Postcard from Ciudad Sandino

I am standing in a metal transmission tower with a boy named Moses on a hill which slopes down rapidly below us to Lake Managua. On the left a series of dark hills rises from the lake shore, on the right the lights of the city of Managua. Behind us a sliver of a moon hangs in the darkening turquoise sky above the hills that rim the valley of Managua’s Western suburbs. We have climbed about thirty feet among the metal support and the wind from off the lake blows strong in our faces as we savor the view.

I met Moses and his family this morning. Wandering around Managua’s old center I saw the Cathedral with the collapsed roof, and the old congress building which has been made into a museum. There are rooms about the environment, pre-Columbian artifacts, the national tree and anthem. Except for one mural comparing Sandino and Zapata to Prometheus, however, twentieth century history is strikingly absent. In the second floor meeting hall, my guide does point out that the Sandinistas staged a coup when the congress met here. I wander out, down to the empty waterfront plaza which somehow reminds me of Chicago. I eat dinner at an open-air Comedor: a few wooden tables and plastic stools under a tree, food cooking on a few homemade aluminum grills spraypainted silver, another table where some one cuts up vegetables for a stew. There is a red wooden box slightly larger than a phone booth which advertises Coke and houses the coolers for drinks. I talk to the woman running the comedor about my loneliness and she asks if I want to see where they live. I say no, I should see more of town and get some money, so the son offers to show me where to find an ATM machine.

The only ATM machine is at the edge of downtown, in a three story mall filled with shoe stores and other upscale shops, as well as a food court and video arcade. There is a movie theatre showing the Motorcycle Diaries, about a 23 year old Ernesto Guevara. I decide that taking a fifteen year old Nicaraguan to see a movie about Che actually would be an appropriate tourist experience. Of course, he seems more interestied in the video fight games we play while waiting for the opening time. I watch the two protagonists on their odyssey visiting the rich and poor of Latin America, staying with rich doctors and poor mine workers, and what they learn on the journey. When Moses again invites me to stay with his family, I accept.

Like most intercity transport in Central America, the forty minute trip from Managua is on an old school bus. In Guatemala they are usually painted with colorful designs, in El Salvador they are shiny, almost like a graffiti mural. Here in Nicaragua, however, they are usually still yellow, with “Murraysville School District” or a similar indicator of who they belonged to in the states still visible. As we hang from the rails on the ceiling like New York City straphangers, Carmen, the mother, tells me, as has been said so many times since Baucis and Philemon and before; “Our house is humble, but you are welcome.” Of course, she doesn’t know about Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As it was for our grandparents and many others in the much less materially wealthy United States during the Great Depression. Her reason was much simpler “We’re Christians.”

The house is painted light blue and organized: with a cement floor and indoor plumbing. The outside walls are made of aluminum sheeting nailed to two by fours and the interior walls are made of blue plastic sheets a little thicker than a garbage bag. The house is a few steps up from the dirt floor shacks with light peeking through the boards in Guatemala. They also have shelves and things to put on them, like clothes, a collection of stuffed animals, and an encyclopedia of Nicaraguan history. We eat dinner and watch a dubbed version of WWF. The thirteen year old daughter has been doing housework for a neighbor, but there have been some complaints about her attitude. The father tries to give a motivational speech, drawing on his years spent fighting against the Somoza dictatorship and the US-backed contras as well as stories from the Bible.

Afterwards he inflates an air mattress. They mention other guests: a Peruvian couple heading towards the United States, abused children placed for a few days or weeks by a local social service agency. They bought their house for $1,000 but I suspect their house has done more to serve the human needs of people other those who spent that money than many houses worth several hundred times as much.

In the morning Carmen takes me to the Eastern market. We push past stalls of vegetables, four-foot wide miniature stores filled floor to ceiling with TVs or hanging clothes, music videos blaring from occasional TVs. A few people sell bell peppers from shopping carts. We also pass a man preaching over a loudspeaker and few people standing nearby with collection baskets. Carmen mutters something about the word of the Lord being made into a business. We stop at a comedor where a huge aluminum basin rests over a grill made from an old wheel rim. A man unwraps the banana leaves to reveal a steaming mixture of beef and yucca, and admonishes me that I should look at him rather than his cooking. The flavors of the beef and yucca taste wonderful together. As we eat it the woman explains what the man meant and mentions “He lives in a room back there—with another man.” There is neither surprise nor judgment in her tone.

Later we take a bus to Metrocentre—a white two-storey mall very reminiscent of California. We go to the food court: with McDonalds, Burger King, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants around a mass of identical formica tables. It is morning so the stainless steel grilles are still block the counters, but you can see the spotless work surfaces, the plastic display cases. I ask her if she’s jealous of the people who get to work in such shiny surroundings. Last evening I helped stack the chairs and cooking supplies inside the red wooden phone booth and chain the tables outside. To wash up, we drug water in buckets from a public faucet two blocks away. But of course the teenagers working here probably don’t make much more than she does. They don’t make as much as they did when her husband drove the cab they sold to buy their house, which is why they’re hoping to save enough to buy another one.

To me the contrast between this world and their open air comedor is stark. But to Carmen and Moses, both are part of the world they live in. They just enjoy coming for the ambience “We almost never buy anything, too expensive.” Just as they enjoy a great view over Lake Managua, a ten minute walk from a house where the walls are made of plastic sheets.