mouseworks

Just a theory, tossed up. We basically have three major languages in the Americas -- and I've heard that Portuguese spoken is mutually comprehensible by Spanish-speakers. We're all mono-lingual travelers. The Nicaraguans were recommended Ometepe Island, which again is a geological curiosity. I wanted to see Jinotega because it's mountains. There's a strong strain of going to see things ("Jinotega muy bonito" the Nicaraguan woman on the plane told me) -- the botany, the biology, the volcanos (our guide recommended Cerro Negro, the newest volcano).

My encounter in front of the cathedral in Esteli was probably with another monolingual tourist -- would a resident of Esteli actually be out on a Saturday taking photographs of a common landmark when the next day, one would be seeing all the mothers and families on Mother's Day (Spanish Catholic Mother's Day)?

Europe would have many languages between Ometepe Island and Annandale -- Spanish comes up to Annandale in places and English goes down spottily through Miami.

From Alaska to Terra del Fuego, two major languages. And I see the Spanish-speakers visiting Skyline Drive.

Kinda sad in one way, that the other languages lost out for the most part, but interesting that many of the other language speakers are multi-lingual.

Geology is so much of who we are in the Americas, whether the tectonic plates were generous or not. Volcanos and lakes, basin and range, Appalachia mountains pre-Grevillian, all of Nicaragua younger than anything in Virginia except the coastal plain and the rare Miocene volcanos.

The less lyrical observation -- Nicaragua is poor. The cost of living is cheaper because in some places, there's no need for heating and air-conditioning, and no need for heating any place. The hotels aren't out of main sequence costs with US hotels at about the same physical states of repair. What makes living there cheaper than the parts of the US off the coasts is the same thing that made the Lower East Side cheaper in the 1960s -- it hasn't been rehabbed at this point. The other factor is being able to grow food all year round, of having some very fertile soil due to recent volcanic activity. If the comparison is between life in a suburb of a major US coastal city and there, then Nicaragua is a fantastic deal. If it's between an inland US city or small town and Nicaragua, not so much.

Land frenzies happen all over the place -- I remember reading a passage in A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul where the narrator realized that the land people had been speculating in was bush and would be bush for a long time. They're particularly problematic in areas where the local economies don't generate the same incomes that world economies generate, and where the land, once bought by speculators, generally has to be taken by adverse possession to put it back into productive use for the local economy. Most local places have traditions of using places owned by absentee landlords -- Patrick County did, Honduras did. We had lumber poaching.

There's a dream that we can find a place where the locals are good enough, where their basic values are high enough that we can trust them not to do this. I suspect that the place is called Switzerland rather than Nicaragua. One American woman's neighbors ate her smaller stock (probably didn't eat her horses because horsemeat doesn't appear to be a Nicaraguan preference). Expecting all poor people to ignore the vacation homes left vacant weeks on end, the timber on land that the owner hasn't seen in years, all that, is to want people to be completely beyond envy. The Nicaraguans told the woman we stayed with that the prevailing national fault is envioso.

The guys in the compound with the cement wall so high that nothing was visible except the razor wire at the top understood this. The people in Esteli with the guard dogs on every terrace and the armed guards in front of the houses understood this.

The Japanese girl who was attacked at the top of the mountain path leading to a lighted cross didn't understand this.



My niece is touring through Europe, a post college graduation present from her mother's family, I think. She said of Switzerland that the cities were beautiful and safe and had excellent public transportation, all probably due to being in a rich country. And a rich country that has avoided the major European wars since the 19th Century.

I don't know if the Swiss exported all their poor centuries ago or what, or if my niece was just seeing selected cities.

Nicaragua is safe for people who go where there are other people, who are reasonably careful about what they eat, who speak as much Spanish as they can. It's not particularly safe for getting rich off the development of the place, leveraging first world money against third world land prices.

I suspect that if someone wanted to grow their own food, certain parts would be excellent if the people doing this learned about best practices for composting toilets and recycling gray water.

Jinotega seemed more possible than Esteli though I'm not sure I'd find as many interesting people, Nicaraguan and ex-pat, to talk to. The feeling on the street was different than the feeling on the street in Esteli, but the very thing that made Esteli feel more familiar, the more urban body language, the more exhuberant speech patterns, also meant that everyone in Esteli was more part of the global media exposure than those in Jinotega, and with that, comes other things -- drugs, bigger awareness of the differences between us and them, and all that. Jinotega had nice houses next to places that were crappier, without the gunmen and dogs.

We get used to things -- when I lived on Mott Street, I got used to being hyper cautious walking home at night, to dealing with the fence and after hours operator who lived downstairs, to dealing with the street cunt-calling. I loved New York and felt the trade-offs were worth it.

Didn't get an immediate sense with either place that it was the place. Guess I need to keep looking.

A couple of years ago, I was looking at house prices all over Europe and in especially the UK that would be equivalent to houses in the US. It seemed that house prices in that range were close to equivalent transnationally.

I'm suspecting that house prices on the lower ends are also relatively flat, that what you got for $110 a month in NYC in 1975 is more or less the same as what you'd get for $110 in Jinotega, Nicaragua, that the prices for these things have also been affected by international travel, costs of non-locally produced plumbing parts, copper wire, and all that. I knew people in NYC who had rent controlled apartments, very tiny studios for $45 a month. A room in a house in Jinotega now goes for about that. There's been considerable inflation in house prices in the US, but I suspect that the lowest end in the more economically depressed areas in the US would be comparable to prices in Jinotega. The difference with Jinotega is that more people than not are part of the renter pool at this rate. The better off Jinotegans are not 100 times better off than the average.

Seeing someone with four times the local pay for school teacher as rich would also require me to see college tenured professors who made four times what I made as rich. I didn't. I don't think people in Jinotega who knew what I got in Social Security would think of me as rich. Rich has a certain power to it over other people's lives.

Most of the people coming to try their back to the lander schemes weren't rich, either. Rich is owning the factory.

Jinotega didnt' have the load of Gringos that Esteli had -- or necessarily the radical difference between the factory owners and the rest of the population. Esteli had the cigar factories.

My income has varied by a multiple of around three during the last decade. I've never felt that I was rich when it was high, just that I didn't have money problems then. I've never made as much as six figures, ever.

And even that's not rich, really.

The other things that make Nicaragua cheap is not having to heat and in some places, not having to run an a/c. In the places that don't require cars, there's that savings (but many Gringos buying land tend to also need cars to get to their land and a car in Nicaragua costs more to run than a car in the US from what I've read).

For better or worse, the old style hand-craft textile home textile production in Nicaragua is gone to the point of not seeing handspun and woven cloth in handicraft shops in Esteli. People still make boots and shoes by hand in both Jinotega and Esteli (I really want a pair of handmade boots).

The surplus from world cloth manufacturing ends up in the markets of Jinotega. Suzanne, the gringa who was showing us around, had a North Face jacket she'd bought for a couple of cordobas. I got a pair of light sweat pants for maybe fifty cents or a quarter.

Food is cheap enough, but growing crops for export pushes the home food production onto less useful land. I didn't see any signs of malnutrition in Jinotega (have seen it in Patrick County) but this may be because Jinotega is a market town and has the money from the various service and professional work (lawyers, doctors, government agencies, banks, etc.) to be able to afford the food. Nobody seemed particularly prosperous; nobody seemed in dire straits. The usefulness of government patronage jobs complicates the political life but that is also true of small town politics in the US.