Dice Carlos, “Ethnocentricity: Tranquility vs. Productivity”

It is 6:09 am and I have been up for the past 45 minutes and awake for the past hour. Thoughts are rushing through my head at the rate that raindrops are tapping on the roof and it's pouring outside. Yesterday, Kyle (a.k.a. “Carlos”) and I lead a planning meeting during which we presented our opus of a model for expanding the work that he and I have been doing for the past 3 weeks and which I have been doing for the past 3 months. The meeting went really well and in many ways, it was my final piece of work in San Juan, as for the next 3 weeks, I will be traveling with Andrea and then passing off what I have been doing to the others who live here.

I've been doing a lot of reflecting about my experience.

The scientist in me views things very linearly. As many of you know, I cannot multi-task, which is perhaps a manifestation of a this more fundamental tendency for me to place things in sequential order. Causal relationships are often linked in this manner: one event brings into effect another which in turn causes something else to happen. Physics (until you get down to quantum mechanics which simply links probabilities to every outcome) is the perhaps the most basic example of this linear relationship: you throw something with a given force and direction and it's path is dictated by the laws of nature. I tend to project this metaphysic onto all that I do: I classify my surroundings on some sort of straight line in my mind. This has its benefits and its drawbacks. It aids my understanding of how to get from Point A to Point B, my productivity. After all, if you can't organize the world in some personal way, how can you affect that world in some meaningful way?

However, this is ultimately a false view of the world, despite that fact that my suburbanite instinct, cultivated by the very-linear progression from high school to college to medical school and beyond, would beg to differ. While there are discrete answers to questions about the physical world, there are often not singular responses to human questions. What is the best book every written? What has been the most important moment in history? What is the best song ever written? Of course, there may in fact be correct answers to these types of questions, if one person is answering them. For me: 1984, when my parents met (for obvious reasons), and Paranoid Android by Radiohead. But those are not the universally correct answers. My experience here has often called this principle, whether and when there are universally correct answers, into question.

Kyle and I were talking about a class that he took at Dartmouth about cross-cultural differences. We were comparing the culture here with our own back in Los Estados Unidos. I think I would boil it all down (to the extent that I can) to this: in the USA, we value productivity and measure our lives within that rubric. We value ambition. The American Dream says: “Come to the United States and you will go as far as your ability and hard work will take you!” Whether or not you agree with the legitimacy of the American Dream (I, for one, think that there are many stipulations that need to be added to it for it to be valid), the very idea of achievement grounds our cultural value system. Because of this, combined with the propensity for Americans to assign a monetary value to everything, we norteamericanos can easily classify lives just as physicists classify forces: linearly. The businessman who makes more money has a more successful life than the guy who sweeps the floors at McDonald's.

Nicaraguan success is certainly measured similarly. However, layered above the simple American standard for success is tranquility. Mind you, this is not the same as happiness. I would argue that our cultural values dictate the paths to happiness, but that happiness is ultimately the end goal of all people from all cultures. While individual cultures attach linear paths to happiness, adding a pluralism of cultures makes this world view planar. My observations have led me to believe that the means to happiness in the US is productivity and achievement, whereas the means to happiness here in Nicaragua is tranquility.

In my 3 months here I have only seen one person exhibit any level of stress and that person is me. When plans falls through, and I'm left pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to fix the situation, I will often turn to others around me and find their response to “¿Como estas?” is “Traquilo.” This often pisses me off, since in these instances I feel like I've been left to the dogs and handle situations on my own. However, this is a powerful observation: everything that I have experienced in the past 3 months points to the fact that Nicaraguans simply do not feel the emotion of stress. The question is: Which way is better, productivity or tranquility? The answer, for me: productivity; for my Nicaraguan friends: tranquility.

