Arrival/Week 1 (1/15-16/14)

For the first time during my three trips to Nicaragua, the muggy wave of air finally felt less jarring as I stepped off the plane and up the jet way. Cesar, who has driven me to or from the airport probably about four times now, met us at the airport exit. We fell into a comfortable conversation about how his father was doing, his favorite baseball team (the Red Sox), and his English classes. Driving past Lake Managua, the second largest lake in Central America, all the beauty of Nicaragua streamed back to me. Before long, we arrived in Leon, me at the Casa de la Familia Perez, where I stayed last year, and Stephanie Muriglan (Fitchburg PGY-3) at the Tortuga Boluda Hostel.

The Perez family welcomed me back literally with open arms, and were all speaking so quickly and at once that I could initially hardly understand a thing. My host brother, Sebastian and I went to a coffee shop to catch up, and I had the best (as well as only) fresh papaya juice that I have ever tasted. I will omit his name because we discussed his tenuous health, which unfortunately, forced him to take leave from his work in November.

We returned to his house and had dinner with his family, which is so much like my family it’s uncanny. Everyone gets together for dinner and talks 900-milion miles per hour. After dinner, we took our nightly walk, as I encourage Sebastian to do for exercise. During our walk, one of the things that struck me was just how colorful, both literally and figuratively, Leon is. For example, at 9 o’clock at night, we just happened to walk by a religious gathering where his parents and 8-month-old nephew were. We had just had dinner, but of course we were offered plates of gallo pinto (rice and beans) and sweet rolls.

There was a small albino boy at the gathering, and I learned from Sebastian that that they call albinos “angels.” On our way home, I had just been talking about how it seemed that every year there were more cars on the roads in Nicaragua, when a bicyclist crashed into a motorcycle. The motorcyclist was uninjured, but the bicyclist was having extreme difficulty weight bearing on his left leg, so I suggested he go to the hospital for an X-ray, and he finally relented.

Stephanie and I planned to go to El Tololar the next day, but neither of our phones was working, so we were unable to let anyone know that we were coming. We spent the next day getting settled and fixing our phones. Later that day, I visited a medical supply store in Leon, where I obtained a quote on an autoclave, a vital piece of data for my project on the optimal method of medical equipment sterilization for the clinic in El Tololar (more to come on this).