Rain

Finally the omens have come together. How I have waited for this moment. The rain is falling, and I am inside. I have showered, put on clean nightclothes, and made a cup of hibiscus tea. My computer is charged, and I am not tired. And just this morning I made the intention that I must write about my experiences here, whether or not I stumble across exactly the right words or phrases to express them.

The best of the omens, and the reason I mentioned it first, is the rain. It used to be a dream of mine, in the rainy season in Senegal, to be caught inside my hut, alone, in an eternal torrent. Why? That would be the only guarantee of having uninterrupted time to myself. Otherwise people were always around, always visiting me, always wanting to talk, never wanting to leave me alone. Surely if I was alone I was unhappy, they thought. But if it was raining, they would stay in their huts, and they wouldn’t worry about me being alone in mine.

Here in Nicaragua the issue is not so much people bothering me as the other way around. I’m not exactly bothering people, but, without the rain to keep me inside, there are always things to be doing. Tonight I was down in town, just finished a gardening meeting and just beginning a computer class, when I looked out the window and saw a sharp flash of lightning and heavy clouds behind the volcano, in the direction storms come from. I was supposed to teach the class, wait for a friend, go with him to meet the bus driver to make arrangements to have tools purchased at the hardware store on the other side of the island and delivered here tomorrow, and then plan another meeting. But when the lightning flashed, I looked at Nevis, my computer student, and he said, it’s going to rain hard. Soon. I left my baby plants outside, I said. And the rain will smash them, he said. And they will die.

So we changed the computer class to tomorrow, and I dropped all my other plans, and scurried through the fields, across the creek, up the hillside, and through the fences to get to the farm before the downpour. Of course, I arrived, and it didn’t start raining until half an hour later. I got my plants into a protected place without a problem. And it wasn’t a hard rain. But it conspired to get me here, in the house, alone, at 7:30 p.m. With a charged computer.

The charged computer is mentioned as a sidenote, and it is a sidenote, but rather an important one. You see, on the farm we only have solar and wind power, and we have a slightly problematic battery system, and it’s only possible to charge my computer during the day. And I can’t use the computer while it’s charging. If I charge my computer in the morning, and use it during the afternoon, then in the evening, if I want to use it again, I’m out of luck. Or if I’m gone all day and can’t plug my computer in, or if someone else needs to charge things at the same time, or or or…it’s a complicated issue. And it often ends up with me lying in the hammock at 7:00 p.m. thinking how much I’d like to write some e-mails or write a blog post. But the computer is dead.

Back to the rain, however. Appreciating the rain as an excuse for staying inside is nice. There’s far more at stake in this situation, though. I left Nicaragua mid-July to spend what turned out to be two months away, attending weddings, visiting family, and working. When I left, it was raining all the time. Almost every night. The path from town to the farm was always muddy; the paths on the farm were muddy; we were frequently working in the rain. Chris, the farm director, says that you get an extra workout in the rainy season, because your shoes are so heavy with mud all the time.

I dreaded coming back in October. From the day I had arrived on the farm in February, people were telling stories about the previous October. How it rained for three (six?) days without stopping. How you would wash your clothes and they would never dry. How everything was moldy. How there were torrents of water rushing through the outdoor kitchen during heavy rains. How everyone was crowded together under the only roof that didn’t leak. And trapped there while it rained and rained and rained.

But when I came back in October, everything was dry. The formerly muddy path was solid and hard. The garden that I had worked so hard to prepare and plant before I left – and expected to come back and find verdant and fruiting – was a wasteland, barren except for a few resilient beans and greens. Everyone everywhere said to me, our rice is triste, it is so sad. There are no grains on the plants, because it has not rained. I had heard the same thing in Guatemala – in large areas of the country, there was no cosecha, no harvest. The plants were planted, the beans and corn and rice sown, tended to, and their produce awaited, but the rains did not come. And the plants did not bear. And now there is no food. In some places there is no water. Or even if there’s a little bit of water now, there isn’t near enough in the rivers and streams to keep them flowing until next year’s rains begin. This is a drought.

Because my primary occupation for the next five months here is with gardening, and particularly gardening in the dry season, this is a serious issue. Because people that I know and care about have lost their harvest, all they invested in it, and all they were hoping – and needing – to gain from it, this is a serious issue. Because people are going to be hungry, and food prices are going to rise, and the economy is already in a bad way, this is a serious issue.

When you buy your food at the supermarket, and there aren’t any mandarin oranges because of a late spring frost, that’s a bit of a bummer. When you lose your job, and you’re not sure when or how you’re going to manage to find another one, and you have to quit eating out and doing other nice things because you can’t afford them, that’s a bummer. When what you grow is what you have to eat – that and mostly only that – and things don’t grow, that’s more than a bummer.

