o’ meter through the roof. I offer to switch with one of them so they can sit next to each other but the mother refuses. “She likes the window” she twangs cheerfully, “and I like the aisle, so we do this. Don’t worry, we’ll just talk over you!”.

Twenty minutes into the two hour flight from Denver to Houston I want the both of them dead. An hour in, while I’m trying to sleep with my iPod on and my hood pulled over my eyes one of them taps me on the shoulder. “Your cookie….are you going to eat it?” She twangs sweetly and points to my food tray. I just hand it to her. Honestly? Really? You’re asking strangers for food? Have at it.

I’ve never been so glad to see Houston in my life. When the plane drops through the clouds and I can see little houses and cars, it’s the fucking promised land. Forget Nicaragua. Houston, and it’s promised escape from being the meat in a Large Twanging Women sandwich, is Mecca, Utopia, my own personal holy land.

Unfortunately, however, there is more Houston than is good for anyone. Usually once you start seeing signs of life, of little cars and freeways, and people, the runway is in your very near future. Here not so much. We fly over suburbs and more suburbs. Water. Some more houses. A bevy of industrial parks. Either the pilot is lost or Houston is not a city but rather an animate, living thing. An amoeba of a city, stretching amorphously in every direction, spreading itself across the landscape, growing exponentially with every minute.

Or, you know, my perspective could have been skewed. But I lived six lifetimes in that final thirty minutes. Six cramped, annoyed lifetimes of strange thighs pressed up against mine.

It’s a long road home.

Pig Fever

It pops up for the first time in the Houston airport: signs posted on glass doors, a picture of a woman coughing with a dire warning about swine flu and a list of vague symptoms: fatigue, fever, cough, sore throat, having a pulse and breathing, feeling a little peakish, etc etc etc. If you have any of these symptoms, the sign warns, stay in your hotel room and call a doctor. Do not go out in public.

It occurs to me that Houston might be chock full of hotels packed with people with the sniffles, all of whom are sure they’re going to die very soon. Must be a big boon to the Marriot and doctors who are willing to make house calls to hotels.

While talking on the phone to a friend two people walk by me in surgical masks. A second later Mickey Mouse walks by. I put the same amount of importance on both of these things. The world is an odd place. People do strange things. People like to have things to be scared of and the media likes to create them. People also like it when people in enormous mouse costumes wave at them. Go figure.

By the time the plane drops into Managua it’s dark out. I don’t have the opportunity to swoon over the sight of the metal roofs and traffic circles. I could be landing anywhere. The first sign something might be amiss is a strange form we’ve been handed with our customs declarations on the plane. In broken English it asks if we have any symptoms - the same vague list as the flyers in Houston. I’ve been seated next to a sweet Danish man and a woman who’s there as a medical volunteer. None of us are stupid, we check ‘no’ next to every single one. The we confer snidely about hysteria and how much the media loves a good pandemic. Swine flu was so three weeks ago. *

The three of us are still making swine flu jokes when we disembark to find every single person on the jet way wearing a surgical mask.

You can’t get anyone in this country to wear a seatbelt but you can get them to wear surgical masks? What? Since when did Nicaragua start giving a shit?

Through the rabbit hole, Alice, we’re going through the rabbit hole.

Instead of just walking to customs, like I’ve done a billion times, we are instead herded into a long, nonsensical line in the hallway to customs. When the line rounds the corner I see a lot of men in white lab coats and surgical masks and a thermo-imaging camera with a big screen behind it. Each person has to stand on a rug in front of the camera and a bright red silhouette of yourself with your temperature in Celsius, flashes on the screen. It’s like a cross between Ghost Hunters and getting a new license at the DMV.

I notice big fluctuations in people’s body temperatures but the men in lab coats - at least one of whom looks to be about fourteen years old - just wave everybody through. They’re huddled together chatting amongst themselves. The youngest one takes off his surgical mask and plays with it, swinging it on a finger.

When we get finally get to customs there are more long lines, more surgical masks, including some military men packing big weapons. If you sneeze do they shoot you? Everyone is dead shocked. Managua is the capital of the wave-through customs people. Now there are at least a hundred people standing in lines and the customs people, instead of taking your five dollars and glancing at your forms, is interviewing every single person.

The Dane times it on his watch - every person is interviewed for an average of three minutes. There are at least thirty people in front of us. By the time I get through this I’ll just turn around and get back on a plane to Denver. Sometimes a couple goes up at the same time, filling us with hope: this will economize time! The Dane clocks them - couples come in at seven minutes. In short, we’re fucked and hoping everyone is single.

Sometimes the world isn’t fair. Today it isn’t fair to my new insta-travel friends. As we’re commiserating in line a woman appears behind the masked customs officers desks brandishing a sign that says “Finnegan Dowling”. My shuttle driver. I step out of line and from the other side of the barricade get her attention, point at the line and make that helpless “What can you do?” shrug. She talks to one of the customs guys and I’m pulled out of line and waved over to a closed line. One of the customs guys comes over, looks at my paperwork, stamps my passport and waves me through. I wave goodbye to my plane friends, still marooned in the never-ending line, who wave back with murder in their eyes. By the Danish man’s calculations they have about two hours in line ahead of them.

In twenty minutes I’m out, in the shuttle and on the way to Granada at last. We drive by the Pharaoh casino, La Colonia supermarket, the mall where Linda and Alan and I went. The past few months have been crazy. There was a Bad Relationship, a relationship so riddled with drama and angst it more resembled two people trying to keep a sick goldfish alive than anything romantic. I had my semi-annual battery of medical testing, more stressful than I let on but everything came out clean. A health crisis with my much beloved, completely satanic corgi mix Mercy. I haven’t had time to get excited about coming back. It seems the days just flew by until yesterday morning when I woke up with a packed camping pack and a stern note to myself to buy batteries on the way to the airport.

Driving through Managua, finding myself on the Carraterra, passing the familiar love hotels** and roadside restaurants, none of the bad goes away. It just gets easier. Distance equals perspective. There’s something somewhere between relief and excitement in the back of my throat.

We stop at an On the Run for water - I’m parched, dying***. The woman behind the counter is wearing a surgical mask but I’m getting to the point that I don’t even notice them anymore. There’s a group of twenty somethings buying cans of Tona and plantain chips, talking amongst themselves. When I got home last time it took me a while to get used to the background hum of strangers speaking English again. Killing time in Houston I told a friend of mine I was afraid I was going to have culture shock. The past eleven months is the longest stretch of time I’ve been away from Nicaragua in three years. You won’t, he said. And I don’t. I have Background Chatter Shock.

Lilly doesn’t have a room this time so I’m at the mercy of a new hostel, one I picked at random at the last minute because it advertised free internet. Lie. I should have remembered that most hostels here advertise free internet and don’t have it. But it’s on the Calzada, close to Donna, three blocks from my old house, close to my neighborhood. The women shows me the room. It’s the size of a closet and a bit cobwebby but clean and with it’s own bathroom. Ten dollars a night. Done. I check the bed for scorpions. It’s never happened to me in Granada but after my last night in San Juan Del Sur with the nest in the window, I’ve sprouted a new phobia with accompanying OCD.

Paying for the room, requesting it, my Spanish feels gummy, thick, coming out of my mouth. Speaking it at work hasn’t helped me retain the basic things you need to get by in daily life. My accent blows, my grammar is laughable but I get through. I am thoroughly humbled but I have a room. I fall into bed and pass out.

The last text I sent from Houston airport was to Jon, my old roommate, adopted brother and close confidante from the house on Calle Santa Lucia. He’s in California with his family, will be back in Nicaragua next month. We tried to hook it up to cross paths but with my work schedule and his family stuff it wasn’t doable. I want to be going back to our old house, I text. I want you and Alan and Linda there. I turned my phone off before he had time to reply. This morning is bittersweet. It’s like I’ve gone back in time but everything is different, rearranged. Later today I’ll walk up to Calle Santa Lucia, see Lilly, find Donna, go by the clinic, get ready for the trip to Corn Islands on Monday. Now I just orient. I go to the Euro Café, where I’ve had a million Diet Cokes and written a billion blog entries. The guy who owns it recognizes me. You’re back, he says.

Yup.

I’m back.

Bring on the scabby dogs.

* Lest you all think I’m somehow superior or above all this, please see blog entry from last year: In Which A Quick Glance At The Tuberculosis Poster Convinces Finn That She Has Tuberculosis, Thus Filling Her With Mortal Fear And Dread.

** Love Hotel, also known as Auto Hotels: Okay, so most people in Nicaragua live with their extended families, three or four generations in a house. As you can imagine, this does not allow for, errrrr….intimacy. Hence the ubiquitous Love Hotel. These are roadside hotels with completely walled in parking lots (so no one can see your car) where you can discreetly rent rooms by the hour. It’s not as creepy a concept as it would be in the US. I’ve never been in one but I did meet two young, strapping Australian guys on a surf tour who did not know what a love hotel was, checked into one and were mortified when they were handed a stack of clean towels and condoms. Apparently nineteen year old Australian surfers do not appreciate their sexuality being called in to question. Me, I would have thought it kind of a tip off that they were asked how many hours they wanted, but what do I know.

***On The Run is the exact same thing in Nicaragua as it is in Colorado: an ultra modern, brightly lit convenience store with well laid out shelves and clean bathrooms. It’s like an island of Non-Nicaragua in Nicaragua. That said, last time I was here I used to sneak up to the one in Granada all the time to have a little gringa-fest of air conditioning and fountain soda.

(Photo notes: I did absolutely nothing today that could be illustrated with a relevant photo and I was afraid to take pictures of the mask-wearing workers yesterday, though I wanted to. I was afraid they wouldn’t let me into the country if they thought I was mocking their pandemic. Or the military guy would shoot me. But an entry without pictures would kinda suck. Everyone likes pictures, even if I take horrible ones. First shot, house near Parque Central. Second, cathedral near Donna's house. Third, funeral carriage near Parque Xalteva, final, street dog outside of Euro Cafe)

*****Some big-time kudos: to Val Arie, Carol and Jack, the woman from Malaysia who’s elephant card occupies a place of honor on my dresser, to everyone: thank you for sending me back. I am enormously grateful I cannot even begin to tell you. To my sista-from-another-motha, the ever diabolical Sheena, queen of three woofs.blogspot.com, who really should be here with me . To Renee, for driving my ass to the airport. To Roseman, for babysitting my beasts while I’m running off again. To Karen, Kristen and Marlon for babysitting my sanity in Denver in the run up to me coming back. To my father and my sister for helping me out. To my bosses for not canning my ass for taking off for two weeks. And of course to Donna and Dr. Tom to asking me to come back for this. *********

Eulogy For A Potato

2009-03-04T20:40:00.000-08:00

For a reincarnation-type entry I should really do a lot of catching up. But before I can do any of that, before I can write the next entry - the one where we meet the new sarna monsters and catch up with the old ones, before we watch me fall flat on my face in my native country, I have to eulogize what became a symbol of the clinic, an indomitable spirit. This entry is a lot more serious than probably any one I've ever written. It's not a harbinger of entries to come - watch this space for more of what everyone had come to expect. But hold up for a second - this is important shit.

The Potato (nee Rocky) continued to flourish by the lake under Donna’s care. His hair grew in, he remained feral, he showed up every morning with his consortium of bitches* to grab breakfast off Donna, amble around insolently, and take off.

A few months after I left, he sprouted a tumor on his back. He was brought back in - how, I don’t know. Though Donna and I email regularly she didn’t go into the details. I can only assume it’s because Heidi and Claudio, who took over most of what Nick, Toni and me** were doing, kick a lot of ass. But they managed to bring him in and Dr. Tom took the tumor off. Donna tried to get it tested but couldn’t find a lab that could do it. The Potato was re-released at the lake to do his thing.

Several weeks after that he stopped showing up for breakfast. Donna asked everyone about him and finally some of the night caretakers at the lake told her he was down by the water, ‘with the vultures’.

She never found his body and he never showed up for breakfast again. The Potato, also known as Rocky and Papas Fritas, had died. It’s unknown what he died of - if the tumor was malignant and the cancer, still in his system, consumed him. Or if he was poisoned, something that happened with alarming regularity at the lakefront while I was there. I like to think he was a little too street smart to have been poisoned.

The Potato lived life on his own terms. The thing with being a clinic dog is that you do not need to win a Mr. Canine Congeniality award to be there. Ticky bit every one's ass. Lobo spent the first week lying on the floor, getting up only to crap under the surgery table. After a few days pretty much every dog would settle in and realize that well yes, you were contained, life was easier there. Food was free flowing, no one was trying to poison you or chase you off and, aside from med time, no one would hassle you too much. All the other clinic dogs would adjust. The Potato never did. The brief time he was at the clinic he refused to compromise his feral nature. He spent all his time either lying in the corner of the yard, away from everyone, or trying to get out the front gate. Yes, he was horribly ill and yes, this was an easier life but it wasn't his life. And he wasn't having it. Thus after a debacle including an incredibly-unpleasant-for-all-involved bath, a near-death leap from Donna's balcony and a lot of sulkiness, he was re-released to be treated at the lakeside.

He lived the last few months of his life furry, reasonably healthy and well cared for. For a dog he had a big life. He was the ultimate survivor - he survived far beyond what would have killed most dogs. He was a fighter - even half dead he refused to be corralled, preferring to jump a two story security wall tipped in glass to return to the lake. He became an international celebrity - after Portia he was the dog I received the most emails about. And he had love. Whether or not he wanted it, he had love. People who looked after him and cared for him by his rules. People who had never seen him who worried about him. And he had Donna.

He was just a feral dog, a scabby street dog in a third world country full of scabby street dogs. But he taught us all so much. May we all live with such courage, without obligations that take us away from who we really are. May we all remember that sometimes it’s better to live without security if it means compromising what makes our lives ours.

Donna is infinitely more articulate than I am, and she was his primary caretaker.To quote her email about his passing “He was one great dog, wasn't he? More than that, Rocky was one hell of a
good teacher”.

He was. And Donna’s caretaking of him is a lesson in and of itself. May we all find someone who takes us as we are. May we all find it in ourselves to love our dogs, our people, as they are.

I have so many other stories to tell - Victoria the three legged dog. Betty Boop, who found her way to the clinic right before I left. But in honor of The Potato, he won‘t share this entry with another dog. This one is just his.

Godspeed, Rocky.

* this is an entirely appropriate use of the term 'bitches' and not an example of Finn's potty mouth - he actually did travel with a pack of female dogs.

**I want to make the important distinction about this phrase "what Nick, Toni & I" did. In reality it should read "what Nick and Toni did all the time, day in and day out on top of their Peace Corps duties and what I did when I was in town". I can't possibly even come closing to comparing what I did with their commitment, dedication and day in and out devotion. Not even close.

Photo notes: First: as far as I know the last photo of The Potato ever taken - at the lakefront, where he belonged, doing his thing. Next: the tumor removed from his back. Sorry about the gross out photos but it wouldn't be this blog if I didn't make every one's stomach heave now and again. Third: The Potato at the Lakefront, prior to being brought to the clinic and before being treated. Finally: The last photo I ever took, at the lakefront for morning breakfast with Donna and the bitches.

Postscript for clarity: I actually am, and have been, in Colorado. More on that later.

Interlude/Prelude to an Epilogue: And Now What?

2008-07-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

My roommate Alan left on Thursday. Alan got here a day after I did. He's become a good friend to me as has John, my other roommate.

I leave in less than a month. Back to Denver. I realize a month is still a lot of time - hell, most people don't get to spend one month doing what I've been doing let alone five months. Even still Alan's imminent departure has put it in the forefront of my brain: I have to go back. And I don't know how to or what to do and, quite honestly, why I should.

Not entirely true, I know why I do have to go back: Money. My house. My dogs. Some people I dearly love and care for that I want to see. My health has taken a bitch slapping here and I need to go back to the States where I eat a little better, am not constantly surrounded by people who chain smoke and hence have me chain smoking.

Don't get me wrong - I love Nicaragua. Giacomo Belli described Nicaragua as 'The Country Under My Skin' in her book with the same title and Nicaragua is under my skin, it's where I feel at home, it's where I know how to navigate the universe a little better than maybe I do in Denver, language barrier and all. And I love Granada. Calle Santa Lucia has been my home for more of the past year than any place else. That said, I don't want to spend the rest of my life here.

Before I decided to come back here I did plan on leaving the country again for a period of time. My initial plan was to go to Cambodia and Southeast Asia for a while. But I loved the work I did here, loved the project, and have a weird phobia of a meaningless life. So I came back. And I have worked hard. And I am proud, so proud, of the work that's been done and the amazing people I work with. But I have no intention of settling here permanently, though it would be easy to do so given the resources.

The world is a big place. There's a lot of other places - and a lot of other projects - I'd like to work on. Occasionally I have to be a grown up and make some money. And I don't want to spend the rest of my life a transient - one place to the next. I always want to travel but I need to set up a homebase some place, somewhere that when I come home actually feels like home. Where will that be? I don't know. But I do know it won't be Granada. And I need to figure it all out.

I'm not convinced I know how to do that - figure it all out.

In a month I have to get back on a plane. I know when I get on the plane it's going to feel like I just left yesterday but when I get off the plane my life is going to be completely different than it was when I left. I left in the middle of winter, owning a car, having some relationships I don't have any more. Even with my good friends in States there's a crevasse of time and space that we've sort of been yelling across for the past few months.

The people who know me in the States who have come to see me in Nica have made the same comments - you seem lighter here, easier, more in your element. I don't know how much of that has to do with Nicaragua itself. I have a weird skill, an odd tic - I am the most in my element when I am the farthest away from what is comfortable. I'm quite sure that if you put me in Phnom Penh or Estonia or Senegal I would seem more in my element than I do in Colorado. Unfortunately, however, this is not a terribly marketable skill.

I don't know how to re-adjust to the US. The thought of chain stores, super highways, convenience stores - just seems so damn complicated. I don't drive a car here. I ride a bike or I walk. And I won't even get into the work issue. Here I work hard and I do dirtier, harder work than I would in the States. But I keep odd hours, have no real 'boss' - you can't really count Donna as a boss. The thought of a desk tying me down eight hours a day is completely incomprehensible. As is the thought of going back into an American animal shelter - with all their funding and equipment - to work.

Think about it for a second, though - I have been gone for five months. I have not really used American currency, been in a big box store, done all the things we do every single day in the States. I kiss people on the cheek when I meet them here. I am used to being called 'La Finn' or 'Feen'. I buy most of my food from neighbors who cook it in their houses or on the street. Enormous amounts of my time are spent living outside of my comfort zone.* I am constantly surrounded by noise and friends and stimulation. Not artifical stimulation - not TV or radio or what have you - but actual stimulation - people in the streets, endless parades, loud music, sidewalk parties. My life is lived primarily outside. My living room where I work on my computer, watch the BBC, eat, is an outdoor courtyard. For the most part if I'm inside I'm doing stuff in the clinic or sleeping. The only time I wear actual shoes is to work and I hate wearing shoes. I cannot imagine the silence, the sterility, the formality of the States again.

Meanwhile Alan's hammock sits empty - the green and white one closest to the TV. For a day or two we left his stuff up by it - the big bottle of weird juice stuff he was always drinking, his enormous ashtray. He left it like that when he left and we jokingly referred to it as a shrine to Alan. The next day the cleaning lady came and picked it all up - put his juice stuff in the fridge, emptied the enormous ashtray.

But his absence made me think. Alan used to listen to all my existential crises, my relationship woes. And as Alan has said to me a million times in response to said crises and woes, while lighting his trademark cigarette, 'Well there's really no sense in worrying about it now, is there?".

Though with a little over three weeks remaining, it might be a good time to start worrying about it.

Godspeed Alan. I miss your odd brand of Manchester-Accented-Football -Screaming-Antisocial Zen already. Thank you for being such a good friend to me, mi hermano.

And Then The Remedy: Into The Ocean

For the first time since the now-infamous Kidney Infection Incident, I went back to the ocean.

I didn't go to Las Penitas. From what I understand everyone I know out there is fine, though the hotels are tore up something awful. A Nica friend was really excited about a party in San Juan Del Sur so I went there. They stayed one night, I stayed three.

It's been a long time, two months, maybe more - since I've gotten to be out on the waves. I blew the first hour badly. Sometimes I forget that surfers taught me to boogie board which is a bad thing and I am not a surfer, nor am I even a swimmer. I have no business paddling out past my head and trying to catch anything before it breaks. Particularly at Majagual. Las Penitas is rough - it's got a bad cross break and it's easy to get tumble dried even in the shallows.** Even at high tide, Majagual is positively gentle comparatively as well as incredibly shallow. You can get a nice, long ride without going out past your neck. But the first hour I get nothing - I ride in a few feet and lose the wave, bob around endlessly.

I come in for a drink of water and a guy from DC gives me some golden advice I forgot "jump that bitch when it's whitewater and ride it like you own it all the way to the beach".

Thank you, generic DC guy.

The first decent ride feels like sex, love, Christmas morning, the Easter bunny, chocolate and really good sushi all rolled into one. By the fourth one I'm spinning the board, rolling it, having a blast. And for the first time since I got sick I feel alive, really alive, again. All better now. I've been all better for a while but there's just something about the ocean that makes everything one hundred and twenty percent better. Yes my eyes sting, I spit salt water, I still suck pretty badly, my 'active sport' sunscreen lets me down and it will take me hours and a bucket of conditioner to undo my terminal case of saltwater hair but it's all good. Todo es bien.

Coming back? Todo es bien. Having no clue what to do next? Todo es bien. Everything is okay. The ocean, like an old friend, is here. And I'll be back at least twice before I have to leave. And on top of this being the easiest beach to ride, it also has a lot of good memories for me. After a while I take a nap on my board. I wake up, go in the water again. In the trees near the beach the howler monkeys are hooting bloody murder at each other. The Pepsi from the bar at the beach is too sweet but they don't have diet. Todo es bien.

That night I sleep the sleep of the dead. The happy dead.

* I am not a toucher - the cheek-kissing is part of living outside of my comfort zone but it's a Nica thing - it's rude to not do it. They do it when you are introduced, when you say hello, when you say goodbye - men, women, everyone. And a lot of Europeans do it, too. It's kind of funny that the queen of the hands-off-stranger will have a terrible habit to break regarding NOT kissing people she doesn't know when she first meets them. Other things outside my comfort zone: dancing. Everyone - EVERYONE - here dances. In the streets, in the bars, in the clubs, everywhere. It took my Nica friends a long time to accept that not only will you never see me move like I come from Columbia, I will not even try. As for the 'La Finn' thing, that's a weird Nica tic - I don't know if they only do it with extranjeros or people with one syllable names or what but there are people here who refer to me only as 'La Finn' or my roommate as 'El John'.

** I've taken some fantastic tumbles in my life but my last trip to Las Penitas included one so monumental it can only be described as epic. And I learned a valuable lesson regarding the inadvisability of string bikinis in rough surf. I now have my boogie boarding bikini which is the equilivalent of a straight-jacket - nothing is making that thing come off. Nothing.

***Another odd site note about surfing and surfers that has nothing to do with anything: most surfers can't really surf. Yes, they paddle out, yes they essentially come in a bit and some actually manage to stand up on the board but not very many people can actually surf surf. And I don't just say that from being at Majagual - I've watched surfers all over the east and west coast of the US, I know a lot of surfers. The people that are actually good enough to get up on a wave and ride it are a small percentage. Honestly, there's a lot of men in this world who just need to get over the whole ego thing and buy themselves a damn boogie board. ****

*****And yes, there will be an animal entry coming soon - this isn't the epilogue yet. But the infamous photo stuff: First pic, flowers outside my room in SJDS. Second, abandoned Texaco station near Mombacho, third, beach at Majagual. Fourth: some serious saltwater hair. *****

Another Pictorial/Before and Afters/An Interlude About Mugging

2008-06-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

I really do win the award for crappy blogging lately. So much has happened - a bunch of clinics, a new dog at the clinic, an epic journey in which Finn gets waylaid by a sinus infection, a strike with burning tires on the landing strip at Corn Island and spends two days at the Managua airport with a shit-ton of medical equipment but misses the entire Corn Islands trip.

And I will actually hit those. Honestly. Part of the problem is that I start about fifteen different entries and then my writing ADD kicks in and I'm off onto something else.

Anyway, Donna got sick and missed the trip, too. But no matter how sick she is, every single morning she gets up and drives down to the Lakefront to feed the feral dogs.

To read this blog you would think Donna only has the clinic - she doesn't. She runs two schools, a restaraunt that's a job training program for street kids, a bunch of other projects. When I say she is the busiest woman in Central America I am not screwing around. And despite my occasionally quoting her colorful language - she drops the f-bomb as much as I do at times - this is a woman who actually won some ridiculously prestigous award for citizen diplomacy, is described in the Lonely Planet guides as 'Mother Theresa with the potty mouth'. In short, the woman WORKS. But she never forgets the lake dogs.

I think it started with the Potato - see below - but now there is a whole crew of dogs and cats that wait for her every morning. She pulls up in her truck and five dogs and three cats coming flying out for breakfast.

All of the dogs are ferals. We managed to trap and fix the females and Donna can touch a few of them but all of them are dogs that are not candidates for the clinic.
There's no real point to this, just that it's a cool thing to see. And one of the cats had kittens in a shed. The kittens don't stray out of the shed but they are starting to eat solid food. They hiss, they bat, they run but they wait for breakfast, too.

Interlude: In Which I Have The Obligatory Attempted Mugging In A Central American Country & A Juvenile Delinquent Gets The Shit Scared Out Of Him So Badly He's Probably Considering The Priesthood:

Something you should know about Nicaragua: according to UN statistics it is the second safest country in all of the Americas after Canada. People are scared shitless of Nicaragua - they forget that the Contra thing was twenty years ago. But this is a safe place. I walk around this city all the time and feel safer than I would walking around most parts of Denver. Yup, I've had the odd drunk guy pester me and people I know have had thier bags snatched. There's even been some awful, awful crimes here - a friend hit in the head with a rock during a botched robbery by a gang, a murder last years, some other friends mugged with a machete. That said, it happens less here than it does in the States.

Last night my friend Linda and I are walking down Calle Martirio on our way home. It was pretty late - we had gone to a work dinner and then out to a club. I walk down Martirio all the time. No hay problemas. Tonight, however, we are on a dark block. In a weird twist of it-never-happens-in-Nica, there is no one sitting out on their sidewalk. It's dark, it's quiet. Out of nowhere this twelve year old looking kid just appears next to us. He asks for a peso - slang for a cord.

I'm a bitch about this. I don't give out money to street kids or beggars. There's about a billion reasons I have for this, but I don't. No, I say. No, adios, vas. No, goodbye, go. He asks again, still following us. Linda and I move across the street and the kid follows a bit behind us. This kid, I tell Linda, is starting to freak me out.

Right after I said this all hell breaks loose. The kid grabs Linda's ass. I don't see this, I just see him rush up, grab and then back off. And then Linda turns around and makes the most horrific sound I have ever heard a person make. She doesn't run, she doesn't squeal, she confronts him and she makes the most terrifying noise I have ever heard a person make. The kid takes off down the street.

I have no idea what happened - it all happened so quickly. I see one pissed Swiss woman screaming bloody murder. I see the kid running down the street like his ass is on fire. So, in a move that makes absolutely no sense what so ever, I go after him. Don't ask me what I was thinking - I guess I just thought he had gotten something from her. Don't ask me what I was going to do if I caught him - if I have one religion it's pacifism. *

Either way none of this is what the little bastard expected. Whether he was trying to grab ass or get money, we don't know. But this is not how Scared White People behave. They run. They hand over everything. Instead I am hauling ass down the street in a mini dress after him and Linda is screaming 'Vamos a mortir ti!' - We're going to kill you. In Spanish. And then I think she might have yelled it in German and possibly in English as well for good measure.

About half a block down I realize I'm being an ass and I stop. The kid is running like he will never run again in his life, around the corner and down Calle Arsenal.

Linda and I walk the rest of the block down the street in hysterics, laughing so hard we almost wet ourselves, going over the incident again and again - Linda's hellish scream, we're going to kill you, me going after him. When we get home John is up watching TV and we tell him the whole story breathlessly, interrupting each other and laughing our asses off.

We be some tough bitches.

Before & After:

I know I've done this before but going with Donna to feed the Potato and the other Lakefront animals the other day made me think it might be time for a bit of a recap of how some of these guys started and what they wound up looking like by the time we were done.

