Ileana

My first memory of her was at the kitchen table. She was sitting across from me, beautiful, I unable to take my eyes off of her over my morning egg. To my left was her boyfriend, a nurse, though I didn’t know for certain at that point if they were a couple.  One could only assume, given that they spent so much time together. I don’t see many public displays of affection between couples here.

For breakfast was cornflakes, an interestingly popular cereal type. She poured the bowls full of milk, brought them to the table, and each shook in their desired amount of cereal. I was quiet, eating my own gallo pinto (rice and beans, deliciously prepared by my host mother), egg, and cuajada (cheese). I paused to watch their ritual, fascinated because I have never done or seen what they were doing in the manner that they were doing it, envious because I wanted to have a close enough relationship with someone in order to form a ritual. Minutes passed of them pressing the flakes deeper and deeper into the milk, and again, and again. I realized that they didn’t want the flakes to be crunchy. I should have asked why. I suppose I still could.

She was immediately kind to me.  Giving me full smiles and talking to me in ways that made me feel as though she knew language was my barrier to communication, and that my quietness did not stem from stupidity or arrogance.  

Her personality is one that I wish I could imitate. She is confident and gregarious; making jokes with everyone, bringing a much appreciated blunt honesty that presents itself in such things as a comment about her “enormous moustache”.  For her do not exist the awkward moments of not knowing what to do in a situation. After 5 years of medical school and one of interning, she got sent into the mountains to do her 2 years of social service – which she finishes in January. Afterwards she can return to school to focus in an area of medicine – anywhere from 3-5 more years - as those 8 years only title you as a general medic.

Her hair is long, dark, and curly in an astonishingly perfect way. When she lets it down you can smell her shampoo from across the room. She puts it up in the morning, so by the end of the day it may not even be completely dry. Her nose is small and rounded, her lips full - in fact all of her is full and pleasantly rounded. She looks better in jeans than anyone else I know. When she smiles the tops of her cheeks form a similar curve to that of her nose, and she casts her eyes down.  Why does she cast her eyes down? You aren’t sure if she is embarrassed about smiling, or if she simply wants to savor every smile as her own personal moment of joy, or if there is more to the joke than she lets on (or that I am able to understand)…

She has a daughter, Rebecca. She is 8 years old and lives with Ileana's ex-mother-in-law in Chichigalpa, Chinandega. I found this out after a couple months of being here. I have had the pleasure of meeting Rebecca several times. She is the spitting image of her mother, and just as humorous. I asked Ileana about the story of her living in Florida, where her mother lives still. She said they moved there when she was 18. “I fell in love, I got married, I had a baby”. She is no longer with the man. I have seen pictures of him – she showed the wedding album to us around the dining room table, where so many other interactions take place. She looked 15, not 19, on that day, and just as beautiful. She was thinner. The boy she was marrying was lean, tall, and there were no pictures of him smiling. Indeed, Ileana only had a ghost of a smile in some of them. Photos seem to be very serious things here. Or perhaps they don’t want to pretend they were smiling if they weren’t. I don’t know; it’s another thing I haven’t asked anyone about, and ought to.

When I first got here, we would get up and need the shower at the same time. I would let her go first, because she actually has to be at work at 8, whereas I only choose to be there at that time. She was the one who gave me the idea to bring music into the shower here. It certainly makes the frigid water more bearable in the early morning cold. One could say that if you were still dragging the threads of dreams around behind you before you got into the shower, you will not be afterwards. I am not complaining – running water is something I will appreciate forevermore! For the first several months, I showered like this. But concerning either method the reality of the fact is: it’s cold.

At one point I was planning a lesson and she was kind enough to lend me a very helpful book – in Spanish - about STI’s. I may or may not have lost it. Then again, I may have given it back and forgotten. When she handed it to me she said, “Es bonito.”

Jose

          This was a home once. You can tell by the layout; the small bathroom on the first floor, the kitchen with the large island.   The wide open living and dining rooms. An office.  Family pictures on the mantel, memory markers much like grave stones. Over the years the family remodeled, added on, and are still – you can see the construction that they attempt to cover with tarps and large plastic signs advertising themselves.  Now it is a hotel. Stunning art on the walls. Arrow – shaped pool. Breakfast included. Ring a bell to get in. The son, Jose, and his young family work there every day, but there are other employees as well. Jose, who is the only male worker there save for the security guard that appears at night,speaks English fluently. He lived in the US for over 10 years. Went to school, came back, went to the US again, came back.

