“Once there was a way to get back homeward…”

 An email I wrote to Amit today.  A little different insight into what I´m up to.  

I am in Matagalpa after a delightful taxi ride where the driver talked about how dangerous Managua was the whole time and a 3 1/2 hour bus ride on which a mal intentioned man kept telling me how a man has to pleasure a women as well as a woman pleasuring the man when you go to hotel and ¨bang bang bang¨ No this isnt enough, you´ve gotta do more than that, more than just the boom boom boom.  His cousin fell in love with a white girl.  He says they are muuuuuuuuuuuuy amable. He wants to fall in love with a gringa.  Oh we´re both single? He says. How nice. Tienes hijos? Marido? Soltera? Amor es rico x10 he says.  Hand on leg. Hand on leg. Hand on leg. Amor es rico.  I say…I don´t want to talk about love anymore thank you.  End of convo.  He falls asleep.  Guy opens window from outside and cracks me in the head with the handle.  I survive the blow. I arrived in Matagalpa, got a 6 cordoba taxi to the city hall with 10 minutes to spare. 

I met Susana, who is, the most, delightful woman ever.  She is so sweet.  We went to store and had some juices.  Mine, called La Bomba, had broccoli, carrot, cucumber, lettuce, parsely, 10 other veggies.  It was delicious.  We are going to the Casa Materna at 2:30.  I am very excited but already getting tired of speaking spanish.  She said something about a north american girl being there so maybe she will speak my tongue.  Susana is a spanish lady who came here 8 years ago, had a baby a year later in the campo with 2 midwives and left her husband.  She does maternal massage and reiki and all and I really enjoyed talking to her.  Got into CAFTA, the education system, a society of consumption.  I don´t know exactly what I´ll be doing except probably following the nurses around but we´ll see, but as far as I can tell, I´m welcome.  Those idiots, our friends from Central, said Matagalpa was a tiny town.  Try a half million people.  The town is not gorgeous but it looks like the hills are. 

No andes mamando

Andie

Final Leg.  Nicaragua.  We arrived a couple days ago I think, maybe more, maybe less.  Heat makes you forget things.  Right now I am in Masaya, Nicaragua - a town famous for its 2 huge artisan markets and its exceptionally beautiful lagoon.  Amid constant threats of the iminent doom for a tourist in Managau, we decided not to stay put.  Its raining and it smells delicious. 

The conference was excellent.  Tons of people came out to the farm for the three day event, students, business owners, ngo officials, campesinos, even this American chick who works for a BU study abroad program.  The first two days were spent teaching people the process of making biodiesel from start to finish, including quality testing, safety etc.  The final day was a series of presentations by conference attendees about their personal projects and forum for discussion of concerns, questions, and how to maintain communication.  The conference really demystified the whole process for me.  Everyone at the conference got to make their own biodiesel in old coke bottles which made the whole thing so much more tangible, and intelligeable.  We left the farm shortly after and after much discussion, research, contemplation and a few bad moods, we decided it would be best to leave our ducks at the farm with Argentina, the cook.  Argentina really loved those ducks and asked us specifically, before we even said anything if she could buy them from us if we didnt want to take them.  She was even wearing an apron with two embroidered ducks on it.  We knew it was right when she wanted to show us how well they swim by plopping them in the communal water well, much to the disgust of the biodiesel crew.   So we sadly left them there, knowing it would be cruel to make them spend hours more on buses in the travel basket, considering they are doubling in size every week.  We also werent sure that we could get them in the states, so this was probably our best bet.  Guatemalan ducks in Honduras. I miss you Tinamit.

We left early from the farm and made our way, after 11 hours of transit to El Salvador to visit Evelyn.  IHP itself couldnt have constructed a better 3 day visit.  Never have I gotten to see so many angles of a place in such a short time.  We stayed in Evelyns fathers old home which is now being rented out to a family of three, Margo and her two kids.  She is the mistress of a man who has another wife and family who knows about Margo.  Apparently this is very common.  Evelyns mom took us to the countryside to her childhood home where we got to talk to people who were there during the Guerilla War in the 80s.  We met a woman who hid behind a tree and watched her entire family killed by the government.  Now it doesnt sound so cool when I also say that we ate some new fruits we never tried and had the best chocolate covered bananas of my life.  That night we went to the Fair in Santa Ana.  How to describe the fair…

We sloshed around in mud from booth to booth eating 4 different foods fried 20 different ways, and then went on the oldest fair ride in fair history.  I am shocked to still be alive.  Amit screamed like a little girl.  We then went to Wonder Boys Circus, the greatest spectacle the world has ever seen.  Zorro threw knives at plump women,  clowns gave performances that would shame the industry, and 16 year old boys dressed in drag and did a loosely correographed dance that ended in some male parts on Amits leg that were anything but welcomed.  It was glorious.  Two dollars well spent.  Margos baby daddy came with us and drove us home in his souped-up prelude.  The next day we went to Lake Qualtepeque, and paid 5 dollars for an embarrassing 200 meter -boat ride.  Beautiful lake but no Atitlan.  We ate some beans and tortilla and beer in someones back yard for lunch.  I cut my finger on Megs antique knife and bled all over the beer.