I think that, while I came here to produce, to somehow spend my time in a meaningful way so as to help with this water filter project, this cross-cultural experience is fundamentally a practice session in how to see the world in another way. It is a chance to change or at least weaken the instinct, developed from cultural values, to view “my way” as the “right way” and “their way” as incorrect. Instinctually, peering down the American road to happiness, I frustrate myself with the thought that here, work will go on until people's blood pressures rise. I'm sure that my Nicaraguan friends have been equally frustrated by my insistence on working past that point. While morality has some power to stratify some cultural values (I can confidently say that the Nazi world view is objectively wrong) creating somewhat of a 3D view from what was once a linear road to happiness and then a planar combination of paths, I think that the majority of comparisons between cultures remains planar—relativistic.

The funny thing is that even the most seemingly fundamental of linear relationships, classical physics, is in fact not true. In 1905 Albert Einstein showed that everything with respect to the laws of nature is relative, when he wrote his famous paper on Special Relativity.

Planning to Re-plan

Many of you have noted that I have not recorded my thoughts for some time here in this blog. I have been pretty busy over the past few weeks and one of the unfortunate results of this, aside from cutting my sleep short, is failing to properly take the time to record my experiences and then broadcast them via the web. One lesson that I have grappled with, as will become apparent as you read on, is the need to expect that plans will fall apart. I have found that very few things are truly dependable, whether they be physical resources like electricity or transportation, or human resources. I think that is the, albeit frustrating theme of that past few busy weeks and part of the reason why they have been so busy, since the majority of events and actions were preceded by preparation and then scrambling to account re-prepare. There are a few stories that I'd like to share.

First, team “Bartek in Nicaragua” has recently acquired a new member. Kyle “Capitan Carlos” Oberle arrived in Managua after the weather in St. Louis delayed his flight for a day which meant that I made the 3-hour-one-way trip to Managua twice in two days. But, no matter—Kyle is here and we are working in sync now! As would be expected, his arrival was followed by a figurative sigh of relief that someone could understand my native tongue and that I could again express complex thoughts. Not to mention the fact that Kyle is an all around good travel buddy. Having him here has changed the dynamic of this trip for me in a great way. While having an individual experience, and all the frustrations and joys that go along with that, has been great, having someone here to share the work and the play with is equally rewarding. We have already accomplished a lot together and we expect to continue doing so for the next week and a half until Andrea comes and my vacation starts.

Kyle jumped right into the thick of things and we got out to the campo on his first day here. In true Nicaraguan fashion, he spent his first night in a hammock that we rigged up in my room because we returned too late at night and his family had already gone to bed. However, as mentioned before, planning and re-planning is something that I've begun to get used to.

That Friday, we ran into Victor, a local fisherman who is a good friend of a good friend of mine and who had already offered (another story of expectations which were built up and then let down) to take me fishing. So, I asked him when we could go “pescando” and he told us that tomorrow, at 1:00 pm, he would pass by my house and we could go out. Although I can't understand a single word he says (There are some people whom I can understand as if they were speaking in English, and there are some people that sound to me like they are speaking one of the other 1,500 languages on this Earth which I don't have a clue how to interpret. Victor fits into the second category.), I made sure to check and recheck that we would swing by at 1:00 the following day. Alas, the next morning, after a great run with Kyle, I returned to my house in a ball of sweat only to find that Victor had come by already looking for me. Knowing that a day of fishing was worth the stress of trying to find him, find Kyle, and get out in to the sea, I ran down to the beach only to be ridiculed by him saying that I wasn't there when he came by.

The more important part of this story is the actual experience, although the building of expectations and the failure to realize them is and has been an important lesson for me here. Once we got going, though, it was something else.

Victor is a 55 year old man that walks barefoot nearly everyday with his circa-1913 wooden cart full of his daily catch from the beach to his house. He has a pink faded LA Dodgers hat which could have been anything from blue to white when it was new. He doesn't wear a shirt and he smokes on and off the boat. Lastly, he has an infectious smile that, although I can't tell what the words emerging from it mean, speaks to me all the same. After we found him, he waded into the water and then swam out to his boat as Kyle and I stood on the beach debating whether people are healthier in Nicaragua because of the higher level of physical activity that they have in comparison to the US. Then Victor hauled the motor on his shoulder out to the ponga and placed it on the back. With a little push, we were off.

