In Which We Describe the Joys and Woes
of Residing in the Humble Structure Which We Have Come to Call “Our
Home”
Being that this little pile of bricks
and concrete on the Main Street of San Nicolas has the distinction of
being our first house together, we think it bears some description.
It is, after all, where we spend much of our time.
When I call it a “little pile of
bricks and concrete,” I don't mean to disparage our house. In fact,
one thing that I quite like about our house – and, for that matter,
every other house I've visited in Nicaragua – is how it unites
indoor and outdoor worlds. Because it is perpetually warm here, there
is no need to shut out the elements. And so you encounter
architectural structures where the outdoors flows freely into the
indoors: a kitchen, for instance, where the roof ends and a small
courtyard begins; or, in our case, a house where all doors open to
the outside. There is something revitalizing about having to go
outside to get from your bedroom to your kitchen, and something so
vital in never forgetting the whole big natural world beyond your
man-made windows.
That said, my appreciation for the
whole big natural world is not quite so resounding when I have to
shuffle my flashlit way outside to the latrine in the middle of the
night, or when I turn on the light to find a baseball-sized cockroach
with wings scuttling across the bedroom floor. But those moments are
in the minority.
So, our house. When you enter from the
street, the first room you encounter is a rather dingy, poorly-lit
room with cardboard-divider walls. This room is used most often by
the natural medicine clinic that takes residence here Monday through
Wednesday; we often come home to find a line of sick people waiting
on a bench. Davie has also discovered that a hole in the tin roof
over this room creates quite a fascinating “camera obscura”
effect - in the circle of light on the floor projected from the hole
in the roof, you can watch the clouds moving in the sky.
When you enter our proper house, you
first enter the room in between the kitchen and the bedroom, which is
really more of a porch. It has three walls and looks out on the grove
of banana trees in our back yard. This is also where we string up our
hammock.
The bedroom, porch, and kitchen all
have shiny new tile, thanks to Billy and Kristin, the volunteers who
lived here previously (who, incidentally, also left us non-stick pans
and a complete set of tupperware). The floor tile is so nice and
shiny, in fact, that I feel moved to walk about the house barefoot
all the time – a custom, I have come to discover, that is highly
frowned upon by the prevailing Nicaraguan social mores. (Footnote:
Nicaraguan floor culture is an intriguing topic that I hope to study
more. For instance, sweeping and mopping the sidewalk outside your
house seems to be generally expected as a regular duty, despite the
seeming futility of cleaning something that is, by its very nature,
perpetually dirty.)
The tin roof over our bedroom is
unfortunately a bit of a layabout at performing its only job as a
roof; it has five tiny holes in it, through which stream five tiny
waterfalls when it rains. We have, therefore, strategically placed
five buckets about the room to catch these waterfalls and make them
into lakes instead. Though malaria is not much of a problem in this
area, we sleep beneath a mosquito net.
Our kitchen, unlike many Nicaraguan
kitchens, has the good fortune of possessing an oven, inside which we
have baked many a loaf of bread. In the style of Nicaraguan kitchen
furniture, our kitchen is accented by plastic chairs and a plastic
card table, which we hide beneath the beautiful embroidered
tablecloth that Davie's grandma made for us.
The shower room and latrine are both
outside the main structure of the house and are both quite hospitable
to refugee mosquitoes and other manner of small insects that seek
safe haven. The earth beneath San Nicolas is not graced with plumbing
lines; therefore, we have a large water tank next to the pila, where
we painstakingly hand-wash our clothes (an exercise that takes at
least three hours). The city water comes on every other day for a few
hours in the morning, so during these hours we fill the tank with the
water we use to do dishes, do laundry, and take showers for the next
two days.
The showers we take are sometimes
dump-showers (scooping water from a big bucket onto our heads), and
they are always icy-cold. Davie has consequently taken to getting up
uncharacteristically early so he can heat up a big pot of water over
the stove and mix it with the cold water from the tank.
Our back yard is a whole jungle of
fruit trees waiting for their seasons. We have banana trees, mango
trees, coffee trees, hot-pepper bushes, grapefruit trees, noni trees
(a medicinal fruit with a repulsive flavor and smell), and another
citrus tree that we have yet to classify. The rest of the yard is a
bit overrun with weeds and piles of rocks that people have thrown
into the yard. We put the abundance of bricks we found to good use by
constructing a brick path out to the latrine, but when it rains the
path becomes more of a river than a thoroughfare.
All in all, life in the campo of
Nicaragua takes much more deliberation and preparation than we are
accustomed to. Be that as it may, we remain quite comfortable in the
little pile of bricks and concrete in which we reside on the Main
Street of San Nicolas.
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