Picasso Dreams

Sandino Quote

"The sovereignty and liberty of a people are not to be discussed, but rather defended with weapons in hand."   —  Augusto Cesar Sandino

Aldous Huxley Quote

"A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy."

— Aldous Huxley, 1937, in Ch. 7 of "Ends and Means"

Street Vendor in Managua

See more photos of Nicaragua here.

El Gato Negro

I am a sucker for black cats.  This little kitten was running around the grounds of Las Mercedes in Managua.

Casa en el campo

White Woman's Guilt

copyright Kelly Ann Thomas

Ah, lazy mornings.  I awoke at dawn to the sounds of two tribes of Howler monkeys competing to provide me with my morning wake up call.  Callie crawled onto my chest for her morning cuddles until Richmond, my Maine coon cat, pushed her away and demanded I share the love.  The young ones (Nicky ad Isabelle) spent the morning playing with a cardboard box.

Not wanting to get up just yet, I pick up the latest Vanity Fair and settled back under the covers.  Bill Clinton's comeback, Angelina Jolie's relief work, and the founders of internet commerce take me far away from the jungles of Nicaragua.  Though I delve into the articles, each time my eye drifts from the pages, I am reminded of my geography - the cane ceilings, the wild parrots screeching from the tree, the rolling green hills, and the blaring of the horn for the 6:10 bus to San Juan del Sur.  Outside, the blue spotted butterflies make a rat-a-tat sound (similar to static electricity) as they chase each other in all directions.  Occasionally an interloper will join in on the butterfly version of Three Card Monty, rattling off their passionate clicks until one suitor is chased away.  I steal a pillow from Rob and try to focus on the articles about pretty and important people.  I cannot remember the last time I was this lazy.  Normally by 6 a.m. I am brewing my chai latte, feeding the cats and Not My Dog and Nobody's Dog, serving myself a bowl of granola and yogurt, and assembling all the things I will need in town - trash and recycled materials, compost bin, laptop, camera, cell phone and charger, keys, yoga mat, money, and all the things needed for the store.  Invariably I forget something each day.

It felt so good to lie in bed until 6:30 that I decided to play hooky, which I can do because I am the boss.  Having worked every day for the past few weeks, I can justify staying in bed.  My presence might be missed, but isn't necessary for the day. 

As I get ready for the maid (I wash the previous evening's dishes, pick up my clothes and make the bed so as not to appear too lazy), I feel fortunate and guilty.  I can sing my own self-worth, but had I been born into an impoverished culture with parents who had little or no education, I might be the one sweeping the floors and scrubbing the showers.  Poverty is a requirement of capitalism.  I don't know what Arelia thinks of me or extranjeros in general.  We pay her 150 cordobas for 4 hours of labor; the average wage for a maid in the campo is 80 cordobas for 8 hours of work.  We also provide for her medical care.   We have given her stacks of nice clothing, linens, shoes, toiletries, and household items.

Many people underpay their maids.  Many maids steal to make up for their crappy wages.  It's more complicated than the "pay them more" solution for reasons that I will not cover in this post.   

The second day Arelia worked for me, she found a garish plastic belt in the bathroom trash can.  She asked if she could have it.  The belt had come with a pair of shorts.  Just before I tossed it away, I thought that I should offer it to Arelia when she came to work the next day, but it was so ugly, so tacky that I thought she might be insulted by the offer.  She picked it out of the trash and asked Rob if she could keep it.  I was mortified by my wasteful actions when he told me she liked it and needed a belt.  It's not trash to me, she said, although worded slightly differently.

I don't usually toss things like that away, or if I do, they go into a "gratis" box that I leave on a corner, not too far from the garbage dumpsters.  Of all the things I have given away, only one item had a dearth of takers.  In fact, this one item sat on the stoop to our store for three days before someone finally picked it out of the free box.  That item would be Kato Kaelin's autobiography.   Rob and I joked about the old drunks rummaging through our free book pile, fighting over who got to keep the French cookbook written in German.  "I don't want Kato, you take him!" we imagined them screaming at each other while grabbing the second to last item to go, the French cookbook written in German.  Kato's ghost-written autobiography had "graced" the shelves of the Iguana book exchange for several years and became my property when Dee donated her picked over collection to me.  A month later I relayed our imaginary story of the drunks rejecting the autobiography of O.J. Simpson's houseguest when one of my unidentified friends said, "I have that book." At first I thought he meant he had read the book in the past, though he couldn't have been older than 13 when the trial occurred.  No, he said, he picked it out of the free box and had the book in his office!  I didn't know whether to be insulted or amused.  The drunks picked up copies of my old Cold War text books and guides to Soviet missile production, but not Kato.  If anyone from Kato's publishing house is reading this blog entry, I suggest you find the person who gave O.J.'s buddy a cash advance for his memoirs and put him in rehab where he belongs.