The crew consisted of me, Manuel (the brother of a good friend), Joakim, Victor, and Kyle and I. I've already described Victor. Joakim was tall, by Nicaraguan standards, and lanky. Manual was shorter had a bit of a gut, which is normal especially considering the quantities of fried food here, and a killer of a tattoo—it was a middle finger, tattooed right on his upper arm!, above a cross. The irony oozed from that right arm.

We made our way north, up the coast, seeing a view of the beaches that had been foreign to me but was truly beautiful. This coast is the most beautiful of any I've seen in my life including Thailand, New Zealand, Australia, America, Aruba, Costa Rica and St. John. Then we stopped and Joakim and Manual went diving for lobster. We were asked if we knew how and if we had equipment, but even if I did know how and had my own my equipment, I wouldn't have gone. They would use a hook on the end of a long pole to hook the lobster in the side and then drag it back to the boat in their hands. After about a half an hour, we were heading back to San Juan bay to look for fish. I have never fished when it is not for sport and while the difference is subtle, we were certainly using and treating each fish as a means to an end—namely payment—rather than an end in and of itself. It turned out that we didn't catch that many fish that day and the biggest lobster was me since I had been in too much of a rush to find Victor to put on sunblock.

The majority of last week was devoted to preparing and planning (and then, of course, re-preparing and re-planning) for this past Saturday, the final phase of the three-pronged pilot project in Papaturro. We went on Monday to finalize the hygiene education phase, phase two of three, since when we went on the previous Thursday, the community simply didn't show up. The meeting went well and we spent the better part of the afternoon collecting water samples from every home in Papaturro to test how well the filters are working. That made 60 samples which Kyle and I had to analyze that night after a day of teaching, walking, and collecting. We were tired, but determined. At around midnight, we finished with the sample preparation, placed the resulting petri dishes in the incubator and went to bed. On Tuesday, around 11:00 am, the power went out, which meant the incubator turned off, which meant that the samples were not at the prescribed 35 degrees Celsius. The power outage lasted about 3 hours and while we were able to get some help from a hotel in town with a generator, there was about 2 hours when our samples were cooling.

Collection, analysis, excitement to see results, power outage, adjustment to new changing conditions.

That Thursday, Kyle, my “sister” Nadiezdha (it's a Russian name), and I went to Rivas, the closest city, to pick up supplies for the fecal collection which would occur in two days. When returned in time to go to Papaturro to drop off the collection cups, but when we got back to town, it was raining and my ride had fallen through, so we decided to make the delivery on Friday—when it would be “no problema” to use the Centro de Salud's truck. I made plans to meet with someone at 10:00 on Friday morning because we were going to leave at 8:00 and the trip should have only taken about an hour or an hour and a half at most.

The next morning, I showed up at the Centro de Salud and waited. Then the driver came, but told me that he needed to drive to Rivas and that should wait for the other driver. After waiting another 45 minutes, he arrived and we left. I was frustrated and felt rushed and the fact that the guy sitting next to me was relaxed—”tranquilo”—only made me more tense. The most important thing, though was that the materials got delivered. The lack of ability to follow through with thorough plans means that there is often a quick reevaluation of what is important and what isn't and I knew that those materials (collection cups to be distributed to the community members) needed to get to Papaturro or there would be nothing for the laboratorians who were coming the next day to analyze with their microscopes. So the collection cups got to Papaturro and I made my meeting late.

The next day, the big day, “Feces Saturday”, began late. We got to Papaturro by 9:30 am and—GLORY!—there were townspeople waiting with full collection cups—SHIT!—to be analyzed. This put a smile on my face since simple assembling the community had been a difficult task in the past. You have to celebrate the little successes. We set up the mobile lab the the lab techs, itching for some samples to look at, began looking at the samples. Results began streaming out: E. histolytica, Giardia duodenalis, Ascaris lumbricoides. We were rolling! In about an hour an a half we had cataloged and analyzed the 58 samples but that only represented half of the population of Papaturro which meant either 1) constipation had swept the town and thwarted our plans to collect poop from everyone in the town or 2) people didn't care enough to go through the process of collecting a sample and bringing it to school. I was went with possibility number 2 and so, after the two doctors came and began their consultations with the community members who had returned to see their results and receive the medication that was need to treat, I hopped in truck with two Brigadistas, the Nicaraguan term for local health worker, and we went to some of the homes that were far from the school to see what was going on. While we fell short of my hope of gathering the entire rest of the town, we did pick up one woman and we learned that, understandibly so, expecting the entire population of the town of Papaturro—or any other town for that matter—to poop on command was unreasonable.