The first photo I ever put up that actually made people email me telling me I was making them sick to their stomachs was The Potato - the original lakefront feral dog that we tried, unsuccesfully, to keep at the clinic. If you think looking at the picture made you sick, keep in mind I had to bathe this dog. But this was the Potato as he was originally found:

And the body shot:

I take no credit for this. After we realized we could not contain him and he needed to be returned to the Lakefront, Donna went down every single morning and fed and medicated him. This was the beginning, I think, of the Lakefront Feeding Crew. But Donna did this, single handledly, with probably $5 worth of ivermectin tablets, buckets of kibble, some antibiotics and a dedication to being there to take care of him on his terms every single morning. But this is the The Potato now:

And he looks nothing like a potato at all. In fact he looks like a golden retriever. He will always be feral, he will live his entire life by the Lakefront where he is happy. But he is cared for. And he is better. And he actually looks like a dog:
And of course Minnow, who arrived bald, terrified and looking a bit rat-like. Much healthier than The Potato but still bald:
Minnow was returned to his owner on Corn Islands last week. I wish I had a picture of him right before he left - he was totally hairy and looked just like any other pain in the ass adolescent puppy. But apparently he made a big splash on the Island and no one could believe the 'purple dog' was the same one we returned. But this is the Minnow a month before he left, looking like any other dog. Some daily ivermectin shots, some food:
And of course everyone's favorite standby, the dog originally known as One Eye. Porsha as she was found at the bus station to Masaya. Grotesque, pathetic, sad, practically bald, with an infected empty eye socket and barely alive:

And this is the Porsha, everyone's favorite dog, as she looked last week. There will be no more updates on Porsha for at least a month. Why? Because she left for her new home in Colorado yesterday. Godspeed, Porsha. If any creature in the universe deserved the turn of fate her fat, happy, one eyed ass recieved, it was Porsha. I can't wait to see her in Colorado:

* This is true. I made a vow a long time ago that I will not, under any circumstances, use violence against another human being. Even in self defense. Will I say horrible things? Yes. The ability to say horrible thing is a skill I have. But I will not raise a hand to another person. Violence, someone once said, is the weapon of the weak. I also won't hit animals, though I have broken that rule in defense of myself and my own animals. That said I've also taken some bites I could have avoided if I was more willing to react. And I eat meat and have humanely euthanized thousands of animals - we're all walking paradoxes, I recognize mine. But it is the nature of humans to be violent - to hurt each other and other things. A lot of people are willing to commit themselves to try to overcome other, what I believe are more innocous, parts of human nature - sexuality, the need for acceptance, healthy conflict - for some religion or some ideal. But as a species and particularly as a society we love violence, embrace it.

**Photo credit: I totally boosted the last pic of Porsha off of Mauren, another volunteer. She takes amazing photos and it is the last pic of Porsha before she left. **

No Time For A Real Post, So A Pictorial...

2008-06-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

Prior to leaving for Corn Islands, three vets did two days of clinic in Granada. We did it as a dry run - not using the equipment that we wouldn't be able to bring with us to Corn Island. And because, well, Granada always needs more clinics. In two days with three vets, a small area and a whole bunch of vet techs over fifty animals were fixed. Additionally many dogs had veneral tumors removed, were dewormed, treated for various stuff. It was a wacky two days.

The rest of the team is already in Corn Islands. I got way-laid by a sinus infection and am joining tomorrow with forty-odd pounds (at least) of medical equipment. So far they've fixed over 100 dogs in two days, many with major health issues they've treated. And that was on the small island. But the next few days should be fun. In the meantime, though, some of my crappy-Nicaraguan digital camera pics from the two days of Granada clinic.

Dr. Tom - who I think was the founding vet of this project with Donna - and Dr. Terry Kane work on our make-shift second table that Dr. Tom built, MacGuyver style, from PVC pipe specifically for the Corn Islands trip.

Dr. Shayna and Vet Tech Pam have fun trying to get a feral roof cat out of a trap. Both of these guys are new to volunteering with the clinic and incredible - Pam is probably the most capable tech I've ever seen.

Claudio, a Granada native who trained as a tech and is now equally awesome checks post-surgery dogs.

Feral street dog with enormous testicular tumor awaiting surgery. Yes, he bites, hence the Hannibal Lecter muzzle. Not a mean dog, just a feral dog who really just doesn't want to be handled.

Dr. Shayna intubates the sedated tumor dog after he was anesthesized while Claudio holds. He spent three days in a cage at the clinic recovering and recieving chemo and mange treatment and was re-released into his territory.

And Now For The Cute Stuff. Because People Dig The Cute Shit.

When Donna was out looking for the tumor dog she found this pup wandering the streets. Into the truck she went. She, like the dog from Las Cruces, has some mange issues but is otherwise healthy and happy. Now we have the two puppies - the Las Cruces pup and this one. We named the blond Las Cruces pup Lucia and this one is called Isabella but they sort of formed a unit - they're the same age and the same size and equally bonkers. Hence they sort of are called, as a unit, the Scabies Babies.

It's a weird thing, though. Two pups in one week. Not that there aren't a million sarna puppies, we usually just don't get a melange of them at once. But these two, despite themselves, are endearing. Within a month or two their hair will be back and they'll be totally normal puppies. Plus Lucia, the Las Cruces pup, had taken over where Minnow left off in terms of hell-raising and flip-flop eating. Quite frankly I'm relieved we have another Scabie Baby to keep her occupied.

Their main source of occupying each other is chewing on each other. Or chewing on Porsha. But chewing on each other is more fun because the other one chews back whereas Porsha just sort of sits there, smiles, and acts like a large, fat, one eyed chew toy.

But yes, meet the Scabies Babies.

Almost Vacant - Or Things Go All Nicaraguan As They Always Do.

2008-06-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve been a bad blogger. Or at least a less active one. So many updates and all I can blame it on is that my camera sucks and I hate to post blogs with no pictures.

First of all, Godspeed Freda. After more than three months at the clinic Freda finally found a great home. She left last Monday to go live with a family that wanted a quiet, calm dog that was good with their toddler. She met them and was a champ with the kid, as she always is. We had a night of suspense - she did her ‘I don’t want to be any problem to anyone’ shy thing when they came to meet her and they decided to go look at some other dogs and maybe puppies.

The next day they called and asked when they could come get her. The whole family showed up and Freda, dressed in a new collar and leash walked out the clinic gates for the first time since before I got here. I know the family that took her and apparently she’s doing well as I knew she would be. Even still I miss her quietness, her intellegent, alert eyes, her sweetness.

And Minnow leaves to go back to the Corn Islands on Tuesday. Huger, hairier, and more of a hell raiser than before. It will be so quiet without her though it will be nice to know whatever flip flops I wear to work will remain intact.

On June 26th Porsha flies to the States. I might cry when she leaves. Even though I know I’ll probably see her again - she’ll be living an hour away from me - my cynical, fourteen-years-in-animal-shelters self might bust out a tear or two when the fat girl goes to the airport.

In theory this would have wiped out our population. Unthinkable. No clinic dogs?

Yes, we have the Corn Islands trip next week, a clinic this weekend and lots to do but no orphans? No resident patients?

Funny How Things Never Work Out Like That.

We got a call last week from the person watching Bohemian Paradise while Lucy was out of town. One of the dogs she feeds had shown up in horrible shape, lied down and couldn’t get back up. The guy, who was incredibly nice and runs Lucy’s other hotel in Costa Rica, carried the dog inside - it was literally a monsoon out and he was out in the rain. This dog looked like death, was soaking wet and was covered in fleas. If there is a god, bless him for that guy ignoring all of that and carrying him inside to safety.

When Donna and I got there we recognized the dog immediately - he’s been on the streets forever, usually over by the Parque. He, like Teddy, is a known entity. One of the restaurants fed him on a regular basis and but it closed a while back. For him to be ranging so far out of his usual territory indicates he was literally starving up there. None of us had seen him in a while and we were shocked by the condition he was in - bones over skin.

Literally. Nothing but.

Oh and he’s ancient. And potentially deaf as a stump.

I have to admit that I held off taking pictures of him or blogging on him for a while because, well, I was sure he wasn’t going to make it. He could barely stand, even to eat, he would fall down and need to be hauled back up, he spent all his time holed up in a kennel and he had more fleas on him than I have ever seen on an animal in my life. But he ate whatever we put in front of him. We treated the flea issue.

Nick and Toni named him Lobo.

Then they put him on antibiotics. And he took those and ate. And then one day I came to work and there he was, standing at the gate with Porsha and Minnow, wagging his tail and waiting for dinner. Instead of sitting in his kennel waiting to have food put in front of him and then picked up and carried out to the yard, he was motoring around on his own.

The old man is going to make it.

Today we had a clinic - over thirty animals sterilized, some sick animals looked at, a couple of dogs with cancer treated. We locked up the other resident dogs in an upstairs area but Lobo stayed in the clinic, snoozed between the surgery tables. At the end of the day they neutered him. Everyone was a little concerned - he’s so old, he’s still skinny. But there are a lot of venereal tumors in dogs here so neutering was necessary not only for the sake of doing it but also to make sure he wasn’t cancerous. Of all the dogs we did today, he came back up from the anesthesia the quickest. Within a half hour he was wandering around looking for food, seeing what was going on.

Despite his amazing ability to hang on, though, one thing is for certain: despite having lived his entire life on the streets Lobo can never be returned to them. He has no teeth. He is deaf. He is ancient. And from the state he was found in, he is no longer able to fend for himself out there. Even in a home it’s uncertain how much time he really has left. It’s almost impossible to age street dogs- they tend to age quickly from malnutrition and hard living. Their teeth get tore up pretty young from eating whatever they can. But he definitely is old.

Unlike most lifetime street dogs he is friendly, he likes clinic life, he’s pretty happy where he is. He doesn’t seem to want to go back out. Unfortunately finding a placement for him is highly unlikely. At Donna’s other school, Quinto Chavallos, they have a number of animals that are unadoptable for one reason or another but good with the kids and live there. It’s a cool place - sort of a peaceable kingdom with kids, dogs, cats, all hanging out together. In all likelihood Lobo will, once recovered, live out his days at Quinto Chavallos.
But Wait, There’s More.

A few days later Nick and Toni have to go to Managua for Peace Corps stuff. As they walk by a landfill a skinny little kitten runs out and starts mewling at them. They pat it, walk off. It’s a sad little thing but they’re in Managua for a few days. What can you do? There’s food at the landfill. It’s a life.

And then the kitten starts following them. And then the kitten winds up in their hotel room for the night. The next day Nick hops on a bus back to Granada with the kitten in a box, drops it off at the clinic and hops another bus back to Managua to finish their Peace Corps stuff.

Now we have a kitten, too. And not a very Nicaraguan kitten, either - a sweet, friendly, sickly, tiny little kitten.

So now we have the pup from the barrio (see my last entry), Lobo, and the kitten.

But It’s Never Just That Easy.

On her way to the clinic today Donna finds another puppy - a sad little black, mange encrusted puppy, bigger than our barrio puppy but not much. Into the truck it goes. And of course it’s too young to be released. And it doesn’t belong to anybody, it’s just another street baby.

Thus entirely blowing the everyone-has-a-place-to-be theory. Lobo will go to Quinto Chavallos, si. Or at least it’s very likely. But as for the mange puppies and the kitten? We now have a nursery/nursing home. A bunch of sick babies and a batty, sweet, deaf old man who occasionally just sits down and randomly barks at nothing.

Welcome to Casa Lupita, newbies. Enjoy your stay - maybe not a five star resort but at least all your meals and meds are included. Once you get better, then we’ll figure out what the hell to do with you all.

****A note on funky timing and pictures: I actually started this blog entry days ago - Freda has been in her new home for more than a week by now, methinks. But a bunch of other stuff happened - the barrio trip, a very, very busy spay/neuter clinic, et al and this sat on my computer, half finished and forlorn. Thus half of it is last week, half is this week. Go figure. It wasn't confusing before, it's only confusing now because I mentioned it.

Pics: First: La Freda. Second: Lobo after a few days of food and meds. Third: The Managua Landfill kitten devours anything you put in front of it.

Last side note - and me without my camera. Sherman came to the spay/neuter clinic today. And he is the size of a small car with big ears and looks nothing - nothing - at all like the cute little puppy. He's still adorable, he's just in his gawky adolescent phase. I'll bring my camera to the spay/neuter clinic tomorrow but well, I missed getting his pic. You can really only neuter a dog once. ****

Back Into A Different Barrio - This Is Tough

2008-06-12T21:22:00.000-07:00

***Just a warning - there is a graphic pic here - nothing gory but sad - so just know that and please don't write me and complain***

Funny how life works. I had this blog entry ready to put up today - Freda gets adopted, Porsha and Minnow get ready to leave, we get a cat and an ancient, deaf dog that I was sure was going to bite it. It was on my hot list of things to do today as I had some down time in what’s been a crazy week. That happy blog will be up in the next few days.

What’s the famous quote about the best intentions of mice and men? Or how things in motion will remain in motion? Crazy keeps crazy going. It happens.

I am in my shower with my hand on the handle, literally about to turn on the water when the phone rings. I get out - you never know, with nutty weeks, what’s on the other end of it - and it’s Donna. She was at Thalia’s and met two volunteers from Las Cruces. Las Cruces is an incredibly poor barrio on the other side of Granada - almost outside of Granada. You go past the cemetery, down past where the paved road ends and keep going for what seems like miles of almost impassible, deeply rutted dirt roads. These women, a British and a Spanish woman, are living and volunteering down there with an NGO that builds houses and works with this forgotten little community.

The Spanish woman is a nurse, the British woman a social worker. In the course of working with the families, they encounter one family where everyone has scabies - scabies - sarcoptic mange - sarna. It’s actually not terribly easy to get sarna from animals unless you live with them, sleep with them, share a house with them. And their dogs were infested with sarna. They had one older puppy with it and a mother dog that had just given birth with it. Additionally, the mother dog had flea and tick issues.

The kids have sores from the scabies. The volunteers are going to treat the family and clean the house but they need help with the animals. Additionally they have some other animals in Las Cruces that need assistance but this is the pressing issue.

I take the five minute shower, put on jeans and shoes. As I walk to the front door the horn honks and there’s Donna and the women. We go to the clinic, pick up supplies. Slip leads. Ivermectin. Wormer. We don’t have enough flea and tick stuff and we’re low on ivermectin pills - what we use to treat dogs in the field, where we can’t really inject them. While I throw stuff in a bag Donna runs to the pulperia and gets bologna for the pills. I check the age requirements on the wormer, the ivermectin, for the older puppy.

We go to the vet pharmacy and pick up flea stuff, more ivermectin. I call Nick who tells me the ivermectin - which treats the sarna - is safe for the mother dog but she cannot have the flea medicine or antibiotics.

The Las Cruces volunteers are awesome - funny and smart and progressive. While we’re in the vet pharmacy they run into the regular pharmacy to buy a case of condoms for a sex ed/birth control class they’re giving to a women’s group they started.

We set out in the truck. I’d heard of Las Cruces - that it was incredibly poor, an off the map, forgotten place, but have never been there. You can hike to the Laguna through it on a path and I have some friends that have. But it’s actually bigger than I thought. We head down one road, cross onto another, bouncing and slamming through.

When we get to the house we see the older puppy immediately - he looks like a little Potato - bald and bloated with worms, scabby in places with a few stray hairs. The property looks like two small wooden buildings - home made - and what might be an outhouse. I don’t see any animals except chickens and some pigs. There’s a table type thing in front and I dump the bag of supplies on it while the volunteers talk with the woman.

We go into the house and the mother dog is on the ground with the puppies. She looks good, better than I expected, but I can’t see much because there’s no light. The babies are young enough that they don’t have their eyes open. I don’t know that they have electricity. They bring the mother dog out for me to look at. I see some ticks and slight hair loss but she’s not like the older puppy. We give her the sarna pill in meat. She eats it, runs back into her puppies.

Meanwhile the older, bald puppy has taken off down into the arroyo and is eating stuff down there. The two volunteers tried to collar him but he’s too nimble. We ask the kids to get him - he knows them, it’s easier for everyone. While one of the little boys goes after him we talk. The woman mentions there’s another dog in the house, they have a little black dog. We ask to see it. If the other dogs have sarna and the family has sarna, this one needs to be treated, too.

Donna goes in the house and throws down a little dog food. The black dog darts out, eats it, goes back under. A few minutes later one of the kids goes in and hauls it out from under the bed. It doesn’t have much hair loss but it has a ton of ticks, it’s gums are white. He puts it down. Before we can even touch it, the dog goes down on it’s side, convulses and goes still, eyes wide open. I touch it’s eyes. No response. It’s bladder and bowels release. I feel for a pulse and can’t find one. I try the eyes again.

It’s gone, Finn, Donna tells me. It’s dead. I try to find something glass to put in front of it’s mouth to see if there’s any breathing at all - it’s chest isn’t moving - but she’s right. The dog is gone.

I have seen probably literally thousands of animals die. Sad but true. I worked in shelters for years. I have euthanized a lot of animals. But I’m just totally shocked. The dog was fine a minute ago. Yes, it’s gums are bone white and there are enough ticks on it that it’s obviously anemic but I didn’t expect it to keel over and go down before we could even look at it. It wasn’t starving to death.

No matter how many things you have watched die, it’s not easy. Even humane euthanasia of animals in pain is not easy. Yes, you develop a black sense of humor and you learn how to deal with it but each death is a little tragedy. And here is one more.

No one picks up garbage down here - I don’t think there’s really any city services at all. They would just throw the body into the arroyo where other dogs and cats and pigs will wind up with the ticks and the scabies. Someone gets a bag and we put the body in the bag, put it in the back of Donna’s truck. I still have no idea what killed it so quickly - anemia? A sickness? - and it concerns me.

While we are dealing with this, they have caught the little puppy. We put it on the table. The woman tells me it’s six months old but it looks about eight weeks. It does have teeth, though, so I worm it, give it mange medicine. It will need to be treated for weeks and the volunteers agree to do it. With the kids, the scabies, and the mother dog the woman has too much on her plate.

So much on her plate, though, that she is willing to hand the puppy over to us. If I had known that I wouldn’t have medicated it here but still - she’s willing to let it go. We find a box in Donna’s car and put it in. It goes on the lap of Sam, one of the volunteers, on the front seat where it can get the air conditioning.

We go to another house, this one also with a nursing dog. These dogs are in much better shape - well fed, no real sign of sarna but some tick issues, the mother only has one puppy, the house is an actual house. One of the dogs has a wound and while I’m looking for the stuff to treat it a monsoon hits - the rain is a solid sheet. We have to get out before the dirt roads flood.

We leave promising to return. On the way back they’ve closed one of the dirt roads and we have to take another, less traversed one. The truck lurches so much my head hits the ceiling. Right as we get to the paved road the puppy decides the combination of medicine, box, dog food, whatever it ate in the arroyo and car ride is too much. With it’s head sticking out of the box it throws up all over Sam and the front seat of the car.

Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but laugh. Not because the other dog is dead, not because there’s so much that needs to be done - for that family, for that neighborhood, for this country, for everything - but because you are tired and drained and sad for the other dog and covered in dog barf and mud. And so we do. And we make dog barf jokes. And as we try to clean it up in the car we all wind up covered in it - the poor puppy. And we take the puppy back to the clinic - Donna has to run to another project - and we clean him up the best we can, get him some water and pedialyte, put him in a kennel with soft bedding.

When I return that night to do dinners he is sleeping peacefully. I put the other dogs in the clinic to let him out - I’m unsure of integrating him due to his size and how weak he is. At first he hesitates, hides in another kennel. I haul him out, put him in the yard. He wanders around for a bit looking scared. And then he picks up a branch and carries it around because he is, after all, just a puppy and like all puppies he wants to play or destroy. And as I do errands - cleaning out the kittens cage and feeding it, moving furniture on the patio for the dogs to have a dry place to sleep - I keep an eye on him. He uses the bathroom, checks out everything, his little bald tail starting to wag.

When I need to leave I put him back in his cage, release the other dogs. He doesn’t fuss or struggle. He has some water, digs into a bit of food.

Hang in little guy. Hang in.

***A quick side note - the mange puppy we brought back is, like Minnow, actually a female. But, like Minnow, I refer to all puppies as he. Shouldn’t make a huge difference, puppy is puppy. But worth noting that I always think of puppies as genderless and default to ‘he’. ***
****Another side note: linguistic one - sarna is not always mange. Here ‘sarna’ is used as the blanket term by Nicas whenever a dog has hair loss. Even if it’s a flea allergy or massive overinfestion or whatever - they call it sarna. And I have that habit, too. But I do believe the actual translation for it is mange but again, any skin problem becomes winds up getting called ‘sarna’. When I use it in the blog I usually do mean sarcoptic mange, which is incredibly common here. ****

For My Neighbors: A Little Alpo Goes A Long Way/Straight From The Horses Mouth

2008-06-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

Herein lies the deal - a lot of people look at this and read it. I have no idea who or why or how but thank you for reading, for donating, for sending me pictures and emails and everything else. But I don't know who, if anyone, is reading it here in Nica. I know that this blog wound up on 'Best of Granada' and 'Info About Nicaragua' websites. I have no goddamn idea how, but thank you. But because of this I assume some people here in Granada do check this occasionally. And maybe they're people who aren't on Donna's enormous mailing list. Thus I re-print this letter from Donna.

For my friends in the States and Canada that are having kittens over the quality of what we're feeding, please remember we feed A LOT of dogs. And dog food here is pretty pricey and you have three choices: two supermarket brands from the States and one that comes in an unmarked bag. And quite frankly anything the fact these animals are getting anything on a daily basis is an enormous step towards keeping them alive.

And now, the letter:

Hi Neighbors,

To get to the point quickly and painlessly, we need your help.

Our small but hardy volunteer group at Casa Lupita has been faithfully feeding homeless dogs daily...both at the clinic and on the streets....while searching for adoptive homes for them. We've had great luck these past few months. A number of dogs, and cats too, are living the good life after being brought to a great state of health and taken to live with people who love and respect them.

None of them were placed overnight. It took bathing, medication, good nutrition and a lot of TLC to bring each of them to their peaks. Once covered with mange, plagued with parasites, ticks and fleas, and just enough flesh to cover their weak bones, these dogs and cats were finally turned over to their new owners in good health and great dispositions.

We want to continue this practice for as long as we can. But we need you to be a part of it too. Each day we feed as many hungry dog and cats that present themselves. Each morning I drive into the lakefront's tourist center where five homeless dogs and three cats (two of them with litters) wait for their breakfast. Further down the road, two more wait for their idea of a doggy bowl of cheerios. Toni and Nico Edwardson, our community's Peace Corps volunteers, and Finn Dowling, a vet tech who has been volunteering with us for the past few months, have been caring for several street dogs in jeopardy as well as those kenneled at Casa Lupita awaiting adoption.

Here's where you come in. We need a steady supply of dog and cat food. These critters have discovered the joy of eating, and they want to continue as long as we''re able to provide them with it. If you can commit to a bag of dog or cat food each month, this would help the small population that we're feeding now as well as allow us to expand to include other hungry animals.

Please don't let the attitude "They're just dogs" prevail in our community. They are living beings that feel hunger and pain just as you and I do. It's easy to turn our heads the other way and not allow ourselves to see the hope in their eyes as they wait for a morsel of your food to fall to the ground for them. Our community can only become a better one with each homeless animal that is made well again and taken into someone's heart and home. But the first step is to help it find the state of health that it deserves.

One bag of food each month. It's a small gift that, in a way, you will be giving yourself.

Thanks so much. Please drop it off at Kathy's Pancake House. I'll pick it up there before Sandy serves it as a side dish with waffles.

Toward peace,

Donna

***And no, Donna is not a horse. I'm just using the expression. And yes, I had permission to reprint it***

The Calvary Arrives, The Lake and Barrio Dogs Get Done and I Contemplate My Future.

2008-06-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

Prelude - The Sound of One Hand Clapping.

Donna and I stop for food during our barrio runs. We’re sitting around waiting for our food and watching the people at the next table drink. There’s a ton of wasps around and they complain. The waiter comes back with a can of Raid, sprays the tables, drinks and all, and goes back to what he’s doing. The drinkers go on drinking. Donna and I watch this devoid of shock or anything.

Welcome to Nicaragua. Who wants some Raid with their beer?

I can’t say much about it. I’m wearing surgical scrubs with dubious stains on them, some of them fresh.

We’re not having a Big Talk but we are having a talk about what happens when I go, how she wound up here being the busiest woman in Central America, about her stint in Peace Corps, a bunch of things. She’s been out of town, I was sick and traveling, I haven’t really had any Donna Time as of late. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I go back in July, I tell her. Figure something out, I guess.

Then why, she asks, are you leaving? Why not just stay until you figure it out? She doesn’t ask me because I’m invaluable, because Casa Lupita can’t live without me, she asks because it makes sense: why go back to someplace you don’t like with no real plan and very few obligations?

I don’t have any sort of good answer for that. I sip my soda and think and watch the drinkers at the next table enjoy their Raid-Enhanced Victorias. And I wonder about the difference between being useful and hiding out. And I try to ignore the fact that the wasps are fascinated by my scrubs and I am bee allergic.

The Calvary Arrives.

I get the message Friday: It’s Donna, can you call me about some big stuff that’s going on tomorrow?

It turns out that we have a tour group coming to the clinic tomorrow and Sunday. Four Costa Rican vets and eighteen vet students from the US. They can do surgeries. They can do just about everything. And they want to work.

Immediately we set to scrambling, trying to line up some animals for them with no notice. We’ll get the lakefront ferals Donna feeds every morning - the crew of dogs that turn up with the Potato. I have to go do an injection for a friend that runs a place out at Laguna. I tell her - they have two new pups, one of which is sick and needs the injection, the other which is healthy. Bring them both, I tell her. The vets can look at the sick one and we can spay the healthy one.

I go back to the lab that’s done all my blood work where the woman mentioned she had cats she wanted fixed and tell her. One of my neighbors has a dog that got hit and lost the use of it’s leg. I talk to Lilly and she goes to hunt her down to see if the neighbor wants the vet to see it.

Toni, Donna and I go to clean the clinic top to bottom. We recruit Allen, my roommate to come with to move furniture to make extra surgery stations. We set up stations outside, in the schoolhouse itself.

Toni and Nick are out of town for the weekend so I’m at the clinic at 6 AM the next morning to get our dogs taken care of and out of the way and do some last minute stuff to get ready. At 8 AM the a tour bus pulls up and we are flooded, flooded, with vets and students.

We have a few animals that have come in - the first ones in are my friends from the Laguna. Kit turns up with all of her neighbors animals, ready to roll. She has another friend that has neighbors needing the vets services. She takes off in her truck with him. The vets start and the students start doing intake on the animals, taking pulses, tagging animals. We divide the students into groups - nine in the morning, nine in the afternoon. We just don’t have the room for all of them. Some are dispatched with Donna to go to the lakefront and grab the ferals.

I am running around frantically finding catheters, needle tips, things they need. I help the vets muzzle a snarling dog, do holds for a few injections. Donna turns back up with a full truck - they got everyone but the Potato who is still considered too iffy to do right now, health-wise. We wrangle those dogs into cages, muzzling some of them.

On intake two of the lake dogs are throwbacks - they just gave birth and can’t be fixed. Dr. Tom will be here in June and can do them. Donna drives them back and releases them.

Someone has dumped two tiny kittens at Lucy’s hotel - seriously tiny kittens. They get examined, started on milk replacer. Kit agrees to nursemaid them for the few weeks.

At times on Saturday we have some downtime. I love the Costa Rican vets - they’re younger, funny, bright. Gabby has black scrubs and a cool hat. Not fair - I want black scrubs. Francisco is a geography whiz and during a moment of downtime we play quiz by the big map in the school yard. Kiribati, I ask. He knows where it is. He know the wheres, I know the weird facts about the places. We have a geek-fest next to the surgery tables.

The students are sweet, smart and want to work. They pick ticks tirelessly, cup after cup after cup of them. They do incredibly thorough workups on the animals, checking pulses, prepping, shaving. These animals, one of them says, are the worst ones we’ve seen so far, shape wise. It makes sense. They’ve been to a few countries on this tour but Nicaragua is by far the poorest. We do a lot but it is exhausting.

I was supposed to go to a party on Friday night but I skipped it because I knew Saturday would be an early day. Saturday night is my friend Katherine’s going away party. I go home dirty and tired but determined to go. I lie down on my bed without showering, set my alarm for an hour. A quick nap, up, shower and go.

I wake up at eleven that night, call Katherine and apologize, go back to bed.

The next day it’s more of the same - at the clinic at 6 AM. Our dogs know something is up and they don’t want to eat. They like the students, seem to be waiting for them.

We have an issue in that we have run through lake dogs, all the people we called brought their animals in yesterday. They start with spaying the Minnow and we go back out to the lakefront. A family that owns a restaurant gives us their one dog, covered in ticks and full of parasites. They don’t want it fixed, just sanitized, de-ticked, wormed. They have another one, a little one, also covered in ticks and full of parasites but they won’t let it come with us. We’ll have to treat it there.

We get a sarna stray that hangs out down by the marina. Those go back and are put in the queue, the students doing their workups. Meanwhile word has hit the streets and people from the neighborhood are bringing in their animals.