But I digress, as I am prone to do.

Compared to an American, I live a very modest life.  Compared to a Nicaraguan…well, I am not in the league of the uber rich Managuans who show up in their helicopters and make their maids tend to their children on the beach - in full uniform, including pantyhose, but I live in a nice house, own two (cough, cough) vehicles money pits (because the first one is lacking mobility caused by a non-functioning differential), and have a nice business.  I have a really nice life.  I am suffering from White Woman's Guilt.  Reading Vanity Fair almost seems a cliché.  Almost.

A Tribe of Congo Monkeys

A tribe of 50 Congo monkeys (including at least 10 babies) came for a visit  a few nights ago.  They spent several hours hollering, swinging through trees, and taking care of the little ones.  These are the best of 200 photos!  I used my 300 mm lens (latest and best-ever consumer purchase from my stateside visit), great for definition, but difficult to focus between the branches.

I put up an (incomplete) album of my eco home as well, which you can see here.

KAT Rant: Nica Politics

Crock Dundee wannabes say living in Nicaragua is like living in the Wild West.  There are no rules.  Take the rules for electricity theft.  Oh, there are none!  Between 30 and 40 percent of electricity sent down the antiquated lines is stolen.  The IMF is withholding further aid that will NEVER, EVER BE REPAID, because the government hasn't imposed laws to deal with electricity theft.  It's rampant for all sorts of reasons, but the government's solution is to criminalize theft above 700 Kilowatts, which is far more than the average home uses.  Ortega, the man whose contribution to the Sandinistas was robbing banks on their behalf, railed against all the big businesses who are stealing energy.   There are barrios in Managua where 80 percent of the homes and hovels are hooked up to electricity illegally.  The big businesses are the only ones with money to pay the bills, taxes, employment, and thieves both domestic and international, Spain specifically.  We pay more for electricity than any other country in the Northern Hemisphere.  Sure, there's geothermal, but the last President sold his soul to an economic hitman.  Back in the 1980's, the IMF and The Economist magazine convinced the former Minister of Energy that oil would never rise above $13 a barrel, and so the IMF loaned money to Nicaragua for expensive, oil-powered generators built to last 20 years in a land of plentiful and constant geothermal energy.  Prior to this conversion to fossil based fuel, Nicaragua's energy was more than 70 percent geothermal.

Nicaragua now faces a shortfall in international aid.  EU countries have scaled back donations, citing the lack of transparency.  Hugo Chavez sold Nicaragua sour crude oil for half the market price, and two percent interest.  Ortega sold some (or all?) of the Venezuelan oil at market price and hired a private company to monitor the financial transactions.  Generally Accepted Rules of Accounting do not apply.  When this scandal erupted, Ortega treated his friends and family (though probably not the step-daughter he allegedly molested for years) and the rest of his entourage to a little R&R in between jaunts to Iran, Libya, Cuba and North Korea.  I made the last one up.  I am not sure if he has ever visited North Korea, but it seems his style.

The leading Sandinistas want nothing to do with Ortega.  Dora Maria Tellez, Commandante 2 in the Sandinista revolution, held a hunger strike in protest of Ortega's dictatorial powers and his denial of her splinter-party status.  Carlos Mejia Godoy, a Sandinista and the most famous folk musician in Nicaragua, denied the Sandinistas permission to use his music.  "No mas dictadoro" and "No mas dictadora" are scrawled on buildings, walls, and billboards throughout Managua.

There is a great deal of passion here.  If Americans were one-tenth as Nicaraguans, George W. Bush would not be in office today.  No doubt another crook would have taken over the Presidency, but there would have been far more than a whimper after the 2000 debacle.  I hope that the country evolves peacefully, despite La Dictadora Rosarillo Murillo and her incestuous husband, officially referred to as El Presidente.  It promises to be an interesting journey.