When all was said an done, we had collected 59 samples and given about 50 medication sets to family leaders. We had a great time and we accomplished something which could quite possibly save the town from at least the agony of diarrheal disease and the cost of it and at most possibly a death or two of a small child. This was public health in it's purest preventative form.

You plan actions and processes, but not emotions. Perhaps my planning in the future will need to include frustration, anger, uncertainty, flexibility, inventiveness, reaction to change, and the subsequent joys from small accomplishments.

(The two pictures are from Saturday, “Fecal Saturday”. The first is the lineup of facel samples waiting to be analyzed. The second is Chepe, one of the three laboratorians, at his microscope.)

Dichos

I have been collecting “dichos”—sayings—for a little while because I like the poetic nature of these pithy little communication tools. There are many in English which I have tried over my time here to (roughly) translate to Spanish, but somehow, they don’t retain their zippy rhymes and connotative meaning in the other language. In the same way, some in Spanish don’t really work in English but here are some of my favorites with attempted translations:

Es mas madre la que cria que la que engendra
It is more motherly to nurse than to give birth.

Agua que has de beber, déjala correr.
Water that has to drink, let it flow.

Palabras necias, oidos sordos.
Harmful words, deaf ears.

El camarón que se duerme, se lo lleva la corriente.
The shrimp that sleeps is taken away by the current.

Musico pagado, no toca bien son.
Music having been paid doesn’t play a good song.

Cuando el gato va a sus devociones, bailan los ratones.
When the cat tends to his duties, the mice dance.

Pobre Nicaragua, tan lejos de Dios, tan cerca de las Estados Unidos.
Poor Nicaragua, so far from God, so close to the United States (when I recited this to a family member the response was: “Nicaragua no esta lejos de Dios!”—“Nicaragua is not far from God!”)

Hay que capitalizar el socialismo y socializar el capitalismo.
We must capitalize the socialist and socialize the capitalist.

El criterio de la verdad es la práctica.
The judgment of the truth is practice.

Hace mas el que quiere que el que puede.
It is more that which you want than that which you are able to.

(The picture is of the bay which I took on a hike to the lighthouse on a hill in town)

Proyecto Piloto en Papaturro

After much planning, re-planning, scheduling and rescheduling, we got out to Papaturro two days this week and worked on the “education” arm of the three-pronged pilot strategy to improve the health of the campesinos. In addition, I spent Tuesday and Thursday exploring other communities to see how their filters are working. All told, it was a busy and productive week—a great start to a busy and hopefully productive month.

We arrived in two vehicles, which is a miracle in and of itself, since transport has proven time and time again to be the most difficult part of this entire project. There were seven of us coming from San Juan and three Brigadistas from Papaturro, forming four teams of two to visit each house while Fidel and our driver-converted-temporarily-to-Filter-Technician Marvin visited a few select families which either needed their filters to be installed or maintenanced. I was nervous about whether we would be able to pull visiting 23 families in one day, talking with each of them about their hygiene, their filters, the cleanliness of their homes, and recommendation of how to make them all better. But, we came, we saw, we conquered!

A quick anecdote: When I was putting together the materials that we would use (pictures, a teaching guide for each team, and recommendations to leave with the family), I was trying to balance the ‘dibujos’ with the ‘texto’—the pictures with the text. However, I realized that my efforts to assemble both were not in vain, for at one of the houses we went to (and I know was the case at others which other teams visited), the nice old lady was just learning to read. Having the images (which we got from CAWST, again, you can’t saw that Canada doesn’t do it’s part!) was in fact vital and the combination of image and text gave her a change to practice to boot!