My feet and ankles are pink, slightly raw from the scrubbing they just received with the scrub brush. Once a week or so, I take the rough plastic bristles to my skin in the hopes of removing the layer of brown that doesn’t come from the sun but that seems almost as much to be a natural part of me.

Watering the garden, tromping through dust, hauling buckets of water, moving stones, turning compost, cutting down trees (rapidly regenerating ones, of course) to make vegetable beds and hauling the wood halfway across creation, hiking down the rugged path to town – dirt and mud of all forms are a fundamental part of life here, so why not carry them with you?

‘Here.’ Where is ‘here’? Slightly more broadly speaking, ‘here’ is the island of Ometepe, a figure-eight-shaped land mass formed by two volcanoes rising up out of the beautiful blue Lake Cocibolca. All the island’s inhabitants live, more or less, on the side of one volcano or the other. We’re on the Volcan Maderas side, the luscious cloud-forest-covered-crate

r side, and we enjoy a daily view of Volcan Conception’s almost perfectly shaped but rather unvegetated cone.

Narrowing down a little, the ‘we’ that I am specifically referring to are the inhabitants of Finca Bona Fide, a permaculture farm doing a combination of research and projects focused on improving food security for people in our own little community of Balgue, just down the hill from us on the lake shore, and the world ‘round.

I would love to tell you about those projects, and hopefully I will in the weeks and months to come, but I prefer to take today to introduce you to a smidgen of my life here. Start with me and work outward from there – is that egocentric or what?

My favorite mornings begin with the rising sun falling on my sleeping bag, a stretch and a roll off the spongy pool mat that cushions the wooden floor of the treehouse below me, and, if I’ve woken up early enough, a few stretches and peaceful moments looking out over the lake and the volcano before descending to life below.

I prefer to sleep in the treehouse, not only for the delight of falling asleep under moonglow on tree branches or black sky strewn with stars, but also for the cool winds that pass freely over me all through the night. Last night I tried sleeping in my new ‘official’ abode, a round structure with a cement floor, a low stone wall, open sides, and a thatch roof. Since I don’t have a bed yet, and therefore can’t rig up a mosquito net, I slept in my tent. As I tried to fall asleep, I listened to the wind rushing in the trees around me yet felt not even the slightest breath of it on my humidly sticky skin.

This humidly sticky skin is becoming par for the course now; from mid-morning until late afternoon, the sun beats furiously down and leaves us without a doubt that this is the most intensely hot time of the year.

Somehow I don’t notice the heat so much in the mornings, even when I’m swinging a pick and filling buckets of rich dirt from swales to replenish the tired soil in the garden beds or gathering bag-fulls of dry manure or rice straw in the fields around the farm. I was so oblivious to it the other day, chopping down bananas and plantains, mulching young fruit trees with their moist stalks, and hauling the fruit up to the kitchen, that I turned the exposed part of my back a nice shade of raspberry.

These are my mornings: some days intense, some days more mellow, like today, wandering in the bush looking for seeds pods of a certain wild plant that is known to be a nitrogen-fixer and that we want to plant in various places to improve soil, and collecting and storing cilantro, okra, mustard, and bean seeds from the drying-out plants in the garden.

Nevis, my Nicaraguan co-worker in the garden, and I made a list this morning of the things that we will be doing in the next six weeks before the rains begin. Most of it I’ve already mentioned – collecting good soil for the garden, fixing the raised beds, collecting manure and mulch, making and storing compost, collecting seeds of various nitrogen-fixing plants that we’ll put in compromised soil and let grow more or less wild until fall – as well as preparing the fields for plantings of corn, beans, rice, and rainy season vegetables (I can’t wait for our own cucumbers, cantaloupe, watermelon, squash, zucchini…), making nurseries of grasses that we’ll plant along contour lines to hold the soil in the fields in place, and doing all this while planning one of our biggest events of the year, the seed exchange, or Intercambio de Semillas.

Of course all these things can’t be finished during our five hours of morning work, and so, hiding in the deepest shade we can find, and trying to put off anything that involves moving the body until as late as possible, we let our brain-storming – and for me, my community-related involvement – activities spill over into the afternoons. Today Nevis and I began planning a workshop on organic agriculture that we’ll put on at the community center in May in the hopes of spreading the good word and encouraging people to think about the quantities of chemicals they’re dumping onto their fields, and, indirectly, into the beautiful blue lake that provides the fish that we eat every day and refreshing swims in the afternoon. We’re also hoping to attract people who might be interested in working in the fields with us this summer, who might come not only with the desire to earn a few extra pesos but with at least the spark of an interest in what kind of craziness happens at this farm up the hill and what they might be able to learn from that. (More notes on the craziness, as embodied in words like ‘schizlobium’, later).