Donna has a school down in one of the poorer barrios and we head down there, bringing some students with us. The barrio folks want help for their animals. We get a one month old puppy, infested with fleas and ticks and bald in patches from health issues, a big older dog to neuter, some other tick infested animals, some younger dogs to spay. Another small puppy, this one covered in sarna and with wounds. We fill the truck, put animals in the backseat of the truck with the students.

A woman from a different barrio is visiting her friends - she wants her animals done but has no car. We go back to the clinic, unload, and head out to her barrio. More animals. A female dog for spaying. A male dog with a festering wound on it’s hind end. We drop the lakefront tick dog back with it’s owner, armed with a syringe of anti-parasitical for the small dog they wouldn’t let us take. The vet student holds it on a table and I inject it there. It’s a little bastard of a dog and it whips, almost gets me. We’re not going to sit there and pull all the ticks off of it but it’s something.

Katherine’s host family brings in their dog, a pit bull that has lost the use of it’s back end. They get a big cart and bring it over from blocks away. Gabby breaks away from the table to look at it, see if there’s anything we can do. Their other dog has skin problems and we give them meds for that one as well.

Someone discovers Porsha has an ear infection. One of the students sets to her ears with antiseptic cleanser and fluid. Porsha being Porsha, she bears up like a champ.

It is a flood - there are dogs everywhere, all of our cages and crates are full. The vets and students are working in triple time, de-ticking, fixing, doing wound care. Usually we keep count - statistics - on what we do but now there’s no time, just dogs.

A few of the dogs have erlichia and are bleeders. The sarna stray from the lake is a difficult surgery. She cannot be re-released that day and will have to stay at the clinic for the night. She’s too feral for us to feel comfortable leaving her as she is - she will either kick up a huge fuss or hurt herself trying to escape - and the vets inject her with valium.

Some of the barrio dogs are ready to go and we take some students and go to return them. My Spanish blows but the one thing I can do reasonably spotlessly is post-surgery instructions. We also give typed instructions to everyone but there are a fair amount of people in these neighborhoods that can’t read so we go over everything verbally. Most people won’t admit they can’t read so everyone gets verbal and printed. Some of the barrio dogs had infections - the dog with the wound, one of the spays had an infected uterus. We distribute medicine, explain dosing. Claudio, a bilingual volunteer, wrote out dosing on the pre-printed post-surg instructions but we go over these as well.

By 5.30 we are left with two dogs waiting to be picked up. Amidst much cheek-kissing and hugging the vets and students leave, exhausted. Donna and I clean up some, feed our clinic dogs.

Katherine leaves tomorrow and it’s my last chance to say goodbye. We had made dinner plans but we run so late that I have to meet her for dinner in scrub pants and the tank top I had on under my top - I have no time to go home and change.

I get home that night and take an enormous shower, change my sheets. I crawl into a clean bed , scrubbed off and smelling good, exhausted, drained.

Toda esta bien. It’s all good. We did what we were supposed to do. And we did it well.

Some photo notes: all pics taken with my crappy plastic Nicaraguan digital. First pic: returning barrio dogs at the end of the day. Second: Francisco and another Costa Rican vet work on a barrio dog. Third: three of the vet students do an intake on one of the lake dogs we had to throw back. Fourth: Vet student holds up the dumped kittens while Donna looks on. Fifth: Gabby, another Costa Rican vet, sans black scrubs but with cool hat works on lake dog with vet student. Sixth: Tick infested puppy. I spared everyone the close-up disgusting ear shot but every black dot is, in fact, a tick. Seventh: Porsha gets her ears done. Eight: Lake dog recovering from anesthesia at the clinic. Ninth: Ticky puppy gets a snack post tick removal and bath. Ninth: the last of the lake dogs - the sarna infested one that had to the spend the night - bolts as it's released back at the lake.

Interluding: A Potential Re-Entry Issue/Next Time I'll Be Illegal

2008-06-01T20:27:00.000-07:00

***A quick prelude: why all the interludes lately? It comes back to you-can't-keep-all-of-the-people-happy-all-the-time-but-you-can-try. When I do write about the dogs and my work here I get emails asking where all the funny, ridiculous, day in the life of me crap is. When I do write about me, I get emails asking how the dogs are and what the clinic is doing. Since I write constantly anyways, balance is now the name of the game. I'm trying to interlude and clinic at semi-even interludes. Should you be of the where-are-the-dogs camp, rest assured that I just spent two days with four vets, eighteen vet students and a host of barrio animals and that entry is will be up in a few days.***

My visa was set to expire the 28th. Nicaragua only issues you ninety days and then you either have to leave the country and re-enter or you have to go get an extension on your visa. In theory it's cheaper to leave - you pay about $3 to get into the country via overland routes. But that doesn't take into account the cost and hassle of getting out of the country, staying out for 72 hours and then getting home again.

Go to the office in Managua, my roommate tells me. It's easy. In and out, $20, you're done. He's been here forever and keeps pushing his leaving date back so he's a good source for this sort of info. Plus he's also the one that knows every decent chicken lady in this city so he's trustworthy.

In one of those odd, only-in-Nicaragua twists the office is in a mall. In a dirty little American moment I was kind of excited about this - mall. In the states I hate malls. Here the idea was a wee bit intoxicating and exotic. Mall stores. Food courts. Bookstores. Wow.

Me being me I didn't leave for Managua until 10 AM. I thought this would be a fatal error on my part but it turns out the office, in another odd Nica twist, doesn't even open until noon. When I got there my heart sank. It was 10.45 and already there had to be fifty people lined up outside this office, waiting to get in.

Herein lies the bitch about Nicaragua: people here get up early. Really early. Like there was a band with a tuba practicing outside my window at 6.15 this morning early. It makes sense that my roommate, who works in Managua and always went after work, never would have encountered a line. By the time he got there most Nicas would have finished their day's obligations and gone home to sit in front of the house in rocking chairs and shoot the shit.
I, on the other hand, was stone cold screwed. And stuck in the mall for at least an hour.

Contrary to what I anticipated, I had a really visceral reaction to Metrocenter, the mall where the office was located: I wanted out. Malls here are for wealthy people and Metrocenter is for the wealthiest of the wealthy - the top 2% of the population. Most of the people walking around were dressed up in brand name clothes. There was a Benetton, a Radio Shack. And everything was enormously, stupidly, ridiculously expensive. I looked at a Spanish/English dictionary - I need one and this one was pretty basic but it would have worked. Price? $30. Like US. That's what a teacher in this country makes in a month.

I'm not one of those earnest, donate everything to charity, Mother Theresa types. I have some nice stuff. I insisted on bringing my own sheets and towels from the states. My underwear is nice and while a lot of my clothes are goodwill, I have a lot of brand name stuff. Even still something about this seemed obscene. I want this country to prosper. I want people to have access to not only things they need - like electricity - but things they want. But I was incredibly uncomfortable and wanted out. Out out out out. Like immediately.

Had I not been in imminent danger of being an illegal immigrant, I probably would have given in to the urge and bolted. But I was up a stump, really, so for an hour I wandered around, looking and thinking.

Aside from the class issues, I had other discomfort issues with the place. The lights were too bright. Everything was a little too clean, a little too well organized, a little too, well, un-Nicaraguan.

This could present a problem. When I first got back to the States last year we stopped at Costco on the way back so I could get some pictures printed. I hadn't been gone half as long as I have this time. My response to Costco was immediate: get me the hell out of here. It was almost overwhelming - the wealth of products, the size of the packages of everything, the whole experience.*

After over four months - because I am changing my ticket to get back the time I lost to being sick - what will it be like for me to return to the States? Will I immediately start plotting my escape back here, like I did the last two times I was home? I don't know. Maybe I need to spend more time in the Managua mall, begin some sort of gradual readjustment process. Eat some Burger King. Go to Curves. Seek out fluorescent lighting and air conditioning.**

I don't know.

The good thing about the whole experience, though, was that the actual immigration office was a little island of Nicaragua in the middle of fuck-all only knows what. It was hot. It was overcrowded and understaffed. It was full of arcane forms that you had to pay for, prior to even filling them out.

I got in line behind the million other people and was immediately confronted with the form selling guy who came at me with rapid fire Spanish. I didn't get him. At all. After a guy behind me translated, the form selling guy determined what I needed and sold it to me. Seeing as he only had one form he was selling to every single person I'm unsure as to why he needed to ask me what I was doing there.

There was a guy two people behind me in line - a US national. He was in his fifties and had left Nicaragua over thirty years ago. He was just there because he had fathered a son on a return visit a few years back and, with the consent of the kids mother, was trying to bring his son to the states. He helped me with the form which was confusing as hell. The first thing he told me was I didn't have to fill it all out. No one, he explained, has to fill in everything. Just a few things.

Bienvenidos a Nicaragua! The useless form! Of course!

The line was incredibly long, incredibly slow and completely Nicaraguan. Personal space? Who needs it? The woman behind me was literally standing on the backs of my feet, her substantial stomach brushing my back. She was very unhappy that I had allowed a good six inches between me and the woman in front of me and kept poking me in the back with a pen and telling me to move up, even when the line hadn't moved. I am not making this up - she kept digging a pen between my shoulder blades, into my back, into my kidneys, telling me to move. For two hours I stood in line and the whole time I kept getting the damn pen dug into me.

My American friend, who has spent two years and infinite hours in this office trying to get his son home, told me cheerfully "I know this is my country but I really hate some of these people.". I told him that while I always tried to be polite here I was really glad I didn't know the Spanish for 'Lady, stick that pen….".

When we finally got to the front of the line I noticed another desk and another line to the side. Shit. I hope, I told my new friend, this is a one-desk ordeal. He assured me it probably was.

He was wrong.

I gave the immigration guy my passport, copies of everything, the form. He looked everything over and asked how I afforded to be here six months a year. He also asked me what I was doing here. The minute I said 'soy voluntaria' it was over. He smiled at me, told me it wasn't a problem.. Then he worked out something on the calculator. 89 c. - about $4.50. Fantastic. I pulled the money out of my pocket and handed it to him. Oh no, that's without the office fee. He took the calculator back, typed some more and handed it back to me again - 420 c. - about $21.

I would have paid any amount of money at that point in time to get out of that office and out of that mall. I would have offered up a finger. $21? Still cheaper and less hassle than a few days in Costa Rica. Whatever. I paid him. He wrote up the obligatory Nicaraguan receipt, stamped, it handed to me and……didn't give me my passport back. He then pointed to the other desk. You need to go there, he tells me. She does the stamping.

This is quintessential Nica. It would have taken him thirty seconds to stamp the new visa in, write the date on it, hand me my passport. He knows how to use a stamp - he just stamped my receipt. But this is Nicaragua. They need to have a different stampy lady.

He took my passport over and stuck it on a pile of other passports and then indicated the other line. Once again I wound up next to pokey-pen-lady. The universe hates me.

Because this line was substantially shorter than the other one and this is the country where line-cutting is an art form, the stampy desk was besieged with people trying to dodge the big line.

Time and time again people would walk past everyone up to the stamp desk and ask a question. This would cause stamp lady to stop stamping, answer the question, and point them to the main line - a few minutes each person. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

Pen Lady, meanwhile, was remarkably mellow. I wanted to ask her where the damn pen was now or if she only busted that out for extranjeros who refused to ride piggy back on the stranger in front of them.

Finally after another god-knows-how-long I saw the stamp lady pick up my passport, look at it slowly, pick up the stamp. I started to walk toward the desk. She put both down and picked up the next one on the pile.

As I have said before, I try to be polite but after 2 ½ hours it was game over for me. I went up to the desk and pointed at my passport. Stamp. Please. She looked surprised but pulled it back out, stamped it and handed it to. Time required for actual stamping? Literally under ten seconds.

There were about ten other errands I had planned to run in Managua that day. Go to the big grocery store and try to find something resembling clif bars - I had found them in Costa Rica. Get a piece of pizza. Go to a really clean, really good tattoo shop there run by a guy who had trained in the states and just check it out.

Instead I ran out of Managua like the city was burning. I got out of the mall and jumped the first bus back to Granada that passed by. I didn't even wait for the good La UCA one - I piled into one of the little mini-van things that aren't any cheaper, are overcrowded and are miserable. I wound up sitting in the luggage area behind the drivers seat for 45 minutes, stuffed into this thing with eighteen of my closest friends. These are maybe made to hold ten people, eleven tops. I've never been so damn glad to sit on a luggage rack in my life. In all honesty I would have sat on the top of a chicken and goat express to get the hell out of there.***

* Everything in Nicaragua - and most of Central America - is sold in very small sizes. You don't buy a jar of spaghetti sauce, you buy a small bag of it. Milk comes in small bags. Granola comes in a what would be a single-serving size bag here. On the few items that do come in bigger sizes there's no price break for buying the bigger size. It's actually usually more. Buying eight ounces of cream cheese costs way more than twice what buying two four ounce containers would cost. Not only does this make no sense, in a country with a huge litter issue you would think they want to cut down on packaging.

** I actually hate Burger King. And I've never been in a Curves in my life. But both of these - as well as Quiznos, TGI Fridays. McDonalds - are available in Managua in the rich area. Very odd.

*** I've actually seen them do this - put people on top of chicken buses. On the Sunday after Semana Santa the packed buses leaving San Juan Del Sur were lurching down this unpaved road with people perched on the top of them, next to the bicycles and wooden baskets of plantains.

Taking The Show On The Road/Fighting The Good Fight Against All Reasonable Odds

2008-05-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

A Spay/Neuter Clinic At The End of The World.

Next month we leave for the Corn Islands. It’s a team of eleven of us, thus far - five vets - Dr. Tom and a bunch I‘ve never met and four techs - Toni, Nick, Kit and I. And Donna and Kit for back-up and because they're running this show. A multi-day, two island spay/neuter bonanza.

The Corn Islands are on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, two small, beautiful little Caribbean islands, mostly uninhabited with little tourism but a healthy diving/snorkeling industry. I’ve never been out there but the people I know who have - and the pictures I’ve seen - make it seem like a picture book paradise of white sandy beaches and blue ocean. To the best of my knowledge they’re accessible only by plane. The whole east coast of Nicaragua is very hard to get to - getting off the coast is even harder. You have to fly in on a small plane from Managua.

I think this is how it all began but I'm not entirely clear on it: a very cool couple from Colorado went out there to go diving and found a puppy, a sad, skinny, homeless puppy.* They found it a home with a restaurant owner out there but it was kind of an eye opening experience for them - they started to notice all the other skinny, homeless animals and wanted to help. So at great personal expense to themselves and with the aid of other ex-pats out and some elders out there, they got the ball rolling to do a spay neuter clinic. They found Donna and asked her if she knew any vets.

Field trip, kids.

While the couple and the people on the islands have been unfailingly generous - we have free housing, even a scuba/snorkel trip, we still have to cover all of our airfare. The two airlines which services the islands are not kickin’ down . And the airfare ain’t cheap. But with such a limited population of animals and an army of vets, imagine the impact we’ll have on the islands

We have a rare opportunity here to literally almost solve the starving spay population in a little known part of a third world country.

Damn.

I never flat-out ask for money and I won't again but I am now: this is not a cheap project and we need funds to do it. The potential end result project is unbelievable - we can almost literally fix the problem in one small place. But we need money. We need money for airfare, we need money for supplies. While the islanders have been unfailingly generous, they can only do so much. So please, hit the link to Building New Hope on the side of the blog and donate through PayPal. And send a note specifying that the money is for Casa Lupita. If you mention you heard about the project through my blog so much the better.

Here, I'll make it even easier for you: http://www.buildingnewhope.org/casa-lupita.html . You don't even have to go to my links site. Just go there, hit the paypal and help out.

And for the record the cool couple that started this whole project? They’re taking Porsha. Told you she got a good home.

And At The Other End of Nowhere, Another Clinic Run Essentially By An Army of One.

Twice in the past few months I’ve been out to Las Penitas, a little coastal town outside of Leon. Las Penitas is not a big tourist site for gringos - it barely merit’s a paragraph in most guidebooks. One of my roommates turned me on to it and I went out there twice when I had people visiting.

Las Penitas is the real Nicaragua. Yes, there are nice summer and weekend houses out there owned by rich Nicaraguans and a few ex-pat owned bars and hotels but there’s also the poorer houses, the ones with tin stapled to the roof. In 1992 a tsunami hit the town and took out a lot of the buildings. Some have never been replaced and the ruins just sit there. **

Both times I stayed at Barco De Oro, a little hotel on the inlet at the mouth of the river. It’s a beautiful spot - you can see the ocean and the river from the patio, the hammocks are plentiful, the food is decent, the staff is nice, the surf is a little rough but I’ve body boarded out there a few times. It’s just at cool place.

Sandrine, the French woman who owns it, is a huge animal person. She has two dogs of her own that live there - Luna and Mileu. Luna is ancient, an old gray creaky creature that genially drops on her back for belly rubs when you look at her. Mileu, a big one eyed pit/hound something, is everyone’s dog. He comes to the beach with you and guards your stuff while you’re in the water, tries to get you to throw sticks for him, accompanies you around town. It’s kind of a cool thing - a free rental beach dog. There’s other animals there - a few cats, some nasty parrots, some odd pigeon things. With the exception of the birds all are ex-animales de la calle - street animals - that Sandrine took in. It adds a nice vibe to the place - a peaceable kingdom.

Las Penitas has a deluge of street animals, particularly skinny dogs. Some of them kind of belong to someone but most are just sort of hanging about, waiting for a handout. A lot of the other restaurant owners will slingshot them or throw rocks to keep them away. Sandrine doesn’t. While she doesn’t welcome them into the hotel she does occasionally put food out for the super skinny ones and she turns a blind eye when tourists share their food with them. She has names for some of them, watches out for them if they get too skinny or too sick.

As far as I could see there are no vets in Las Penitas. It’s about as unlikely a place for a spay/neuter clinic as you can imagine. Granada has a tourist industry, an ex-pat population that has imported some ideas about animals. Las Penitas doesn’t. It’s just another Nicaraguan town with a lot of skinny stray animals.

Unlikely, yes, but it seems Sandrine pulled it off. She got vet students from the college in Leon to come out and do spays and neuters. The original idea was to do all the street animals but the first time they did it a bunch of people living in town brought their animals in and so they did those instead. Now she’s setting up other ones, not just for the street animals but for the owned animals that didn’t get done the first time. They need money - for anesthesia, for supplies. So do we. Badly. But in a country with so few animal welfare resources it would be a sin for me not to mention Sandrine and what she’s doing out there against all odds.

I don’t think she has a pay-pal button on her website or even any information about her clinics. There’s just some very low key fliers up at Barco Del Oro saying look, this is what we’re doing, if you can help please do. But she does have a website with information about her beautiful hotel and her email address is up there. And I know they need help, too. Some of the tourists give money, some of the turista bus drivers will occasionally drop some cash, too. But for the most part it’s an uphill battle in a little known part of the world that has a lot of other problems and no over-active bloggers constantly talking about it.

This is her website: http://www.barcadeoro.com/eng/index.html . If you find yourself in Nicaragua, stop by and see her. If you can help her with her clinic, please do. If you do web-design and can possibly help her set up a paypal button on her site for her clinic, drop her a line.

*Two things - if the small skinny puppy belonging to a restaurant owner sounds familiar it’s because it is, in fact, the Minnow. And Scot, if I’m getting the story wrong correct me here.

** See prior notes re: no one gives one tenth of a crap about Nicaragua. Did you know it had been hit by a tsunami? I didn’t.

****Some photo credits: I've never been to Corn Islands so I boosted the Corn Islands photos off of Kristen. She's a good egg, it's for a good cause, I don't think she'll care. The Las Penitas photos were mostly shot by K as well - my camera got boosted. In one Kyle, my old college roommate, throws a stick for Mileu, one of Sandrine's 'beach rental' dogs. Luna, the ancient dog, naps under a hammock. Final photo is a reciept for a donation to Sandrine's clinic.

More Interluding (Kind Of): Weight/More Fun With The Postal Service/Feeling Competent

2008-05-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

I bought myself a tee-shirt today. I never buy tee-shirts or tourist crap in general*. But this one is too delightful - and true - to pass up. It makes me happy. Seeing as my morning started with finding Fidel Castro eating a massacred songbird in my courtyard right after I got up, I really needed happy.

The Irish Girl Needs To Eat.

At least eight, probably closer to ten pounds. That’s what I lost during my week of fever. I lie on my back and look like a mountain range. All my clothes are baggy. When I was out the other night two people commented on how small my arms are. Not nice.

I am not a good Nicaraguan eater to begin with. Unlike some of my friends who have packed on the pounds here, I don’t like Nica food. I don’t like fried food. I don’t like things in milk-based sauce. My tolerance for beans and rice is only so high. The only things I do really well with are the plantains and these wicked potato ball things which override my objection to fried food and would give a cardiologist the vapors.

Oh and I like the salad. That’s how you know you’ve been here too long - you actually like the vinegary cole slaw type salad with chilies on it. But the salad is a useless item right now.

But I need to put some of this back on. Quickly. I had to bust out the belt for the first time since I got here.

And so I eat. I eat and eat and eat. I flag the bakery bike guys down whenever I cross their paths, getting big bags of pan dulce and fried doughy things. The anti-Atkins diet. I go to the European café and eat paninis and gelato. I sit on the corner with Katherine and suck down fried potato balls.** My roommate brings home hamburgers from Chicken Sandwich Family and I destroy them. When I go to the Chicken Lady I tell her to double down on the plantains. I can’t bring myself to do the mayonesa they throw on everything that even resembles a sandwich here but avocados? Extra please.

My usual diet of fruit all day during the heat and Chicken Lady for dinner goes out the window. I eat three meals a day, stomach aches be damned. I suck down the juice, all of which here is full of extra sugar. Nicaragua is set up for people who want to put weight on. Just not for me to put weight back on.

No avail.

In the states I would have already packed the pounds back on. Thai food. Sushi. Italian food. Here it’s a constant fight to find the few things I like eating. And I’m not a huge eater in the heat to begin with so I fight with myself. And I walk everywhere so I burn calories like a motherfucker. I spend the .60 and take cabs.

Today after a noodle salad at 11 AM I give up. The belt can hang around for a bit longer. I’ll deal with the mountain range and protruding hipbones. It’s going to have to come back organically. All the food in this heat is making me tired. I can’t deal with one more stomach ache, one more sugar high and crash.

Except for the potato balls. I’ll keep working the potato balls.

More Postal Fun.

I go to the post office yesterday. I know at least two packages were sent to me over a week ago and they should be here by now. I’ve long since given up on having people sending stuff to my actual address - I tell them to send them to the post office in Granada. The mail service here is never going to send me anything letting me know there’s a package for me anyways so maybe I can win points by not even expecting it anymore. Save them the step.

It’s gotten to the point where they know my name. I walk in and go directly to the back, where the packages are. There are packages piled everywhere - outgoing, incoming, all in big mixed pile. The ancient file cabinet bulges with envelopes. And this is the room I can see. I know there’s another hidden room back there - on several occasions they’ve pulled packages for me out of the secret room after swearing they don’t have them.

As usual there’s a million people working there, standing around. When I walk in, before I even say a word the guy starts shaking his head. He doesn’t look through any of the piles or the clipboard that has a partial inventory of what‘s come in.. He doesn’t even offer to look. What’s your name? He asks me in Spanish. Feeent? No packages today.

Finn. I tell him. Finnegan. Not Feent. I offer him my passport. He doesn’t take it.

He just keeps shaking his head sadly. He looks so sympathetic I almost forget that I am standing in a room full of un-inventoried packages, any one of which could be mine.

You live on Calle Santa Lucia, right?

I am famous. I am fucking famous in this post office now. They know where I live. I explain that I just had my friends send stuff to general delivery. So they don’t even have to worry about a notice. It should just come right there. No need to send a notice. I’ll come and pick it up. Nice and easy. No fuss, no muss. I just want my clif bars. Please. Just the clif bars and whatever other ridiculous things my friends have shoved into a box and spent small fortunes mailing to me.

More sad head shaking. A few of the other package people have come out of the secret room. I look at them hopefully. They’re shaking their heads, too.

On a few occasions they’ve just had me go through the packages in the front room. They don’t even offer me that option today. They just shake their heads sadly. No clif bars for you.

I don’t get it. My friend Kathy has gotten every piece of mail ever sent to her. Every piece of mail - every single one, letter, package, postcard - I’ve had to wrest from the maw of the postal service. And every time I find that it’s been sitting there for weeks while I’ve been waiting for it. I don’t know if they don’t like my name, my address, my predilection for receiving actual packages. I don’t know. Nothing has ever been opened or stolen. It’s just been, well, not delivered. Left to rot in the secret room until I reach a point of near desperation.

Posiblement Lunes, the man says hopefully. Regressa en Lunes. Maybe Monday. Come back on Monday.

Maybe they just really like me and enjoy having me around. I don’t know. I just want my damn mail.

Maybe Monday I’ll act like I might cry. That works sometimes.

Back in the Saddle Again.

Nick and Toni have been doing mornings and hence Minnow’s ivermectin injections since I’ve been sick. Now that I’m better they’ve kept it up - gotten into a schedule they kind of like. This weekend they’ve had guests so Katherine and I have been holding down the fort again. Not hard with only three dogs. Katherine comes at night with me, in the morning I go alone.

It’s been weeks since I’ve done an injection. Yesterday I have to do it by myself. Minnow is not happy but she cooperates. Something about the needle makes me feel like I’m really back at work. Not that pills in hot dogs, tick picking and meals aren’t work but this is what I know how to do. I’ve been injecting animals since I was 17 years old - vaccinating and microchipping and giving fluids and taking blood. I went through the euth cert process in Florida and Colorado to do IV‘s, IP‘s, everything. A sub-q ivermectin shot is nothing. But it makes me feel competent.***

Today I am dropping off a cat trap with Lucy on my way to the clinic. Lucy is a huge supporter of the clinic and an all around fabulous person. She owns a beautiful hotel, Bohemian Paradise, that I’ve been lucky enough to stay in. And she cares. She cares about the street animals, she cares about the environment, she cares about the women that make the soap they use in the hotel. If you ever come to Granada you need to stay at her place. Honestly - http://www.seecentralamerica.com/hotel-nicaragua/index.php .

And she cares about the roof cats. There’s about five ex-roof cats that live there now, lounging on the benches and hanging around the fountain. And she traps and neuters the ones that try to pop in.

When I’m dropping off the trap this morning there’s a lovely family from Tulsa staying there. I get to talking with them. This is Finn, Lucy introduces me, she’s with the animal clinic here. The family starts telling me about how they’re active with the shelters in Tulsa. They want to see the clinic, meet the dogs. I offer to bring them with me.

They come with me. I recruit the grandfather to hold Minnow while I do the injection. I show him my preferred hold - head over his shoulder, back legs braced. Minimum of force but no chance of her whipping around. He’s no Mandy but he holds like a pro. Minnow doesn’t whimper. It takes a split second. .4 cc’s and we’re done.

Is that it? He asks. Are you done?

That is it. I am done. But I scratch Minnow’s now-hairy little head and it feels good.

*That said order your rum and machetes now while I still have money. And while the tourist market in the Masaya does have taxidermied fighting cocks I am not trying to get one of those back into the states, no matter how much I love you. I’m sorry.

** I have, Katherine tells me at the clinic, been thinking about potato balls all day. She leaves in a week and a half and I just introduced her to the potato ball. I feel both good and bad about this. Good in that I had something useful to share with her. Bad in that I gave her a nasty jones a week before she leaves. And there ain’t no potato balls in Victoria.

What is a Potato Ball? A Potato Ball is proof that there is a higher power in the universe and occasionally it likes you. You take mashed potatoes and add about 50 lbs of butter and cheese. Like real cheese, not salty, rubbery Nica cheese. Then you make a softball out of it. Then you dip it in batter and boil it - literally boil it - in oil over an open fire. When someone orders one, you take the already deep fried potato ball and dump it back in the oil - a re-fry, essentially. Then you wrap it in a banana leaf and hand it to a gringa.

I realize this sounds absolutely repugnant. I really do. The first time my roommate showed me The Chicken Lady Who Also Has Potato Balls And Is Henceforth Known As The Potato Ball Lady I swore that was gross. Then I ate one. Don’t ask me why, I just did. And all it takes is one potato ball. It’s like heroin. Fried tacos, empanadas, gallo pinto - no thank you. But the Potato Ball, oh god the Potato Ball. I’ve come close to the point of tears on nights when the Potato Ball Lady has taken an unexpected evening off and I’ve had one of those days where I just need a fucking potato ball.

I don’t know what I’ll do without chicken ladies, potato balls and maduras.

*** One of the states - I can’t remember which - even gave me a certificate, frame-able, that I am euthanasia certified in that state. I remember finding that incredibly screwed up at the time. What exactly do you expect me to do with that? Put it on the wall next to my BA? And who does the calligraphy for the you-are-certified-to-kill-things certificates anyway? And for the love of god, why?

Interlude: A 3rd World Instruction Manual/Frustration/Chaos Theory/Has Anyone Fed Castro Today?

