Jarol's Favorite Place

The dry season is here in full force in Northern Nicaragua; it has only rained once in the past month. The earth in our back yard is cracked with deep chasms (into which we can stick a machete, we've discovered). The hills around San Nicolas are brown and dry, and the stiff grass by the side of the road crackles in the breeze.

It was into this scorched landscape that we ventured last weekend, along the red dirt road to the community of Quebrada de Agua. Our friend Jarol lives in San Nicolas now, but he grew up in a little farm house in the campo and wanted to show us this place. Jarol's whole family came with us: his wife Elisa, who has a gruff voice and a hearty laugh, his 9-year-old daughter Ararely, who knew the name of every bird we saw along the walk; and his mother, Doña Victoria, who mutters curses through the constant cigarette between her lips.

As we walked, people called out to Jarol and his family from the stoops of their houses, shouting friendly insults or asking Jarol to help them with farm tasks. We stopped at one house to talk to some cousins of Jarol's. We sat in the dark kitchen, flies buzzing around the mounds of tortillas covered by cloths, talking with an old couple who turned out to be the parents of Maria, a woman who I tutor. The old woman stirred a cast-iron pot over a wood fire that has made the kitchen walls black over the years. When it was done, she served us all plastic plates of steaming-hot arroz con leche.

Then we continued on our way, with Ararely chattering on about the earth's rotation, the names of the trees, and the frogs we might see at Jarol's childhood home. When we got there, the house was empty, its current occupants having walked to San Nicolas for the day. It was a simple cement-slab house, with dirt floors and a little outside kitchen, but by the way Jarol showed it to us, it could have been a mansion.

He took us around outside the house, knocking down some ripe mandarins from a tree and showing us the tiny buds on the mango tree. He took us down to the well – a hole in the ground where water bubbled up from the earth – where he used to bathe and do his laundry. Ararely leaned her head over the water, looking for frogs. Then he led us through some brush up to a clearing on top of a little hill, where we sat and looked out over the land. “This is my favorite place in the world,” Jarol told us.

Even after Jarol's mother moved to San Nicolas when he was a teenager and his siblings dispersed as well, he told us that he chose to stay at this house, living there by himself for several years – an uncommon occurrence in Nicaraguan culture. It was only when he married Elisa, who refused to live so far out in the campo, that he finally agreed to move to San Nicolas.

Later in the day, we climbed up a tall hill next to the house. From there, we could see not only San Nicolas, but also lots of other surrounding communities, in all directions. We sat on piles of hay on the ground and looked out on the brown squares of farmland below. Jarol pointed out some grown-over fox-holes in the ground, where during the war Sandinista snipers would shoot down the mountains at their Contra opponents.

When we got back to the house, Elisa served us some lemon chicken with vegetables and beans. Pigs and dogs wandered into the house, watching as we scraped the chicken off the bones.

After lunch we all walked over to Jarol's grandparents' house just down the road. There we sat on their front porch, gnawing on sticks of sugar cane and talking with four generations of Jarol's family. His grandmother is 84 and blind in one eye, but she still walks for miles when she has to get into town. His grandfather, who looked limber for such an old man, claimed to be 94, but it's also possible that he just know the year he was born.

Jarol's grandmother told us that she had 19 children. As I thought about this astounding fact later, it struck me that this woman, who spent such a huge portion of her life giving birth to and caring for children, seemed like one of the strongest, most independent women I've ever met. There is this developed-world notion that women who have kids and stay at home with them are less independent and somehow not quite as hard and strong as working women. And yet Jarol's grandmother was a perfect example to the contrary, I thought.

On our way back to San Nicolas, we stopped to buy cuajada cheese at a little house along the way where Doña Victoria claimed we could find the best cuajada around. And as the sun dropped, we hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck down the mountain, with Jarol pointing up to the peak from which we had looked down on San Nicolas earlier that day.