Afterwards, we shared in the black gold of Atlanta, that refreshingly unhealthy drink that in the states is the enemy to school children everywhere but here is a consolation form the heat...Coca-Cola.

Style

I would be remised if I left out of my online discussion of this experience, a comment about style. Style here in San Juan del Sur comes in three different flavors. The first is that of the young people who have essentially adopted the dress \of the surf tourists that, at this point in time, are quite common in town. Familiar brands sported by this subculture include: Billabong, Quiksilver, Ripcurl, Vans, and Nicasurf which is a local surf shop and clothing line started by a local surf guru. I’ve noticed that above all, there is one thing that unites the surf tourists who transported this sense of style here in the first place: tattoos. Their nationalities range from Canadian to American to German to South African but rest assured that these foreigners-turned-settlers, if they are between the age of 20 and 40 (which many are) have a tattoo of something either on the small of their back or their ankle or their arm or some combination thereof. That’s the “surf style”.

The next flavor of style is just plain regular. This category of clothes-wearers don’t have any sort of noticeable pattern, but generally dress themselves well in jeans and nice enough shirts. However, many people in this category cross over to the last flavor of style as well.

Calling the last flavor of style a “style” is really an ironic use of the word. It is in this category that the majority of garments and the majority of the population fit; it is, in some sense, anti-style, since the word “style” connotes that there is some attention paid to form over function. The point is that most people here don’t wear clothes because they look good or because they like the color or, as is so important to most Americans, subscribe to some sort of brand loyalty (although most have a set of nice clothes that are reserved for church and other formal occasions)—they wear what they can get to cover their bodies from the sun and for social norms. The result is that there are many, for example, t-shirts that people wear but likely don’t understand. Case and point: I was walking down the street and saw an old woman wearing a hat that said “Keene, NH”. I did a double take and just before blurting out: “Whoa! Keene, NH…I went to Dartmouth!” realized that she didn’t have the first clue where the heck Keene, NH is. And then there was the family that used a “Framingham Soccer” bag as a storage container in one of the communities in the Campo. Again, my knee-jerk reaction was to relate to them that Framingham is not to far from my home, which I quickly realized brought them no closer to understanding my home since they didn’t know where Framingham was in the first place. My favorite (this one is for you, Jon) was the guy I saw riding a bicycle with a shirt that said “Exciting Idlewild!” on it. What he didn’t know, and what you probably don’t know either, is that Idlewild was a ski resort near Winterpark, Colorado which closed it doors many years ago. Some altruistic marketing director, upon boxing up the items in his office, probably realized that they had a large number of unused and useless “Exciting Idlewild!” shirts which could serve a better purpose in a third world country taking up space and perpetually collecting dust in someone’s closet.

This is not to say that people don’t care about how they look here, it’s just that sometimes they don’t have the means to actualize their desire to look good, beyond combing their hair and donning the nicest shirt they have which says something in a language they don’t understand.

Las Vidas de Los Guerrillas

I knew that this family was tied to the revolution. I’ve already told you about the scholarship that Felix and his brother Emilio received to study at the Russian Naval Academy in the mid to late 1980s. However, I didn’t realize that El Pajaro Loco himself had fought as well. Sometimes I feel like conversations about the Revolution in 1979 and subsequent Contra War are like lenses through which I can better understand the history of the United States, since I have never spoken to anyone who either fought in the American Revolution nor the American Civil War. While everyone knows the simple facts about US History, the revolutionary spirit and the struggle that people faced having to fight against their former compatriots is different when presented in conversation, albeit difficult for me to understand since my Spanish is not nearly to a level of fluency yet, than in a history textbook or novel.

El Pajaro Loco was telling me about how he fought side by side with Felix in the Mountains very near the border with Costa Rica which was one of the main fronts of the Contra War. One image stuck out in my mind. He said that in those days he used to smoke a lot and was nervous all the time. Although, I couldn’t quite understand which was the cause and which was the result, I suspect that with or without nicotine pumping through his veins, the constant threat of danger from guerrilla would have been sufficient to enervate someone sufficiently. However, when he did smoke, he had to cup his hands around the butt of the cigarette or cigar so as to hide the faint, but distinct orange glow from sight. As he was telling me this, he showed me with his hands how he used to hide his smoking from the enemy, undoubtedly always on top of the next mountain. I’m sure that just added compounded the nervousness: his refuge itself—smoking—was shrouded in further danger.