2008-05-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

How To Take A Bottled Water Shower: A Third World Primer.

They fooled us. Tuesday night they sent trucks through the streets with loudspeakers announcing a major water-out Wednesday from 6 AM to 6 PM. Tuesday night we all dutifully filled every reserve gallon and pitcher in the house. Allan filled his coffee maker. I banked gallons in my room. The kitchen was full of reserve gallons, liters, everything. Everyone took long showers that night.

Wednesday morning dawned rainy, gray - and with running water. All day.

Thursday, however, I go to brush my teeth and turn on the tap to hear that sickly air-gasping noise coming from the faucet.

Water-out. And the occasional rolling black-out to make things really fun.

To quote a bunch of pissed off Nicas, thank you Ortega.

I have to go for my ultrasound and exam today. I need a goddamn shower. A real shower. That is not going to happen. Thus I am reduced to the gallon shower. J., my roommate, swears that's one of those skills you develop in Nica - The Ability To Take A Decent Gallon Shower. It goes along with Learning To Enjoy The Cabbage Salad and Dealing With A Postal Service That Has No Interest Whatsoever In Mail.

For those of you who have never done it, this is how it works:

1) Take out little wash basin thing. Fill halfway with water. Wash face.

2) Use face-washing water to scrub feet. Your face is substantially cleaner than your feet. And if you're like most people here you washed your feet before you went to bed so they're pretty clean already. And to be perfectly honest you're not going to get zits on your feet. Unless you're some kind of freak with zitty feet. In which case that's going to happen gallon shower/face washing water be damned.

3) Give up on the idea of washing your hair. Braid it back or pin it back or whatever. Unless you're a guy with shaved head just give it up. You can drop a couple of gallons in the basin and try it if you're that desperate but you're just going to wind up with soapy hair and no water left for the rest of you. Take some measure of relief from the fact that water-outs rarely last more than twelve or fourteen hours and the rest of the city has unwashed hair as well.

4) Get in shower with one gallon jug of water and big ass two and a half gallon bottle of water.

Yes, there is more water under the sink. Tempting. But keep in mind that you probably will want to flush your toilet at some point during the day. And you will want water to brush your teeth again if this keeps up. Also get the reserve water in the kitchen out of your head. That is for cooking and cleaning. And just as you know exactly how many reserve gallons are in that kitchen, all your roommates do, too. Be a sport.

5) This is where it gets unpleasant. Get in shower. Dump part of gallon of water over body. No matter how hot it is, this is not nice. If you don't believe me get in your shower and dump a bucket of water over yourself. While I, like most people here, don't have hot water, there is a world of difference between cold water coming out of the shower and purposely dumping cold water on yourself. It's vaguely sadistic.

6) Before you have a chance to dry, grab soap and lather. Quickly. And keep in mind that any soap you put on you, you half about three gallons to get off.

7) Before soap has a chance to dry dump remainder of gallon over yourself. Hit critical parts first.

8) By now you're original gallon is out. Refill gallon from big ass jug.

9) Repeat process until all soap is gone. Dump water over self. Refill gallon. Dump more water over self.

10) Even though you are essentially clean, extra deodorant and lotion are called for. You are clean, it's entirely psychological but still. Most people here shower several times a day - quick rinse offs, real shower and all. You will not be doing this until the water is back on. Fuck-all only knows when that will occur. Load up, kids.

11) When you come home that night and the water is on do exactly what you shouldn't do when you live in a country with a horrible infrastructure that causes rolling water-outs: take a twenty five minute shower. Wash your hair. Shave your legs. Act like it is the last shower you will ever get in your life. Shower desperately, apocalyptically. Your roommates have just done the same thing, as have all your neighbors.

12) Promptly forget to refill all your reserve gallons so when the next unannounced water-out occurs you will be shit out of luck and forced to make sad cow-eyes at all your roommates under the hope that they will cough up a gallon or two. Or to cannibalize your expensive five gallon jug of drinking water. (Expensive being 28 c. - about $1.09 but everything is relative).

Frustration: The Never Ending Story.

I thought it was over today. I really did. I walked up Calzada, through Parque Central today sure that the Sick Phase would be done today. Today I would get the ultrasound, the rest of the lab work, one stop shopping, write it off, clean bill of health and life carries on.

Sometimes I forget where I live.

I have a new doctor today - a radiologist. In theory he'll check everything - do an ultrasound, run all the labs, poke and prod me a bit and release me to life as usual. Not going to happen.

First of all I go without a translator. I don't know why, I'm just sick of asking people for help, my Spanish - particularly medical Spanish* - is decent, though rusty. And I'm sick of having people, no matter how much I adore them and no matter how much they've saved my life, all up in my shit. I've always been private about my health and my relationships. It's a good time to return to that policy. No translators. And mi doctora speaks some English, knows my language limitations so I kind of assume this guy will as well.

He doesn't but he's patient with me and all the language is stuff I understand - rinones, kidneys, antibioticas, etc. Most medical stuff is the same in English and Spanish but with different accents. If I don't get something he reverses, uses simpler language, uses a few English words. I like him. My Spanish, mostly forgotten and neglected during me being sick, comes back, creaky and stiff. I remember words like 'tuve' - I had, 'tal vez' - maybe, 'espalda' - back, 'tengo mieda' - I am scared.

But he can only do an ultrasound. He can do that and give me the results but I have to go to a lab tomorrow for the lab work and bring everything back to mi doctora for the final results. I want to scream.

He is incredibly respectful, patient, thorough. The gel is cold on my stomach. He tells me everything he's doing it as he's doing it - I need to look at your stomach, so I'm going to move this down. I try to tell him that I was sick when I was younger, I understand what he's doing, I take no umbrage. Esta bien, he keeps repeating. Es normal, esta bien. It's good, it's normal.

When he's done he tells me there's no permanent damage to anything, everything looks good. Despite roasting my organs in that fever, they came out unscathed. I will remain sore for a few days but everything is fine. But, he tells me, I am not cleared without that lab work. And without la doctora looking everything over.

For the ultrasound and all his care and time I am charged the princely sum of 250 c. - about $12.50. I leave with a typed letter basically stating 'esta bien' and a copy of the pictures of my innards.

There are times when I have my shameless American moments. I want clean and well lit and well organized. I want policies that makes sense. I want my mail. I don't want to hear Shakira or reggaeton or Enrique Iglesias at ear splitting, fan shaking volume coming through my window. I don't want to be the national ambassador for tattooed gringa women and I'm sick of mean eyed older women and their assumptions.

Right now I want medical one stop shopping. I want this to be over.

Wait, Stop, Rewind: Chaos Theory.

Lotta Nicaraguan crap-talkin' going on in this blog right now.

I've had a couple of people out to visit me since I got here. One, when faced with the Mercado stated "this is not a city, this is fucking chaos".

It is chaos, compared to the States. The crush of people in the Mercado. The nonsensical nature of our one chain store. The million unlicensed street food vendors selling everything from cheese to tortillas to bags of sugary juice type beverages with straws stuck in them. The horse cart and car traffic jams near the hardware stores. The never ending honking, noise, people everywhere you look.

Chaos.

But it's also vitally, hopefully alive in a way no place in the States could ever be. Public space actually gets used - there's a million kids playing pick up games of soccer or break dancing in Parque Central. Sidewalks are for eating, talking, even dragging the TV out for your favorite show. The pharmacist I always go to plays guitar so sweetly and always kisses my cheek, makes me practice my Spanish with him even though he and his family all speak English. Esperanza on the corner keeps my favorite soda cold for me, puts aside pieces of sweet bread when the bakery drops it off. The girls on my street who yell 'Feeent!' and wave when they see me, or stop to talk, chattering away at me with me only getting half of what they're saying, holding my hands to look at my rings or my arms, kissing my cheek, being patient when I forget words. The chicken lady who laughs and smiles and wonders where I was when I was sick and always piles extra chiles and maduras on my banana leaf. The boy down the street in University, about my half my age, who has a sweet crush on me and likes to practice his English with me, afraid to meet my eyes when he talks to me. The endless religious ceremonies. The fireworks that go off every night for no reason except Nicas like to blow things up.

And the churches that have been here forever and will be here long after you or I are gone. And the live music that comes from every direction - kids drumming in the street on Calle Calzada outside the bars, bands in the gazebo in the Parque, my drunken neighbor singing his brains out to sad ranchero music.

It is chaos. And gray water runs down the street and there's a huge litter problem and it's nowhere near perfect. But it's flamboyant and silly and ridiculous and tacky and dirty. And you either get it or you don't. And if you do get it you keep coming back. Like my roommate Allen. Like my friend Katherine. Like a bunch of other people I know who keep getting pulled back in, their second third fourth fifth eight 'I just bought a house here but it's just to rent out or I'm keeping the lease on my place or how much does it cost to change a ticket' time.

I get it.

Castro Is In The Kitchen Eating A Taco.

Technically the kitten has had a name for a while. When J's friend was visiting he started calling it Puma, prompting me to refer to J. as Uncle J-J whenever the cat comes up. But no one really used the cat's name except for J. It was always 'the cat' or 'that little bastard who was eating food off the counter'.

Lilly has rounded up an assortment of people who might possibly want a cat and there's been two offers to take him. He just has to be neutered. But every day the cat is supposed to leave and every day the cat is still here.

For the past week we've had Ivan, a Cuban guy from Miami, staying at the house. Ivan is awesome. He's funny, he owns an isleta and some property out at the Laguna he refuses to develop because it just makes him happy to know it's there, undeveloped. In a few months he's going to grad school in Seattle and sometimes we talk about Seattle or Cuba or linguistics or evolution or other things.

One day when we are all sitting in the courtyard Ivan comments on the kitten.

It's like Castro, he says, every day someone says he will be gone but every day he is still here. Unpleasant, pushy, and still here.

Thus the kitten becomes Castro. Unlike Puma, the name sticks. Where is Castro? Castro is bugging the crap out of me - has anyone fed him today? Castro knocked the garbage over.

For some reason I find this hysterical.

* Because my Spanish was so bad the last time I was here, the only Spanish I picked up was at the clinic - hearing Kit and Nick and Toni and the vets talk about infection and antibiotics with people. Thus my first fluency in Spanish was the names of antibiotics and whatnot.

Coming Back/A Rapidly Expanding Porsha Problem/Pi Finds Himself In A Change Of Circumstances/Minnow Grows Hair/Heckled

2008-05-21T21:31:00.000-07:00

Coming Back

For the first time since I got sick I go out. Go for dinner and see a movie at a friend’s restaurant a few blocks up from my house. We go in a big group - Rita, Mae, Kathy who is in town for a few days prior to leaving for Mexico, Ivan from Cuba, a bunch of other people including some Nica women, friends of Mae and Rita, who find me hysterical - they keep tickling me and grabbing my arms to look. I adore them even though we can’t communicate in any sort of meaningful fashion.

It’s all Granada and I’m horrified to discover that everyone knows I was sick. People I don’t know well are coming up to me to see how I’m doing. This reeks of college, of being the sick kid, of coming back after Hodgkins to find the entire fucking city knew my business. Granada is a small town. My fever has become the thing of legend - the fact that I’m out and about and not brain damaged from it is commendable, I guess. I see Donna for the first time since she brought me to the hospital. I tell her I don’t remember most of that day. She tells me it’s not worth remembering.

Rita and Mae both volunteer with Building New Hope projects - in the schools. I know this isn’t what happened but I have this mental picture of Donna assigning me to them as their first project. I know she didn’t but it’s funny mental picture “don’t let the vet nurse die, we’re going to need her in a few weeks when we go to Corn Island”. But a Dutch woman from another project tells me there were daily updates about me on the circuit. There are comments about how tiny I’ve gotten - how much weight I lost in that one week. How odd.

It seems there are two camps - the ones that saw me or got the daily updates and are amazed to see me walking around - and the ones that only heard about it and are blasé about seeing me. Either way it’s overwhelming.

Our group is big and we take over the place. There is a spattering of activity, rearranging of tables, Thalia is busy as hell. I give Julio another of my dwindling American cigarette collection. I have one of the Nica woman’s toddler on my lap and she tickles me, too. I am infinitely tickle-able, apparently.

I duck out early and walk home. I’ve walked home from Thalia’s a million times - it’s a short walk. Tonight it seems to take forever. La Doctora was over last night and said I looked good, I haven’t had a fever in days, I have my ultrasounds and lab work tomorrow. But so much activity after such an enforced period of inactivity drains me.

A Rapidly Expanding Porsha Issue.

I’d like to pretend I’m back at work, I really would. In reality Katherine is at work and I am sitting on my ass on a stool watching Katherine work. Thank god for Katherine who found the clinic about a week before I went traveling, signed on for a week to cover some clinic shifts and found herself married to the clinic for weeks on end while I got better.

And thank God for Katherine in that I mentioned that she had just been through her own butt-shot odyssey in my last blog entry and now I’m posting a photo of her. Because I know she’ll take it in good humor that I get so many Canadian hits*, specifically BC hits, and her country people, should they recognize her from my blog, will know she got the old IM in the cheek, too. And that I once threatened to stab her in the thigh with a fork under the table in a restaraunt but that's another story altogether.

Not that the cheek injection is anything revolutionary - if you’ve ever got sick in Nicaragua and been treated here you’ve gotten the needle, I think. At least if you’ve been treated by Nicaraguans. As an interesting side note la doctora is supposed to stop by tonight. I’m really hoping she shows up sans needles.

We’ll start with Porsha. Here’s the good news: Porsha has a home, methinks. With like the best person ever. And not only does Porsha have such a good home, she has a good home with an hour away from me in Colorado. So I kind of hope that I’ll be able to see her again, maybe bring one of my dogs up to chew on her. I love that dog.

So now that we’re over the Find-Porsha-A-Home-Problem what is the new Porsha problem?

She’s fat. Like seriously fat. Like beyond chunky, into the realm of the if-she-was-a-person-she-might-need-to-buy-more-than-one-plane-ticket fat. None of us can figure out her metabolism and none of us can deny her food. Porsha loves food like pageant girls love Vaseline on their teeth. And in theory it’s very easy to say ‘well then feed her less’ but a lot less easy when confronted with Porsha’s ability to inhale an entire cup and a half of kibble in ten seconds and then look at you with her one eye full of don’t-you-remember-what-I-looked-like-at-the-Masaya-bus-terminal. You fly over here and cut her food you heartless bastards. And please don’t suggest some walks. Toni and Nick took her home for a few days and the walk over to the house was painful. Getting her on a leash and out the gate was a chore in and of itself. Porsha is no dope. She has seen life outside the clinic gates and really doesn’t feel the need to be gallivanting around the city. She gets some exercise as a chew toy for the Minnow but it doesn’t match up with her amazing food-vacuum skills.

But the problem is Porsha needs to be on a plane next month. Which means she needs to be able to fit in a crate, let alone on a plane. And if she doesn’t leave soon we’re going to have to butter her up with margarine or something to smoosh her fat ass into any sort of acceptable size dog kennel. Either that or see if the municipal zoo has something that they use to ship wild boar or something of that size that they’d be willing to donate to the cause.

Minnow Grows Hair

Again, I can take no credit for this. I was gallivanting around the country and then I was enjoying my tour of bloodstained third world hospitals and contemplating my ceiling for a week while Toni and Nick were dutifully injecting her daily. But the Minnow, who showed up completely bald, is beginning to have hair. Lots and lots of hair. I was actually shocked when I saw her for the first time yesterday. Nick had been saying for weeks she was getting fuzzy but I lacked perspective - she still looked bald to me.

But now she is blond. Patchy and blonde, yes. But blonde. As in the sort of blonde you have to have hair for others to realize you are blonde-blonde.

And while Ramon moved on to his new home, as did Sherman, she continues to chew on Porsha. In the absence of Ramon she’s even charmed Freda and she and Freda will chase each other around and chew on each other.

I don’t get the Minnow Ju-Ju when it comes to the other dogs. She has broken down even the hardest of hard cases. And while I always thought she was cute, she had a sweet face, I have to admit that now that she is hairy she is adorable. Adorable enough that she gets away with yanking off my flip-flop and running amuck with it. When we go back to the Corn Islands in June, Minnow will come too. She will be restored to her owner, back to her bed and her meals and the life to which she was accustomed. A little older, a little wiser, a lot hairier.

And Then There Was Pi

Who I have to assume Toni named after the Life of Pi, because she was reading it at the Laguna a few weeks back.

I don’t know anything about Pi, except I got an email that there was a nice older, homeless dog hanging around Nick and Toni’s with a touch of sarna and since we had room, they were considering bringing him in. Today Nick called and told me they brought him in.

Thus this older black street dog, with his scarred face, finds himself in a total change of circumstances. He seems dazed, a little stunned. Like most new street dogs (Porsha excluded) he doesn’t know what to make of the kibble. He is sweet and quiet and unassuming and prone to putting himself in a kennel and staying there. He seems relieved and a bit tired, like he’s happy for the safe place to sleep even if the food isn’t what he hoped it would be.

Aside from some patchiness in his fur and some scars on his face he seems to be in decent shape. A little itchy, a little thin. But now we have two that need homes - Freda remains unclaimed, quietly waiting as she has since before I got to Nicaragua. And Pi sleeps it off, brand new, still settling in.

A Word On Power, Heckling And My Ability To Cut Loose With Strings of Profanity

The heckling thing has come up a lot lately. Mae, who is staying at the house, is having a horrible time with it. My friend Kathy came back and she noted that Granada is the worst for it - the constant hissing and kissing noises, the endless comments. I have an advantage in that I am tattooed and that intimidates the hell out of Nica men. They make comments and hiss all the time but it’s over the minute I turn around. I don’t even need a ‘que vas?’ to make it stop.
I admit that I don’t notice it anymore. I notice when I walk around with my roommates or other men it doesn’t happen - there’s a blissful silence - but I’m so used to it that most of it bounces off of me anyways.

And most of it is innocuous to begin with anyways - almost more polite than anything else. I very rarely get the super aggressive noises, the intimidation tactics.

The street the clinic is on is lined with hecklers. They sit on the corner and play card games and hiss and make their little noises but for the most part they leave me alone. There is one prick, however, who obviously plays it like a little power game. He wasn’t bad before I left but in my absence he got horrible with Katherine - saying all sorts of crap. It made me angry that he honed in on her.

Tonight we are leaving the clinic on our bikes when he hisses at me “hey sweetheart can I come for a ride?’.

I don’t know why but I just turned around and unleashed a stream of obscenity on him the likes of which I haven’t for a while. I won’t even try to recreate it. It was completely thoughtless - my friend told me this little piece of shit had been scaring her and when he tried it with the two of us my inner Boston Irish came out. I was talking to Katherine at the time and just stopped, mid-sentence, unleashed on him and turned back to her without realizing I had done it.

Did you just….she asked me.

Oh my god, I think I did. We laugh about it for a second. I’ve busted out the ‘que vas?’ once or twice and on one occasion the ‘no me hodas’. I even once got into a pointless yelling match with a bunch of fourteen year old boys that my name was not ‘Taaaatttttuuuuuu’ or ‘Bicicleta’ or ‘Sweetheart’. That actually ended well with them apologizing and introducing themselves. But I’ve never just double barrel unloaded on anyone before like I did on that cretin.**

A few friends of mine as of late have had cretin issues that have driven them to finally say something. I’ve said it a million times - I really don’t believe there’s any harm meant by 99% of the heckling - I think it’s just cultural and that’s why I ignore it or even smile at the old men. But there are the idiots that use it to try to insult or play little power games with women. And they deserve comments like “You bet your ass that cigarette is rica” or whatever it was that my friend Corissa said to one of them that made me laugh and undoubtedly left the idiot stumbling over his own tongue and wondering what sort of tiny little blonde maelstromm just ran roughshod over his dumb ass.

We’ll see what happens with The Cretin tomorrow when we go back. He so much as opens his mouth and I’m going to start insulting his mother - the nuclear insult in Latin America.

Postscript: I go to the clinic alone tonight for the first time. The Cretin is sitting outside when I go to unlock my bike and leave. He opens his mouth and I whip my head around, glare at him. He looks at the ground. ‘Hola, senora’ he says politely.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

*Sheena is a goddess. A really damn mean one, but that’s the best kind. We adore Sheena. I’m speaking of myself as the collective ‘we’ but it’s true. I love Sheena and if you don’t that’s your problem and she probably hates your ass, too. And will tell you that straight to your face, too. For those of you that read her blog but have never met her: yes, she really is just like that. Wicked, ain’t it? And yes, she does have tattoos and yes, she was a punk rocker.

** ‘Que vas?’ roughly a not nice way of asking what someone is looking at. ‘No me hodas’ - don’t fuck with me.

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

2008-05-18T22:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Sick

2008-05-16T18:38:00.000-07:00

Part I: Fever Dreams

The first two days I sleep almost all the time. I dream a lot - deep, heavy, impersonal dreams. All of them are European in theme and all of them are vaguely unsettling in some way I can’t put my finger on.

In one it’s the late fifties/early sixties in some incredibly clean, boring Nordic city. My job is to be to the little girls voice in a series of car commercials - the fathers says something and I answer. But it’s not a little girl voice, it’s my voice and no one seems to notice. And the guy that plays the father - a jowly, heavy browed man, looks at me too seriously, like I am his daughter. The car commercials are in some language I don’t understand and I sit around a big microphone in a studio. I always feel uncomfortable, out of sorts.

In another one I am in Spain but not the pretty, picturesque parts of Spain. I am living in a crappy apartment complex in some suburb with a bunch of other traveler type people. No one has ever bothered to decorate, it has ugly carpeting. It’s time for me to leave and the bus is coming to take me to the airport but I haven’t packed. I don’t particularly like the place, don’t have any particular attachments to the people living there but the thought of packing seems overwhelming - I have a whole room full of stuff plus stuff in the bathroom. The bus pulls up out front and I am still staring at all of it. I keep staring at it as the bus honks, pulls away, leaves me there.

Every now and then I feel a small, cold hand on my ankle or forehead - one of my female roommates checking to see if my fever is going down at all or maybe I’m making some noise or something, I don’t know. My skin is so hot that I feel anything, any change of temperature on it will wake me up, stop the dreams. A breeze through my window, the kicking aside of a sheet, it all feels like ice on my skin. I press my lips together and they feel like they’re burning.

I don’t remember if I dreamt or not that first twenty four hours that I slept through, before they took me to the hospital. If I do I don’t remember them. But I was hotter still then.

Part II: How It Happened

And I’m skipping over the emotional parts of this story. It’s not the point.

I had been feeling a little warm, a little overtired for a few days. I wrote it off to not enough sleep, some emotion, a bit of a sunburn, the crazy heat that comes before the rainy season. It had rained the night before - it hasn’t since - and in the car on the ride back from Managua I fall asleep. I wake up when I get back to my house, pay the driver, go inside and lie down fully clothed on the bed and fall asleep. It is Sunday, around 11.30 in the morning.

When I wake up I am on fire, soaked with sweat, still in the same position. I look at my cell phone. It is Monday morning. Nothing seems clear, I feel like I’m drunk, in a fog but I also realize I am in trouble. I call around to try find my travelers insurance. I call my landlady to see if it ever showed up at her house. It hasn’t. I think I fall back asleep. This whole first day is a fever dream in and of itself. I’m sure I’m getting things out of order, out of sorts just in trying to retell it.

My landlady shows up with a thermometer. Apparently I look like hell. All I want is some water. She takes my temperature. It’s metric and when she translates it comes back at almost 105. Donna is coming with the truck, she tells me, we’re taking you to the hospital.

I feel terrible about this. Donna just got back into town Saturday night and I don’t want to be a hassle to anyone. You need, she tells me, to go. You’re really sick. Nothing seems very clear. I have trouble staying on my feet. Donna comes and we go to the hospital. It’s the free one. All open air except for the exam and hospital rooms. I find a bench in the shade and fall back asleep.
After a while they put me in a room, put me on fluids, take a bunch of samples. It’s a small room with three other beds, all full, bloodstains on the floor, rubber gloves in the corners. I am put in a chair with my IV. Please go, I beg Donna. I’ll call you when I know something. I watch the bag drain, try to sleep. I think the woman in the bed next to me is dying. People keep trying to talk to me in Spanish but I’m not lucid enough to understand it.

Eventually they move me to a bed. You’re almost done, they tell me. I call Donna. She comes back. While she is on the way they ask me something and don’t like the answer. They hook me up to another bag. When she gets here they tell I need the other bag, that I might not be leaving. I tell Donna I won’t stay here. There’s no fans or air conditioning, most of the beds don’t have sheets. My chills are horrible and I’m shivering. I keep asking for another sheet to use as a blanket. When they finally give me one it has dried blood on it. Whatever is in the bag is taking forever to go in and the needle hurts badly.

I know the restaurant has to open tonight and I tell Donna to leave again, I’ll call when the bag is done. She tells me she’ll send Lilly for me. I fall asleep again for a few hours and when I wake up the level in the bag hasn’t gone down at all.

I’ve had enough. I call Donna. Lilly is on her way. When she gets here we go over exit instructions, a handful of prescriptions. Your roommates are waiting to take care of you, Lilly tells me.

When I get home I immediately go to bed. Allen goes for my prescriptions. One of female roommates, a woman I barely knew who just moved in three days ago, notices the bag is leaking. John is out of town but she met one of his friends, a nurse. She calls the nurse who calls a doctor who shows up in fifteen minutes.

I like the doctora immediately. She turns up on a motorcycle, in her late twenties with a sweet smile, wearing heels. She looks at the bag. Your blood is congealed in it. That’s why nothing is moving, that’s why it hurts.

She and another roommate go to the farmacia on her moto. She comes back with some shots, other pills, the central American version of pedialyte. She uses the IV line to inject the drugs that were mixed in with the fluids and then disconnects the whole mess. She also gives me an intramuscular shot - a horrific, burning pain. She smiles sympathetically when my eyes water, when I whimper as the needle comes out.

For the next few days she comes over to do my injections, check on me. Yesterday she tells me my face has changed. Yesterday you looked like you were dead, she tells me, today your face, you look like you’re alive. As I take my injections she pats my back. You will be okay. Your fever has broken.

Part III: Cabin Fever/The Incredible Kindness of Near Strangers.

With the fever mostly broken and my lucidity restored I am bored, restless. Everyone looks out for me. Allen makes me rice. Mae picks me up things - water, more pedialyte, whatever. Rita checks on me, chides me when I talk on the phone too much, exert myself too much. While I’ve lived with Allen for months I barely know Mae or Rita. I am humbled by their kindness, their willingness to take care of me. The sickness has made me forget my mediocre Spanish and Mae and Rita prefer Spanish. Both them and the doctora are patient with my inability to speak anything but English. And I’m humbled by Allen’s concern, his constant assertions that I try to eat something.

Even still the stronger I feel the more being housebound wears on me. I read too much, squandering my few books. I spend too much time in my head. I watch BBC. I watch CSI. I spend too much time on the internet which has just gotten connected. Not being able to do anything for myself makes me insane.

Yesterday I go to the Pulperia for the first time. Rita walks over with me. I have never been so happy to buy orange juice in my life. I haven’t been out of the house since the hospital and the streets are so quiet - almost American. There’s been a big transit strike going on and I didn’t realize how silent the roads are without the million taxis, the few lorries, the odd bus or two. There’s just the odd private car and moto. The end of the dry season heat is overbearing and people are inside. It’s weird.

I walk back to the house - all 50 yards - by myself.

Today I go out by myself for the first time. There’s about twenty cabs operating legally in the city and I take one to the Mercado, go to the farmacia for myself, run some errands, make a few calls. After an hour and a half I’m ready to be back home - it’s hot, I’m tired - but it still feels good.

Now two hours I feel restless again. I take my meds, finish this, do some cleaning, contemplate a trip to the pulperia. I am bored out of my skull. Which is probably a good sign.

I am gearing back up. Tomorrow I’ll go to the clinic for a little bit, mostly to see the dogs and have a sandwich with a friend. By mid next week I should be back up to full speed.

*** A few notes: so what did happen to me? Tropical disease? Dirty third world country? No. Kidney infection. Same kind I’ve gotten in the states before. This one just got a little more out of hand because I was an idiot and didn’t take care of myself. Nicaragua is not going to make you sick. Just don’t be an ass and take care of yourself.

And will I get hepatitis from the hospital? No. My friends were there and I was lucid enough to know they were using a fresh needle they opened in front of me, a brand new bag of fluids. Yes, they need a maid but no, where it needed to be sterile it was. And my doctora is incredibly sterile - a fresh needle for every butt-shot. The Nicaraguan predilection for prescribing everything be administered via intramuscular shot, right in the cheek is a blog entry in and of itself. They never do that in the states. Here I was getting a bunch of them a day before I graduated down to just pills. And let me tell you people, they hurt like nothing you can imagine.

Particularly when, as my friend Katherine who has just been through who has just been through her own butt-shot odyssey notes, you have no ass.