Anywho.  We thought Margos boss, Tito, was just going to give us a ride to San Salvador to catch a bus to Managua that day but he ended up picking us up in his Nissan Land Destroyer and buying us a fancy hotel room and taking us out for a 125 dollar meal.  Hard to do in El Salvador.  We got to see San Salvador  from the windows of his SUV, an exact replica of the most wealthy parts of LA.  I could not believe this place.  Ferrari dealerships, malls with elaborate fountains.  More opulent than most things Ive seen in the states.  Who knew.  Laundered drug money Tito said.  

So after throwing up for most of the bus ride to Managua, we are here with little direction or plan, and any direction we do have conflicts with the desires of each other…so confusion and lots of it.  I miss the mountains and the view and the sense of understanding. 

Abrazos,

Andie 

9! Best of the Trip So Far!  (gifts have been purchased.)

Honduras.  Muggings.  Gropings.  Scamming.  Duck Poo.  Honduras is a beautiful beautiful place…if you are nowhere near any tourists because when you are things get rough.  After a couple weeks with the biodiesel crew, we split off and headed for Honduras after another invigorating night at Lake Atitlan.  My 3rd visit and god willing not my last.  We spent A LOT of time on buses which the ducks did not enjoy but we put them in the showers of the rooms we occupied along our way (even when communal) and man does it smell after we do that.  They seem to like showers though.  I usually try to clean it up well but on a couple of occasions we´ve had to split quick and the clean up job is less than adequate. 

We went to Tela, a city on the Carribean Coast.  Ugly beach.  Ugly town.  LOTS of mosquitos.  I really wish we hadn´t wasted a moment there.  Amit and Meg got mugged on the beach.  I hope his parents don´t read this…  Our negative experiences in Honduras have been fully redeemed by our current local.  We met back up with the biodiesel crew 3 days ago on a finca in Sula Santa Barbara which is just a couple ours east of the Guatemalan border.  We are having a biodiesel conference here starting tomorrow and people are coming from all over to partake.  We are staying with an NGO called Sustainable Harvest and this particular site is a farm in the mountains which is absolutely gorgeous.  The weather is warm but beautiful.  The people who work here are amongst the kindest I´ve ever met and the food is delicious.  The place is completely full of the most adorable children I´ve ever seen.  It is such a calm and peaceful place to live and work.  We haul up all the water we need from the spring which has really got me thinking even more so than before about water usage.  You really start to reconsider the need for a 15 minutes shower when you know what it feels like to haul 7 gallons of water up the side of a mountain.  It is amazing how little we need and how much we use.  I really wish we´d come here sooner.  Our ducks LOVE it here and all the people here love them too.  This sounds almost unfathomable but if it turns out that we can´t get them on the plane then we may leave them here.  It would be the safest thing to do but I´m still not ready to commit to it.  It seems like an omen that the last name of the cook´s family is Hernandez.

BIRTHDAY!  Wednesday was my 21st birthday and I certainly didn´t expect to spend it climbing around ancient Mayan ruins or eating a pink marshmallow frosted cake given to me by a Honduran man I befriended only one day before with a lit cigarrette in it as a candle, but I did!  It was a wonderful day, thanks mostly to Amit who has truly been the most wonderful friend ever in every way and really made my birthday what it was.  He slept through the alarm at midnight to wake me up and then slept through the alarm that was supposed to wake us up to leave for the Copan ruins.  But he got me up at 630 and we missed the bus but hitched down the mountain and then took a couple buses to the ruins.  It was a beautiful ride and I was thrilled to get to ride a bus without having to worry about my pack.  We met up with Meg and our friend Tanner at the ruins who had split off a couple days before so that they could spend more time in Copan, a cute little town near the ruins.  We  were walking around the ruins thinking we´d never find them and I idly called out ¨tanner¨ just for the hell of it and sure enough he responded.  We snuck into some tunnels and got kicked off and Tanner dropped his nalgene bottle down the side of an ancient pyramid and we watched ton of huge red macaws take flight.  Not a bad day.  We headed back to Sula with some rum in tow, Botran of course, and then Jacobo, the guy who runs sustainable harvest got me a beautiful cake and some form of alcohol that comes in a plastic bottle.  I think it was supposed to be rum.  The night was pretty low key.  Amit gave me lots of wonderful presents including a bag of doritos and another present that he lost and should hopefully find sooner or later among other things =)  It was a beautiful day but I sure did miss seeing my friends and family.  Plans for Vegas will be made.

So I spent yesterday cleaning veggie oil out of a chicken bus to get ready for the conference and the morning searching for 2 liter plastic bottles for the conference attendees to make test batches of biodiesel in.  Not bad.  I´m covered in mosquito bites and have surrendered myself to DEET.  The conference ends the 18th and then off to Nicaragua or El Salvador to visit Evelyn.  I´m not sure I´m gonna be ready to come home.

 2…things are running…quickly

Andie