Mornings, afternoons, now evenings. Actually, I brushed over a huge part of my afternoons, and occasionally my evenings, in the three words, ‘community-related involvement’. But I’ll save that for another page, I think.

It’s quite possible to sum up the best part of the evenings here in one word, though – sunset. Without fail, it’s a photograph that’s already been taken but that one feels almost compelled to take again and again: read from left to right like a book in Arabic, it begins with deep blue lake and light blue sky split by a perfectly straight horizontal line, moves over to the smoky gray volcanic triangle of Concepcion in the shadows, and concludes with pink and purple wafts of cloud drifting above a perfectly round ball of orange fire. Inhale long and low, exhale long and slow; the sun sinks behind a screen of palms and spiky ceba trees, and it’s time to rinse the dirt off my filthy feet and call it a day.

Month Three

It’s morning, and I’m running down a narrow little street near my house. I’d rather run on it than drive; the speed limit is 30 km/h. And even at that wretchedly slow crawl, driving is dangerous: the elementary school kids on foot and the junior high school kids on bikes seem to see no difference between the sidewalk and the road, and frequently some car or person materializes out of nowhere and appears two inches in front of my bumper.

The sun is rising on the hills in the distance; stripes of light coming through the clouds set the red and gold leaves glowing. The digital display at the bank says 6:20 a.m. and 0° C. It’s a little chilly. After my alarm rang, I lay under my thick comforter for awhile before getting up the courage to roll out into the unheated room, scramble into my fleece-lined running clothes, grab my iPod, and duck out the door.

I often feel warmer outside than inside. Usually when I’m outside I’m active and my blood is flowing, while inside I’m scrunched up as close to the kerosene heater as possible, burning my back while my toes are still cool, studying Japanese, writing e-mail, or reading.

My apartment is old, and the insulation—if there’s any—is quite poor. Heat comes from a kerosene stove in the living room and any space heaters that I want to use to supplement. I get slightly warm water out of one faucet in the kitchen attached to a gas water heater, and my shower, also gas-powered, still gets quite hot, though the previous resident warned me that in winter I shouldn’t expect as much. I talked to my supervisor about the uncomfortableness of being cold inside the house, but she just rubbed her hands on her folded arms and said, Wear lots of warm clothes. I’ll be an Eskimo toddling in circles around my living room, left foot, right foot, left, right, left.

The drums are beating outside the teachers’ room windows at school, and I want to write left right left right left right left right left right as fast as I possibly can, trying to keep time with their rapid beat. This could be a page filled entirely with left-rights, like the pages I used to cover with ‘Chinese writing’ as a child. But that might not be so interesting to read.

Oh, I was running. Sorry, I forgot. I run to the end of the street and over a canal on a pedestrian bridge. From there it’s up to the main road that runs by the sea. It’s like the Hokuto City version of U.S. 31 in Greenwood, Indiana—a four-lane road lined with grocery stores, banks, gas stations, restaurants, a few houses and office buildings, car dealerships, and other regular monstrosities of industrialization, constructed as unaesthetically as possible. This road even has a massive cement factory on one side and a cement pipeline stretching far out into the bay, where the ships come to load. It’s a scenic masterpiece.

I was listening to an NPR podcast about the environment yesterday on the way to school. The topic was Japan. Originally, Japan was likely one of the most beautiful countries in the world, the reporter explained. But now, she said, it might be considered one of the ugliest. Maybe that’s a little extreme—but I think I would say it has more human scars in more ridiculously gorgeous places than I’ve seen in awhile. Like the plastic retainers with yellow reflectors leading up a hilly path to a majestic panorama of forest, cliffs, sea, and distant islands. My neighbor Suzanne teases me about how ugly I find our town—I say that I would love it if I could wipe all construction from the last fifty years off of it and return to rugged coastline and sparsely populated farmland. The sheaves of golden rice standing in the fields a few weeks ago were magical; I could have sat and gazed at them for hours.

There are crumbled shells under my feet, and slippery little mounds of wet sand here and there threaten my gait. Not that there’s much at stake—in general, I’m a clutz and a perpetual tripper. I’m running past the beach now, if you can call it that, a strip of dirty sand surrounded by concrete. For the last two weeks now, every time I run in the morning I see the same man and his two shaggy chestnut-colored dogs there. One of these days maybe he’ll be coming up or going down just as I go past. I’m curious—the dogs are anything but the overgrown fuzzy rats that I saw people taking shopping with them last weekend. They don’t give off the slightest aura of domesticated animals bred for decorating tiny apartments and funkily stylish women’s shoulders. No, they bespeak wildness and freedom, space and dirt, energy and enthusiasm, running after Frisbees on cool fall days, slipping in piles of crunchy leaves, standing up mud-covered, panting and sweating. That would be so un-Japanese.

