mouseworks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mouseworks) wrote2010-06-06 06:51 am
mouseworks) wrote2010-06-06 06:51 am
From Away
I used to wonder, when I lived in rural Virginia, how people could have a vacation house next to someone who was living in desperate poverty (I was working with a social services agency visiting one of the people, trying to arrange medical care for her that wouldn't get her beaten up by her husband for being in a car with another man).
And when did tourism change from going to places better off than our own, the Elizabethan Englishman in France or Italy, to touring poverty?
Nicaragua is very poor. The people are friendly, but it has a feeling of not meaning anything personal. That rent and food would be cheaper enough that I could live a lower middle class life -- um, I don't think for me that this is enough. The country is very beautiful, but overpopulated for the resources it has. In the areas we saw, the grazing was damaging the lands, not like areas where cattle have grazed for centuries without the damage.
Jinotega didn't have the guard dogs on terraces or the armed guards in front of better private houses, but a Japanese tourist had been attacked on a mountain trail a day or so around the time we were there. Safe if one is in town. Esteli had the armed men in front of the better houses in town, the guard dogs on the terraces, the walled compound for the upper middle class surrounded by a high wall and razor wire. Our Miraflor guide, Aldo, had an uncle lived there.
For me, not an immediate love. I think to live there would be to believe that one's own good fortune was absolutely due to one's own superiority and that one deserved the better life. The foreigners weren't smarter than Aldo who was working for $20 a day.
A woman who'd been there before me has a friend who works as a researcher at a station at Lake Apoyo. She'd said that she felt a person would have to be a missionary or doing something similar to live there, talked about all the vacant time shares in developments near the lake.
She said, "When I first traveled in Mexico, I thought it was poor. Then I went to El Salvador and it made Mexico look positively middle class. Well, Nicaragua makes El Salvador look well off. Nicaraguans to go El Salvador to look for jobs."
Some non-locals are good for a place, the same way that people who've been away and came back can be even better, bring in different perspectives, new ideas, capital for projects. There are enough of them in Nicaragua without me, I think.
And when did tourism change from going to places better off than our own, the Elizabethan Englishman in France or Italy, to touring poverty?
Nicaragua is very poor. The people are friendly, but it has a feeling of not meaning anything personal. That rent and food would be cheaper enough that I could live a lower middle class life -- um, I don't think for me that this is enough. The country is very beautiful, but overpopulated for the resources it has. In the areas we saw, the grazing was damaging the lands, not like areas where cattle have grazed for centuries without the damage.
Jinotega didn't have the guard dogs on terraces or the armed guards in front of better private houses, but a Japanese tourist had been attacked on a mountain trail a day or so around the time we were there. Safe if one is in town. Esteli had the armed men in front of the better houses in town, the guard dogs on the terraces, the walled compound for the upper middle class surrounded by a high wall and razor wire. Our Miraflor guide, Aldo, had an uncle lived there.
For me, not an immediate love. I think to live there would be to believe that one's own good fortune was absolutely due to one's own superiority and that one deserved the better life. The foreigners weren't smarter than Aldo who was working for $20 a day.
A woman who'd been there before me has a friend who works as a researcher at a station at Lake Apoyo. She'd said that she felt a person would have to be a missionary or doing something similar to live there, talked about all the vacant time shares in developments near the lake.
She said, "When I first traveled in Mexico, I thought it was poor. Then I went to El Salvador and it made Mexico look positively middle class. Well, Nicaragua makes El Salvador look well off. Nicaraguans to go El Salvador to look for jobs."
Some non-locals are good for a place, the same way that people who've been away and came back can be even better, bring in different perspectives, new ideas, capital for projects. There are enough of them in Nicaragua without me, I think.