Nicaragua: Poor Places

The bus stopped near a dirt path that veered off the Panamerican highway.  Up the dusty road stood a small community, similar to others one sees along the great transcontinental artery.  A collection of grey one-room zinc-roof cement houses, that must have started as a single house along the road and expanded outward along an improvised trail; each new house making the trail a little longer.  The dirt trail now led deep into the forested hills, and the steep inclines and waterways where it proved impossible to build marked the spot where one community ended and another one began.  These communities have no “center,” and the schools and churches simply mark the spot along the trail where a group of homes turned into a village.

The further one travels along the dirt path, the poorer and poorer the villages become.  The community closest to the Panamerican has small convenience shops (called pulperias) that sell snacks, drinks, sliced bread, salt, and other household consumables (soap, detergent, toilet paper, ect.), that are purchased from a bigger town nearby (which is still a pretty small town) and resold at their makeshift shop (their home).  Individuals also go around selling other products; the person who owns cattle sells the milk in the morning, while the people with farmland sell vegetables.  The community lacks running water, which means that people walk daily to the closest well to fetch water; there are several wells, with varying degrees of water quality.  There are “drinking wells,” which are the wells that are chlorinated to allow the villagers to drink from them; and there are “non-drinking wells,” which are wells that used to be drinking wells until a frog was found in them.

Past this first community, still following the dirt path, there is a small creek that people cross by jumping from rock to rock, and that turns into a full blown river during the rainy season.  After the creek, there are two steep hills, and the conditions of the path worsen, making vehicular travel impossible. (Note: Vehicle sightings in the community nearest the Panamerican are rare but not unheard of; usually one sees a pick-up truck carrying grain and people maybe once a day.  There is also a bus that passes through once every day.  Beyond this first community, vehicles are never seen, for reasons already stated.) The path levels off, and one is suddenly on top of a knoll, gazing out into the beautiful wild rolling hills all around.  The air is fresh, and as you keep walking you have to step aside as leather-faced men guide large herds of cattle past you.  The surroundings alternate between modest plots of farm land, pastures populated by grazing cows, and swarming wilderness.

In the community atop the hill, the houses are made of sticks and mud mixed with hay.  The roofs, of broken tile or rusted zinc.  The outhouse is the size of an airplane bathroom, with walls made of zinc or sometimes simply a black tarp wrapped around four sticks.  A pig wanders around carrying a large Y-shaped log around its neck to prevent it from getting through fences.  The property is protected with barbed-wire.  Inside the house, an emaciated dog begs sheepishly for food, while chicks run around the living room floor (the floor is also just mud).  The kitchen has two slabs of old unvarnished wood as counters, and a homemade cooking stove, constructed of brick and mud.  Most families do not own chimneys for their stoves, and when they cook the smoke fills the entire house.  In this particular house, the walls are partially exposed near the top, letting in the sun’s rays on a sunny day, and probably flooding parts of the house on rainy days.

The typical everyday meal is eggs, rice and beans, accompanied by a tortilla.  Dinners tend to be smaller than lunches; most people eat gallopinto, which is just what you get when you mix rice and beans together. The man of the house is a subsistence farmer.  He grows beans and corn, and vegetables in the summer.  The corn is used to make tortillas, while the beans he grows are sold in order to purchase rice.  Eggs are provided by the numerous chickens the family owns.  Meat, one imagines, is eaten on rare occasions, when they kill the chickens or the pig.  The drinks are natural fruit drinks from the ubiquitous fruit trees, mixed with a lot of sugar (the sugar coming from the pulperias in the nearby community; the salt for the meals also must be purchased there). 

There is no water or electricity in this community.  Drinking and washing water are supplied by a small creek, maybe five minutes down the hill from the house (in this sense, the family is lucky, as other families have to make much longer trips to fetch gallon buckets of water).  The housewives go on daily hikes to the nearby community (the village nearest the Panamerican) to charge their cell phones and to purchase household products from the pulperias.  In the kitchen, I see a battery powered radio; the only form of media entertainment in the house.

This community, consisting of just twenty houses, does not have an elementary school, church, or health center.  Children attend a one-room school up the road, where kids of all ages are taught in the same classroom.  In terms of churches, there is the option of the evangelical church a half-hour up the road, or a catholic church the same distance in the opposite direction.  The only health center in the area is at the community nearest the Panamerican.