         This is access to an opportunity that so many have not had, and will never have.

         He is easy to like. Long, curly lashes, bright brown eyes. An easy smile framed with dimples, soft body. Generous disposition. He cares about you. He sees us at our most vulnerable. Ill, physically or mentally, taking time away from our homes and jobs for various reasons.  He’s been hosting for so long that he knows the routine better than we do.  He knows what to expect from guests and has made rules accordingly. Nobody in the pool after 7pm co-ed rooms only for married couples leave the key at the front desk.

       Whether people follow these rules is another story…

       He has two young children. I go to fill my water bottle with purified water from a jug in the kitchen; Managua water isn’t potable.  It’s getting late at this point, past 6pm, and a little girl is curled up in an armchair, fast asleep. She’s been there most of the afternoon. Her comfort is like the comfort of the smell of your father as he envelopes you in a hug. Or the easy, impossibly flattening stretch of a cat. The bowl-shaped satisfaction of waking up in the predawn hours to know that you have several more hours of teeth-clenchingly delicious sleep.

       This comfort is why people come back to this hotel, though there are others similar in the same neighborhoods. Go not two miles away and you can have all the familiarity that one can get out of a 5 star, international hotel. GO to that other hotel. You will not hear the laughter of the cooks in the kitchen, not know them all by name and chat with them daily. Sort red beans with them on the green countertop talking of nothing, nothing at all important, but enjoying the sound of the breeze and this opportunity: to do something so old and practiced and never-changing. Sharing time without having to sit silently doing nothing when you’ve run out of something to say for the moment.

        Jose will do what he can to make you happy. He will look into the problems you are having with the hot water system that you mentioned to his esposa. It’s not a huge problem, you tell her, but I got an electric shock when I tried to turn the water off. He doesn’t know how to fix it… Ah well. Turn the water on and off with a towel, you decide. Anything to take advantage of the hot water, though at this point you almost would rather not use it. It dries out the skin…

      He works during the day, mostly, and he tells you that he will until he dies, and his children, and their children and their children. You have no idea where he lives at night and realize that you have never been polite enough to ask. You wonder if his house looks anything at all like the hotel. If it is as clean, as modern. If the windows are as grand, for these are windows of a palace.

You’ve never heard him raise his voice.

Marlene

She wasn't allowed to move for a  month due to deep vein thrombosis in her left leg.  Somehow she still looked fabulous, resting on her plush, steely blue couch, wearing a baggy t-shirt and sparkling, dripping earrings that make her smokey blue eyes sapphire.

She taught biology for most of her adult life. Now she's retired, renting out rooms of her two-story burnt orange building to all sorts -- US citizens, Germans, old Italian men, Nicaraguan models, Mormon missionaries and even occasionally a Black man. She is proud of the diversity she's maintained and keeps it a close-knit group, calling all the female renters "hija" and "amor".

Sometimes she'll lend out scissors, pots, or her kitchen and table for a neighborhood dinner.

The conversation will range from her troubles with learning English to her disappointment with the young empleada who cooks and cleans her home, to discussion of religion - a fragile subject that at any moment is likely to shatter into judgements and generalizations. She asks probing questions that are at times only thinly veiled criticisms or complaints.

But she also wakes you up mornings to tell you when the water has come back on after it had been away for days and she's open and kind to any visitors. And perhaps most important and thoughtful of all, she assists tenants in keeping out bugs called Chinches -- a little beetle whose bite, when left untreated, causes an illness that will kill its victim in later years.

She lives alone in her part of the house, not speaking much of husband or children, but gushes about her grandchildren.  The truth is that she has quite a history of love, as will we all. She loved a man and was not allowed to be with him; he was too poor. She married someone else. Had children with him. Life went on, but some mornings when she is looking in the mirror she wonders if she would have looked differently had she married the first man.

When the doctor told her she couldn't walk she took to the television, a situation that at once clearly bores her and lets her blissfully sink into the world of the rapidly changing images on her screen.

She doesn't own very many mugs, for some reason.  Coffee for more than 4 is an amalgamation of
holders - jars, cups, short glasses - anything that will hold the hot liquid that she graciously allows her guests to sweeten to their own liking, a privilege not too common when visiting with someone in their own kitchen.

You wish she really was your mother. Her terms of endearments have a grating effect on your heart after the first month of having them rolled out to you as you walk past her door. I am so far from my own mother, with her own blue eyes and her own earrings and pet names and judgements.

