Coyotepe

Funny how one day changes a lot of things.

Last night we welcomed 8 other volunteers to our Basecamp for their sojourn here. They are nursing students from New Brunswick and will be here for two weeks. Our room is considerably more packed, as in every bunk has been taken, and one has been doubled on. These nurses certainly got crafty with putting up their mosquito nets, so good for them. They will be working in Granada with Pilar the Spanish doctor midwife doing rounds and checkups and things, a pretty good placement considering they don't speak any Spanish.

Which makes me all grateful for the four weeks we had in class with Jessica, because I feel as if I will at least be able to hold down a conversation on Monday when I start at Carita Feliz. Which is another thing--having all these nurses here has taken my mind off the first day jitters of starting at Carita Feliz. There are just so many of them in our one bathroom and they occupy the space not occupied before and they are new so I don't have time to be quiet and pensive and gather fear about my placement. And that's all I will say on that until I have more concrete details and feelings and experiences at Carita.

(I feel the need to share that I am writing this in a hammock with a loud cricket and noventa cinco pointa cinco Spanish love music station playing, a strange context to say the least.)

So this weekend we are staying in Granada to catch up on the Granada things we haven't yet done. Had an all you can eat breakfast at the chocolate museum in town. Delicious and partially Nicaraguan. We will return in an evening to make our own chocolate bars, that's for sure. Purchased some love poems and the third Harry Potter in SPANISH, so I know what will be occupying me for the next four weeks, as a read that would take me half a dedicated day in English will easily take me two or more weeks. Needless to say, I absolutely cannot wait.

And then Becky, Alicia and I went for an afternoon excursion to Coyotepe. It is an old fortress prison since forever, but held prisoners as late as 1975 in the revolution. We bussed to Masaya from here, one of those chicken bus affairs with painted exterior and three people to a 1.5 person seat. Funny to think how deplorable those conditions would seem back home on public transit. Now whenever the 99-b line in Vancouver seems crowded, I will be smiling away and slightly nostalgic for there are no chickens in my face, smelly old men missing teeth on my lap or seven children with one overwhelmed mother. So there's that gratitude. Or perspective. Whichever it is.

The bus essentially deposited us right in the heart of the market. And oh my god. When people say that Masaya market is where it is at, that was the absolute truth. Entirely overwhelming but massively intriguing, just about every handicraft there is to be offered is there on display, pretty much being made right in front of you. Shoes, bracelets, clacking wooden toys, piñatas- all of it somehow fitting onto the shop stalls, each for each, so many colours and textures that the light filters in softly, strangely through drapes of hammocks, over the brown working fingers of shoe makers and toy sellers. We are definitely going back to bargain and buy, but it was an experience and a half to just walk slack-jawed through that place.

Our taxi driver practiced his English for the short drive to the base of Coyotepe, offering to take us to the top but we of course wanted none of it, being at one with volcanic-mountainous inclines at this point. Which is to say we just wanted to climb the hill that would take us to the imposing fort.

The heat was present but just holding out hands as we walked up the scratched road. Paused for some pictures on a lookout rock, already in awe of the views of this country. There is no better way to feel how small we are than to view it from such a vantage point, gazing out over the roads and cars and houses and buildings in which we live out our lives, maybe never seeing the bigger picture, maybe never knowing the shadows of the clouds on the lake, draping the volcanoes, the way the trees move, how quiet it gets with lizard rustle and bird flock in the greenery.

And then we rounded a bend and right there was one of the lookout towers, all like hey how's it going Nica, I'm just going to hang out here on this hill and hold your history. We walked in through the gates, looking on the white cement guard walls and the mouths of the lower prison, buried underground for maximum human cruelty. We tagged along the end of some kind of high school/college history group, complete with the chaperoning teachers adding graphic detail to the accented English explanation from the tour guide. "imagine being in here for months on end, surrounded in the darkness by yourself" ... "imagine hearing the screams of the prisoners chained to the torture wall"... "imagine thinking it was you next". And as strange as it seemed to hear these things come from the voice of some American history teacher (assumed), it was moving. Beneath the sleeping bats and dripping walls, some still streaked with the remnants of feces being poured down, beneath the opening from which hung countless prisoners who'd met their fate at the end of a rope on top of a hill, swinging and creaking like the eerie prisons doors...and still this was mid afternoon, faint daylight finding its way in patches and flickers to the graffitied cement walls, carved with "te quiero morir" and how only Christ is the saviour.... It was not hard to feel the darkness of the place, to know that it existed in history.

I don't know the particulars of the revolution and I don't know whether the prisoners were the "bad guys", whether any of it was worthy of such a black and white concept. The empty cells could only tell so much-in the quiet of this sunny day, it took a thought or two to imagine the horrors of the prison. The daily war of fear and despair, the taunting, the not knowing.

We are such a strange creature, human beings. We are capable of the greatest good and the worst of ungoods, creating art and misery and science and mystery as easily as we breathe. Always we believe our suffering to be the worst, that no one has suffered what we have while all the stories of human history are carved on prison walls and hearts and minds, tree bark tales and fireside fairy tales, ghost stories with a spine shiver of truth in all of them. We are not a solitary being; everything we do exists in relation to the rest of the world, and this is the world we don't always remember to look at. To open your eyes for a moment and imagine what it was like here for more than just your present experience. Who has breathed this air, walked these steps, closed their eyes against blinding sun and shuddered at bat swoops and ripped in the uneven ground of our lives. Who has been before us and who will be after. What are we making and breaking and shaking from ourselves, how very much and how very little we mean, standing in torture chambers and beneath the guillotines of human error.

It was a good exploration and a good kick to the heart in ethics and history. It began to feel wrong to smile in pictures being taken, but then we cannot be mourning every life lost for every moment of our lives. At some point we are still living while other existences have been gone forever, and at some point we need to reconcile this living guilt with a breathing history and move in some direction that is not destruction.

So be it. And so it is that we grabbed the life in us and ran across the Panamerican highway for a moment and crammed back on to a Granada bus and pressed against all these other live people going somewhere.

Here's to going places and recognizing how human we are and how many have existed. To prisons and panoramas and people.

dftba.
-k