It’s time to turn around. I have to get back home, take a shower, and pretend to like my structured 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. life. Schedules, class periods, school uniforms, indoor and outdoor shoes, rules of apology, approach, attitude—and grammar. I see a slang lesson coming soon. And another run.

Month Two

(written in early September)

→ Expert: This notebook is made of special neutral paper which can be written with a smooth touch.

First day.

I don’t speak Japanese.

I don’t understand Japanese.

Many Japanese people in my area do not speak much English.

Leaving home in the morning, I panic. Will I remember the way to school? Turn left after the AU cell phone store. What if I pass it and don’t realize it? What if it’s farther down the road than I thought? What if I get lost and show up late? [a mortal embarrassment—there’s a hole in my head where “never be late in Japan” has been drilled through, next to the “never ever (get caught) speed (ing) or have a car accident” hole] I watch the streets and stores vigilantly, watch my speedometer, watch the traffic around me; I am alert in every direction.

I pass the AU store, I slow down and turn left. A short distance up the road on the right I see the soccer fields and the bland walls-and-windows construction of Hamawake Junior High School. I pull forward into a parking space, not yet having mastered the almost universal practice here of backing in. I would rather stand out than scrape the paint off of one of my new co-workers’ shiny Mitsubishis.

Now I have to choose the correct entrance from the three sets of glass doors at the front of the building. Two are for students; one is for teachers. If I choose the wrong one, not only will I be committing an embarrassing error, I will also not be at my locker. And then I will mess up the prescribed shoe-changing ritual of which my locker is an integral part.

1. While standing on the floor for outside shoes, right next to the platform or
below the ledge of the floor for inside shoes, reach into your locker and take out
your inside shoes.
2. Place your inside shoes on the platform or floor, whichever is closer.
3. Take off your outside shoes and step into your inside shoes in one motion.
4. Reach down, pick up your outside shoes, and place them in the locker.
5. If you are on the platform, walk along the platform until you reach the ledge,
step up onto the floor for inside shoes, and continue on your merry way.

Somehow I manage to find my way through the right door; I complete the shoe-changing ritual, albeit sloppily, since my arms are full of posters, papers, lunch, computer bag, water bottle, coffee mug, etc.; I navigate the school halls from memory and successfully arrive in the teachers’ room on the second floor; I call out “good morning” from the doorway and nod-bow (I have not yet perfected the art of full bowing without falling over); I walk in and sit down at my desk.

Relief. Part one (of who knows how many—it seems like there are an infinite number of firsts) accomplished.

As I lay out my things on my desk, Mr. M. comes up to greet me.

“Good morning, Catherine. Here is your schedule for today. Before classes begin, you will introduce yourself to all the teachers at the morning meeting and then to an assembly of all the students. In Japanese—is that okay?”

[Refer to the beginning:
I don’t speak Japanese.]

“Sure, of course it’s okay.”

“Good. The teachers’ meeting is in five minutes.”

I can’t remember the introduction speech that I wrote two weeks ago. And anyway, I found out after I had given it multiple times that some of my grammar was wrong. Even though I had asked a native speaker before giving it if it was correct. I don’t like to say things incorrectly in front of big groups of people, especially big groups of junior high school students.

More small panic. Oh well, I guess I’ll make a ten-second speech. Better than nothing.

Open with a nod-bow.

“
Ohayoo gozaimasu.
Watashi wa Catherine desu.
America no Indiana kara kimashita.
Nihon wa hajimete desu.
Doozo yoroshiku. Onegai shimasu.
”

[
Good morning.
I’m Catherine.
I’m from Indiana in America.
I’m in Japan for the first time.
I’m very pleased to meet you.
]

Close with a nod-bow.

Or something like that. I still don’t know if the Japanese is right. But nobody snickered or giggled, at least that I could hear.

After I gave my speech in front of the students, the class president came forward and spoke on behalf of the students. Before he began, he bowed deeply. Nervous and terrified of falling face forward and cracking my head open on the podium, I didn’t bow in response. When he finished, he bowed deeply again. Still nervous and terrified, I stood there stiffly.

In Japan, you should always bow. Whenever. Wherever. To whomever.

My life is replete with mistakes. Any time I’m not making a full-on mistake, I’m making a mini-mistake or an almost-mistake. Or I’m feeling like I’m making a mistake.

It’s okay. That’s how it goes at the start.

Shitsuree shimashita.
[Excuse me].

I say this often. I need to say it more. And bow a lot. Maybe bow a little deeper.

(And pray that I don’t fall forward. I have a tendency to crack my head open).