And I’m very good about mentioning my roommates and Lilly and Donna helping me but it would be a sin to not mention David, my father, Pete, Karen, Kristen and my friends in Granada who offered anything at all, worried over me, sent me everything and kept me laughing, dealt with travel insurance nightmares and let me cry it out at times, even not so lucid times. Thank you. I love you.

And on she goes. ***

The Minnow Cometh & A Few Words On Ramon And His Ass Grabbing

2008-04-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back Donna got an email from a guy on the Corn Islands, on the east coast of Nicaragua. He was very interested in getting a spay/neuter blitz going out there as street dogs are a problem and no one is dealing with it. Super nice guy. Turns out he's from Colorado, too.

I'm not entirely sure of how this all happened but from what I understand he and his girlfriend went out there, found a puppy that started feeding and became aware of the problem out there. He found a nice home for the pup on the island and has been going out to the Corn Islands from the States once a month to work on setting up the spay/neuter blitz and see the pup.

The puppy, unfortunately, broke with demodectic mange. Demodex is nothin', mange wise. My dog, Seamus, had mange when he was younger and he occasionally will get a spot or two of it. Basically it's a mite that most dogs carry - it's passed through the mother. It's not contagious to other dogs. Most dogs will never have an outbreak of it. But if a dog is carrying a heavy load of it and there's some sort of immune system crash -ta-da, let there be demodectic mange.

Minnow, the pup, had a reaction to some flea control and broke with massive, monstrous demodex. Lost all her hair.

Our other dogs have had sarcoptic mange - scabies. Big, scary, contagious awful mange. Demodex, not being contagious, is the equivilent of the sniffles to us. No problem. But sarna - the spanish all-purpose word for mange - is a huge fear to Nicas here. And trying to explain that this is a different mange that is harmless and non-contagious is pointless. Minnow needed to get off the island before someone tried to poison her. Plus her owner on the island - the home the American found for her - has a restaraunt and a bald dog running around...yeah. No.

Until Minnow grows her hair back, an event that should hopefully coincide with the spay/neuter blitz on Corn Islands in June, she’s joined the herd.

The first few days she was a little unsure of this whole mess. Unlike the other dogs at the clinic, Minnow has a home, a bed, an owner. She was scared of the other dogs. She thought the food sucked. The daily ivermectin injections merited temper tantrums - squealing like we were axe murdering her.

But puppies are puppies and puppies, like elastic bands, stretch. First she liked Sherman. Sherman was okay. She would play with Sherman. Then maybe Tessa, our boarder who is about her size was alright, too. Maybe a little fun to chase around.

And then within three days she was being a royal pain in the ass to the other dogs, eating like a beast, tolerating the injections sans theatrics, chewing on my toes and stealing my bag if I put it down.

This is a good sign. And she’s getting fuzzy, too.
Oddly enough her best friend at the clinic is the one dog I fretted the most about her getting along with: Ramon. Ramon can be cranky and impatient with the puppy. Though he’s an enormous marshmallow, he has this fantastic guard dog act that scares the shit out of people passing the gate. He doesn’t like to play. Except with Minnow. They wrestle around like idiots, chase each other. She grabs his cheek and leads him around. He flops over on his back and paws at her.

Sadly, Ramon leaves on Saturday. Not sadly, really. He’s going to a good home. Godspeed, Ramon. But Minnow will miss him.

You have to give the little bald monster credit. I can see why the nice guy from Colorado and her owner on the Corn Islands are so enamored with her. She’s capable of charming the hell out of Ramon.

A side note: we are clearing out. Tessa leaves for Canada tomorrow. Ramon goes on Saturday. Freda has a possible placement on a butterfly farm. Still, however, Porsha and Sherman wait. Though Porsha is taking a few days off from clinic life and staying with Nick and Toni as she had a reaction to tick treatment. No, they can’t keep her - they have other street dogs they’ve adopted. But she’s taking a breather.

A sad side note: The question is not will other dogs move into their places, it’s which dogs. Nick found a half-dead puppy in the gutter that will be coming in. And there’s a cornocopia of other sick, sad, really-bad-at-being-street-dogs street dogs who are good clinic dog candidates. The question is not will but who and how do you even go about choosing?

A Few Words on Ramon

I’ve been having some wireless issues that make posting tough. In the past few weeks I’ve been able to spit out the odd update here and there but I realize the one dog I’ve kinda ignored is Ramon, originally Ticky. When I posted the picture of his ear I got a whole bunch of emails about how gross that was. Welcome to Nica Street Dogs 101. But poor Ramon is now famous only for having a really gross picture of his ears online.

The original idea behind Ramon was a catch, fix and release. He was doing okay on Calle Santa Lucia. He wasn't underweight. He had a touch of sarna when I first got here but I gave him three weeks worth of magic hot dogs - hot dogs with ivermectin pills in them - and that took care of that. Plus he seemed to be an old dog. He was always just sort of lying around by the pulperia, napping in front of my house.

And then there was the tick incident. I don't know how possible it is to spend eight hours ripping ticks off of a dog and not forge some sort of bond. The verdict came in: Ticky stayed. And he got a new name: Ramon.

Like pretty much every other dog here he popped positive for erlichia, a tick born illness easily treatable with antibiotics. We treated him. And with his ten thousand hitchhikers removed, he started to get his energy back. As he did we discovered a few things: he was a young, energetic dog once his entire circulatory system wasn't being used to power a small city of ticks. He was a little racist - he barked at Nica men. And he was kind of a pervert - he doesn't bite, perse, but he does like to grab your ass when you come in. Just a nip, but still.

The racism he got over. He actually wound up enamored with the school's quitador, a younger Nica guy, and would wait for him every night by the door. The perversion will probably always be an intergral part of who Ramon is. He knows better than to try it with me but pretty much everyone else gets a nice ass grab when they walk through the gate. Men, women, children, other dogs, doesn't matter. He's going for the butt.

I'll miss Ramon. Ass grabbing aside, there was a quiet, stoic side to him that reminded me of my old lab, Simon, who died a few years back at the age of eighteen. And he was a good guard dog. Aside from the signature butt-bite he never would hurt anyone but he was really good at raising a huge fuss if anyone was at the gate. Reassuring when I would stay at the clinic after dark.

Godspeed, Ramon. May life present you with an absence of ticks and an abundance of passing behinds to nip.

A Few Weeks of Ivermectin/How This Whole Thing Works/The Only White Prostitute..

2008-04-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

Anyone want to guess who this is? Anyone? Anyone?

This is The Potato after three weeks of ivermectin, antibiotics and regular food. And I cannot take any credit for this whatsoever - I was out gallavanting around the country while Donna was down at the lake taking care of him every morning. I just saw him for the first time in weeks a few days ago and I was dead shocked. All the scabbing is gone. He has hair. His ribs are no longer visible. He looks like a dog. Not much of a dog, true, but a dog. Holy crap.

He actually even has kind of a sweet face.

No he has not been brought back into the clinic and it's highly unlikely that he ever will be again. He's too feral. We can get close to feed him and to occasionally pat him but he has not forgotten his confinement at the clinic and makes damn sure that we get nowhere near him with anything like a slip lead. He doesn't growl, he just sort of skitters away.

Donna got him into sort of a routine where she goes down to the lakefront every morning at the ass-crack of dawn with a big bag of food and whatever meds he was on. The first few weeks she had to hunt him down, the infamous Spud Hunts, but eventually he realized we weren't trying to pull him back in and now he waits for her at the same spot every morning.

And now he brings friends. The little black and tan female he seems to always hang around with who just gets in rougher and rougher shape. She's started developing sarna as well so now she's on Ivermectin hot dogs as well. We're also going to put her on a once a day antibiotic to deal with the mystery cuts on her head. If anything she is schitzier, more nervous than The Potato himself. Despite being older and slower, she's good at dodging hands. Definitely not a candidate for being brought in which is good thing as we are way above capacity as it stands. As I said before, the idea behind Casa Lupita was never to be an animal shelter. But she'll be treated on the street.

There's also another dog, this one in pretty good shape, a really pretty little brindle and white thing. Sleek. Like the othere two she is feral to the core - she comes up for the food but you can't get a hand close to her. Which really is a shame because she's a beautiful dog. But unlike The Potato and his girlfriend, she is either younger or much better at street life and aside from being a little skinny is in good shape. When there's a vet around she's definitely a good candidate to be grabbed, fixed and re-released.

Aside from the three dogs there's a cat who hangs out and waits at the same spot for Donna, too. I didn't get any pictures of it but it's a hugely pregnant black calico. Nicaraguan animals kill me. In New Orleans after Katrina the hungry dogs just ate the available cats. Here they all sit around together and wait for the food truck to arrive. The cat belongs to someone at one of the restaraunts and just shows up because it seems to like dog food. It eats right near the dogs and no matter how many bowls the dogs eat - finishing one and waiting for Donna to pour more in - they never try to grab the cat's stuff. It's all very civilized.

A Few More Quick Notes On The Clinic.
It occured to me the other day that in my orgy of photo posting I've never really put up pictures of the clinic, what it looks like or how this whole thing works.

The clinic is one room in a school house. I guess at one time it was a music room but then they pulled out the stuff and put in an operating table and vet stuff, some cages were added last year. Prior to the existence of the actual clinic a few ex-pats had arranged a spay/neuter clinic here with a visiting vet and used someone's house for it.

The school house has a huge courtyard and when I was here last year there were three cement kennels in it. Since then three more have been added. The dogs very rarely use the kennels - they're primarily for the spay neuter clinic. But some of the dogs are locked up while school is in session. The rest of the time they live in the courtyard, some of them hanging out with the kids during school hours.

The way Nica schools work there's a huge break in the middle of the day. During that break I go in and let out the ones that are locked up, do morning food and meds, fill everything up. I then go back after school is out to let everyone out again, do their dinners and their meds, hang out with them, that sort of thing.

Inside the clinic itself we have an operating table, a little fridge, some shelving that acts as the pharmacy, a sink and counter, a bank of cat size cages that weren't here the last time I was here. Over time a lot of equipment has been brought in through some means or another - an anesthesia machine, all the surgical equiment, a pressure cooker that works as an autoclave. It's literally one tenth of the size of the operating room we had at the bloated, overfunded shelter that I used to work at. That said, when the doctor is in they put mats down on the floor for recovering dogs, set up every available inch of space and roll through surgeries at a rate even the most well funded, well set up clinic would have trouble matching. It's a machine.

When the actual surgery clinics are going on the school isn't open - aside from the two-stage school days here a lot of schools, including this one, aren't open on Friday. And literally every inch of courtyard and clinic space is maximized. The dog size crates we have are stacked outside in the shade. Dogs are tied out to posts in the shade or under trees prior to surgery. Twenty three animals in one day. Think about that.

Holy fuck.

Non-Animal Epilogue: The Only White Prostitute In Granada.

All the chicken ladies in my neighborhood seem to have closed up shop for the week. The closest one is the only one I make a point of never going to. Unlike the other chicken ladies, she's mean eyed and nasty, her food is always cold. I've never gotten sick off of her but she's always had some bitch issues.

Most of the other chicken ladies know me - if it wasn't for fruit, yogurt and chicken ladies I long since would have starved to death. They know my Spanish isn't great, they joke around with me, give me extra chili, are friendly. I might be an odd gringa but I'm sort of their odd gringa.

But the Chicken Bitch is different. It's actually a chicken family - an older woman, the mean-eyed younger woman, some guy, a few other people - all sitting out on the sidewalk with their grill and their table selling food.

Last night I am shit out of chicken lady options and go back to her. While she's putting my food in the banana leaves - I don't know how there's a goddamn banana tree around here left with any leaves on it from the chicken ladies and the vigaron ladies - the older woman starts talking.

People, my spanish isn't great but I do speak some. And the word for tattoo is the same in English as it is in Spanish. She's whispering - not quietly - to the boy and laughing but I'm picking up some of it - tattoo, dress, street.......whore. Whore. The word for whore is the same as the word for bitch, really, and I'm never anything but friendly so I'm pretty sure it's being used in the hooker context.

There's a million things I can think of to say but I don't say anything. It's fucking outrageous but getting into an argument with them won't do anything. I go home royally pissed off.

My roommate is helping me with my Spanish homework and I tell him about it. Don't let it get under your skin, he suggests. Just don't go back.

When my other roommate gets home I bitch at him about it. He's been here forever. He just shrugs. You know how this place is. It's a sidewalk culture. All they do is talk about other people. Everyone out there is talking about everyone else all the time. They all watch everything everybody does and talk about it. Besides, it's a weird cultural thing - they don't know you and most tattooed Nicaraguan women are prostitutes.

They really do think I'm a hooker. Honestly.

Wouldn't they think a hooker would have a better bicycle? And while I will cop to running around in sundresses and lipstick all the time I look way more like a librarian than a hooker.

Later the same roommate that tells me they probably do think I'm a hooker borrows my bike to go to the same chicken lady. I can't take offense because he lives off chicken lady food, too, and has shown me where all the good ones are. He offers to tell her that I'm not a prostitute. Don't bother, I tell him. Let them think what they want to think.

When he comes back he tells me they looked at him funny when he pulled up on my bike.

They probably think he's a man whore now.

The Gratuitous Use of Adorable Puppy Updates To Make You Read Other Semi Important Things

2008-04-19T18:34:00.000-07:00

It seems a little fucked up to chase an entry on the difficulty of placing Porsha due to her homeliness with a cute puppy entry. But I rest assured that yeah, you all know Porsha still needs a home. Badly. And some wonderful person in the States emailed me today and is raising money to defray the cost of shipping Porsha to the States if a home can be found for her there. So if you are at all interested in owning what might be the best dog in the world, please see my last entry. And email me. ASAP.

I generally dislike the word 'cute'. It's a banal word. But yes, the puppy is cute. No, the puppy is goddamn adorable. When you last saw him he was a little handful of black and white. Now he is an enormous speckled beast with a name: Sherman. Or first name Sherman, last name Tank.

We have no idea what could possibly have fathered Sherman. When he was just a wee little creepy crawly thing Boston Terrier, Pit Bull, Border Collie were all bandied about as potential parentage. After all Freda, his mother, is black and tan. And then he started to grow. And grow and grow and grow. And his fur went from flat black and white to speckled. So now all we can assume is that whatever Freda mated with was some sort of enormous speckled monster, a cattle dog on steroids, a dalmation large enough to devour a small city. We are clueless.

In America puppies start on their mothers milk and then are gradually weaned over. First you make a mush with some wet food and puppy food, then gradually you make it more solid, then you feed just puppy food until they graduate to dog food.

This is not the way these things work in Nicaragua. One day Sherman was nursing, the next day he bellied up to Freda's bowl, stuck his nose in and started eating dog food. He kept occasionally nursing off of her for a while but for the most part he just up and decided to eat dog food one morning. And now he does. He eats his weight in dog food every day. He's gotten so bad that Freda started hoarding food to keep him from eating everything so now they have to have seperate bowls. This would be easier if we had enough bowls. Instead he eats off a plate. Until he finishes his plate, then he tries to eat Freda's food. And if that doesn't work he takes off with the empty plate forcing me to chase him around the yard to retrieve it. For a five week old puppy that wobbles around like a drunk after happy hour the little bastard can move.

I would feed him in the bowl and give Freda the plate but Sherman is really big on up-ending things onto himself. Water buckets, dog food bowls, garbage cans, whatever. And he's a little too short for a real bowl yet.

This brings us to a non-puppy related interlude - and do not worry people, the puppy porn will continue after this brief non-puppy interlude: we are not an animal shelter. We are not set up to be an animal shelter. Casa Lupita, the clinic, is one room in a school house with some cages built into the wall outside. The original idea was for it to be used by visiting vets to do spays and neuters. Maybe hand out invermectin tablets to the street dogs with sarna when there was a vet tech or someone around to do it. The idea was never to accumulate a collection of these dogs, let alone have a dog give birth there.

With spaying the street dogs, it should be catch and fix and release. Or treat on the street and bring in to fix and release. But some of them just cannot just be caught and released.

First there was a dog so sick and tame it would not have survived treatment on the street. That was Scabby. I believe he was the first one though I could be wrong. He lived at the clinic last year when I was here while we treated him for mange, severe malnutrion and a bunch of other infections. But being there makes them too used to people to be effective street dogs. And most of them sucked at street life anyway which is how they wound up so critically ill. But living at the clinic they lose the instincts that keep them alive out there. Scabby - now BB - wound up being adopted by a wonderful woman, an ex-pat who treats him like a king. And he is a beautiful dog now.

Since then other similar cases have arisen. The criterion are always the same - the dog is very sick, incredibly tame and needs more critical care than can be given on the street. But we are not set up to do this. At most we can handle one or two of these dogs, daily care wise. Now we have five counting Sherman with one more boarding dog on the way. And this doesn't even take into account finding them homes in a country overrun with street dogs where anyone can find themselves a puppy.

But now back to our friend The Tank. Aside from his abrupt decision to eat dog food, he's also scorned any attempts to make him puppy-size water bowls. We made him one out of a cut off soda bottle and he up-ended it and then chewed it up. We gave him water in a smaller bowl and he stepped in it, played in it, and then up-ended that on himself as well. If the big dogs drink out of the big bucket, then Sherman will drink out of the bucket, too. Come hell or high water.

Very high water.

I have to check the bucket a few times a day to make sure the level is high enough that he can get his face far enough in to get water. Nicaragua is not a cold country - everything here needs extra water when the temperature climbs into the nineties. I also have to make sure that it's heavy enough that cannot upend it on himself which he has done numerous times. This is delightful to watch but not terribly good for keeping everyone else hydrated.

And sometimes because he is a puppy and hence an instrument of mass destruction he needs to try to eat the bucket. Just because. Luckily metal, unlike my toes, shoelaces, Porsha's ears, and the garbage, is completely immune to his pointy little puppy jaws.

There is an odd juxtaposition about having Sherman at the clinic. Yes, there have been other puppies there. Remember Tyson, the pup we pulled out of the ditch the first day I was here? Puppies have come through. But unlike the other puppies Sherman has never spent a day of his life on the streets. While the other dogs have had to forage for food, dodge taxis, avoid being poisoned, Sherman has always enjoyed the security of regular meals and a protected place to stay. I'm sure he'll grow up somewhat fucked up and in need of a doggy therapist - an only child raised by a horde of mange ridden and tick infested half dead street dogs in recovery - but he has lived a life of relative luxury and safety. He's sort of like a baby born in a drug rehab in a bad neighborhood. Maybe the other ones tell him stories - if dogs can do such things, which I doubt - but he doesn't know what it's like out there. And it's pretty unlikely that he ever will. Yes, he is already the size of a tractor but he is still a puppy. And a puppy under the guardianship of people who will insure that he winds up with a nice family.

Even if I do have to fish him out of the garbage sometimes.

But the other dogs, even cranky Ramon and timid Tessa, treat him like their own. Porsha lets him chew on her ears and pull her tail. Ramon will occasionally growl if he's being a little too mouthy but the other dogs look out for him, take care of him. And god forbid something does happen to him that elicits a whimper - I step on him, he gets his paw stuck somewhere - all four dogs come flying over to make sure no one is messing with their puppy.

Though Freda does sometimes kick his ass when he needs it. But she's his mom. These things are allowed. And it's kinda fun to watch. Particularly after he just finished chewing my toes to shreds.

***A quick note on rehoming these dogs: I can't stress enough what frickin' rock stars Nick, Toni, Kit, et al are. Because of them a bunch of these dogs that had no chances in hell before now have homes. Tyson and others have moved out to Laguna, to neighbors of Kit's. Toni and Nick have worked the hell out of their Peace Corps network to place others like Quixote and Tripod. I've said it before - I show up for a bit and do my thing, work, but I'm the one who has the time to write the stories. The real heroes are the ones that are here all the time.***

A brief non-animal related interlude: The Best Heckling Ever.

Like most Americans without a great grasp of Spanish I have a tendency to invent Spanglish when I don't know the world for something - tack an 'o' or an 'ina' on to the end of an English word and assume that people know what I'm talking about.

I always assumed that this particular form of Spanglish was only spoken by native English speakers. Today I am in the Mercado in Masaya buying a new bathing suit when I walk by a group of taxistas - cab drivers. I'm not wearing a damn bathing suit, just a sundress but it doesn't matter what you're wearing, heckling is going to occur. There are the usual whistles and hoots and hissing, a 'you are booteeful' and then one of them says 'Holy Crapp-o, las piernas." Piernas being legs, though I'm probably butchering the spelling on that.

But Holy Crapp-o. Crapp-o. I had a little Holden Caulfield moment right there and that just killed me. I started laughing which embarrassed the hell out of the poor guy.

Holy Crapp-o.

An Ugly Dog Problem, A Boarder Joins The Hoard and a Few Updates.

2008-04-17T18:55:00.000-07:00

We have a black and tan dog problem. We now have five dogs at the clinic - Freda, Porsha, Ticky (who is now Ramon), the puppy, and now a tiny little timid thing named Tessa who is only boarding with us until she's fat enough to fly to the states.

Of the five of them Porsha, Freda and Tessa are all black and tan. It looks like a goddamn Guinness convention in the yard. Black and tans every which way. Despite being familiar with all of them I sometimes have to check for the presence of an eye or a set of larger ears before I start calling them by name.

Which brings me to a bigger problem: The Porsha Issue.
Tessa already has a home. Freda is unavailable for adoption until the puppy is old enough to be on it's own. But Porsha, sweet, happy, beloved Porsha, could go at any time. She's ready to leave. She's more than ready to leave - she needs to leave. While most clinic dogs get sick of clinic life, dislike the chaos of the kids at the school, balk at the confinement of the yard, Porsha loves clinic life. If we offered her a lease for her kennel there she would sign it. In a heartbeat.

Which leads us to Porsha's biggest problem: She is the best dog in the world. She loves other dogs. She loves kids. She's good with cats. She's so mellow that she's the only dog allowed in the clinic on spay/neuter days - she just sprawls out and keeps an eye on the recovering dogs. She breaks up fights between other clinic dogs. When the puppy chews on her ears she just wags her little half tail. When Quixote bit her so badly she needed antibiotics she refused to fight back. Of all the dogs, she has had the most surgeries and the most invasive surgeries: she was spayed, what was left of the eye was removed, her rear dewclaws were taken off. Later there was a problem with the eye removal and she had to have another surgery. She has taken all of these in amazingly good spirits. She wags her tail during injections. Her body also bears the greatest signs of abuse - a scar around her neck where a cord grew into her skin. A punctured eye. None of it has effected her goodwill, her good nature, her trust in the universe. She plays with the puppy while you trim her nails. She is the perfect goddamn dog.

So where is the problem exactly? The problem is that Porsha is ugly.

We think she's beautiful but to other people she is homely, unsightly. In the states a medium sized non-descript black and tan dog is a tough enough sell in a shelter. Add in the missing eye, the hairless ears (which might still grow hair, all is possible), the scar around her neck, the fact that her hair that did grow back in came in grey and it's impossible not to see her through the eyes of other people: she is an ugly dog.

And she is not in a shelter in the states, she's in a clinic in Nicaragua. To get her to a home in the States or Canada would cost hundreds of dollars. It's doable, it's been done before. It will be done again shortly with Tessa, our sad little boarder who was lucky enough to have a Canadian find her on the streets and fall in love with her.

To be perfectly honest, all of us want Porsha to go to a home in the States or Canada. We are all in love with this dog, her ridiculous grin, her unbelievable tolerance for anything, her absolute passion for food that has resulted in her not only being an ugly dog but also kind of a portly ugly dog.

Porsha needs a porch to lie out on, a sofa to crash on, some kids to play with, maybe another dog to chase her around sometimes, a few trips to the dog park. She deserves these things. Not that the other dogs don't but Porsha is, well, special. Different. She also needs someone who will understand that prior to coming to live at the clinic she inhabited another universe - a harder, crueler universe. It's highly likely that Porsha has never seen a sofa in her life or laid out on a porch. It's a certainty that she's never been to a dog park.

Cultural differences being what they are, trying to find the kind of home for her that we would like her to have is near impossible.

Toni and I were lamenting over her the other day. The dog that will be the hardest to adopt out is the one that we will be the pickiest about finding a home for. And it's all because of one simple problem: Porsha will always be wonderful but she will never be beautiful. At least not in any sort of Dog Fancy, Westminster sort of way.

The Boarder.

Look, it's another black and tan female dog! What are the chances? I'm not entirely sure where exactly Tessa came from or how she won the Nica Street Dog Lotto but she's only with us for a few weeks. Apparently a Canadian woman found her on the streets and fell for her. She's too underweight and sickly to get a health certificate now so she's staying with us until she's well enough to travel.

She seems like a lovely dog, if a little timid. Unfortunately, though, the clinic dogs all have pretty strong personalities so poor Tessa comes off about as interesting as a dishrag. I'm sure once I get to know her and she relaxes some she will become as endearing as the rest of the lot but thus far I can't think of much to say about her. She likes to lie around. I have her on the anti-Atkins diet - she gets kibble loaded with pasta to try to throw some weight on her but she's not a good eater. She trembles and throws herself onto her back when you scratch her behind the ears. She's astute enough to realize that Freda hates every other dog until she gets used to them and she stays out of her way. That said, yes. We have a boarder.

Apparently it's becoming known that we are a safe place for these dogs. Next week we'll have another one coming in. We don't really have the room but it's just another short termer, a dog from the Corn Islands named Minnow who needs to hang out and recover from some mange and other issues before moving on to a home they already have lined up. Do we have room? Not really. Resources? No, not terribly. It's very hand to mouth here. But we'll make it work. We always do.

Some Surgery Updates.

They did a bunch of clinics while I was out gallavanting around and slammed through a ton of animals - twenty three in one day. I think they did surgeries for three or four of the seven days that Dr. Tom was here. Crazy. What makes it even more amazing was that it was cancer week: a lot of the dogs that were coming in had tumors, a result of venereal diseases they pick up on the streets. So not only were they doing the spays and neuters and removing the tumours they were adminstering doses of chemo. The cancers won't kill the dogs now that they're removed. They could use more chemo but it's pricey, hard to adminster to dogs owned by people who can't afford a regular trip to the vet. The one dose they do get should keep them well enough. But Tom, Kit, Nick, Toni - all of them - are goddamn heroes, at the table for hours a day.

They also went and got Lolo, the dog with the broken jaw. It is still alive. Unfortunately, due to equipment limitations repairing the jaw was impossible but he was able to work with it a little, make it more comfortable, make eating a little easier. Lolo will never have a normal mouth but he will, and does, survive. And his family continues to care for him.

In between my trips I went in for a few hours one day, cleaned some instruments, did some shaving. But they worked twelve and fourteen hour days that week to make it happen.

Right after I did get back we had a different vet, Dr. Troy, for one day. I got back on a Thursday and was expecting a Saturday surgery clinic. In the absence of a vet we function primarily as a very small shelter and do some work with dogs on the streets themselves. But we were going to have a vet and thus the ability to do some surgeries. So the word was put out on the street: Bring animals on Saturday. We can operate.

Woopsy. Date confusion. We actually had Dr. Troy on Friday. Thus Friday morning finds us all set up for surgery with no surgeries to be done. Screw.

We paid the neighbors 100 cords - about $5 - to let us fix their dogs. It's a shame we did have to pay them but they keep cranking out puppies and well, particularly in the poorer communities it's hard to make inroads into the prevailing attitudes towards animals and sterilizing. Thus we bribe.d. Not as a habit, not as a matter of course, just this once. But we did.

That's two.

At eight AM I find myself driving around with Nick, Donna and Jeff the Farrier (more on him in later entries - what a cool guy) trolling for animals to fix. We drop Jeff off at the carriage owner's union and one of the drivers says he has a dog we can fix. After we set Jeff up we take the guy back down to his barrio to pick up the dog. While we're there his friends and neighbors come out with other animals for us - another puppy. A cat. We load the back of the truck. On the way back to the clinic we pick up a dog at the abandoned hospital. Apparently the dog has been living there for years and the police that guard the place take amazing care of it - she is fat and happy. But they can't control the fact that she cranks out a litter every year. They had actually approached Donna or Nick in the past about getting her fixed. We toss her in the back, too, and head back to the clinic with full crates and a cat in a pillowcase.

Another woman shows up with another cat. All in all we do eight or nine surgeries. Dr. Troy is awesome - careful, conscientious. Eight or nine is not a ton but it's something. And here anything is something fantastical.

***A future note - I am getting caught up on my blogging so I should be churning out for the next few days. And I know what the people want and so yes, puppy updates and pictures coming tomorrow as well as the Progress of the Potato and a note on Jeff, who actually just might be the most popular farrier in the world right now. Or at least the Americas.***

Interlude: The Story That No One Will Believe/Zen & The Art of Pali

2008-04-12T20:34:00.000-07:00

Pre-Prelude: Blogger is having some wacky formatting issues so I've tried to fix the paragraph issue about 20 times and add more photos to no avail. Screw it. There's some funky spots that should have paragraphs and did have paragraphs but blogger robbed me of them. And the Toilet Terror photo won't post. I'll have worked this out next time but as most of the people who read this do so for the clinic stuff - and this is not a clinic entry - I'm not going to lose my head over it.

