Julie Carey 4/19/10
Carry on, Ranger! Traveling to Latin America for me was like a shot of tequila. Everything that frustrated me about the United States was turned on its head south of the border. Traffic lanes were optional and rear view mirrors purely cosmetic. Retired American school buses painted like amusement park rides read “Dios me bendiga” and carried 5 passengers to a seat, 25 in the aisle and room on top for chickens, baskets and bundles of who knows what, and of course extra passengers. “No hay luz,” people sighed, lighting candles, at least once a night when the electricity went out. Processions with marching bands, swinging pots of incense, costumes and other regalia brazenly barged down main thoroughfares for no apparent reason. Trucks cruised bumpy dirt roads of mountain pueblos blasting whatever might be deemed essential news flashes from a megaphone. Any rule could be overridden by a wink and sly slip of un poco dinero. What could be more fun? The deaths of my mother and my marriage within a span of six months and had led me through a tunnel of grief and I had been hiding within the demands of my job as an inner city teacher. When my sister suggested I join her family on a vacation to Nicaragua for Spring Break, I jumped. Give me that shot of tequila. While I had briefly visited Costa Rica and crossed the border into Belize once to renew a visa, Guatemala was the country in Central America I knew best. My first trip had been a solo journey when I was 25 or so. I was working as an Outward Bound instructor and the season had ended. I was curious, wanted to learn Spanish and had the freedom for such an adventure.
Naively, I landed myself into the center of Guatemala City armed with nothing but my backpack, Berkeley guidebook to Central America and pocket Spanish dictionary. All the other gringos headed straight to Antigua for a pampered, safe week in a middle class home attending one of a hundred Spanish schools with all the other foreigners. Not me. I wanted remote. I wanted different. I wanted adventure. Indeed, that’s what I found on that trip and subsequent others. I chose a Spanish school hidden deep in the northwestern highlands in a town where all the men wore red and white striped pants and the women slung small children onto their backs to work in the corn milpas. People spoke a Mayan language called Mam or made an attempt at pidgeon Spanish. From on top of the hill on one side of town, I did my homework to the soundtrack of Evangelical wailing coming from a church in town, blaring Norteño music and the periodic boom of bombas, fireworks set off for no apparent reason. The family I lived with had a one-room house with a dirt floor and no electricity or plumbing. The pigs slept under the house and the one-eyed cat slept near the wood stove where tortillas sizzled three times a day. There was no phone in the village at that time, but mail went out once a week, as frequently as a doctor came to town. You had to carry a pocketful of stones when walking at night to keep the pack of dogs away. Here, my tequila glass was full. Little did I know what lay in store for me in Nicaragua. My sister’s husband was an international hybrid whose Palestinian father had met his Ecuadoran mother at school in Berkeley and raised his brother and him in Iraq. One of his aunts had left Ecuador as a teenager
to marry a handsome Nicaraguan aristocrat and that was who we were going to stay with. “Cool,” I thought. “It’s time I see the other side of the story.” My jaw began to drop when their driver picked us up at the airport to whisk us up into a posh neighborhood above sweltering Managua, capital of the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Casita and Eduardo’s immaculate tiled living room terrace overlooked a dreamy garden of tropical flowers, avocado and mango trees and a luxurious swimming pool. Dulce promptly appeared in a gingham maid dress when the little silver bell was rung at the table to bring mas café con leche or whisk away the dirty dishes. Ronald washed the brand new white Land Rover inside and out every day. My jaw continued its free fall when we arrived at their beach house where a local man was summoned to climb a coconut tree and release 20 coconuts with his machete then serve us cocktails with the fresh milk inside while we lolled about in the pool. My jaw officially hit the sand when their personal massage therapist showed up to rub each one of us down to the soothing music of our choice. Don’t get me wrong. Life had been rough on me lately. Who wouldn’t die for this? After all, I was worth it, right? But I couldn’t stop wrestling with the nagging social inequities that I knew lay just beyond this elegant beachfront property. Out there, I knew, was the infant mortality, the malnutrition, the lack of health care, the children begging on the streets. How could I reconcile this opulence? And what about Dulce and Ronald? What was this? Somoza’s palace? But Casita and Eduardo were such good people. Eduardo had worked for the Sandinista government, after all and Casita was a beloved member of the Sabbah family I had come to adore and respect. I
resigned myself to enjoy their warm hospitality and the decadence of a tropical vacation…and made every effort to mingle with la gente whenever I could. When I got home, I described, with pride, my idyllic vacation, while internally I battled to silence the guilty voice inside that cried, “Life in a bubble. That wasn’t the REAL Nicaragua. You cheated.” So life went on and a week and a half later, I woke up with an overwhelming sense of nausea that doubled me over. Following was a sequence of cold sweats, sweaty fever and painfully achy body and skin that put me in bed for the rest of the day. Work was out of the question the following day, as the fever continued. “Wow,” I thought. “I’ve really caught a bad virus. I hope it goes away soon so I can get back to things.” I tried the next day at work, but realized it was a bad idea when I broke out into a cold sweat and lost my temper at a student in the middle of class. I was diligently taking liberal amounts of Tylenol, but my fever seemed to override this assault, lingering around 101°-102°. Being the trooper that I was, I braved it out, through soaking sheets for another day before my sister finally paid me a visit. “Do you think you have Malaria?” she asked. The thought had never occurred to me. I didn’t remember seeing a single mosquito, let alone remember scratching a bite. It wasn’t even rainy season. We were only there a week. We searched the web. “Intermittent fever and chills, body aches, headaches, wild dreams…” It was all there. The advice online was, “Don’t watch and wait. Get to a doctor immediately.” We looked at each other with fear in our eyes and headed for the emergency room. After 6 vials of blood, a nose culture, chest xray, two bags of IV fluid, lots of scary talk with the
doctor and a few cranberry juices later, we were sent home with the promise of test results and an appointment with the infectious disease doctor the next day. That night, I visited another land. I curled up shaking under my down comforter, pulling it over my head for warmth as I fell into a fitful night of sleep that ended by peeling my body off my drenched sheets to fumble for the thermometer which revealed a temperature of 103.4°. I was going to die. Compulsively popping ibuprofen, I called my sister who rushed over to drape cold, ice water-soaked towels on my burning skin. Any light was too bright. I kept my eyes closed for the entire morning, counting the hours until my 2:00 appointment. At last it arrived. What might have taken a half an hour of consultation, examination and treatment turned into two hours of the doctor quizzing his intern on tropical diseases while I shivered uncontrollably under my sister’s coat. Vital signs revealed a 102.7° temperature, to which I meekly requested some Tylenol. All the blood tests had been negative, but he decided to give me Malaria pills anyway. I stopped at the lab to draw four more vials and picked up the Chloroquine at the pharmacy and went home to sleep. In three days, I was back. I could move, I could think, I could even clean my house. I decided the incident was worth a Facebook posting. It got a rise out of a lot of people, the most amusing coming from an old high school boyfriend who had unexpectedly chosen a life in the military. “Carry on, Ranger!” he advised me. It made me giggle, it really did. I guess you get what you ask for. I had wanted rugged, real and gritty. I had poo-pooed the coconut milk cocktails by the poolside. It seemed that one mischievous mosquito had found its way into my skin to make sure I had a true Latin American adventure.
10-word summary Watch out for tequila. You might just get the worm.