Maria comes out of nowhere. She links arms with me as I am strolling down the street near the central plaza in Leon, Nicaragua's second-largest city. She leads my father and I to some buildings which display a stunning series of murals depicting Nicaragua's modern history. The famous shadow of Sandino, a broken horse statue symbolizing the fall of the Somoza regime, bloody graves in rememberance of the young men killed while fighting during the Contra War in the 1980s- "Muy triste," Maria says several times, her head bowed and shaking. And finally, a painting of two young children running through an open field with a high kite trailing behind them. "Peace," Maria says. I nod in agreement, but her and I both know that the economic and political violence that continues to be directed at the Nicaraguan people is still far from anything resembling 'peace'.
The next day, we hop in a cab with Maria and ride up the hills just outside of Leon. We are going with Maria on a tour she recommends, to El Fortin de Acosaco. The dirt road to this abadoned prison is pitted with deep holes and several times we have to get out of the cab to make sure the car can make it without bottoming out. The cab driver seems determined to press on, however, and eventually we make it to the top. When we arrive at the prison, we see that it really is abadoned except for a reclusive character who appears to have been squatting in the place for quite some time. He stands stiffly in front of the cab, with his solid arms crossed in front of his solid chest, examining us with one of his eyeballs half-popped out of its socket. If it wasn't for Maria at our side, I might have asked the cab driver to turn back around and go, because the man was intimidating, to say the least. With a quick exchange between Maria and the man, he backs away and dissapears into a room which he has blocked off from the prison for himself. My father and I follow Maria and the cab driver around as they lead us from room to room. Maria explains what each room was used for while the cab driver adds his own comments about what he knows about the place. The prison was used by the Somoza regime to house and torture Sandinista revolutionaries, they explain. Fifty metres or so from the building is solitary confinement: a cement tomb in which a grown man would have difficulty laying down straight or standing fully erect.
Afterwards, Maria invites us to her casita ('little house'). It's not so much a house as it is some scrap wood and metal pieced together. We arrive and she introduces us to the children-- smiling, hungry little things who are delighted to see strangers. They huddle around us while Maria goes to find us seats. Chickens, mangy chihuahuas, and skeleton kittens crawl around the yard. Maria comes back with a print out from an electrocardiograph. She points out the places on the graph that show she is sick. She tears up and she says she needs surgery that she can't afford. She tells us that her daughter is deaf. Her son is embarrased by their poverty. And actually, this isn't even her house. She is homeless. This is the house of a friend, who has been letting her sleep here. She has to sleep in a small bed with 3 of the children. Her friend has told her that she must move out of the house, but Maria says she has no where else to go.
My inability to find the right words to say has nothing to do with a language barrier.
