Central American Premier of the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

Noah enjoyed a rather pedestrian career in the renowned Washington Middle School Senior Band somewhere in the middle of the clarinets. At the American Nicaraguan School, he is one of the best players, in the high school band even though he is still in Junior High. He also plays occasionally with the high school ensemble. He takes lessons with one of the best clarinet players in the country, but he almost never practices. It is drive like this that got him selected to play with the other members of the ensemble in the ANS high school musical – Putnam County Spelling Bee.

Practice was sporadic. Sometimes it would be scheduled after school and then not happen. Sometimes we told Noah it was just too difficult to arrange a ride and they would have to practice without him. He really wished he had not agreed to do it. At some point, some professional musicians were hired to fill in the gaps. There was an all day dress rehearsal the day before the opening of the play. We asked Noah how it went. It was a very Nicaraguan experience he said. First there was no power then when there was power, Fernanda’s amp cord wasn’t working because it had been taped together and we had to send someone over to her house to get another one.

The first night of the show, we all drove to Managua to the theatre of the Alliance Francais. Jonathan went down a one way street the wrong way on the advice of some drunks hanging out on the corner and put a huge dent in the car when he scraped the official Alliance Francais truck making an emergency u turn to avoid oncoming cars. As at all school events, I was struck by the whiteness of everyone in the room compared to any other room full of Nicaraguans I had ever encountered. I still feel terribly out of my league with the Managuan elite.

The play started with a sort of history of Broadway with various members of the drama club singing excerpts of songs from Rent, Wicked, West Side Story, Grease etc. I’m not sure why. Perhaps everyone needed a turn. Perhaps it is due to the fact that the length of a regular Broadway show just isn’t quite long enough for Nicaraguan attention spans.

Finally the play started. Noah played brilliantly. The acting was astonishingly good. It was in fact, the Central American Premier of the play. It was in English. The accents were perfect and the kids maintained all of the little tics and speech idiosyncrasies of their characters. It was several degrees of separation. Nicaraguan kids portraying caricatures of US social types. The family next to me asked what a Spelling Bee was. It is hard to explain to someone who never had participate in one in third grade. Not a single person laughed at the bar mitzvah jokes.

We got home late and the kids still had to get up at 5 for school the next day. There was another performance on Thursday night. The closing night was cancelled at the last minute because May Day celebrations were causing disturbances by the theatre with their mortars and fireworks. It was deemed unsafe to go on with the play. Thank goodness we got the message before Noah got all the way back into Managua in the midst of the rabblerousing. Only because Fernanda thought to call Jules on his cell phone.

Rain

We have heard it has started raining in Panama and here in the mountains, but not in Granada yet. Stifling heat this morning. For about an hour, there was bowling lane thunder from the West and North and the sky got a little bit darker, although still clear to the East. The green parrots were flying around and squawking. It smelled like rain, but we did not get our hopes up because yesterday, same thing happened and it only rained in Managua.

Finally, the rain came. Falling steadily now for almost half an hour, but starting to let up now. It smells so good. Nothing like warm wet earth and warm wet concrete tiles. I can hear the car tires splashing in the street. The doves are fluffing and preening on the roof ridge.

I tried to take a picture off my balcony, but it is hard to capture rain from this angle.

Taxi Strike

For over a week now, the taxistas in Granada have been on strike. The are protesting the sale of 60 new medallions that came about as a result of a study showing that Granada needed more taxis. The taxis are all parked around Central Park. The taxistas are drinking beer, playing cards, harassing city workers. It got ugly two days ago when they started burning tires at around 5 in the morning. Then they shot off a lot of fireworks and mortars. Then they reportedly supplied a bunch of thugs with beer, sticks, stones and more mortars. Their targets were scab taxis at first and then just anybody. Finally, the police got the word from Managua to restore some order. See the police here are national, not local. They have no loyalty to the mayor who is a different party than their bosses. So they don’t do anything.

It would seem that the point of a strike would be to generate sympathy, but at the moment everybody is mad at them. People depend on the taxis to get to work because no one has their own transportation. Buses go but they are slow and crowded. One of the great joys in Granada is that a taxi costs 50 to go anywhere in the city. But folks are very pissed. They are fed up with taxistas charging more to go to further out neighborhoods. They are universally decried as being dirty and bad mannered. I once flagged one down who couldn’t open the doors of his filthy taxi. He may have been drunk.

Angel brings word of the situation every day when he comes in the morning. He has to borrow one of the bikes because usually he gets a free ride from one of his friends to our house. He says the problem is political. The mayor is liberal and the taxistas are Sandinistas. He says it is always like this; the mayor’s office refuses to talk until someone dies. One person dies, and then they sit down. Actually the did finally meet yesterday with the new bishop mediating. No agreements. This morning Cristina said they were burning tires over on our side of town because they realized taxis are operating along the edges.