Las Avispas versus Los Humonas…Ganamos!

The past week has been taken up with preparation for, and the realization of, the Jornada Nacional de Salud—National Health Day. The Ministerio de Salud—the Ministry of Health—mobilized all of its satellite centers, of which there is one in San Juan called the Centro de Salud, to vaccinate the population and especially children under the age of five. The campaign spans two weeks, from April 23 until May 6, with the primary days being April 28 and April 29, the former for caravanning into the Campo and setting up vaccination stations in the houses of Brigadistas, schools, and other public places, and the latter for doing the same within San Juan itself. During the remaining 12 days, the Centro de Salud has been and will be visiting other communities that were not feasible to visit on April 28. This effort to visit every community in the Campo is serendipitous for me because it allows me to: 1) get to know communities that I haven’t already; 2) observe a vaccination campaign in a Third World country which is pretty neat in and of itself; 3) collect water samples from filters in communities that I haven’t been able to visit thus far.

Ok, that’s the background.

Now, Thursday, I joined a group of nurses, a doctor, and some other medical staff on a trip to Miravalle and Toro Venado (literally, “Valley View” and “Bull Deer”). The drive itself was beautiful: we were driving on the side of a mountain, from the top of which you can see the ocean to the west and to the east, Lake Nicaragua and the two volcanoes, Concepcion and Maderas, which form La Isla de Ometepe. After this, the road cuts around the mountain and weaves in and our of dry river beds in thick forest. I immediately went to Toro Venado to collect water samples from the filter in their school. As an added bonus, there was a small monkey sitting next to the well in a collecting basin for water but which was dry, but that is somewhat of a digression from the story, so I’ll stick to the main line. But he was damn cute. And a kid picked him up and freed him from what seemed like entrapment in the basin. Ok, I digressed and told you I wouldn’t.

I walked back to Miravalle after receiving directions that I couldn’t understand, and took samples from the two filters there, one in the school, and one in a private household, which I needed guides (two kids, one was 8, the other 10) to find. By the time I got back to the medical station where the staff from the Centro de Salud had pitched camp, they were wrapping up their vaccination operation and I was tired. After about 20 minutes of resting, I got into a conversation with the doctor, Hector Luis Galan, about his service in the military during the Contra War. We got talking and continued to wait for the truck to return to pick us up. We were interrupted by a shout from inside the pharmacy by the preschool teacher who emerged with not one, but two wasp bites. After giving her some hydrocortisone cream, we went inside to investigate. As one would expect, there was a series of wasp nests inside the pharmacy and a relatively constant flow of these flying menaces in and out of the two-room building.

I got thinking: wasps are bad, the other room in that building is the preschool, pharmacy and preschool. I’m sure you know have a friend who is highly allergic to bees and carries an Epi-pen with them everywhere. It’s a nightmare if there is a stinging incident and no epinephrine in sight and in fact, it can spell death. If the point of our visit was to prevent disease (doubly so with vaccinations and water filters), perhaps the best preventative measure, perhaps the most important thing we could do for the health of the townspeople buying items at the pharmacy or the little 4-year-olds sitting innocently in class, would be to eliminate those damned wasps!

I shared my thoughts with the doctor who, perhaps because our earlier conversation of war had rekindled some deep love of struggle that exists in all of us, concurred without the need for further convincing. However, we had no chemicals or body armor on site. My initial strategy was to start a small fire inside the building (it was made of concrete with tile floors) and smoke those insectual beasts out. This was quickly changed to: light a fire on the end of a broom stick and burn the wasps and their nest. We got some poster paper from the preschool and made a large cone shape around the broom stick in which went kindling and small sticks from outside. Then we closed the cone so that it had a cocoon-like shape, in the middle of which was the fuel for the fire. I was deemed the point man to take the fire to the enemy.

