15 November 2005 23:06
The ThirteenthTwenty-seven of March, 2005. The Lord's Day.
The president of Iglesia Mennonita de Nicaragua was kind enough to give us a lift to the ticabus station at 0345. Hailing a taxi at that hour might have been a bit difficult. After arrival there, we had a classic case of ignorance on our hands. They say ignorance is bliss, but i was mighty edgy during this particular session. (Necesito a apprender mas espanol, methinks). I tried to go board my bus, but was told we weren't loading until 0430. Fine, I sat down with the others and watched people in the crowd of cranky early morning travelers.
We weren't the only ferriners there, and we weren't the only people in the "mostly clueless" zone. Come 0430 (with the bus due to leave 15 minutes later) I tried to get on, only to find out that I needed to have my ticket validated. So what we should have been doing for the last half hour was standing in that long line we'd avoided earlier. We jumped in line, but it was a typical central american line (he who shoves hardest reaches the front first).
It was a long wait, and I was pretty sure I'd be missing my bus, but lo and behold when I got out of the ticket line shortly after five o'clock, the bus was still there--and didn't leave until over half an hour beyond that. Let me chalk it up to a learning experience. But if I knew then what I know now... well, I guess it wouldn't have been such a learning experience now, would it? :). In Jamaica it's known by the phrase "soon come mohn". An appropriate phrase from college would've been "dude. chill."
I was very relieved to collapse into my seat. TicaBus is a first-class service between the major Central American cities (primarily the capitols). The windows are big and the seats recline. I like big windows, and reclining seats are a plus.
I immediately noticed the man sitting diagonally across from me (the seating was staggered) was reading a large study Bible. His wife was asleep next to the window with their daughter on her lap. The other primary character in today's bus ride was a photojournalist from San Fransico.
We were finally on the roll twenty minutes to six as we careened out into the tight residental streets (whoever thought to put a major bus station there must of thought it was a good idea back in the sixties... most of the stations along our route were in very tight spots).
The San Franciscan (I never did learn her name) was one of those people who could be a twin to somebody else you know from somewhere completely different. Since I never learned her name, we'll call her Christina since she reminded me of a certain g2er; face, mannerisms, even hair style. Unfortunately for her, she belied her psuedonym. For those of you familiar with the mennonite game; I've found you can play it with non-mennonites as well, provided they're from mennonite areas. She turned out to be a native of Kansas, and for a couple weeks had gone to the same gradeschool as Dad did (albeit quite a few years later). That kind of floored us both, because Dad's hometown is anything but large (in '00 the population was 742).
The man on my left was Juan (easy enough to remember, it almost makes me think i made it up for my journal). His 3yo daughter was Marylisa, and cute enough to cure cancer. She was of the age where she didn't need much conversational feedback to keep her chatterbox running. Which was good, because although she short enough to comfortably rest her chin on my knee, somewhere between 103 and a 104% of her spanish went sailing right over my head.
As near as I could gather, Juan was an ex-gang member turned devout catholic missionary. (Christina was fluent in Spanish, but very reluctant to translate for some reason...I'd probably get tired of translating too (though right now i get so much joy simply out of finally comprehending that i have no objections to passing the joy on)). He'd had two brothers killed in gang related shootings (one a drive-by).
Currently he was twenty-one, his wife eighteen (and looked fifteen), with a three year old daughter. His wife spoke maybe seven words in a solid day's drive, and most of them to Marylisa. She looked disturbingly familiar, but when I figured it out about four hours later that this Guatemalan girl looked like a twin sister to the son of a Filipino pastor I knew in California I decided to give up the comparisons (but she did look just like him). Juan was very outgoing (I could say "Juan was a latino" and it'd have the exact same meaning) and tried to tell me a good bit about his work.
This too went mostly over my head, but he was pretty good with his hand motions (the drive by shooting of his hermano was crystal clear). He was going / had gone to Chicago for two years (couldn't figure out the tense on that one) to witness to gangs there. I think Chicago was in the future, then he wanted to go to Africa, then to Cuba to witness to gang members in both places. There was absolutely no denying this man's intentions. his open witness put me to shame.
He had Marylisa sing me a song; she placed one hand on top of the other on my knee, looked me in the eye, and sang to me quite unabashedly (the song was about God's love). It was a fairly simple chorus that took her about a minute to sing, but it was completely adorable. I very much admired her method too--I've never had anyone look me directly in the face while they were singing to me (though Mom probably did when I was young). Norteamericanos just don't look at each other when they sing, they look anywhere else but. After she was done, she smiled, then immediately went back to doodling on a pad in her father's lap without further ado.