Meanwhile, it is delightfully quiet in the streets because the taxistas aren't driving around honking at anyone they see pause for a moment on the sidewalk and the running has been great free from speeding taxis down by the lake. Things must be getting hard for families. It is unlikely that any taxistas have savings to weather a strike and there isn't any union to take care of them.

Have I mentioned its HOT?

Hot, hot, hot. I find I am not leaving the house much because it is so stifling out in the street. There isn’t anywhere to go in Granada that is cooler than my own house. We get a strong breeze and then there is always the pool. That never gets hot.

Hard to accomplish anything. I am sitting in the hammock and the roar of the hummingbird’s wings in my tiny courtyard is deafening. Even writing this paragraph I had to take a little nap.

It hasn’t rained since November and the countryside is crispy. Lots of dust in the air. They say the rain could start again as early as the end of the month. Can’t wait.

Work

I worked hard all day on a very small proposal for ReWA that took much longer than it should. I broke down and turned the air conditioner on at 3 o’clock. I have discovered that working in the back of the house cuts out the door distractions. Since the monitor and keyboard got stolen, there’s no reason to work at the front desk anyway. Surprisingly, I actually enjoy working here. With Angel to drive the kids around, Christina to clean, Moni to cook and shop it’s easy to sit down and get to work. I guess I normally do the work of 4 people at home. Hmmm. Oh, how I will miss my staff!

Pesaj and Semana Santa

We spent the first night of Passover on Little Corn Island. I had 2 boxes of matzah, some amazing live salad greens from Steve Ensalada by way of Peta and a beet. The chef at Casa Iguana was very obliging. I asked him to roast the beet, boil us half a dozen eggs, wash the greens and find us a bottle of wine. We were stumped by the bitter herbs, because he couldn’t come up with horseradish, or even regular radish. No biggie, it was kind of a pseudo Seder anyway. Fortunately I realized they thought boiled eggs with matzah and salad was our dinner and clarified the purpose of the ceremonial foods in time to get our dinner reservations in. Glad they were serving chicken.

We sang our blessings and ran through the Haggadah rather quickly as a very big moon rose over the Caribbean Sea. The kids didn’t want to sing songs because they are at a painfully conscious stage.

We had a second Seder Friday night in Granada with the Ginsberg family so that I could get a chance to make matzah ball soup and matzah almond roca. The horseradish was again a little problematic, but Laurence assured me there is horseradish in Dijon mustard so we put some of that on the Seder Plate.

When it was time to open the door for Elijah, we heard drums coming down our street and opened the door to find a different prophet covered in blood and stretched out on a funeral pyre.

His mother was gazing down at him. They were held a loft by a group of young folks wearing purple hoods and robes. The pointy capirote (hoods) always remind me of the kkk but it was so hot these guys had theirs rolled up over their faces and looked more like purple smurfs.

Whereas I was running out of the house during Purisima to catch every passing of the Virgin, I found I was less motivated for the Semana Santa processions. I find the images of Jesus so much less compelling than Mary. I also may be experiencing a little band and float burnout after all of these months in Granada. There seems to always be a procession in the streets.

But the oddest interpretation of the season had to be what Avi saw in Masatepe. I wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t shown me the pictures. They have an event there each Good Friday that is simply referred to as the Judios (Jews). Many groups of men dress up in matching short skirts and wear pointy hats covered in crepe paper. Each group has a contraption of chains that they pull through the street. A designated Jesus and/or Judas is bound in the middle of the chains and pulled. At first he is held off the ground and flying through the air, but as the runners tire, he gets dragged along the pavement. Major road burn. Also small children are walking around dressed up as Jesus and one lucky youth gets to be tied to the cross and raised up in the town square.

The official news report is 95 dead in traffic accidents (28) drownings (41) homicide (20) and a gun fight (6) for the week of the heaviest traffic and partying of the year. Talk at the kids' school was about the 12 who died when a pickup full of young folks being driven fast by a drunk had a head on collision with a small bus.

What We Found on Little Corn Island

Not a single car or truck on the island. The main thoroughfare is a sidewalk with dirt paths leading off to beaches. Loads are transported by hand carts or wheelbarrows. There were a few bicycles and a few boats. The beaches are soft light sand ringed by coconut trees. Mango groves cover the two hills. The water is every color of blue green you can imagine.


We stayed at Casa Iguana which had simple brightly painted plywood cabanas scattered on a small cliff overlooking the beach on the east side of the island. That side is blessed with an almost constant wind. The west side with the village and the pretty sunset is stifling.

Three delicious meals a day were served in the lodge looking out over the water. We rented snorkeling equipment to explore the reefs right off the beach. For our big outing, we walked to the north side of the island and found another beautiful beach of white sand and coconut trees.

We slept with the Caribbean Sea breeze in our faces. We swung in hammocks. We read books. The boys paced the beach engrossed in a conversation they seemed to have started many years ago that we can never figure out.