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What´s up guys.
Just want to bring you up to date a bit with
what´s going on with me. I´ve been travelling
for the past few days and I want to tell you about it. I wanted
to go to Masaya, a couple hours north, to check out the crafts
that they seel there. So I got on the crowded old school bus
in Rivas and find a seat. I´m the only white dude on
the bus. This old old lady comes along and sits next to me.
She grabs my arm and smiles and nods her head. These girls
are working there way through the bus selling home made ice
cream and the old lady looks at me and shakes her finger telling
me not to get any. There not good for anything she says, like
she is protecting me. Then we get going and the old lady tells
me she knows me from before in another town. She looks at
me and says, You are from Israel. I say, why Israel. She says,
because you are pretty. I say, no, I am from the United States.
She says, we call that the damned city. Why, I say. She starts
smoking her fingers and says, a lot of crack there. She is
from Managua, so I ask her how it is. Beautiful, she says
and starts grabbing the air. It is filled with thieves, they
kill you for one peso. Then this other lady wants to sit with
us, so I go to stand in the isle, and the old lady says, No
No, you can´t sit here. She is huge, she says to me
in a loud voice. Then she put her head against the seat in
front of us and went to sleep the rest of the trip.
From the second story of a restaurant in Masaya
I could see a mural fading on a large destroyed wall opposite
an old church. It was of the Nicaraguan and Sandinista flags
side by side. In the now restored old market i bought a postcard
of a smiling young mom with her baby in arm, breastfeeding,
and an M-16 slung over her shoulder. The market was destroyed
in the war against the dicatator Somoza, in th 70´s.
Somoza bombed the city from a century old fort,
fuertelexa coyote, that overlooks the city. The fort and the
Volcan Masaya keep constant watch. At the fort I went with
my flashlight down a spirling stare case into blackness. I
walked the cold corador and shined my light into the little
black cells. Political enemies of Somoza spent years there,
ten to twenty in the small cells, in darkness. Stories are
told of released prisoners, after the Sandinista victory,
leaving the prison with long fingernails and hair, perminantly
blind from the years passed in darkness. I looked into a hole
that dropped twenty five feet into an open room. In there
Somoza kept a giant snake. He would through people in to be
eaten alive. That is what my Nicaraguan friend told me, and
he knew the place well. Helicopters would land at the fort
and pick up certain prisoners. They would be carried to the
volcanoe and pushed out, alive, to dissappear into the active
crater.
The crater is iincredible. It´s a thousand
feet deep and probably half a mile wide. at the bottom is
another crater and gas and smoke billows out. It´s actually
hard to breath. From there you can see the Lago de Managua
in one direction, and the volcanoe above Granada in the other
direction, right against the edge of the Lago de Nicaragua.
Yesterday I came to Granada. It is beautiful
here. Old churches, plazas, and fountains. The common horse
and carriage seems even more romantic on these streets. I
was sitting in the park in front of the caterdal, on a bench
surrounded by palm trees with my journal and short stories
by Ernest Hemingway. I was right where I wanted to be. And
this kid, dirty and disoriented comes up saying, Chicle Chicle.....
and holding his glue under his shirt. My first
reaction wasa to avoid the situation, and then I was ike,
well, I work in an orphanage. So I start talking to him and
then his budy comes up, a little pissed off. So I start talking
to them both. There both runaways, just living in the street.
I took them both out to dinner and by the end of the night
they were both saying, take us both with you. We may be able
to take them, but I won´t know for a while. Today I
went in a taxi to the home of the older one and talked to
his mom. She told me to take him with me and help him. Last
night when they were eating I felt very sad, but when I was
talking to the mother my emotions kind of escaped me.
So after the kids went off to sleep last night
I went to a club to dance. I´m drinking a beer and listening
to the music, and feeling okay. I´m chatting it up with
this girl from Managua. She´s telling me Managua is
horrible. She works here as a dancer in a club. I tell her
what I do and she doesn´t even want to here about it.
Her life is to sad to talk about and mine is to good. She´s
got a drug problem and kids in Managua. I´m hanging
out with the mom of half of the kids I work with. Turns out
we were staying at the same place. I made her sad.
So I´m gonna send this with errors, no
re-read, before the computer can get tricky and erase it.
I hope you guys are doing well.
Michael Velarde
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