we make the road by walking

It never ceases to amaze me being here, sitting on this balcony night after night watching the world go by. Nicaragua is a country of sheer kinetic energy, as if the oppressive heat and the torrential rain are whipping together a stew in a smoldering cauldron. This potency brims with a life that continues to widen my eyes. I feel at once a part of it, and at the same time intensely aware of my outlying place.
The children here are effortless. They seem to possess an all-knowing acceptance of life as it surrounds and passes them, without question and with conviction. They stare you down, and do not say “hello” to your hola, but simply adios. As if they know or sense that they will never see you again, for you are just a spectator in their land of dynamic constants. And maybe that’s how you can define this place, a creative force that is set in its scrappiness. And the children here are also beautiful in their realizations, with some natural poets arising even as they learn English, as they describe how they love their mothers like flowers in their garden. But there is also that stark realism that they know intrinsically, that eventually they will set aside this inner artistic honesty to find practical means to support themselves. They are sure of themselves, sometimes sadly too sure of their destiny. The head rules, even if the heart speaks.
You can feel how real it is here, in a place where cookie cutters don‘t exist. In a land where everything is done from the very foundations on up, from waiting for the rain to cement the building material as a necessary part of the logistics plan, to mopping up rain water even as it falls. To not worrying about a boat crashing into the waterfront of the restaurant and going outside to take a shower in a downpour. To the fact that no one seems to swim in the bay during the scorching heat, but somehow everyone is out puddle surfing as the rain floods the beach. Football games at sunset. Pickup truck hearses, everyone getting off their bicycles and motorcycles to pay homage amongst the hundreds of walking mourners, as time stops and a murmuring silence lingers in a place where bawdy and brash reign.
Pickup trucks do not connote anything more than sheer practicality in this context. People hanging off the backs of the truck beds, as if tied simply by a thread without anxiety over potential injury. Children hanging off of motorbikes, families of three or four on a bicycle. Shutting down entire roads to fill a pothole. Wild horses in the street. Oxen driven market wagons. Wandering dogs, emaciated cats. Lizards eating bugs. Bugs eating me alive. Evangelical gatherings preaching loudly in an abandoned field. Trucks with giant speakers strapped to the bed pronouncing everything from a sale to a political slogan to a plea to recycle. The list goes on...