Good Morning Blue Fields

I am sitting in my favorite (of the three total) cyber cafe, nibbling on a fresh large cake bread I bought a block away from here. Í just got off the phone with my mom and dad, first phone call to home since my last day in Oaxaca (or second to last day I forget) and the first time I have heard my father´s voice in over three weeks. The line was breaking up a little, which is frustrating, but it´s good to hear their voices and give my mom the peace of knowing exactly where I am for one moment in time.

I woke up this morning, much like every morning here, to a multitude of sounds. Water running upstairs, dogs barking outside, the family that owns the hospedeja where I am staying yelling from room to room. I usually get to hear a muffled version of the mother´s long speech to whoever is listening outside my walls. I have noticed this a lot in different places I have stayed in both Mexico and Nicaragua, mother´s have these long speaches throughout the day, often beginning with ¨Este dia...¨ or ¨Este ano...¨that their children listen to while they are cleaning or doing some other task that requires their sustained presence. I usually can´t follow much of the lecture, but I have this very childish reaction to the entire situation. I want to plug my ears and say ¨lalalala¨ to drown out sound of these mini-lectures. The disrespectful rebellious child within me flares up out of no where.

However, this particular morning what got me out of bed was the sound of drumming. I could hear drum rolls coming down the street so I threw on my shorts and ran out of my room to peek out between the bars of the hospedeja with two other little girls who were just as curious and excited as I was. I got a better view the second time the group went by, and this time they were followed throught the streets by a long procession of people. Towards the back of the procession I recognized baseball uniforms and someone mention that its the baseball organization. There must be a game here somewhere today, which will go on my to do list of things to track down for the day. I have also heard rumors of a domino tournament going on in Old Bank or Cotton Tree, two of the oldest and primarily creole neighborhoods here. I have no idea how you play dominos, I only wish I had asked Ashley T. to teach me at her family bbq last 4th of July. The game is really popular here, I see groups of men play on makeshift tables near the sidewalk when I walk to the CEDEHCO office. I am meeting with the office´s younger crowd in an hour to visit Danilo´s mom´s bar-restaurant and then meeting with some of the only-slightly-older :) crowd at 4pm to go eat and visit. Then, to my great excitement (!!!) there is going to be a reggae concert-performance at BICU tonight, and I wouldn´t miss that for anything. This entire plan for the day developed last night when I went with Jaime and Danilo and (insert forgotten name here) to a bar to try toña, the Nicaraguan beer. I´m not a big beer fan, but I tried it after Danilo made a toast saying, ¨Welcome! Welcome to the OTHER Nicaragua¨. Being an Anthro student at UW has made me a fanatic about the different uses of the word other, and I was delighted at the many meanings of this toast. I have been promised a t-shirt from the safe-sex campaign, and was gifted a shirt and hat from the other major project CEDEHCA is working on, getting birth papers and registration to the huge-unknown number of young people that never had this done when they were born. Without birth papers they cannot vote (voting age here is 16) and they essentially don´t exist as far as statistics and records go for this region. So they are getting people registered in all the atlantic coast communities, a very large task.

One thing I would like to mention that have been thinking about is the definition of youth and who falls into this catagory. In my mind, when I hear the word youth I think of a rather limited range of ages compared to the legal definition here. I believe I was told that in the laws, the catagory of youth is applied to persons between either the ages of 16-30 or 18-30. So when I talk about JENH you have to keep in mind that this is people between this broad range of ages working together. This just kind of sticks out in my mind, especially since Robert Hudason JR pointed out to me how common it is for youth (sons and daughters of 28 etc) to live with their mother´s still, he was comparing this to the individualism and independence mentality in the U.S. Which reminds me of something Miss Lizzie said, she was talking about how much kids today are influenced by TV and that they don´t mind their parents. I asked her why she thinks that change has taken place. She told me she thinks that in the U.S. they have some laws about what you can and can´t do to you children in terms of punishment, and that youth have developed the attitude that they can protest to higher officials if they feel they are being mistreated because of the littlest spank. I asked her if those laws exist here and she smiled and told me ¨No, only on TV¨.

A little about Blue Fields in general while I have time. The town is located on a lagoon of very brown murkey water. The CEDEHCO office itself is right on-over the water. There are shops and restaurants painted in bright colors similar to pictures of mexico, but I am able to take a breather from colonial architecture here (as Cullen mentioned in his blog, the delight of the beautiful architecture wears off rather quickly, especially with my own feeling on the colonial presence overall). There are no tourists here, none, and there is really no particular reason why they would be here. There are no places accomodating tourists either, so I am getting a break from the tourism industry as well. The only cars on the streets are taxis, which spend all day speeding around giving people rides mostly from one easy walking destination to another.

Behind the wheels of these taxis are some of the men that I partially despise here. I don´t take very kindly to disrespectful acknowledgements of my presence. I am not your amorcita, I am not your preciosa, I am not your baby or good looking girl and I will not give you the satisfaction of my eye contact no matter what you say or what obnoxious way you choose to make noise that might make me look in your direction. Blue Fields is probably the safest place I have been to so far and is my favorite destination for so many reasons, but this place is the worst as far as unwanted attention goes. In mexico the most that was done to get my attention for innapropriate and annoying reasons was the ¨psss-psss¨ that men would whisper, which is better treatment than I receive walking around in Seattle. It would have been a totally different experience if I were a blonde girl walking around in Mexico, but that´s another story entirely. In Blue Fields, when my patience is limited from the heat/the bit of a cold-bug that I had earlier this week, I am irrate at the comments that follow me with every couple steps I take. I am disgusted by the stares. At one low point in my self-control I contemplated flipping people off, yelling at them, glaring and hissing out a ¨Respeto Las Mujeres!¨, but I have decided that I am probably better off just wearing the stern glare I learned from my father and not giving any visible response. I don´t want anyone to have the satisfaction of knowing that they got to me in the slightest. Whoa, okay time to move on.

I have traveled around blue fields mostly on foot, a little by taxi (which was really only neccessary when I visited URRCAN university), and by motor bike. I am very thankful Justin gave me the chance to learn how to be a passenger on a motor bike, because it is now my favorite way to get around Blue Fields. Danilo gives me rides here and there and I get to catch a much needed breeze and whiz past any potential harassment I could have walked through. Mom: this is sooooo not dangerous. There is so little traffic here that I am not worried about riding the bike and you shouldn´t be either.

I was warned over and over again by people in Managua that Blue Fields is nothing but rain and mosquitos. There are deffinately mosquitos, but I don´t have any in my room (now that I switched) and I don´t go anywhere without my bug spray. The rain is great! It downpours, I mean rains harder than I have ever seen before, but only for 5 to 10 minutes and then it´s sunshine and puddles.

Oopps gotta run to meet my friends, I´ll add more later!