Memories of underdevelopment

Welcome to Managua! Arrived this afternoon, checked into a hotel of the classic Concrete and Ceramic Tile interior design school - redeemed somewhat by a pink-purple bougainvillea tree overhanging the patio and by an only slightly underfed and tick-infested spanielish puppy - and set off with Lauren and Jeanette to explore the city. Lonely Planet cautions that the sights of Managua are "few and far between," but, having failed to find anyone who would admit to us that the city even has a center, let alone direct us there, we opted to ask a taxi driver to take us to la Plaza de la Republica. If a village's degree of development and prosperity can be judged by the health of its dogs, perhaps the health of a city can be judged by its Plaza de la Republica.

I had forgotten about the scrum of garbage that swirls through the streets and parks of very poor countries; a twisting scurf of plastic bags and paper scraps that there is no municipal budget to collect, and thus no thought in the minds of the city's residents to do anything wiith garbage but throw it on the ground. Not that they could if they wanted to. Litter is disliked the way mosquitos are: unpleasant, yes, but what can be done? What can be done, also, about Lago de Managua, a lake so polluted that its distant horizon, in broad daylight, is a sort of colorless brown, a negation of blueness more than a shade in itself? Surely the most rational thing to do is tune out the pollution, wade through the accumulating trash as if nothing, live, in other words, exactly like a North American; we segregate our postponement of the waste problem physically, they draw a much neater, efficient psychological barrier right there on the spot.

In the crumbling plaza there are boys of eight or ten trying to make money by selling us eight-cent flowers made of green folded palm fronds. We decline, but they tag along anyway for a while for entertainment purposes.

Managua really doesn't feel like a capital city. We're at the southern end, admittedly, but it feels almost more peri-urban than rural. People have horses, and there are long wild weedy patches of nothing much but tall grass and uncertain fencing, when suddenly a large concrete building annouces itself as the Ministry of Social Insurance or some such. It reminds me of a (less violent?) Detroit, slowly being reclaimed by nature, patches of broken concrete and industrial debris laced with the increasingly bold incursions of raccoons and pin oak and white-tailed deer.

Tonight I made coffee for four, sans coffeemaker, via an elaborate process of origami coffee filter and water in a saucepot. I chatted for a while with the front desk clerk, who, on a salary of four dollars a day, makes too much to qualify for a FINCA loan, but was interested in hearing about the program. He told me that the Sandinistas started cooperatives that were similar in some aspects, although not, I believe, in terms of individual profits, and perhaps also not in terms of choosing one's partners. The idea of group financial accountability is thus very familiar in Nicaragua.

As we talked, an absurdly flamboyant birdsong unscrolled over and over. There were large leafy trees overhanging the concrete & rebar architecture of every Central American city, and the air smelled of lush tropical greenery and gasoline and heat.

Tomorrow, I promise - context!