...sleep lightly

I implied it in the last two blogs--to put away the technology and that it is hard to sleep here in Nicaragua. In writing those words I didn't suspect how they would turn around to both spite and protect me.

I met up with the group I would be traveling and working with in Managua and we began our trip toward Isla de Ometepe--the Island of Ometepe. As we moved we met people who asked where we were from. I caught myself a handful of times:

"I'm American--I mean, I'm from the United States." After all, I haven't left Greater America, and I share a continental, maybe hemispherical identity with the Nicaraguense who are also "American." In fact, it was in modern day Brazil that the name "America" was first planted, so perhaps I am only getting closer to real deal. Not surprisingly, it is an easier question to answer in Spanish, where my only option is Soy de Estados Unidos. They have understood this concept far longer than we have.

Despite ourselves, we arrived on Ometepe after half a day,  smiling and excited, and were carted over to the orphanage, CICRIN, where we were to spend the next week doing construction works. Indeed, exciting it was, even by the first night.

I have always been a light sleeper--or perhaps an ever-aware sleeper--and something near me stirred my senses the first night at the orphanage. A moment later I heard the delicate sound of two lips separating and curiosity led me out of subconsciousness. I softly turned my head and opened my eyes to a crouched figure, pawing through my friend's luggage, looking up intermittently in caution. I suppose you never think you are being robbed until it happens--it is too far-fetched to happen to me, I thought without thinking--and so I sat up calmly. I looked over, hoping my friend had just risen early in the darkness for a morning stroll and didn't want to wake the others. Instead I caught sight of the burglar darting out of the room on noiseless feet and in the instant I was able to make it to the door, he was gone with only a crunch of dead leaves left behind. He made away with my friend's money and my beloved iPhone. An iPhone I care little for except for the photos he stole with it.

It goes without saying that I spent the entire rest of my stay in Nicaragua not only without a way to contact home but also without a camera; I could only memorize the beautiful sights, not immortalize them. And this is much to my chagrin because I love to take pictures of my travels and use them to color this blog or my desktop background or just to armchair travel in the future. Either way it forced me to have even fewer barriers between me and my experience than before. A camera is a wall, and the call of Instagram and Facebook, a distraction. This situation gave me a more unadulterated perspective. And what came into focus was an older world than I would have thought.

I noticed that there is something antiquated about this place, perhaps in their faces which still have the markings of ancient peoples (some of which are even Asiatic, reminding me of the great migrations during the Ice Age). But the sun seems older here too. They wear it on their skin and in their wrinkles. The toughness of their high cheeks, the trenches that crack in expression, the flat foreheads, they are all tanned by a hereditary sun. This is not like me, who gets it on vacation; it is a recent and fleeting color. At the beach where I waited for the ferry to leave, I saw young boys in their underwear chasing one another into the bar for a quick, sopping look at the Real Madrid-Barcelona score. They are various tones of brown, and in their skimpy attire I notice that the color is everywhere. There is no tan.

The sun bakes the land like a tortilla in this dry season where everything is dead or dying--something I wouldn't have been able to notice if I wasn't told since I come from the barren northern winters. I feel like we are harvested maize, popping under heat or puffing like souffles in the rolling hills. I look around in my stuffed minibus ride (what the locals call inta mortales, or something like that, meaning "on your way to die") and see an aging orange haze that takes me out of the bus and into the realm of the Olmec, Zapotecan and Mayan civilizations which thrived for hundreds of years, each adding to the menagerie of technological and agricultural innovations. They produced uniquely accurate calendars, great religious structures and the world-changing maize. Quite a bit has been discovered about these peoples, and quite a bit more is left undiscovered.

But perhaps all this is what I want to see--the vestiges of a glorious ancestry--because it helps me with my Euro-Caucasian guilt for spilling their blood so thoroughly and systematically, and for destroying those rosetta's stones of cultural information. With it I'll sleep better, but even the young men with gelled hair and tight shirts clicking their tongues at the passing women seem more American than I. Their eyes are Mesoamerican and their blood reaches possibly farther back in time than mine does, even if I trace mine back to Mesopotamia. Everything here is baked--a timely process--like that tortilla, dry and crumbling but rich in flavor and reaching far back into traditional and cultural history. I am a gringo, a microwaveable import.

Well, maybe not. I decide a stolen iPhone isn't such a great big deal and I relax into the views passing outside the windows. Sitting in that bus, my knee in the crotch of the man facing me and his nearly in mine, I take the trip from Managua to Jinotepe to Rivas to San Jorje to Isla de Ometepe as a local, as an American.