new house, hot shower, learning the hard way

A moment I have greatly anticipated is finding the place I will call home in Managua for the foreseeable future. In hopes of completing this quest, I left Leon (for the first time on my own!) in the cool morning drizzle in a microbus (advantage: faster than big buses; disadvantage: less leg room). When I got to 7 Sur (shorthand for a highway location where people change buses) in Managua, it was still raining, so I decided to take a taxi from there to the office instead of waiting for the bus. I had arranged to meet Hultner, a Nica who lives in Las Brisas (a cute, quiet neighborhood I had visited with him and Kim, my jefa, 2 weeks ago) and also works with the Nehemiah Center, to go look at some of the places for rent there. I am discovering that it makes a big difference when people here realize you have Nicaraguan friends. I got to the office before he did, so Kim wound up driving me back down the hill and over to Hultner's neighborhood where we proceeded to walk around in the drizzle and look at houses. After 2 hours of looking, the first house we saw still appeared to be the best. (It was 2 houses down from Hultner and his family, which made it attractive.)

BUT, God saved the best for last. Kim drove us over to see a place for rent across the street from someone else who works with the Nehemiah Center. When we arrived the owner wasn't there but there were some men working on the place, so we took a look around. In the front there is a ¾ wall topped with some nice ironwork that encloses the front patio (which includes an area for a car to be parked inside the gate). When you walk in the door, there is large living area with one dark wooden wall and rest white. The kitchen is off to the right and has a nice set of cabinets above the sink. Inside the kitchen area is plenty of space for a stove, fridge, and non-perishable food storage racks (all of which we'll have to buy). Down the hall are 3 medium sized bedrooms and a bathroom. Each of the bedrooms has a closet with storage space. Behind the house there is an outdoor area that will be great for drying clothes in the sun and another room that most likely would have belonged to an enpleada (household staff) of a past owner. We were all wondering what a place like this might rent for. So we called the owner, who was en route, and found out it was only $350/month! (This was after looking at 3 other places much less impressive in the $300 range).

After talking it over with Kim and Hultner, I decided that this was probably a gift from God and I should call the owner and arrange to meet him again to seal the deal. So I did. Then I spent the rest of the day in meetings with Nehemiah Center staff and the evening with FHI staff Shannon and Kathy Ahern and some guests of their family who happened to be in town. I also had my first hot shower in over a month! I had almost forgotten what that feels like...

Back to the house. We had arranged to meet again this morning at 10am. Unfortunately, being totally new to Managua, it was a challenge giving accurate directions to my friend Kathy who was driving me there. However, Senor Cesar Valle is a very nice man and was very forgiving of my being late to our meeting. When we arrived, he responded to my apology with a smile. “Nicaraguans are not very punctual, so we always say “mas o menos” when we set any appointment,” he explained. Don Cesar spent his career in business/HR and is now retired and managing property. He spent some time in the States and speaks English as well as Spanish, so that made our discussions this morning easier. I took a look at the house again and got to see the contract, and everything looks good, so I am going back to Managua on Monday to officially sign it and hopefully move in that very day! It is really gorgeous (a ganga, Kim called it), and I am excited about the possibilities that having a larger house will open up for me and Andrea, my future roommate, to be hospitable to our neighbors and teams that come to town.

After that, Kathy dropped me off at 7 Sur, where I was hoping to catch the bus back to Leon. I was a little nervous about this, since I had never caught a bus back from there before, but I felt confident that it would work out.

90 minutes later, after watching every city bus go by twice, letting one Expreso bus to Chinandega (that also stops at the bypass just outside Leon) pass me by, seeing every conceivable edible thing for sale, and hearing Losing my Religion, and Funkytown played at the bodegas behind me, it occurred to me that maybe the Expreso to Leon didn't stop at 7 Sur.

I was tired of standing, tired of people giving me looks (and trying to sell me stuff), and definitely wishing that I had eaten lunch. I wanted to go home (well, to Leon, I mean). My frustration almost got the best of me as my eyes welled up with tears. I tried to hold them back—the last thing I wanted to do as a gringa alone on the streets of Managua was to make a scene. “This is ridiculous”, I thought to myself. I just need to call a friend and figure this out. So I called someone and left a message. Of course, within 10 minutes, another Expreso to Chinadenga came roaring by and I scurried on board with great relief. I'm back in Leon now (glad to have beaten the rain this time) and proud that to say that I managed to survive my first trip between cities on public transportation alone. But I definitely learned the hard way this afternoon.

(Interesting side note about public transportation here: when I first got here and started traveling, I couldn't figure out why the buses-which by the way, are all really old school buses from the USA-are staffed with multiple people, and why one of them yells out where the bus is going at every stop, when most of them clearly say on the front what their destination is. Then, in the course of a conversation with another staff member, she reminded me that a large number of people here probably cannot read the names of the places on the buses because they are illiterate, and this is a majority oral culture. Duh. Suddenly the whole system made a lot more sense.)