You are thankful for the flowers and long-leafed plants lining the narrow cement walkway that takes you to the rooms further inside. You are thankful for the security offered by this place. The privacy without loneliness. For Marelene's washing machine, her stories of travel, her curiosity. Her immediate and generous giving of love.

Jorge

    He is the most lonely person I know. He tells stories to the air, his features just handsome. A fading scar on the outside of his right eye. Full lips. It's his smile, though, that lets you in and makes you feel important and funny; cared for. He knows about all the living things in his town - people, dogs, rabbits, flora. He dresses well, always looks and smells freshly bathed, hair and shoes shinier and better ordered than a stack of new dishware in a kitchen supply store.

     
    He's been doing some form of labor since before he had hair under his armpits. When he's not sitting at the sewing machine that he supports in its mission of fabrication he sits in class, which sitting at the sewing machine pays for. When he's not in either of those tail-bone bruising states, he wanders in the sugar-cane fields and in the shadows of the regal Guanacaste trees that surround his small and windy town. 

    
     The inside of his left front tooth is chipped. Nothing terribly obvious, just the corner, but when you've listened to him speak for long enough you replace paying attention for 5 second spurts of imagining how it happened. You won't ask him, ever, how it happened because you're embarrassed by the fact that such a question could never naturally follow the story of his father drinking away  the family money, or of Jorge's fainting experience on a hot day while working in the bean fields at the age of 9 with no food or water to fuel the machete swipes. Machetes are hungry and find human hands to attach themselves to in a rather beautiful symbiotic relationship. Machetes do not discriminate based on age.

     In spite of his childhood in which photos show him barefoot out of wretched poverty (instead of youthful freedom) he retains romantic theories and dreams.  He wants to make the most of himself for his country and family. He studies journalism to eventually spread revolutionary ideas of self-education and recreational marijuana, and to pridefully bring knowledge of his country and culture to other nations. And, of course, to travel. His town encircles him like a python, not just because of the size but also the memories that roam the streets with him.

   He's one of those that never stops loving someone once the reaction has settled. Some leave each love behind like candy bar wrappers. But Jorge keeps them alive and sweet in his head. His loves have their own misted glass cases that he keeps dusted and streak-free. He is never single for long because he has perfected a professional and meticulous form of flirting that one cannot help but admire. It is patient and skillfully individualized to each and every female, simultaneously making him vulnerable enough to be almost irresistible. Almost. In his attempts to kiss you, you will be so undecided in whether to turn your head that by the time you do make up your mind, his lips will make it to the corner of your mouth.

     He used to dance and will tell you each time you meet that he used to be thinner; his buttocks firmer, calves more defined. He does move with the grace and ease of practice, always looking over your shoulder as he spins you, or greets you, or tells you of his past. He's looking for danger, you imagine. But he is not so maternal as that. Though some days he picks up his two young nieces from school and the three of them can be seen balancing their way back to the SE part of town on his Rasta-colored bicycle.

     He plays the guitar, which is he is better suited for then singing. He is part of a band and all the members have long hair except him. He had to cut off his dark, straight strands for his job. Something a bit difficult to understand, as the clothes making is the business of his extended family. He spends all day with kin - brother, cousin - there are various places like this in the old town. Houses indiscriminate from other houses until you pass by the open door and are met by the 10 eyes of the young men working the maquinas. Gender roles we know in the US make you think that women would be doing those jobs, but if the options for work are clothes making, 
then that is what the men do while the women care for the children and home.
"Stay-at-home-Dad" is not a fad in Nicaragua. Yet. 

He loves his mother more than anyone, more than himself. She moved to Costa Rica to work and send back money, rarely getting the chance to visit physically.

He used to be Mormon. He may be still but the Church shut down. Though the gates are still opened from time to time to allow the basketball courts to be utilized, mostly for soccer practice.

He wants to build himself a small house so he no longer has to live with his younger brother who resents being a younger brother. 

He says women blossom like flowers within the hour after they rise for the day.

He loves to bathe naked in the first rains of the season, to wash away the predictable summer. 

The Project

  


       This is a series of Character Studies of people that I have met while in Nicaragua. I will make them as honest as I can, but cannot comfortably say that nothing has been changed by time and the fallibility of my memory.  

        So, I will say these are fictitious, based on real people and situations, with real parts of the Nicaraguan culture and geography added in. I have made links to some of these cultural and physical references, and the pictures added in are my own...

I want to give an uncensored depiction of the personalities that I have the opportunity to come across. Everyone deserves to be recognized.