There is something so intimate about knowing people's stories. About knowing where they come from and what their life has been like. This is one thing that continually suprises me in Nicaragua. I am continually suprised by how willing people are to share their stories with me, and then at the same time I am appalled by their stories. They are stories of hurt and loss and difficulties which I cannot even imagine. Yet they just roll off people's tongues and they are not accompanied by emotion or by pain. They are facts. It is what happens here, it is normal life.
I met a man on Saturday night. We started talking, we hadn't been talking for more than fifteen or twenty minutes before he told me that he and his twin brother live with their grandmother, that their mother, (who he characterized as 'bad' mother), lives in the United States with two sons from another man and one daughter from a third man. He told me that they hardly see her and that they have lived with their grandmother their whole lives. So they basically don't have a mom. Then he told me how his father died in the revolution in 1979 and that he died before Alejandro was born. He then told me about how he was married but is now divorced and his wife and daughter of four live in Jinotega, which is a bit of a distance from Leon where he lives. He gets to see his daughter about once a month. He doesn't have a job because as he said, 'Well you know, there are no jobs.' Perhaps this isn't a horrible story, but it is sad. It is all so typical of life here in Nicaragua, a son with neither a mother nor a father, with so little ties to his living mother that he hardly sees her nor do they talk much because she doesn't care.
I met another man on my trip back to Managua from Leon on the bus. Again, after no more than 10 minutes he told me that he actually lives in Miami and works on a cruise ship as a server. He is Nicaraguan and was here visiting on his vacation. I asked him if he likes living in the States, he told me that it was okay, but very difficult. He has to work there, he told me, because it is the only possibility he has to make any money. It's nearly impossible to find a job here in Nicaragua, and if you do it hardly pays anything. I believe the annual average income in Nicaragua is somewhere around $450 US. He asked me if I had any kids, I told him I didn't, and when I asked him he pulled out a picture of a little girl sitting on the floor. He told me this was one of his four children, who he hasn't seen in two years. They live on the Atlantic Coast with their mother. I don't know the situation with him and his children. But I do know that they haven't seen their father in at least two years, and who knows when he will go back to visit them.
Today on the bus I was talking with a friend who I met a while back at the bus stop. Her husband left to go go the United States illegally about 3 or 4 months ago. I often ask how he is doing. She told me today he is there working in construction, I asked her about the pay that he makes and she said he can make $400 a week while here he could make $3,000 cordobas a month, equivilent to about $180. They have a four year old daughter. When he left she told me he probably wouldn't come back for at least a few years, because the cost and toll of getting there is so significant. He will probably send much of the money he makes there back to her and her family. Last year remitances sent from Nicaraguans living abroad was larger than the national gross domestic product of the country.
Last night I went to the pulperia that is in the next block from our house. Pulperias are small stores that are run out of the living rooms of people's houses. You can pretty much buy anything from shampoo to soda to canned tuna at these stores, and many people buy most of their food there or at a market rather than going to a grocery store. I began chatting with her and she told me that both she and her husband are architects but because they can't find work they opened the store about 3 years ago. Although I couldn't understand the exact story she told me that they began facing problems in their succesful architecture firm when President Aleman came into power and they were forced out of their jobs. I asked her if they were able to make money from the Pulperia and she said that sometimes they were. She pointed to the car that sits permanently in their driveway with four flat tires and said that it was the company car, but didn't need to say anymore.
More than anything I think what makes me so sad about these stories is that they all speak to me of lost dreams and the things that folks here are forced to do out of necessity. And they are so common. These stories are prevalent, they are what happens. And I know that the stories are worse than this too. These are just common people living their common lives. While I know that each person carries stories of loss and pain it hurts me to see a whole country carrying these stories in their pockets and being able to so easily share them as if they were not anything to think about.