Prelude: Pointless Nothingness.

I am trying to read La Prensa, the Nicaraguan newspaper, in Spanish. Humbling. The only things I can really read are the gory car accident stories. Luckily they love gory car accident articles here - photos of dead bodies and what not. Lesiones gravados means grave injuries. Muerte means dead. These get used a lot in the gory car accident genre. I can't speak enough spanish to buy a shaker of pepper in the grocery store but I know how to describe someone being disemboweled by a steering wheel.

If it wasn't for comics and the unquenchable thirst Central American news agencies have for reporting on overturned buses and dismembered taxi drivers I wouldn't understand a damn thing.

I try to follow the politics but am forced to resort to the Nica Times, the English language newspaper, to follow the whole Ortega/property rights disputes/ASLN vs ALN thing. But I get all of my gory car accident and Far Side from the spanish language paper. Go me.

The Coincidence I Wouldn't Have Believed Had It Not Happened To Me.

Okay, so here is the odd story of the week: Last week I was travelling around with my friend Kristen who visited from the States. We went to Leon where my camera got boosted (see last post re: karma really needs to bite someone in the ass) and hung out there for a night. A lot of people love Leon but we thought it was hot, dusty, and overrated. Lot of cool revolutionary murals, a few left over bullet holes in buildings, some interesting history but hot and charmless.

After a few hours of dragging through the city we decided to do a quiet dinner, go back to our room and then head to the beach in the morning for a few days. The pizza place we were going to go to looked gross so at the last minute we switch gears and go to this restaraunt over by all the hostels and the college. While we're waiting the fifteen years for our food to arrive (Bienvenidos a Nicaragua! Order an hour before you want to eat!) this Nica girl comes over and starts talking to us.

This is a very odd little interlude and one that I'll mostly pass over. Basically she has tattoos which is unheard of here. The idea of tattooed women is akin to the idea of two headed cows or food that comes within an hour of being ordered. Kristen has witnessed the Finn-gets-camera-phone-photo-ed on public transport phenomenon. But she saw my tattoos and came over to speak to us. Next thing we know she and all of her friends are at our table, there's some bad Spanglish going on, they speak a little English, my bad Spanish, my attempting to translate for Kristen. They're with a ton of other university students and our table is now full and we are speaking very loudly.

Out of nowhere I hear an American voice behind me. You are, the voice said, from Olympia, Washington, aren't you?

I turn around to see a face so devastatingly familiar it kills me that it takes me a second to place it. It's my old roommate from Olympia, Kyle. For six months I shared a bathroom with this man, spent hours talking to him, watched him moon, Charlie Brown style, over the cute Chinese girl across the street. I lost track of him about three months before I left Oly. After he moved out I would run into him every now and again and we would hang out but then I left without seeing him and yeah, just sort of fell out of touch.

Until I run into him in a restaraunt in Leon, Nicaragua.

He sits down with us and we reminisce about the old times, he tells Kristen some stories - In Which Finn Assisinates The Kitchen Rat With A Pellet Gun, In Which He Scares The Shit Out Of Me So Badly I Throw A Chair At Him Because I Think He's An Intruder. I tell some Kyle stories - the 'I Didn't Realize It Was That Kind Of Massage Parlor' story, his penchant for coming into my room every night and sitting on the floor next to the radiator with a beer and talking while I was trying to fall asleep.

It's like running into a long lost but endearingly wacky relative.

Somehow it is decided that we will all go to the beach together the next day.

And then there is the interlude that winds up with us being the only white people at this odd disco that our new Nica friends insist we go to, Kyle getting essentially molested by the tattooed Nica girl , my camera going boosted.

And then there is a nice few days at the beach with a good group of friends and lots of good conversation and boogie boarding and me biffing it and eating sand more than a few times while Kristen takes photos. Thanks K.

But honestly, what the hell are the chances?

Zen & The Art of Pali

Wal Mart has been trying to move into Central America. I can understand them wanting Costa Rica, Panama, Belize, but I am sure who ever brokered the deal to buy a couple of chains of stores in Nicaragua never actually set foot in them. Or in Nicaragua, period, for that matter.

Nicaragua does have a few chain stores - La Colonial, La Union and Pali. La Colonials, which I have never been in, are supposedly big and expensive and very Americanized. La Union, which I was in for the first time in Leon, is like a smaller La Colonial - well lit, lots of stuff, very un- Nicaraguan and quite frankly the flurescent lighting, air conditioning and well stocked shelves threw me into spasms of culture shock so badly that I insisted we leave immediately after Kristen purchased her Toilet Terror. *

And then there is Pali. Pali is La Union's ugly little bastard child. We have Pali in Granada - they are small, dark little supermarkets with no air conditioning, surly staff and completely non-sensical product placement. Rat killer is next to spices is next to dog food. Flip flops are next to toilet paper but a good four aisles away from paper towels. The three different kinds of yogurt they sell are so well spread out that it's practically a scavenger hunt. And sometimes they move things so just when you start to remember that granola is with the cookies you become completely disoriented again. **

La Union owns Pali. Wal Mart bought La Union and hence Pali. For all of us who hate Wal Mart, we should all take a moment to chortle with delight over the fact that Wal Mart must be shitting itself over finding itself in possesion of what must be the least appetizing chain stores on the planet. Oh and all the Pali employees now where Wal Mart badges so their oh-so-carefully branded logo is attached to what can only be described as the Crown King of Shitholes.

Tee-hee.

Unfortunately, Pali is unavoidable. Everyone dreads a trip to Pali like the plague but at one time or another we all have to do it. They have some stuff that is near impossible to find any place else. I buy all my produce at the mercado or off the fruit ladies who push their carts through the street. I buy water, soda from the pulperia near my house. But when I need granola, yogurt there is no other choice to suck it up and fall into the black hole that is Pali.

There are certain givens about: Pali it will be packed. Every aisle will be blocked with big carts of stuff they're trying to find random shelf space for. There will be one or two lines open and they will not be staffed by anyone to whom efficiency or speed is a priority. You are going to be in Pali for a while.

When you do get up to the counter you are going to have to wait while the counter person carefully wipes the counter. And you are going to have to bag your own shit. They just toss it into an empty grocery cart next to the register. And you have to buy your bags.

The trick to Pali is either go during the rare slow times - very rare, almost impossible to predict. Or go with someone else and have them immediately get in line while you shop. By the time you fill the cart they might be near the front of the line. And watch out for line cutters.

Line cutting is a goddamn art form in Nicaragua. It's not malicous, it just is what it is. If someone can get in front of you, they're gonna do it. By any means necessary.

I am in Pali by myself yesterday, standing in line. The world's most adorable five year old child comes up and tries to get in front of me. No. I say to her vehemently. She looks up at me sadly with big dinner plate eyes, clutching one roll of toilet paper. No.

There are a few other gringos, tourists, in the store and they are all looking at me like I am the biggest asshole in the history of humanity.

Trust me people. I live here. I know this trick.

She tries once more.

No. Adios. Va.

She shuffles off to the next line looking like I just pistol whipped her. A redhaired German girl motions for the little girl to get in front of her, shooting me a nasty look. You cow-fucker, I can practically hear her thinking, this poor little girl just needs a roll of toilet paper.

Twenty minutes later when we are all still standing in line it happens. The rest of the little girls family shows up with two - two - gigantic carts of groceries. They muscle in front of the german girl who is stuck standing there looking stupified and saying nothing. The family motions another family - probably friends- to get in line behind them. Instead of being third in line the German girl is now fifth behind three overloaded carts.

As I'm walking out she's still standing in line looking stunned. The adorable little girl, now tucked under her mom's arm, is beaming beautifically.

* Toilet Terror is a form of toilet deodorizer you hang on the outside of the bowl. You don't buy it to use it, you buy it because, well, it's called 'Toilet Terror'. And that is very, very funny.

** In all fairness they did just open a Pali in San Juan Del Sur that looks like a La Union. It is nice, clean, well stocked, well staffed. I have been in four other Pali's in Central America, though, and they are all shitholes. The SJDS one is the exception, not the rule. Trust me.

***A few random notes: More animal updates coming shortly. The spell checker on Blogger.com is down and I am too lazy to go back through this or put it in word and check it there. I really need a new camera as I'm sure this is tedious as hell without photos. Hence I stole the lame photo of Kyle, my old college roommate, from Kristen but most of her pics are too large for blogger to download. I typed most of this on a Latin American keyboard so excuse the funky punctuation. And yes, I do like to make excuses for my writing shortcomings***

Ticky Joins The Party

2008-03-31T19:48:00.000-07:00

Just a quick heads up - there´s going to be a pretty gross picture later in this entry. Nothing bloody or graphic just disturbing. But a heads up anyway as I put the picture on my myspace and someone complained that they almost vomited.

Toughen up kids, the world is a rough place.

Back on track: I am now the proud owner of the best $10 duct-tape engineering Nicaragua has to offer. I bought a bike. It is an enormous pìece of shit, enormous. It has no suspension. One of the links in the chain is bigger than the rest so about every six or seven seconds you get a spine crunching, grinding jolt as the big link goes through. It is hideous. It suffers from some sort of bike epilepsy that causes the rear end of it to wiggle all the time. The kickstand staunchly refuses to stay up.

But it has a banana seat. And I adore it. A banana seat!

Nothing in Nicaragua gets thrown out, really - it just gets cobbled together and re-used. There are no thrift shops here. You fix and mend things until they are no longer fixable or mendable and then you grudgingly sell them for scrap metal or whatever. My bike is a veritable Franken-bike, reconstructed from pieces of a million dead bikes by the bike repair guy around the corner. The frame is probably a 1960´s or 70´s children´s bike. It has enormous motocross tires. God only knows where the hell the seat came from.

Maybe you could paint it, Noel suggests. In my bad spanish I tell him that all the paint en el mundo is not going to help this.

When I am locking it up outside the internet cafe the other day the woman who runs it comes out. I don´t think, she tells me, you really need to lock that thing up.

I do anyway. Bikes here are stolen all the time. Part of my goal in buying the ass-ugliest bike in Nicaragua was to avoid the hassle of having a bike stolen. No one is stealing this piece of shit. No one.

And the bell works, too. Ding ding.

I´m still on work break, now in Leon with my friend Kristen. A few days back we were on Ometepe Island. I cannot stress how bad the dog problem is in this whole country, not just Granada. This dog below was hanging out on the main street. While we were there we kept buying him food - hot dogs, ham, leftover chicken. But this dog sleeps in the dust next to the bus station off the ferry docks where a million tourists walk by him every day. Even though Nicaragua doesn´t have enough money or resources to deal with it´s animal issues, there´s something about the situation that makes me angry. How has this dog been allowed to get this bad? How can all of these well-fed white eco-tourists walk by this every day and do fucking NOTHING? I´m sure some of them do what we did - buy food or what-have-you but I saw tons of them walk right by it again and again and do nothing. When we were walking around a restaraunt owner came out to try to chase it away by hitting it with a chain. A CHAIN. Kristen and I said something and he stopped. The other gringos on the porch - and there many - did nothing.

Conversely the Volcano Tour Guide company people - all Nicas - save all their lunch leftovers to feed this dog every day. Johan, the Nica guy who owns the company, was feeding him some empanadas while I was waiting for Kristen. 'This dog', he tells me, 'it probably will not live much longer. But every day we give it some food and think maybe today, it will have another day. It is a nice dog. It deserves more days.'

There are times when animal welfare in this country feels like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. There are so many - so very many - all over the country and so little organizations that do anything about it. It's tough. Picture below is another street dog running around Granada. This one is too squirrelly to even get close to. It looks a lot worse closer up.

On a happier note, though, we did do another spay/neuter clinic here last weekend. Dr. Tom is in town. Or at least Casa Lupita did another clinic. I was only in town for a brief few days so I stopped in. And Toni, Nick, Claudio and Tom are like a finely tuned machine. They've done a bunch since I was here last year and as a result they just ROLL through it. A bunch of other ex-pats showed up to help with the surgery stuff, too, so as a result I was sort of human clutter. I hung out, washed a few instruments, ran some errands with Donna and then took off again to get ready for this leg of the trip.

Dr. Tom had a neighbor who wanted their cat spayed but didn't have a way to get it over there. When Donna and I went to pick it up we spotted one of the neighborhood street dogs - an older looking dog with funky eyes that hangs out near the pulperia near my house. I went in and asked Esperanza, the woman who owns the pulperia, if the dog belonged to anyone. Perro de calle, she said. Dog of the street. She said it didn't so we scooped it up and tossed it into the back of the truck, too, and I jumped in the back to hold it while we rode back. More the merrier.

I actually know this dog - I did a few weeks of ivermectin laced hot dogs with it when I got here because it had some sarna which cleared up. It's a friendly enough thing but I'd never patted it, just tossed it the dogs and went about my way. I noticed it's ears were kinda funky, stuck up at odd angles, but never really thought about why. When we got back to the clinic we figured out why.

This is where it gets graphic, kids.

Yes, that is exactly what it looks like. Ticks. Thousands of them. Every single bump you are seeing there is a tick. So many that it's ears were sort of forced sticking up from them. They were also all over his body, clustered around his eyes, between his toes, everywhere. All the different species. Some engorged, some not. Some actually feeding off the engorged ones.

Donna and Joyce got some tweezers and a glass of alcohol and started picking. They filled and emptied the glass fourteen times in eight hours and he was still covered. They bathed him and a billion more came off. They were covered in ticks. Everything was covered in ticks.

Meet Ticky, the newest clinic resident.

Of course Donna gave him a nice name - Ramon. Of course I will call him nothing but Ticky.

For over seven hours Donna and Joyce did nothing but pick ticks off this poor dog. I'd like to say I've never seen anything like this here before but we have. If anyone wonders why I was begging, borrowing and stealing any Frontline plus, Advantage, all that crap, before I left this is why.

They went ahead and neutered him and checked his blood. Surprise surprise, like eighty percent of the dogs here he has erlichia, a tick born disease. But he is friendly and sweet and gregarious and has moved into the clinic for the interim. Now that he has started to regain some of his strength we figured out he is actually a younger dog. All the ticks make dogs weak, anemic. In the absence of his tick infestation he jumps around, plays, runs. He and Porsha dig each other. It's cool.

I would love to post more pics of him now but I'm actually back from Leon now - again, only for a few days, more on that later. But I have no pictures. Because my camera got boosted in Leon. Luckily I downloaded the pics in this entry prior to leaving for Leon.

In all the time I've spent in this country I've never had anything boosted. And whoever took it out of my bag took only that - they left all my cash, my passport, my credit card. All of which I would have rather have had stolen than my camera as I use it so much for this blog. I hope karma bites someone in the ass really badly for that. I really do. May they get scabies - sarcoptic mange/sarna. But tomorrow I go on a camera hunt to buy another one.

Porsha had her eye removed and got spayed and looks great. Once I get another camera - and I will but it will cost me out the ass here - I'll put up new pictures. The puppy is the size of a small car. Again, hope to have pics later.

Only one more week of me being here and there and everywhere and then I will return to my normal posting schedule. In the interim I should have another odd interlude post about travels, odd coincidences and other non-animal related events.

To Karen Foster, the other Karen, all the people who sent money to the Building New Hope site but didn't mention this blog - I thank you. They thank you. Ticky thanks you. Porsha, Freda and the enormous puppy thank you. Though the fifteen million ticks we assassinated while cleaning Ticky up probably aren't grateful. But honestly, you rock.

Spud-Hunting And A Few Updates

2008-03-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

It’s a good thing I injected myself with dog penicillin this morning, I tell Donna, it will help with the tuberculosis.

The great thing about Donna is that she pays absolutely no attention to my odd bouts of rampant hypochondria. A few weeks back when we were returning The Potato to the lakeside she took a corner too fast and I, riding in the bed of the truck with The Potato, was thrown hard into a bar in back of the cab. For hours afterwards I bitched about my shoulder. Despite my repeated bitching that it was sprained, she never acknowledged what I was saying. She just talked about The Potato, the clinic, the fifteen million other projects she was working on. It wasn’t sprained, incidentally - just an ugly bruise.

I don’t know if she’s amazingly single minded, doesn’t listen, or just has an awful lot of experience with volunteers who turn into crazy hypochondriacs when confronted with tropical third world countries with over-the-counter antibiotics.

We are on a Spud Hunt. It’s Semana Santa, the holy week, the biggest vacation week of the year for Nicas and we are driving down a very crowded lakeside trying to find The Potato. Not to bring him back in, just to check on him, give him some food and water and some meds I’ve secreted in hot dogs.

For the record I did not inject myself with dog penicillin - I pricked myself with the needle while drawing up the drug for a feral cat neuter Toni and Nick were doing. And I don’t have tuberculosis. We just had this bizarre detour that involved taking a guy who just drank Clorox to the hospital along with a cop who came along for the ride. It was one of those incredibly odd only-in-the-life-of-Donna things - you go looking for a dog and the cops flag you down to drive a guy to the hospital. At the hospital they had a big poster about tuberculosis thus convincing myself that the chest cold I cannot shake is actually tuberculosis and not the result of insomnia issues, an iffy diet, a refusal to take care of myself - let myself rest and get over it.

Donna is talking about the who guy who drank Clorox. How the hell do you do that by accident? She asks me. As a woman who just injected myself with dog penicillin even I don’t have irony enough to make a snarky comment about a guy drinking Clorox. Who turned out to be fine, incidentally. While we were driving to the hospital Clorox Guy was making calls from his cell phone.

We go by the restaurant where the night caretaker occasionally feeds The Potato. Lo and behold, there he is, lying under a tree. And surprisingly he looks great. Or if not great at least better. Great is a long ways off for The Potato. But his face is fuzzy, as are his paws - he’s actually growing fur. And the crust is starting to come off of him. His feet seem less swollen. All the drugs we pumped into him during his brief clinic stay as well as the antibiotic laced hot dogs we’ve given to the night caretaker seem to be doing something.

The fur on his face to me, though, is the real story. I have never been so glad to see peach fuzz in my life. Now along with the four forlorn hairs sticking up off his shoulder he has the beginnings of actual fur - fur.

There is a little girl and boy sitting on the outbuilding next to The Potato’s tree. The little girl - maybe about seven - is staring at me. When I look up at her she doesn’t look away. She meets my eye, smiles shyly. While we hand The Potato his medicated meat and fill his food bowl she continues to look at me.

The owner of the restaurant comes over. My daughter - he tells Donna - has been feeding him. She makes sure he has food. You should give her a little reward.

The little girl looks away.

Donna goes back to her car for something and I go talk to her. Como se llama? I ask her. Daniella, she tells me. Something about her strikes me. Yes, she’s a beautiful little kid but her humanity, her compassion kills me. No one wants anything to do with this ugly scaly thing and she’s been tending to him. Sometimes, like with Corissa, there is amazing courage in compassion. This is not only a sarna dog but the grossest of the sarna dogs, a pariah. And little Daniella is not afraid or repulsed.

Me llamo Finn, I tell her. Feen, she says. Si, Finn. Mucho gusto Danielle. The man introduces the little boy, Luis, and himself. Donna comes back. You should grow up to be a veterinarian, she tells Daniella. We have a veterinarian coming to our clinic. You come and watch for a day, help out.

Luis could be a veterinarian too, his father insists. Yes, Donna agrees. But the real story here is this beautiful, compassionate little girl.

The Potato finishes his food and toddles off. Donna goes to get more to leave with Daniella. Only half tonight, she tells her. We’ll be back in the morning with more medicine for him. Daniella listens to Donna so seriously, nodding her head.

We go to leave and I come back for my water bottle - I left it there. As I’m coming back I see Daniella carefully carrying a bucket of water over to the food tray we left for The Potato. She empties out the old water, refills it with the new water.

Mucho gusto, Daniella, I say again as I leave. Her father smiles, no, no no, mucho gusto por todos. Si, por todos, I say. But Daniella is smiling shyly at the ground, proud to have been noticed, picked out as special by Donna and I.

What a good kid.

Poltergeist Part II - The Real Bad Ass.

I didn’t even hear the trap hit last night. I set it, went to bed. When I get up in the morning I half remember and go to check it. It seems to have moved a few feet from the alcove but is still covered. I lift up the towel and immediately a paw swipes at me, hisses, growls.

We got a feisty one.

It’s a gray and white cat, rangy, male, with some old fight wounds. In some spots the fur on it’s face is rubbed off - probably the result of trying to get out of the cage. Apparently in it's fight to get out of the trap it actually managed to move the whole 15 lb contraption. And it is pissed, furious in a way the other cat wasn’t. When I try to move the cage it makes frenetic attempts to get at my hand, slams it’s head into the wire walls, frantic to get out. It looks like a housecat, it’s the same species as anyone’s housecat but this thing is a wild animal, cornered and desperate.

There is no way I’m getting this one in a cab. Someone will get bitten. Or several people will with me being first in line.

I call Toni and Nick. Got another one. Not going to be able to get this one in a cab or carry it the six blocks to the clinic. They agree to come over with their bicycles and we’ll try to figure something out. Nick balances it on his crossbar and walks, pushing the bike. In the cage the cat cowers, eyes huge, ears pinned.

They do a sedative shot through the cage but this one doesn’t want to go down. Too much adrenaline. Toni hits it again. A few minutes later it gets wobbly, pliant. They put it on gas.

Five minutes of surgery and kitty is ready to go. Toni carefully puts antibiotic cream on some of the fight wounds, treating it as respectfully as if it was an owned cat. We put it back in the cage, take it to an upper level kennel outside, drape the door with a sheet for shade and privacy and let it recover.

When I go back that night it is awake, wide eyed, furious at the universe. Donna comes and picks me up and we drive it back to my house, re-release it in the courtyard. It’s still drunk from the drugs and it staggers around the garden, cowers behind some trees. My roommate and his friends come in. I point it out. Don’t try to pat the kitty, I tell them. It’s the devil. When it sobers up it will find it’s way back up to the rooftops.

A few hours later I hear a few muffled thumps coming from the roof. Satan Kitty has found it’s way back up there again. Over the next few days we catch glimpses of some new roof cats in the kitchen - an a long haired black one, an eerie eyed grey cat lurking on the stairwell. Neither the rough older one we did or the original black and white poltergeist is seen again. Apparently we’ve been crossed off their list of places to go through the garbage and other ones are moving in to claim the territory.

Time to bust out the trap again.

Some Updates

My friend Kristen arrived with a new cat trap and a box full of toys and leashes. All the clinic dogs now look stylin’. Quixote and Freda immediately fell upon the tug of war toy and had a blast.

Quixote left this morning for his new home outside of Rivas with a Peace Corps volunteer. Apparently he loves his new people and was psyched to begin life as an actual house dog. Godspeed, Quixote. We left the toy for Frida but I’m sure someone there will have a coke bottle to throw for him. He was a goofy bastard but I’ll miss him.

Porsha continues to improve in leaps and bounds, physically. She never had any attitude issues - she’s heartbreakingly submissive with the other dogs and loves people. But to date she’s put on ten pounds and looks almost like a normal dog, give or take some scarring and a missing eye. Dr. Tom will be here this week to spay her and look at the eye, see if we can at least sew it shut or something. She will always have some scars - a cord grew into her neck at some point in her earlier life and she’ll wear that scar for life - but she’s about three weeks away from being a normal dog. A normal homeless dog. Have I mentioned enough that we can ship dogs?

Right before I left on my little jaunt I gave her and Freda baths. Someone in the States really needs to adopt Porsha if for no other reason than she can teach a class for American dogs on How To Handle A Bath With Dignity. The whole time I was scrub-brushing off her dead skin she stood stock still, occasionally wagging her little half tail. No theatrics, no squirming, no fussing.

Freda is lonely without Quixote but doing well, putting on weight. She’s become quite attached to the toy Kristen brought and carries it around with her trying to get one of us to play tug of war with her. Because of her baby she can’t really be treated so she’s lookin’ a little bald but good. Think Bruce Willis as a lactating, sarna infested street dog.

The good news is that the puppy now has it’s eyes open and is walking. The bad news is that it’s some sort of freakish mutant puppy that doubles in size every day. It is ginormous. Huge. Still much beloved, still adorable but porky.

Spud-hunting has become a regular occurrence. Despite her eighteen million other obligations Donna goes out every morning looking for him. While she has not seen him, Daniella has and continues to feed him. Last week when my friend Kristen first arrived we spotted him out by the lakeside, hanging out with a female dog with some sort of back injury. I was able to pat The Potato but couldn’t get near his girlfriend. I was also able to confirm that he is continuing to grow some fur.

I’ll be in El Salvador avoiding potential future deportation when the vet is here but the plan is to bring The Potato in briefly so Dr. Tom can get a look at him and possibly neuter him if he’s well enough. I really doubt the world needs any scaly little Potato Babies. Hopefully he’ll also be able to get a look at the Esso Station dog.

In preparation for the vet’s arrival cat trapping is going into high gear. Additionally signs are posted all over Granada advertising the free sterilization clinic.

Dr. Tom also does a lot with horses so they’ll be a one day clinic for the working horses while he’s here. Apparently a farrier from the states will be in that day as well. So they’ll float teeth, deal with some of the parasites and work on their feet. It’s a tough, tough life for the working horses here. Last year I was here for one of the horse clinics and it was really interesting even if I am crap-terrified of dealing with horses.

There’s a tentative plan for me to have breakfast with a woman in San Salvador during my jaunt up there to do a little recon mission. Apparently she’s interested in doing something similar in the city and wants to talk about logistics. I am probably the least qualified person to do this except a) I’ll be in El Salvador and b) I’m willing to do it. But it’s an exciting idea. Maybe sometime in the future bring up a bunch of cat traps and some equipment and do a blitz there.

Onwards and upwards. And all that crap.

**A few notes on this blog entry - part of it was started prior to me going out of town - the Spudhunt and trapping the second feral occured days before I left. The rest of it I just wrote. I am only in Granada for a few days before taking off again for five more days. Then home to Granada for the forseeable future. But there's a couple more entries I'm working on about stuff that happened either directly before I left or while I was gone or in the few days since I've been back. We saw The Potato again today and he's still getting better. So the next week will be more choppy posting before I get back to the regularly scheduled program.

And the pic at top is for the spay/neuter clinic being held the next few days while Dr. Tom is here. I won't be here for most of it but since I was last here they've trained better surgery assistants than I could ever be. When I was here last year I was the only game in town, surgery assistant wise. Now they've got a bunch of other folks trained and a great system. It's a little sad to be on the sidelines for it but I'm so glad that they're rockin' it out. And I'm better at the mangy-street-dog-and-daily-clinic-and-meds thing anyway seeing as most of my vet tech experience involved killing things.

Horse picture is from my last trip here.

And I am over my chest cold. Or tuberculosis. Or whatever it was.***

Honestly, There Will Be An Update Tomorrow But In The Meantime A Porsha Pictorial

2008-03-29T20:25:00.000-07:00

I is typing my little fingers to the bone and hitting our gossip network for what's been going since I've been out of town. I have to go to El Salvador next week. Visa stuff, gotta check in and check out of the country so I don't overstay my visa. Plus Donna has a woman up there who wants to do something similar in San Salvador so I might go have breakfast with her. I am not a vet and as I have said before, I am a cog in the wheel of the heroes who do this day in and out but I can run a recon, if need be.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to show you all something insane.

This is Porsha, AKA One Eye as she appeared when we brought her in about three weeks ago. Not about to win Westminster. Short-listed for Most Pathetic Creature To Still Have A Pulse.

And this is Porsha now:

Yes, Westminster is still a ways off. But she's put on weight, she has hair, the amazing Dr. Tom will be here Monday to spay her and check out the eye. In the states she would have been an immediate euth at the shelter - too far gone. Here, with nothing but some invermectin tablets, some antibiotics, buckets of dog food - we have a real, actual, sweetheart of a dog on our hands.

Go figure.

Real entry tomorrow, as I said, as verbose and wacky as my usual ones. But I did want to post that. And also to do a quick name check to my BFF, my Baby Doll of Evil, Sheena AKA The Food Lady. A goodly percentage of the people who don't know me and are reading this found me through her blog. It's also her blog that made me get my own as opposed to my usual myspace-ing. She's my hero. Rock on, sista, and get your ass and your camera down here. We's got some work to do.

A Brief Moment of Extreme Humility

2008-03-27T20:58:00.000-07:00

I'm still out of town and out of the loop but I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you. I am blown away by all the people who have contacted me to compliment me or ask me how they can help. Thank you. All of you.

If you do want to help the most obvious way is donations. A little money goes a long way down here and anything helps. You can donate via paypal on the Building New Hope website - http://www.buildingnewhope.org/. The website also has a mailing address where you can mail a check. I'm pretty sure you can specify that the money be used for the clinic, Casa Lupita.

