Nica homestay

Yesterday was pretty surreal. I had pretty much my normal day – charla in El Chonco in the early morning, hang out with my best Chonco friends until lunch (yesterday it was Ana, a 26-year-old mother of two who is as sweet as can be and really fun to chat with), work a bit in the early afternoon, and take shelter from the pouring rain until we left around five. There were a few medical consults with Brittany’s dad (a pediatric plastic surgeon who is down for the week) and with Dr. Christian sprinkled into the mix, but it was pretty much a typical Tuesday.

When I left El Chonco, my Tuesday shifted from my normal to a more Nicaraguan normal. My evening pretty much turned into Wilfredo’s day. Wilfredo is one of my Nicaraguan friends. He lives in Villa Catalina, a community that Amigos pretty much built. They built the houses there, put in a school and health center, and have several ongoing projects there, like Young Life (Vida Joven) and the after school programs. Villa is where they moved people from the Chinandega garbage dump, people who were placed in the dump by the government when Hurricane Mitch struck and who were basically stuck.

Villa Catalina is Wilfredo’s home. His house, like all of the houses that Amigos built there, is small and sturdy, with two bedrooms and a main room, a kitchen in the back, and a latrine and shower in the backyard. On this particular Tuesday night, I stayed in a home in Villa just like his with a woman named Fatima and her two children, Junyelki and Sol. My friend Megan, a nurse from Minnesota who lives in Nicaragua full time, has been staying with Fatima two or three nights a week for the past few weeks. She’s been thinking of moving out to Villa Catalina full time, so this is kind of a trial run. I asked Fatima (in my nervous, broken Spanish) if I could come and stay one night that Megan was staying, and she instantly welcomed me to stay any night I wanted.

So when the bus pulled over to drop Wilfredo off on the way back from Chonco, I got off, too. As usual, Benito, the bus driver, forgot to stop at Villa and stopped instead about a third of a mile down the road, but it gave Wilfredo and I a chance to catch up. It was surreal walking to Villa knowing that I wouldn’t be returning to Casa Blanca for dinner or taking a shower like I usually would after a normal work day. The sun was setting, and I was about to settle in for the night at the home of a woman I had met twice. In rural Nicaragua. Weird.

I got there and was welcomed in by Junyelki, who had clearly been awaiting my arrival, and then by Megan, who was watching a sketchy copy of Jungle Book with Junyelki. Fatima came out to say hello and show me to my bed for the night. As I dropped my stuff off and changed into a clean, dry shirt, she fixed me a plate of food (rice, some chicken dish with tomatoes and onions, and a corn tortilla) and then headed out for a special church service. I ate and hung out with Megan and Junyelki, and when Fatima came home and the kids went to bed, we sat around and talked for about an hour and a half.

It was fun to hear Fatima’s stories. She told us about how things were going at the health center and told stories about the Bland kids and some of the other people who have been down here several years in a row. She also told us about her husband, who works 24 hour shifts every other day. And about the neighbor, who gets up at 3:30 AM to start making tortillas because people start coming to buy them at 5. But tomorrow the neighbor probably wouldn’t be making tortillas because her daughter has something akin to the measles. Everyone knows everyone in Villa Catalina in a way that no one seems to know their neighbors in Atlanta.

We went to bed at 9:30 because Megan and I had to leave around 6 this morning (the Amigos staff were leaving to climb San Cristobal, so Megan had to be back for that). I had never experienced darkness as black as when we turned the lights off in Fatima’s house last night. Rural Nicaragua is DARK. The only time I really sit and think about the fact that I’m in Nicaragua is when the sun goes down, and it’s much darker in the rural communities than in Monserrat, where the interns live. It was really cool.

My bed was hard, almost like a bed frame that is meant to have a mattress on top of it, but I slept really well anyway. Fatima made Megan and I some sort of fried cheese-filled tortilla for breakfast, and we went on our way. It was a really fun night and a great experience. I would love to spend a whole summer living full time in Villa and working full time at the health center. Maybe it’s something I’ll consider for my summer off between my two years of nursing school...