With fearless courage, I confronted the swarm and with a quick movement of flame-to-nest, pissed off the majority of the wasps in the pharmacy. I’m not stupid, so I ran. Now the swarm was dispersed and bussing all over the place. The direct vicinity around the pharmacy was filled with inch-long insects darting this way and that. The Doctor-Warrior took the weapon from me and continued to inflame (both figuratively and literally) the nest and some remaining wasps, most of which were rendered harmless because their wings essentially crinkled under the heat and so they fell to the floor. However, there were still the wasps that had escaped the initial attack and they were starting to reassemble back around where the nest used to be. I grabbed the roll of poster paper and began swinging. For a guy that hasn’t played competitive baseball in about 12 years (barring two games in college, which were a joke—sorry Kyle), nor has ever fenced and to my (conscious) knowledge has no experience with the Jedi Force, I did pretty well. The Doctor-Warrior grabbed a rag and with deadly aim was able to eliminate several wasps who sought refuge in the corners of the room. After about 10 minutes, I had hit, right out of the air, about 7 wasps—bogies—and proceeded to finish the job with my shoe. It was exhilarating. And neither the Doctor-Warrior nor I, the temporary Jedi Knight, got stung!

After it was all said and done and we were again waiting, I said to the doctor:
“So what do you think is more important for the health of this community, the vaccines or killing the wasps?”

His response: “Las avispas!”

So, as it turned out our public health arsenal that day not only included the standard: vaccines, needles, Vitamin A, and water filters (and testing materials), but also the: broomstick (which didn’t itself catch fire), a rag, and a rolled up piece of poster paper.

To Credit or Not to Credit…

Leonel and I were talking just before we went to give a presentation about the upcoming National Health Day (Jornada Nacional de Salud) during which every child under the age of 5 will be given a range of vaccinations all around the country. Leo was telling me about the numerous phone calls he has received and continues to receive offering him the “opportunity” to have a credit card. The decision for him is difficult—does he want to own a piece of plastic that on the one hand could empower him to purchase some of the items on his wish-list but on the other hand could being a cycle of debt which, if he is not careful and responsible, could give him endless financial headaches.

I began my evaluation of his decision, naturally, from an American point of view: credit is good. You collect debt which allows you to do more with your money and in addition, you establish yourself in the eyes of the bank as a responsible individual, able to pay back loans on a regular schedule. This in turn allows you to increase your credit limit, decrease the interest rate incurred if you can’t pay your monthly bill all at once, and hence, increase the amount of debt that you owe.

Leo looked at me somewhat blankly. Why does he need to do this? What is the point? He owns his house (i.e. he doesn’t need a mortgage) and the only thing he could think of using this “arma doble firma” (double endged sword) for is buying a motorcycle, a new TV, and maybe some other amenities which, while he would like them, he does not need. The possible costs are great: if he is unable to payback the credit card and find himself locked into monthly payments which perpetually increase. I was reminded of my grandfather’s viewpoint of credit, debt, and loans as intangible forms of imprisonment.

This got me thinking down a path that passes between the American culture which I know and feel, and the Nicaraguan culture which I am trying to learn and understand. Of course, one of the overarching intents of making a trip as I have, is to see, experience, and feel the places where my culture clashes with, mixes with, or otherwise intertwines with the culture here; this is, after all, an intercultural experience. However, I think that in order to see these points of demarcation at which one culture says one thing and another says the opposite, I must approach my experiences with a relativistic frame of mind. While the natural impulsive thought process is to witness something new and feel that since it is different, it is therefore worse, this impulse must be fought. Otherwise the whole project of learning from others that come from different viewpoints as your own is lost. The difficult part comes when you want to form an opinion because ultimately, you need to take action—Leo needs to decide if he wants to sign up for a credit card or not.

We'll have to continue this conversation later...there is much more to say. (The pictures: one is of Antonia Solis, the Brigadista-or health worker-in one of the communities, with a filter that she just finished installing. The other is Leonel teaching parents and kids about the vaccination campaign which is going on right now.)