Additionally you can use Goodsearch - http://www.goodsearch.com/ - for your web searches. Where it allows you to specify what charity where you want the money to go just select Building New Hope.

One of the other biggest needs is homes for these guys. Both Porsha and Freda are needing homes. Both are great dogs, both would adjust well to just about any new home. It's an expensive proposition to ship dogs to the States but it has been done by us before. It would mean a lot to me if we could start finding some options for these guys. Plus as one leaves it opens up another space in the clinic for another dog that needs our help. Think on it.

But all pleas aside: thank you. I am humbled and honored.

New updates on The Potato, Freda, Porsha, the pup coming this weekend. We also have the amazing Dr. Tom in to do a spay/neuter blitz. Plus a farrier to work with the carriage and hardware store horses.

On The Road...

2008-03-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

I´m taking a few days off and doing a little bit of travelling so there´ll be no posts for about a week. But watch this space...

Finn

Another Interlude: La Vida Absurd

2008-03-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

I love this country - God knows I love this country. Currently I’m on my third time here. I have spent a substantial chunk of the last year here. I have given up jobs, cars, etc to come back here time and time again. So please don’t take what I am about to say as a condemnation of this country that I love.

This place is fucking ridiculous.

It is. It’s a ridiculous country. As an American I am used to certain things - efficiency, quiet, predictability. One of the things I love best about Nicaragua is that these are not priorities in this country - through the rabbit hole, Alice, straight through the bunny hole. Every now and again, though, I have my horrific-Gringa days, my Ugly American days where I would kill for a government agency with an actual computer system, a noise ordinance, a vague idea as to when it is the garbage might get picked up or when the power is going to cut out.

Case In Point, The Popularity of the Relojeria.

Time is a very loose thing here. Everything runs on Nica Time which means things happen when they happen and there’s really no sense in getting upset about it. Appointments are sort of suggestions - no one actually turns up on time.* Posted hours are approximate if they even exist on stores or cafes. The closest internet and call center to my house is painted with a big sign: 9 AM - 9 PM. Sometimes they open at 8 AM, sometimes they don’t open until about noon or so. Some days they don’t open or they close at 6 PM or 11 PM. The woman who runs the Pulperia closest to my house - a sweet, wonderful woman who is enormously patient with my crappy Spanish - doesn’t have posted hours. But she takes a nap every day and closes the store for a few hours. She takes her nap when she feels tired. On several occasions I have found myself fiending for a Coca Cola light, a piece of her pineapple pie or desperately needing a bottle of water and found myself standing in front of her locked door.

For a while I attempted to predict when she would take her nap. I finally gave up.

Herein lies the irony: around the Mercado are several relojerias. You see them all over Nicaragua. Reloj is watch. Relojerias are stores and stands that do nothing but fix and sell watches. Apparently they are popular and successful enough here that several can stay in business within blocks of each other.

Who is buying these watches? Why? What are they doing with them? Who in this country needs a watch? I see people wearing them but for the love of God, why?

Exhibit B: Mail/Everyone Loves A Receipt.

Before I say anything about this I would like to say how grateful I am to once again have American conditioner. Don’t get me wrong. I am swimming in gratitude. And aloe vera. Swimming in gratitude and aloe vera.

One week before I left I sent myself a package of stuff. Toiletries, primarily. At the US post office they told me it should take 6-10 days to get here. As I am currently up on week four sans moisturizer choices, I finally started inquiring about this. Nothing has shown up at Santa Lucia Social Club. I ask Rina, who is minding the place, about it. Have you gone to the post office? She asks me. I hadn’t. We hadn’t gotten a notice that there was a package. It’s probably there, she says, go ask.

Today I go to the post office and explain the situation. They are so nice - so very nice. They have a whole room full of packages and they basically have me go through them to see if I can find mine. I can’t. They open an ancient file cabinet and start handing me packages out of that. None are mine but I think I probably could have signed for any of them.

Eventually it is decided: my package is not there. Again, they are so nice, so polite and apologetic about it. They have me write down my name and phone number in case it turns up. I go up to the front office to buy stamps when they call me back. The woman is proudly clutching my package - unharmed, intact. I have to sign for it. When they look it up to have me sign for it I see the date it arrived at their post office: ten days ago.

Quick moral to this story, kids: if you mail me anything more than an envelope LET ME KNOW. My conditioner would have sat back there for all eternity had I not known it was coming.

It costs me 5 cords - about .27 - to retrieve my package. Again: twenty seven cents. I pay and go to leave and the woman flags me down - senora, una momenta. She is writing something. I assume I will have to sign something else. I wait. A minute later she hands me a handwritten receipt for my package fee. They don’t keep a copy of it or anything. Did she think I was going to return my package and want my .27 back? She doesn’t write me a receipt for the 40 cords worth of stamps I bought, only the 5 cord fee.

When I walk to the Malecon, the Lakeside area, I am always given a little receipt for my five cord entrance fee, a little pre-printed thing that probably costs more to print than it costs to get in.

They love receipts here. Love them. And they have weird little systems that are completely indecipherable to anyone else that they adore as well.

The Weird Little System Issue.

I am in a children’s store buying a ball for one of the clinic dogs. You cannot get dog toys here and I’m sick of throwing empty diet coke bottles for Quixote to fetch. By the third or fourth throw he‘s always eaten them.**

It’s a little store - the size of a large storage closet, maybe. There are two people working in it, two women. I point to the ball behind the counter - 30 cords. She takes it off the shelf, pulls out a receipt book and writes me a receipt for it. I go to pay her and she shakes her head vehemently and points to the other woman, who is literally two feet away from her. I lean over and hand the other woman my receipt and the 30 cords. She beams at me, stamps it with a ‘paid’ stamp and hands it back to me. I then hand it back to the first woman who hands me my ball and gives me the stamped receipt back with it.

I do not take a step to do this. I just pass the receipt between one woman and the next.

Quixote never even gets the ball. On the way home a dirty little street kid in Parque Central, maybe five years old is, following me. I have a can of juice and they follow you to get the can for a deposit. If you have leftovers, if you’re coming out of a restaurant, they’ll ask for those as well. I give the kid the can and the ball. He is delighted.

I’ll buy Quixote another one. In the meantime he’s never had anything but a bottle to fetch so he doesn’t know he’s missing out on anything.

But I’ve had the two party receipt thing happen to me in a bunch of stores. In pretty much every case the store is almost empty and the two people I have to hand things back and forth to are literally right next to each other.

Denouement: Do They Have Reggaeton in Heaven? And if they do, can it be counted as Heaven?

My room is painted bright yellow with a huge high ceiling. Bright yellow. The picture below was taken in my room with the light off and no flash. Just the yellow wall. Towards the ceiling is a big grated window. When the sun comes up every morning it bathes the room in an otherworldly yellow glow.

I am not a morning person. Not at all.

Most days if it wakes me up I’ll fumble around for a shirt, throw it over my eyes and go back to sleep looking like a hostage. If you throw another variable into the mix the shirt-over-my-eyes trick doesn’t work.

This morning, six am. The sun wakes me up. Sometimes I forget where I am and it’s a creepy thing to wake up to, this yellow glow. Am I dead? Should I be heading towards something right now? The grate, maybe, with all the light? It can be a little disorienting, particularly if I wake up thinking I’m still in Denver.

So I wake up thinking I might be dead, throw the shirt over my face and……it’s reggaeton time! My neighbors are doing some sort of home construction project that requires an early start and lots and lots of loud reggaeton. Reggaeton, as far as I can tell, is any pop song with a bad dance beat behind it. I heard a reggaeton version of ‘Every Time You Go Away’ - that 80’s song. It’s annoying enough in mid-afternoon. At 6 AM it can almost make you cry.

Again, let me reiterate: I love this country. Some of the things I love most about this country are the same things that drive me insane. But yeah, reggaeton, 6 AM. Brings out the Ugly American in me.

Though conditioner and a moisturizer selection do make it better.

As well as the fact that you can buy a machete in any hardware store for about $3. Not that I've ever bought one but surely that can be counted as a plus.

* I am just as guilty of this as anyone else is. It's not my fault, though. Granada is a city but it's also a small town and everyone walks or bikes everywhere. You cannot get from point A to point B without running into someone you know and winding up in a conversation. It does not matter if points A and B are five feet from each other and you just got here yesterday. This is a fact of life here.

** Whenever I do this all I can think of is telling my own spoiled dogs with their chicken wrap treats and tons of toys “You know there are dogs in third world countries that have nothing but empty bottles to play with”.

Top picture is one of the flowers in my courtyard with fallen mangoes under it.

Roof Cats & The Esso Station Dog

2008-03-15T19:22:00.000-07:00

It sounds like a frickin’ poltergeist, my housemate John says. That’s some scary shit.

We are sitting at the table in the courtyard eating food from one of the chicken ladies on the street. John is the person to go get food with - he’s been here since October, speaks flawless Spanish and works with a primarily Nica organization. He was the one who showed me that the chicken ladies - women who set out huge grills on the sidewalk at night and sell food - have more than chicken. So I probably shouldn’t call them chicken ladies anymore.

Upstairs the yowling and growling continues, creepy and unrelenting. It’s one of the roof cats, a black one. It’s gotten particularly bold and when it smells food it starts making scary noises, probably to scare the other roof cats away. Once we leave it’ll come in and knock the garbage over to go through it for the scraps.

A horrible gurgling noise is coming from the stairs. It’s not even waiting for us to finish. It’s come off the roof and is hiding in the stairwell.

There’s whole colonies of feral cats that live along the rooftops in Granada. All the houses are connected so the cats just go up and down the street. Most houses, ours included, have courtyards in the middle with open air kitchens. The roof cats exist off the garbage, steal anything left on counters, fight and scream and yowl all night. You can hear them running back and forth on the clay rooftops.

Lest anyone think these could be made into happy little pets, don’t. These things are terrifying. Feral cats in the states are scary enough to handle - their Nicaraguan counterparts are monsters. Generation after generation of them have never been touched and they’re tough enough to fight off domestic cats, dogs that people might have in the courtyards they raid. No one is making friends with these things. Believe me.

In the past Casa Lupita has trapped some roof cats in other neighborhoods, brought them in and fixed them and re-released them. If you kill them more just come in to take their place. If you can fix them and release them, it mellows out some of the fighting, the amount of kittens running around. It also lessens the likelihood that it will contract FIV. Neuter them and they live longer.

It’s time for the roof cats of Calle Santa Lucia to be emasculated. Starting with the snarling black poltergeist on the steps.

The next night I bust out the one remaining humane trap Casa Lupita has - the other one got stolen. I explain to the other people in the house what I’m doing. Allen has tuna for lunch and donates part of the can to the cause.

I stay up late that night, don’t set the trap until around midnight to minimize the amount of time whatever winds up in it will have to stay in there. By tomorrow night it will be back on the rooftops, just a little mellower. We have a dark little alcove under the counter and I put the trap there, bait it, cover it with a towel.

Twenty minutes later I am lying in bed when I hear the sound of the garbage being knocked over. Five minutes after that I hear the snap of the trap being triggered.

We have a winner. Ding ding ding.

I throw on some clothes and go out to look. It’s like Christmas morning - everyone who is still up wants to see what’s in the box. When I reach for the towel it swipes out a paw, tries to get me. Hunched in the back of the trap, it snarls and hisses. One of my housemates notes that it’s smaller than he thought it would be. Everything is smaller here - animals, people. We recover it with the towel, go to bed. That night the other roof cats get into a screaming match on the roof. The one in the cage never makes a noise.

Early the next morning I call Toni, let her know I got one. She and Nick meet me at the clinic. Since the last time I was here Toni has not only been trained to assist in surgery, she can do neuters. The cat has mellowed significantly, probably from being awake in the cage all night, terrified. Nick holds him while she does an intramuscular shot of sedatives. Five minutes later he’s out cold.

The surgery itself literally takes minutes. Despite how tough it is it’s a young cat, barely an adult. Afterwards she nicks a corner of it’s ear off so if we trap it again we know it’s already done and will just let it go.

We put it back in the trap and leave it, trap and all, in an upper kennel to recover from the anesthesia. When I come back tonight it is awake, crouched in the back of the trap, furious. I start to walk home with it to release it but neighborhood kids keep running out to see it, trying to stick their fingers in the cage, ignoring my pleas of 'no no no, es gato malo'. I have to get a cab.

In the courtyard I open the cage. It hesistates a second and darts out, up the stairs to the second floor and then back to the rooftop. I rebait the trap, put it back in the alcove.

Whoever was fighting on the roof last night might like some chicken.

The Dog

Lilly is in the States and the woman she’s left in charge, a Nica woman who lived in the States for a while, comes over to chat. You hear about that dog up at the Esso station?

I haven’t but she tells me. Apparently it belongs to a family that owns a little refreshment stand next door at the stop for the Managua bus. A few nights back some guy brought a pit bull, a fighting dog, over. For amusement he loosed the pit bull on the family’s dog. It tore it’s jaw open, busted it’s teeth out.

It’s horrible, she tells me. The poor thing.

While Toni is doing the neuter I tell her about it. We might be able to help, we have some antibiotics. It’s too late to stitch it, since it happened a few days ago and the wound needs to drain. But someone should go have a look.

We aren’t going to bring this dog in - it’s owned - we’ll just see if we can offer assistance.

The only thing that qualifies me for this errand is a deep and abiding love of fountain soda, hard to find in Nicaragua but available at the Esso station. The Esso station is an odd thing to begin with - it’s actually an On The Run convenience store, the exact same ones we have in Colorado and it looks exactly the same as one in the States, complete with air conditioning, soda fountain, American style fast food, everything. Weird.

I walk out later that day, about a mile walk. I get my soda and look around but I don’t see the dog. The Esso station is on the main road to Managua and Rivas and it’s Saturday so it’s packed. I walk around the neighborhood, don’t see any dogs at all. I’m about to walk back home when I notice someone tending to the perfect American looking lawn around the store. In my horrible Spanish I explain who I am and ask if he knows about the dog. He immediately knows what I’m talking about and hurries me over to the stand, a little wooden shack that sells some bottles of Central American soda, some snacks, but is primarily a place to lock bicycles up. Twenty yards from On The Run, a universe away.

More horrible Spanish, more explaining - I’m a veterinary nurse from a clinic here, we heard what happened here, we wanted to know if you needed help. We might have medicine or something. I need to take a picture of the dog to show it to my coworkers. Immediately the whole family mobs me. Pobrecito Lolo, the kids, say. Their poor dog. They thank me for coming.

Someone is sent for the dog. It’s a typical Nica dog of no determinate breed, medium sized and prick eared. I don’t see anything wrong with it until the man picks it up. And then it’s horrible.

There is no actual open wound left, but the jaw is broken and just hangs, leaving the dog’s mouth open permanently. Most of the teeth are gone. It happened a week ago, the man tells me. They took him to the vet and are got some antibiotics. He shows me the bottle and I write the name of the drug down.

An infection we could treat. This I don’t know. I have no idea. I take some pictures.

I ask if he can eat or drink. The man answers but I have trouble understanding. I don’t know that I was clear enough when I asked- my accent makes it hard for Nicas to understand me - and he’s talking quickly. Something about water and milk. While we’re talking the dog manages to pick up a bag of garbage. I get the feeling he can drink and pick things up but can’t chew or swallow food because of this jaw.

To the best of my ability I explain that I don’t know if we can do anything but either me or one of my co-workers will return in a day or two to talk to them. We don’t have a vet but we will have one in two weeks and maybe he can do something.

The vet they took Lolo to doesn’t do surgery and even if could do it, I doubt the family could afford it. The dog is eight years old, ancient for a Nica dog, and the family obviously cares about it. They are furious about what happened. We called the police, the owner tells me, they did nothing, nothing.

I go find Nick at the email café and show him the pictures. He’s stumped, too. He doesn’t know if Dr. Tom would even be able to do anything about it. But he’ll go talk to them, explain to them that if they can keep it alive until then they should bring it to us. He’ll also tell them that if they can’t they should bring it to us anyway to humanely euthanize. It’s not a cruel thing, it’s a poverty thing: if you can’t save something here most people will just slit it’s throat. Not a nice way to go. It’s not done to be mean it’s just the quickest way most Nicas know to kill something. We can at least do a humane euth if need be, a barbituate overdose.

You do what you can, even if it doesn’t seem like much.

To end on a happier note, Freda’s puppy continues to do well. It’s not quite walking yet but it wobbles around, dragging itself like a little black and white seal. We are all pretty cynical but we are all enchanted by the chubby little thing.

Another Mostly Non-Animal Daily Life Interlude

2008-03-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

A quick note on the nature of what is vs. what could be. This is Scabby, the first dog we brought in last year when I was here. He was the single most disgusting thing I had ever seen in my life. And believe me when I say I had seen a lot of disgusting in my life.

And this is Scabby now, only his name is BB now. And he is fat and happy and likes to play with the woman's other dog . He is just like anyone else's dog. The only difference is he's still missing that part of his ear. But none of us are super model material, really, so you can't fault him for the half ear.

Now on to the non-dog portion of the blog. And I don't have pictures for it so I'm just sort of peppering it with other pictures of Granada that I have because they're interesting. And we all know it's more fun to read things with pictures.

The Ganga Guy

You get used to the noises and the catcalls. There’s no harm meant, really, it’s just a cultural thing: men say things. Sometimes they hiss, sometimes they make kissing noises, sometimes they just yell ‘hey’ or ‘hola’ or ‘muy bonita’ or whatever. You just ignore it, sometimes with the elderly men I’ll smile or wave back, just keep walking, no harm meant. Every now and then you get one who has a few words of English just for heckling women. It’s never anything lewd - I doubt that half of them even know what it is they’re saying. ‘Hello you are beautiful good morning’. The best one I ever got was some guy in a business suit who, in passing me, said in one gigantic breath: “you are beautiful you are my life you are all I have ever wanted please come home with me right now.” He didn’t slow down or anything when he said it, just blurted it out like one big long word while walking by me. It’s kind of funny.

Sometimes I get followed, that’s annoying, get questions: what’s your name? Usually I’ll ignore them, if they’re particularly persistent I’ll say something nonsensical back to them - ‘en los estados unidos no tenemos nombres‘. Or I’ll just answer with ‘tengo un novio’ which shuts it down.

Occasionally, though, oh occasionally you get the ones who speak some amount of English and are unrelenting. Walking down La Calzadera one day some guy starts following me - I own a bar, you come to my bar, you don’t pay for anything, I have ganga, you like ganga? What’s your name? I take you to the volcano, you like volcano. I keep walking, say nothing, stare straight ahead.

I keep seeing the ganga guy everywhere. And he does not give up. No matter how often I keep walking and absolutely ignoring him, he does not take a hint. I have never said word one to this guy about ganga or booze or volcanos or food or anything but the assumption is because I am an enormous tattooed gringa I must love drugs and booze and need huge amounts of food and touristy amusement, all of which he wants to provide for me.

The other day I’m grocery shopping. I have a ton of crap - vegetables and fruit from the Mercado, some groceries from Pali, the grocery store. Usually I walk but it’s worth the sixty cents to take a cab, not do the mile walk back to my house with all this crap. Cabs in Granada are fixed rate - 10 cords - and shared. What that means is that they’ll pick up more fares with you in the car if they can. Because I flag down the cab outside of Pali, it’s unusually packed. Everyone doing their shopping. The driver, a guy in the passenger seat with a little kid on his lap, two elderly men in the backseat. I squeeze in next to the old men and am arranging my bags when I hear the voice.

Tattoo girl! Tattoo girl!!

It’s the guy from La Calzadera. Fuck. The driver, thinking he might be able to smoosh another person into the cab, stops. Vamos, I say, vamos. Por favor. Ahorita.

The driver isn’t budging.

And then ganga guy is leaning in the window yelling at me: I HAVE TWO OUNCES GANGA!! YOU COME SMOKE GANGA WITH ME!!! I HAVE HASHISH!! I OWN BAR!! YOU EAT, DRINK, FREE!!!

In front of all five people in the cab. Luckily the driver figures out that ganga guy is not getting in the cab and drives off, him trailing behind on foot, still yelling about two ounces of ganga and free food. Meanwhile everyone in the cab is staring at me. It is dead silent. I don’t think anyone spoke English but ‘ganga’ and ‘bar’ mean the exact same thing in Spanish and English.

Everyone is staring at the alcoholic drug-crazed gringa. No conozco ese hombre, I say quietly. I don’t know that guy.

Everyone looks away but I can tell. No one believes me.

The Best Spanish Teachers Ever

I started Spanish classes today. I was going to go to a regular Spanish school, the kind where you get a one-on-one tutor, a textbook, a lot of grammar - the same sort of thing you get in high school but never remember. There’s a billion in Granada, it runs about $5 an hour. I figured I’d do a few hours a week.

I mention this to Donna.

Oh no, she tells me, don’t do that. Have one of the chavallos teach you. They can teach you useful stuff, conversational stuff, teach you the way they learned English. There’s a guy who cooks at the café who speaks English well and is also Donna’s quiador. He’d be happy to do it, Donna tells me. He’d love it. And he’d charge you like half what the school would.

A week and a half later I find myself sitting in Donna’s living room with two of the chavallos - the one that Donna suggested and his friend who came along to come along. I recognize both of them from when I was here before. One used to teach at the school, the other has been Donna’s quiador forever.

Brief interlude here to introduce the concept of chavallos. Chavallos are gang kids, teenage thugs. Donna runs a couple of programs here that help chavallos get out of the lifestyle, teach them job skills. The two guys I’m working with are success stories. Ex drug pushers and pimps, they both now cook at the restaurant.

This is an odd situation. First of all, there’s a weird dynamic between men and women here, an awkward one. The idea of a platonic make/female friendships here is unheard of. Second of all I am fifteen years older than these guys and it’s their job to correct me, to talk to me like friends and correct me, help me with my language, my ability to comprehend regular conversations.

In the first ten minutes I can feel every second tick by. They are unsure of what to ask me to get me talking, a little shy about correcting me. I’m unsure of what to talk to them about, they’re posturing a little bit, doing the cool-kid thing.

I don’t know what broke the barrier but something did. We went from a stilted conversation about how to tell the laundry people I needed my clothes today to Why Costa Rica Sucks . It’s the sort of conversation that would give Don Vicente, my very good but very traditional Spanish teacher in San Juan Del Sur, the vapors.

They correct my pronunciation, teach me new verbs but in a totally different way than a regular teacher. We talk about my life in the states, their lives prior to being in the café and teaching programs, how Donna got them a teacher to teach them English. We do this all in Spanish with them correcting me. They teach me some slang. Don’t use this, they tell me, then they rattle off something I’ve heard before on the barrio streets but never understood. So that’s hello, I ask them? Sort of like ‘what’s up?’. I ask. No, not for normal people, they tell me, but it is for us, it means ‘yo motherfucker, what you been up to’ in Spanish. I probably will never use it but they teach me it, anyway, all of us laughing.

I mention the ganga guy. You need to tell him off, one of them tells me. You need to call him a son of a bitch. The other chavallo nods gravely. Si. Hijo de puta, they say. Hijo de puta, I say back. No no no, I’m not saying it fast enough. They make me practice again and again. Hijo-de-puta. Hijodeputa. You have to like, spit it out.

The same way they make me practice the phrases about laundry and being late, the same way they make me repeat past and present tenses on a bunch of verbs, they make me practice ‘son of a bitch’ until I cannot only say it, I can say it vehemently and with a Nica accent.

These guys are reformed, they are success stories. Both of them are accomplished cooks, one of them was a fantastic teacher and is now an amazing pastry chef. Even still, they are chavallos. I am not only learning Spanish I’m learning How Not To Take Shit In Spanish.

The Belgians

They are one of the single most attractive groups of people I have ever seen in my life. Not attractive handicapped people - attractive people, period. And in some odd parade they are coming down Calle La Libertad as I am walking up after locking up the clinic.

There’s a truck in front of them filming them, one in back, a bunch of people racing around next to them with television cameras and boom mikes. And then there’s the ten of them - a few people in wheelchairs, one guy with a prosthetic leg, another guy on arm crutches, a little person, a woman with a backpack of oxygen who occasionally puts the tube in her mouth. None mentally handicapped but all with physical handicaps. And they, with their retinue of cameras, are hauling ass down the street.

All white. All devastatingly attractive. Seriously. The guy on the crutches and the woman in the three wheeled wheelchair could be models.

I am trying not to stare but I’m the only one trying not to. School has just let out and all the Nica kids in their uniforms are streaming home, staring, following this group. As I walk by one of the guys in the wheelchairs hollers at me ‘ingles?’.

Yes, I say, I speak English.

Immediately I am swarmed, not only by the disabled people but by the camera crews, a mike is shoved in my face. The guy with the artificial leg, who looks infinitely more vigorous and athletic than I could ever be, asks me if I know where Rancho Major is. I don’t, I tell them, I’m sorry. Did you ask cab drivers?

Yes, they tell me, but we don’t speak enough Spanish and they keep sending us in opposite directions. Can you ask for us?

My spanish sucks but I can do directions.

I ask one of the school kids who tells me it’s next to the Malecon, near the lakeside, walk down to the lakeside and ask the police there. I translate for them. Well then how do we get to the lake?

Calle La Libertad ends at the end of the block and the road to the lakeside, while close, can be a little confusing - there’s a little fork there. I offer to walk them down to the fork, a few blocks away, and point them in the right direction. Just get the cameras off of me.

As we walk the guy on the crutches and the woman with the breathing tube explain it to me. They’re a group of handicapped Belgians and they have to make it from the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua to the Pacific coast in ten days, stopping to do all these challenges.

Yesterday, the crutch guy tells me, we climbed Mombacho. He indicates the woman in the wheelchair - she literally hauled her self up it on her ass with just her arms.

Holy fuck. Mombacho is a huge volcano. I wouldn’t, fully functioning, climb it.

Honestly - that's it. Look at it. It's gigantic. And hot.

It’s a reality show, the girl with the breathing tube tells me. The British did it last year on the BBC. Now we’re doing it. She pauses to take a breath off her tube. And we need to kick some British ass.

We get to the fork and I leave them there, amidst some very quick handshaking and a few hugs. There’s a ton of tourists at the lakeside, they won’t have a problem getting someone to translate for them.

As they haul ass down the street the rear production truck stops next to me, wanting to know if I smoke and if I do, if I have a lighter. It’s three guys, all younger. We smoke a cigarette together and they give me a bottle of water out of their cooler. We were walking really fast and it’s super hot out.

Those people are ANIMALS, the production guys tell me. They’re nuts. You have no idea. They have all these tasks they have to do that able bodied people would have trouble with and they are just whupping ass at them. There’s nothing they can’t do. I ask if they have a hard time with people heckling or anything. No, lot of staring but where ever they go everyone thinks it’s awesome.

I ask if they have a website or something that I can track their progress on. They don’t but they give me the website of the Belgian television network that’s making it. It won’t air until October and there probably isn’t much up about it until then. They ask me if I want to come along, ride down to the lakeside with them, see what’s going on, see where they go next. I’d love to but duty calls. They head off down the road in the truck, speeding to catch up to the group.

***The last of Bolsita's puppies died the other night. She is doing well, Freda and her pup are doing fantatically but we did lose that last Bolsita pup. And no, I don't want to write about that.***

****Other note: I enabled comments on this. I got some emails about people not having blogger accounts wanting to comment so I changed the setting - you don't need to have a blogger account to leave a comment now. But be nice, kids, be nice*****

Potato Drama And Freda's Surprise.

2008-03-11T13:49:00.000-07:00

I am not fully awake when the phone goes off at 9 AM. Knocking everything off my desk while I fumble for it, I answer it anyway. It could be someone calling from the states. It could be an emergency. And while I don’t have to be at the clinic until 11, I understand most people get out of bed substantially earlier than this. Usually I do, too, here but I’m fighting off a head cold, it’s Sunday morning: I am still asleep.

It’s Donna. She’s going to the Lakeside to hunt for The Potato, the horrifically detiorating sarna dog that she’s been keeping an eye on, feeding now and again. With Tyson moving out and Bolsita, the pregnant dog, at Karen’s, we have space to bring him in. Do I want to come?

Usually I am the girl that never says no. But today I hem and haw - I have not even begun the caffeine and nicotine infusions necessary to get me okay. Can we do this later? No worries, Donna tells me. I’ll go check it out by myself.

I haul myself out of bed and am digging around for a soda - forget coffee in this country, unless you go out for it, just forget it - when the phone goes off again. I am still in my pajamas.

Get your ass in a taxi, sayeth Donna, I found him and he’s on his way out. Get down here now. And bring a sheet.

I throw on some jeans, grab my slip lead, a sheet (sorry Lilly) and run out the door, still in the tank top I slept in, flag down a cab.

Donna is by the side of the road in the tourist area where all the bars and restaurants are. She’s going to move the car down closer to us. Keep an eye on him. Toni and Nick are on the way.

Staggering like a drunken sailor, looking like something designed by Pixar to terrify small children, there is The Potato.