Later she came over and doodled in my notebook, a wound up chatterbox that obviously needed no batteries. Meanwhile there was plenty of scenery going by to look at, and I talked to Christina for the first hour or so before we lapsed into seperate pursuits. I caught up on my journal, read a little bit from Mere Christianity, and continued to watch the countryside go by.
The first day on the bus started in Managua and traveled through Honduras into El Salvador, where we spent the night in San Salvador. The two border crossings were relatively painless... the first was handled by the conductore who'd collected all of our passports before hand. We had about twenty minutes to stretch and use the restroom at the border crossing. I took the oppurtunity to get rid of my last cordobas on a couple drinks, which I then nursed over the rest of the trip.
In Honduras, despite being a point to point bus, we stopped two or three times to let a passenger on, and maybe once to let one off. The border into El Salvador was a bit trickier as the conductor had given us all our passports back. Equally clueless as many of the other furriners, I followed the general crowd making sure not to lose sight of Christiana since she had a good grasp of Spanish. Eventually the conductor came through, and seeing half his passengers milling around uncertaintly, he re-collected the passports and got them stamped.
The second half of the day was spent traveling the half the length of El Salvador to the capitol. We stopped once for fuel and a rest stop before ariving in San Salvador around 1630. After getting my ticket for the morrow and checking out a room at the station (they ran their own hotel, were making a killing on the $10 US I paid for a bed), I wandered out to make use of the one hour of daylight I had left.
I didn't know the reputation of San Salvador in particular, but knowing Central American cities in general I figured my family would not approve of me going out after dark. Semana Santa was still winding up, so although I succesfully manage comprehend the answer to "dónde está el cibercafé"; it turned out to be closed. A nearby bread shop wasn't closed, so I bought fifty cents worth of bread (El Salvador uses US currency) and continued on to a small square where a puppet show was in progress.
I assume it was Semana Santa related, but despite the large crowd, there wasn't a lot of laughter. The kids never did laugh, and though a few times chuckles were drawn forth from the adults the play on the whole seemed very serious. Which sounded kind of odd since the puppet voices were the typical high-pitched falseto. I found a mostly clean bench (there were bird droppings in abundance) and journaled for a while. Darkness approaching, I joined the bustle of people (families mostly) crowding the sidewalk, before turning off onto the quiet side street that housed the bus station.
The guard let me in (being gringo was ID enough) and I sat in the lobby awhile watching TV in Spanish before turning in early. There's nothing like being alone in a foreign city to make me feel ALONE. I guess some people probably thrive on that, but though I wasn't really feeling lonely per se, I was definately fully aware of being ALONE.
I get that here in Tuxtla too, when I'm not with people I know. I wonder in time if I'd get used to it, since it doesn't bother me particuarly in Jamaica. But here it's the language barrier and the fact that I'm a solid 12" taller than the average. In Jamaica I can forget that I'm not black skinned and I can understand their accent enough to have a conversation. Here though I have never been able to forget here that I'm taller than everyone else. And of course understanding their conversation is a distant dream.
And the feeling isn't completely about being ALONE. There's a subversive corollary that I think has farther reaching tendrils. It's the sense of not belonging, not fitting in. And that's what really gets me. I don't mind being alone...provided that I know I can fit in when I want to. Just like I did't mind taking $300 in cash and setting off into Central America. I knew that if I ran out halfway I could always shell out the dough for a money wire. I can be poor when I want to...because I'm not really poor.
My room deserves description. For starters it had a sliding metal door, five and a half feet tall, four feet wide. Essentially it was a barn door. The room was of cinderblock, the fifth in a row of five. One louvered window in the same wall as the door, a low queen sized bed in the back corner, a simple set of shelves under the window, a fan on the top shelf, and the bathroom inthe opposite back corner. Raised six inches to allow for plumbing, the bathroom was part of the entire room, but had a five foot high partition. To use the toilet, you stepped into the shower (a pvc pipe, 90º valve, and crude showerhead), turned left and there it was. When sitting on the toilet, your knees were in the shower space.
I took a shower (when there's just one pvc pipe entering the shower area, you can bet your bottom dollar it won't be hot water), shoved the shelves against the door, put my valuables under the bed, and crashed.
23:06 email me permalink / commentary (1)
This reads like a great novel...ever thought of writing a book? :-) 18 November, 2005 23:56 – 
Jenn Heatwole