I don’t understand enough Spanish to get the gist of the whole thing, but something about his gray color, the white crust that covers a lot of him, reminds a lot of the local restaurant owners of some sort of potato dish I can’t translate. Toni, Nick and Donna refer to him as Papas Fritos - fried potato. I call him The Potato. And he does look a bit like a potato. A flaking, crusty, bald potato with the four random hairs he has left sticking out of his shoulder.

With Donna gone The Potato finds his second wind and starts trotting - trotting - off in the opposite direction. I follow him for a bit, get farther and farther away from where they left me. This isn’t going to work. I need to stop him. I do the unthinkable: I loop the slip lead over his head.

Predictably, the Nicaraguan Street Dog Slip Lead tantrum ensues. He flails, whirls, bites at the lead, yowls like he’s being ax murdered. I remain calm, let him have his moment. He’ll get over it. All the park goers are watching with some interest. White people are crazy.

The good thing about half dead street dogs is that they tire easily. After a few seconds he gives up, slumps down. I half lead, half drag him back towards the meeting spot. Every now and then he has a miniature tantrum, howls, drops to his stomach. I wait it out and he gets back up and keeps going. Eventually we find Donna, Toni and Nick, Kit who has come as well. We drop the sheet over him, jerry rig a muzzle from some twine and haul his ass into the back of the truck.

Time for another mini-tantrum. The Potato tries to get over the tailgate. Nick, Toni and I ride in the back with him, Toni bracing one side, Nick standing and leaning against the cab, keeping a grip on his back end, me on his other side, kind of bracing him, kind of taking pictures.

At the clinic the dogs are all running loose except sweet, shy, Freda who is hanging back in a kennel. She slowly gets up to greet us and dead shock ensues. There in the kennel with her is one tiny little black and white newborn puppy.

Freda’s state has been in debate for a while. She’s been here since before I got here. She is small, not swollen but with enlarged nipples. Yes she’s been getting bigger but she’s been getting food. Food will make you bigger. Heat, I said. Toni, who knows substantially better said pregnant. No way, said I. Look at the size of her.

Should have listened to Toni. Toni is infinitely brighter than I could ever be. And Toni has been doing this day in and day out in Nica for years while I’ve spent the past two years essentially being office furniture in the pet supply industry.

The puppy is small but perfectly formed, black with white markings, like a Boston Terrier, bigger than Bolsitas puppies and wiggly.

We are all in shock.

We check Freda over. She is calm, her vulva is dry. Whatever has happened during the night - the labor, the birth, she has handled entirely on her own and it’s over. I’ve always gotten this vibe off of Freda that she doesn’t want to be any trouble, that she’s just grateful for the food and the care and the affection. While Quixote and Tyson and One Eye will cluster around you, begging for attention, Freda holds back, shyly approaches when the other dogs have fallen back. The way she’s done this - her pregnancy, delivering her puppy - is all in character.

We move her from the outdoor area into a crate inside the kennel with lots of blankets, privacy. She immediately curls up with her baby.

Then we get back to the matter of The Potato, who has no such compucture about being a problem. Two of us have to hold him for the ivermectin injection. Toni stands over him with the needle. It takes her a second to even find a place in what passes for his skin to get the needle in. Then we have to wrestle him into a kennel where he sets forth to howling his brains off. Later in the day Donna will come by and, seeing him still hepped up and noisy, let him into the yard with the other dogs. He will promptly dig himself a hole and stay there. When I come at night to feed and medicate he will stubbornly refuse to move, prompting another 20 minute wrestling match to get him back into a kennel for the night followed by more vocal doggy histrionics.

The Potato is a drama queen. Spunkiness wise, this is a good sign. Yes, he is going to be a big pain in my ass for a while but he’s going to be just fine.

Before she leaves Kit calls her friend at the Laguna who is interested in a puppy. The friend came out earlier in the week and met him, thought he was cute. He’s home and wants Tyson, is willing to take him today. Kit will drive him out. We pack him a bag of food, say our goodbyes and less than a week after being half-dead in a ditch, he trots out the front gate to his new home, ready to raise hell and eat furniture. We’ll see him again in a few weeks when he comes back for a brief visit to get fixed. Godspeed, Tyson. Try to behave yourself long enough for them to get attached to you .

Tomorrow Quixote leaves for his new home, somewhere around Rivas.

That will leave us with One Eye - now named Porsha, Freda and her baby, and The Potato. Something tells me The Potato will more than make up for any work load lost by the departures of Tyson and Quixote.

Postscript: The next day I get to the clinic to do food and meds and find a note from Toni: call me, major Potato problems, is the essence of it. I talk to Nick - Toni and Karen are taking Bolsita and the remaining puppy to the vet in Managua. The Potato screamed all day, interrupting classes at the school, harassing the neighbors no end. He may not be aggressive but he is nowhere near tame. She injected him with a mild sedative but he is still screaming his brains out.

It is decided to move The Potato to Donna’s patio. We get him over there and he immediately tries to get out the gate. Donna calls a handyman to construct a barrier there. The patio has two stories and we block off the stairs to the second story.

While we wait for the handyman there is a Potato Bathing interlude. This is so completely grotesque I will spare everyone the details. But we get a lot of the crust off. And the new volunteers, a 14 year old girl and her mom, are troopers about restraining The Potato while I scrub bits and pieces of crust off of him.

We leave. I go back to my house for the most needed shower in the history of bathing. As I’m getting cleaned up I get a frantic call from Donna: The Potato is on the loose. Apparently he broke through the barriers to the stairs, went over the broken glass on the security wall and jumped the two stories to the ground. She’s got him in her sights, please, get a cab.

When I get there he is ambling down the road to the lakeside, bleeding from cuts from the glass. As we follow him in her car we talk. There is no humane way to contain this dog. If we tie him up, he will hang himself trying to get out. He wants nothing to do this.

The other street dogs we have taken have been eager to be off the streets. We were joking the other day about how One Eye would sign a lease for her kennel at the clinic if we would offer her one. For other dogs this is the only life they know, the only one they want. We are doing nothing but traumatizing and hurting him. He doesn’t want to go to Maine. He wants to stay at the lakeside. He needs help, yes, but on his terms.

We decide we will make sure that he makes it safely back to the area he hangs out at the lakeside, bring him medicine for his skin and the new cuts in meatballs, hope he doesn’t get poisoned and leave him be.

It’s all we can do.

Halfway back to the lake he tries to wander into someone’s yard. We decide to drive him back to where we found him, where we know he’ll be as safe as he possibly can be. For the last time I wrap him in a sheet, wrestle him back into the bed of the truck, restrain him as best I can. The blood from his cuts leaks onto me.

At the lake we leave a bag of food with one of the restaurant owners. Today I go back with his meds. He’s not around, the restaurant owner tells me. But he was this morning, he had some water. I leave some more food, laced with medicated meatballs for him. Tomorrow morning the other volunteers will go back over with more food and medicine.

Es vagaro, the restaurant owner told me and Donna of The Potato. A vagrant. He always has been.

Quixote leaves today or tomorrow, a new home near Rivas. That will leave us with Freda and her puppy and One-Eye (nee Porsha). As those two improve, with the puppy there, I’ll continue to treat the dogs in the market but we won’t bring any new ones in.

This will lighten my workload some. Hopefully, as these guys get better a home can be found for One Eye (not that Porsha isn’t a nice name but she will always be One Eye to me) and we can bring in someone else.

One Eye is appallingly sweet, loves people, loves other dogs, passionate about food, surprisingly playful. Anyone? Anyone? A Nica Street dog of your very own….

With these guys the trick is not to see what it is but rather what will be.

The Puppies.

2008-03-09T13:34:00.000-07:00

The next morning Donna and I are out at the lakeside looking for an incredibly bad sarna dog when Donna tells me: the pregger dog had a pup this morning. At six am.

We finish what we’re doing - another horrific case we can’t bring in because we don’t have room for - and Donna drops Carissa and I off at Karen’s.

Instead of a birthing party, there are three incredibly exhausted females. Karen, who’s been up with the dog since six, Heidi, another Granada patron saint of the street dogs, and Preggers herself, nurturing four pups but still looking gigantically pregnant and stressed.

Another one was born dead, they tell us. It was awful. It came out with the sack but it was gone.

The puppies look like tiny, homely guinea pigs, blind and rooting around. Mom looks exhausted.

While we’re talking she starts to strain, pant, again. Another one is coming. Like the dead one, this one is still in it’s amniotic sack. Heidi doesn’t stop to think - as it comes out she pulls the sack open, pulls the puppy out. It’s gasping , not really breathing. We all hold our breath. Breathe.

Breathe.

Heidi rubs it’s chest. It’s chest heaves a few times, catches. It breathes.

There are a million street dogs, a billion street puppies, but in this one minute there is so much victory. Karen, Carissa, Heidi and I are between laughing and crying. Preggers is cleaning her new baby enthusiastically.

It was, unfortunately, the last victory of the evening. Time and time again she would start to labor again and time and time again, more stillborn puppies. It is a marathon that never ends - by the time all was said and done it would be twenty six hours. The five live ones. The one that died between numbers two and three. And then another stillborn. And another. And another.

It’s heartbreaking. We take turns digging the grave in the back of Karen’s garden for the stillborn ones.

I go home and pick up some stuff.

That night I sleep in the spare room outside of Karen’s house, within the locked courtyard, feet away from mother and babies. I have a yoga pad, a sleeping bag. I get up every hour to check on her while Karen and Heidi, who have been in with it since the beginning, get some much needed rest and Carissa gets a cab back to her hotel.

Sometime between four and six am the last one is born, a big one, also stillborn. And then, it seems, we are done. Five live ones. Seven dead. Mom - who is nicknamed Bolsita for the bag she had sticking out of her butt - is exhausted and stressed but fine.

It’s decided to go to the vet in the morning, Karen will get a truck and we’ll drive to Managua to make sure everything really is over, there is nothing left inside Bolsita that will kill her. Heidi has to do work stuff. Carissa stays to do clinic duty. We load Bolsita and the pups into the front of the truck and get halfway down the street. There is no air conditioning in the truck. The road is bad and rutted. It’s hot and Bolista is stressed, I’m struggling to keep the pups on the seat with her while Karen drives.

There is no way this is going to work. No way. We turn the truck around and go back to Karen’s.

Donna knows a vet that will come to the house, a decent one. He shows up and says he thinks it’s going to be okay, gives her an antibiotic shot for any infections from all the stillborn ones. Tells us to try to bottle feed the pups to give them extra help.

The surviving pups are so small, so fragile. There are two that we are smaller than the rest of the already way too tiny pups. From the get-go they have trouble latching on to a nipple, seem limper, less energetic then the rest.

We lose the first one a few hours after the vet leaves. One minute he is alive, wriggling with the others in the pile of naked-hamster looking babies. Then he is cold, gone.

The next day we lose another one, the other weak one. One of the stronger ones, one we called Little Hazel because it has the same markings as Karen’s pit bull, starts to get weaker. Heidi and Karen bottle feed frantically, warm them constantly.

I am at the clinic, working on the other sarna dogs. When Carissa, who is leaving, stops by to say goodbye to Karen she gets the news: Little Hazel is gone now, too. A bad blow for all of us, but for no one as much as Karen who has poured heart and soul into this. If there is any justice in the universe, they will survive just because Heidi and Karen, who have done so very much, deserve that.

At this writing, one is left. Heidi and Karen continue to labor around the clock trying to keep it going. Bolsita, though stressed, continues to do well. Eating, being a good dog mom. After twenty six hours of labor with not one bathroom break, Bolsita finally takes the worlds’ longest pee.

On Karen’s $5000 Turkish rug.

Highly disheartened over the pups, we take the pee as a good sign for Bolsita, carpet aside.

Karen is a saint.

To end on a slightly higher note: Tyson the ditch puppy is going to a new home very shortly. Like within the next few days. A good home, nice people out on the Laguna. This means we can probably squeeze one more into the clinic. Potato, Donna says, the horrible one out at the lakeside. A woman in Maine says if we can get him in and rehilibitate him, get the sarna taken care, of, she will take him, ship him to her home in the states.

The tourism people have been poisoning dogs out at the Lakeside. Potato hasn’t been seen in a day or two but we remain hopeful. Tomorrow we go out on a Potato hunt, to bring him in.

Tomorrow I also get another volunteer, to help since Carissa is leaving. Our first task: bath time for One Eye.

And because it would be disingenuous of me to not say anything: Carissa will be sorely missed. Sent over for a six day volunteer stint with her school, she had no idea what the hell she had gotten herself into. As her classmates read stories to school children, Carissa dug graves for the puppies with us, gently washed the infected amniotic fluid off of Bolsita, worked ten hour days with me. On her very first day we picked up One Eye. Two hours into this first day she finds herself standing next to the pick up truck with me trying to pass One Eye over to her from the bed, where I rode in the back holding the dog. She looks at One Eye - the gaping eye socket, the scabby, hairless, flaking skin, the smell. This is where most people would have made an excuse, backed away, called their advisor, done anything. I worked with career shelter workers who would have refused to touch this dog. Carissa hesitates for only a second, reaches up her arms, takes her, clutches her tight and places her carefully back on the ground, leads her into the clinic.

The girl can roll with it.

Godspeed, Carissa. Thank you for everything.

It would also be disingenous of me to point out something that kind of should be a given: I am not the clinic. I am not barely one tenth of a cog in the wheel that makes this run. I show up every now and again and get to play full time mangy dog wrangler for a while. What makes the clinic - what the clinic is - is an incredibly amazing and dedicated group of people who do this while holding down full time jobs and lives, the people who set this all up, make it run, do absolutely everything against overwhelming odds. Handle the main action of the clinic - spaying and neutering. Requistioning. Bringing in dogs like Quixote and Frida - half dead - and doing awesome work with them. Toni. Nick. Kit. Heidi. Karen. And of course Donna Tabor. And the amazing Dr. Tom who comes in often and just blitzkriegs these surgeries. I have the blog, I have the time, I get to tell the stories but it should never be assumed that they are just mine. Every single day here I am humbled and awed by these people.

The Pregnant Street Dog Saga Begins

2008-03-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

The dog had been enormously pregnant for as long as anyone could remember. A small, long haired brown dog with floppy ears - maybe some spaniel parentage - it lurked around Parque Central and Calle La Calzadera, eating trash, trying to beg off people eating on the outdoor patios. It was skittish, everyone knew about it and it was one of the big goals when I got here - bring the pregnant dog in.

I failed miserably twice - got close and then had her take off. Every night we couldn’t get her was another night for her to die giving birth under a car.

Tuesday I am working with Carissa, a short term volunteer, a college girl who only has a week. We’re dispensing sarna meds in hot dogs to the market dogs, much to the amusement of the locals who have no idea what the fuck is going on, only they we keep buying hot dogs for scaly monsters.

Two other market dogs we're medicating but cannot bring in.

We stop in an area with benches to rest and lo and behold, there she is, hugely pregnant and rooting through the trash. And me with only a quarter of a hot dog left. I lure her over but don’t try to slip lead her. I throw some cordovas at Carissa. Please, I'll sit with her you go get meat. Meat. I don’t care what, any. Just get us enough meat that I can bribe her once I get a lead on her. She’s probably going to go batshit when I get the lead on her and raw meat might keep her quieter. Carissa takes off into the maze that is Granada’s Mercado Central in search of raw meat. I sit with the dog. For a while she stays with me, then she wanders off. I follow her and lose her around a corner, under one stall in the midst of a billion. Fuck.

Poor Carissa is waiting where she left me, 2 lbs of beef in her hand.

For the rest of the day it’s hide and seek. We see her, get close, and then she’s off again, around a corner, under a bench, gone.

I am killing poor Carissa who is not used to walking for hours in this heat, through the fragrance of the meat market, stuck with the woman who always forgets to eat. She’s exhausted and her blood sugar is about to give out. The girl is a serious trooper but this is a little much to ask on day one from her. Particularly as we're also doing clinic duty on the dogs in care twice a day.

We decide to call it a day. Right as we’re walking towards a café, there’s Preggers. She appears out of nowhere from around a corner. We take off in her direction. I throw some beef at her. She comes over. I give her more, she relaxes and eats. I slip the lead over her head. She tenses for a second. More beef. She relaxes. Slowly we lead her through the market, towards the street.

Occasionally one of the vendors will ask us what we’re doing. Carissa, who speaks Spanish, explains. Instead of the usual amusement I expect everyone’s reaction is the same: Oh good, how nice, God bless you.

She is no one’s dog, no one feeds her or calls her theirs but they don’t want to see her die in childbirth in front of them.

Carissa runs recon as I lead the dog through the market.

By some miracle of shitty timing we find the only two blocks in Granada with no goddamn cabs on them. The dog is being incredibly good and sweet but I can tell she’s exhausted. Carissa manages to flag down a cab. In a miracle of a different kind the driver agrees to take her. No cab will take dogs. None. I'm going to pay out the ass for this kindness but I don't care.

I am trying to haul her enormously pregnant ass into the back of the cab when a horse driver passing stops, gets down, pushes me aside and lifts her into the cab. The stars are aligning for this dog. No one will help with the street dogs - no one.

Karen and Paul, an expatriate couple who have noticed her and tried several times to get her have volunteered their back house for her. We move her in. She has a bag sticking out of her ass - something she ate and can’t pass. I give her some mineral oil.

The next day I take a much deserved day off. She apparently is acting distressed and Donna and Heidi, another woman, take her to the vet in Managua. Very constipated, though she passed the bag, full of parasites but mostly okay. A goddamn miracle considering how she’s been living. She could go at any second , the vet tells them. Any time now.

The Trailer For The Real Story

2008-03-06T20:20:00.000-08:00

We got the pregnant one and are in the midst of a street-dog birth crisis. So far five born live, five dead. Whole story later, but for right now, some pictures.

Heidi saves the last one to be born alive. It was actually not breathing but was she got it going. By this point in time we were all near tears. This was about eight hours into labor.

Mom takes over. Left on the streets all of them, including the mother, would have died.

A different story, also coming. Another one we're medicating on the streets but can't bring in due to lack of space. The locals call him 'Papas' or Potato because of his lack of fur. A nice dog but, yeah, gross. We need room. We need homes. Obviously ones looking like this are cleaned up and treated before we start looking for homes for them.

A Brief Pictorial (No, Honestly, Brief. I swear)

2008-03-04T19:14:00.000-08:00

I'm too exhausted for a proper blog entry. All snarkiness and whatnot aside, it's been an exhausting few days. We've brought in three dogs, all in various stages of distress, and began treating some of the street dogs with mange we can't bring in. The people who usually do the clinic stuff frickin' rock - they are machines, really. And all of them have other stuff they need to do first, Peace Corps stuff, other projects. As the only person here who can one hundred percent dedicate myself to clinic stuff I feel obligated to hit hard. Maybe a bit too hard.

In the absense of my usual snarkiness and verbosity, I'll do a little pictorial, instead.

Tyson was the puppy we pulled out of the ditch. He is already a royal pain in the ass - always underfoot and chewing everything in site. Just like any puppy. To see where Tyson came from or what he looked like half dead in a ditch, see my previous post.
Quixote got here long before I did. He's a the big dominant male that's been at the clinic for a while. He was in terrible shape when he got in - wish I had pictures - but now looks like any dog you'd see at any dog park in the states. Aside from his dog-dominance issues he's a sweetheart - it's impossible not to like him.
Frita is also since before my time. She came in about ten days ago. She has bad sarna but is already apparently a lot better than she was before. She is a sweet little shy thing.

We brought One Eye in two days ago. One Eyes is ROUGH. The eye socket is still open and it looks like the eye might have been gauged out. Most of her hair is gone from the sarna and the tips of her ears are destroyed from it. She's almost on par with Scabby, the dog we brought in the last time I was here. That said, her energy level is good, she's a sweetheart and she'll eat whatever you put in front of her. She gets along with all the other dogs. There's a scar around her neck from an old cord that must have been put on, got too tight and cut into her skin. She was someone's dog and you can tell. She likes people.

The other dog, the brown one, we didn't bring in. We don't have the space and his weight is good. Instead we're treating him on the street with ivermectin pills for the sarna.

No pictures yet, but will have some tomorrow of the pregnant dog we finally got today, after days of chasing. It involved a mad goose chase through the market, a pound and a half of raw beef and the bribing of a cab driver but she is in care now.* The puppies are kicking so it doesn't seem she's carrying dead ones, thank god. The infection could kill her. She's staying with an incredibly nice couple that donated a spare room on the back of the property. We're thinking she's going to pop at any moment. Pictures on her tomorrow.

We need a lot of stuff, in some ways. With some fencing and building supplies we could put up three runs in an ex-pats back yard and bring in three of the other really bad ones. But really we need homes for these guys.

* The best part of this is that I was wearing a little sundress and the girl working with me was carrying an eight pound papaya. Quite a show.

Now Things Start To Get Scaly

2008-03-03T19:18:00.000-08:00

I cannot seem to get over this very American thing I have of never carrying cash. A lot of places take cards here but never, it seems, the ones I go to. Luckily Donna comped dinner at Café Chavalos last night - all visa, no cordova on me. But this morning when I go to meet her for breakfast Thalia, the woman from San Francisco who runs the vegetarian restaurant on Calle Martirio, breaks it to me as she brings over my café con leche. No cards.

Luckily Donna is running late so I haul ass up to Parque Central and get some cash out of the ATM, change it with the money changers out front, make it back before she even gets there.* As I’m rounding the final corner to go back to the restaurant I hear my name. In a distinctly American accent. I turn around and it’s Nick, one half of the Peace Corps couple, the people who have been running the clinic (on their own time, not the Peace Corps), the past few months. It’s good to see him.

It turns out he’s meeting us for breakfast, too. As we wait for Donna he catches me up on the clinic. Two dogs there now - both street dogs. One female who might be pregnant, one incredibly nice big male who unfortunately beats the snot out of any other dog he gets around. No vet but the ability to do neuters. Nick’s been over there twice a day caring for the two dogs. The bitch had bad mange but is almost over it and is gut wrenchingly sweet. Once she’s clear she’ll go to their house. Another dog, a three-legged one named Tripod, is bunking down with them until it goes to it’s new home later today. I get invited on the field trip to drive it out to Naidame, a little town about 20 kilometers outside of Granada. Field trip. Yay. Sure.

Donna has arrived but is waylaid in the doorway by some people. Donna is always waylaid. It takes her a few minutes to untangle herself before she can come sit with us. It’s like going out to eat with the Pope. I half expect paparazzi to turn up and start taking pictures of her. How this woman has absolutely no ego - which she does, none whatsoever, is beyond me.

Once we order we talk strategy, plans. There’s a hugely pregnant dog in Parque Central in the early stages of sarna that needs to be brought in before it pops. The couple from the bar last night offered to let it bunk in their backyard if I can get it. Donna knows of a puppy out in the barrio, towards the other school that is going down quick. We need to get it.

We talk about the meat market dogs, covered in mange and mean as shit. There’s a short term volunteer coming out who can possible get them invermectin pills in meatballs. The meat market dogs sleep in the same stalls the little kids use as bathrooms.** Whatever little kids aren’t covered in the mange yet are only biding their time.

After breakfast Nick goes to do some errands and I head off with Donna to find the barrio puppy. We drive down to the end of the street, past where the paving ends, onto the rutted dirt road with pigs rooting by the side of it. It’s only a mile from my house but it’s light years away.

Through the houses you can see glimpses of Lake Nicaragua, clean and pretty in contrast to the decay of the barrio.

Across the street from the school Donna stops, there it is, she tells me. I look out the window and see nothing, a pile of garbage next to a ditch in front of a house. I look again and there it is - tan and white and boney, bloody in spots and unmoving. A puppy or what was one. We get out and I get a closer look. I stand over it and it doesn’t stir. It’s gone to meet baby Jesus. There’s no way this thing is alive. No way. Then I see it’s chest move ever so slightly.

Donna goes and talks to the family and I loop a slip lead around it’s neck. It doesn’t move.
Carro, the family says. It was hit by a car. There’s a million little kids all of whom are delighted by the sight of the enormous gringa poking at the sarna dog. They tell Donna to take it. One of the kids makes a clicking noises and the puppy slowly, painfully lifts it’s head.

And then all hell breaks loose. Time for the show, kids.

Here was my critical error: the sliplead. The dog comes to with something around it’s neck and freaks out, immediately alive and whipping around on three legs, baring it’s little puppy teeth at me, snarling. Slip leads work great on American dogs that know what a collar and a leash is. On Nicaraguan dogs it has the same effect as pointing a gun at the them. I’m at a loss here, holding one end of this while the half dead dog goes bonkers.

The kids are giggling their asses off.

Es veterinario, Donna says helpfully. Not exactly true but explaining the difference would be useless and no one cares.

One of the little kids comes up and grabs the puppy, still thrashing around, and dumps it in the back of Donna’s truck. The kid is maybe six. Humbled I climb in the back beside it. When I get the slip lead off of it, it pushes itself against my leg, slumps down in defeat and fatigue. We rattle out of the barrio, the scared puppy pressing itself against me with every rut we hit.

At the clinic we set up a cage for it. I carry it out of the truck and it stays limp in my arms. We get it on the table and I give it some injections - ivermectin for the mange. Antibiotics - well, just because. It’s a good puppy. It squeals a bit when the first needle goes in but makes no attempt to nip. It’s ears are crawling with ticks. The two other dogs living there come over to investigate. Puppy immediately goes after Quixote, the big dog aggressive male. Shockingly Quixote backs down. Three months old, more dead than not, this poor little nine pound thing is still one bad motherfucker.

We lock it up, leave it to rest.

Donna and I go to the Parque Central to look for the pregnant dog. We come up empty but inventory the other park dogs, what can be done for them. Neuter this one, get some ivermectin in that one. There’s another sweet older dog running around, similar to Teddy. We make plans to come back at night and bring it in. If you try to do it during the day people will say they own them, try to get you to pay them for these mangy, sad street dogs.

Later I meet Nick and we take Donna’s truck to drive Tripod and his new owner out to the their house in Naidame. The new owner is another Peace Corps volunteer - a younger girl from Hawaii. She cuddles in the back seat with Tripod while we roll past fincas, little roadside stands, some contruction. ***It’s a pretty drive.

The town is small, dumpy. I feel bad for her. She’s the only one there and you can tell she’s lonely. The dog will be good company for her. We haul ass back to Granada to get Donna her truck before Café Chavalos opens.

After we drop off the truck we go back to the clinic. Puppy has eaten nothing and made a huge mess of his cage. We pull him out, feed the other dogs. Puppy gets pills this time - a capstar to kill the fleas on him, an allergy tablet just in case. He limps on one leg but it doesn’t seem broken. Again he delights in menacing Quixote.

Nick sits with him and manages to get him to eat a bit.

Nestor, the quiador for the school, shows up while we’re there****. He takes to the nasty, smelly, scabby little puppy immediately. He watches it snarl and snap at the big dogs. It needs a name, I tell Nick. Nick consults with Nestor in Spanish. Tyson, Nestor suggests. Like the boxer. So Tyson it is.

After everyone has been fed and cared for we leave, parting ways in front of the school. Toni, Nick’s wife, has been out of town but will be back tomorrow. We make plans to do dinner when she gets back, invite the short term girl who’s supposed to be showing up.

I go home and scrub for a long time. The likelihood of me having gotten something off the dog is below slim but it’s a psychological thing. I always feel itchy after dealing with street dogs. I take my slip lead, a book, some money, head back towards the parque to grab some food and have another go at the pregnant dog.

My new roommate, a nice older british guy, is watching television in the courtyard. So you’re going back to work then, he asks me. Something like that but not quite. Going to eat, too. Have you eaten at all today? he asks. With Donna, breakfast. Well make sure you eat your food - don’t feed it to the dogs.

(Interesting side note two: Aside from café owners in Liberia, other residents that I barely know are also watching out for my caloric intake. Rest assured. Other side note along the same lines: walking everywhere makes me hungry. I kill an enormous hamburger and some ice cream that night)

After I eat I walk around the park, finally spot the pregnant dog. She gets close but seems to sense my intent and takes off, enormous stomach wobbling. I follow her for a while but it’s a lost cause. Plus the streets are full of folks having a Saturday night and I can almost guarantee that the dog is going to flip it when I get her on lead. I generally try to avoid making huge scenes if I can help it. Disappointing but it’s time to pack it in. We brought one in today.

It’s still early enough that I could go out, visit some friend’s bars and restaraunts, socialize a bit. But I know the house is empty - all the other residents are out doing some such things and I can use a little solitude. I wander home to my bed, a book, some music.

*Yes. This is still safe despite my oopsy at the border. I changed the money right next to the bank security guard and got a wicked good rate.
** Gross, yes, but true.
*** Finca: A farm or ranch. Granada is a big city but a lot of Nicaragua is pretty rural.
****Quiador: one part handyman, one part caretaker, one part guard. Pretty much every non Nica family has one and all business have at least a security guard. Nestor, who is about eighteen, has been there since the last time I came.