Blood and Ice

This week has been pretty much a blur..
We have been so busy just trying to get settled into our new little house that we haven’t had much time for anything else. We have been out in service exactly one time, before we rented our house, and that’s it. Why, you ask? Well, part of the reason is because we have been up to our neck in paint and have been going to the markets in nearby Jinotepe practically every day to stock up on appliances, tables, chairs, soap, etc. Now, you may be thinking that we are idiots and that we should just cruise up to the local WalMart and buy whatever we need, right? Unfortunately, WalMart doesn’t exist here. Or fortunately, depending on what your point of view is regarding a behemoth corporation swallowing up the mom-and-pop shops and taking over suburbs. Personally, I love the giant behemoth corporation.

It’s kind of pathetic, really. You get an idea in your head regarding something you want to buy and you think it will mean maybe an hour of time and you’ll be fine. For example, today we went to Jinotepe to get a simple plastic table and four plastic chairs (you can get beautiful hand-carved wooden tables here for about $300 american, which is a steal….but in Nicaragua, it seems that the best way to go is to just get something that works. Plastic works beautifully!) We went to Palí, which is a grocery store/goods store actually owned by Wal-Mart. We asked, “Hey, do you sell plastic tables?” They laughed at us like we were idiots and told us to try the store next to the book store which is directly across from the Super Santiago, which is a store similar to Palí. So, we made our way through market stalls reminiscent of downtown Bangladesh, people hawking their wares, yelling across the narrow, puddle-filled corridors, dodging men pulling about 500 pounds of bananas and pineapples on wooden carts and dogs that generally avoid crossing your way unless they need to relieve themselves, and finally find the store. “Do you have any plastic tables?” we ask. Immediately comes a frown and the shake of the head. “No,” they tell us. “No one in all of Jinotepe has plastic tables. The prices went up suddenly, and they stopped coming. You might find some in Managua”. (Managua, by the way, is a superheated no-man’s land to people of the smaller towns. It’s a long, tedious trip and very frustrating.) We decide to try one more store and get the same response. As we wind our way back through the Bangladesh market stalls, Marlene stops at a stall that sells plastic bowls where a sister from the Jinotepe congregation works. “Why are you stopping?” I say, tired, wet, and wanting to go home (oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that by this time it had been raining all afternoon. Thankfully this time I expected it and brought my hooded poncho). “Let’s just see if they sell some here,” she says. I roll my eyes. “Didn’t you hear everyone at the stores we went to? They don’t sell them in Jinotepe anymore! Let’s just go home and try another town tomorrow!” She approaches the stall keeper anyway and asks if they have any tables. “Of course we do,” she answers, as if we are morons for thinking anything different. So, we were able to get the tables and chairs, and now we have somewhere to eat at home and when we have company!

Another example of strange Nicaraguan “logic” is the simple quest we had the other day for hangers. Now, the Spanish word for hangers is “ganchos”, right? Everyone knows this. So when we decide to get some ganchos, we ask someone at the Palí once again. “Ganchos?” they ask. “What do you mean?” “You know,” I say. “Where you put your clothes on and hang them up?” “Oh, you mean ‘perchas’”. “Perchas?” I ask. “Perchas,” I’m told. I roll my eyes at Marlene and give her a look that says, “What a retard, right?”. She, of course, nods in agreement with the store clerk. “Yeah,” she says. “That makes sense. It’s like when a bird perches on a stick. Perches, Perchas. Very similar.”

I fail to see what a bird perching on a stick and me hanging up my pants have anything to do with each other, but I just shrug my shoulders. “Okay,” I say. “Where are your perchas?”

“Oh, no,” the clerk says, shaking her head. “We don’t have any.”

“Ah, of course,” I say. So we hit the market stalls again. I go up to a fine looking gentleman and ask, “Do you have any ganchos?”

“Ganchos?” he says. “What are ganchos?”

“Oh, I mean Penchas.”

“Penchas?”

Marlene steps forward. “It’s Perchas!”

“Oh, perchas, yes, right over there.” He points at a bunch sitting in little bundles in a bucket. I walk over and pick one of the packages up. And what does it say? “Ganchos.”

We have also noticed, throughout our almost daily walks through Bangladesh lately, that Nicaraguans will give you an answer to any question you ask, even if they have no idea what the correct answer is. I think it’s because they don’t want to say “I don’t know” and look stupid. So they just make something up and say it with all the sincerity in the world. For example, today we had to get some money out of the ATM. Unfortunately, the banks were closed since it’s Saturday and they all close at 12:30pm. We actually came upon a bank whose “walk-up” teller was still open for another hour. “Do you have an ATM?” we ask her. She shakes her head no. “Do you know where we can find one?” She thinks for a moment and says, “What kind of card is it?” “Bank of America, from the US” we answer. She shakes her head again. “No, you won’t be able to use that one anyway.” This doesn’t really make sense to me, so I ask her again where the nearest ATM is. “Well, if you want to try, you will have to go to a gas station. That’s the only place you will find an ATM.” The idea of going to a gas station, with who knows who hanging around, and getting out hundreds of dollars, definitely does not appeal to me. We thank her and leave. “Well, what are we going to do?” we wonder. Because this particular evening we have invited the Japanese couple, Sumitaka and Akiko, to a nice dinner in Jinotepe as a thank-you for letting us stay in their house, even though they don’t like dogs and even though both of our dogs literally decided to defecate 2 feet away from them on their nice floor. (That’s another story for another time. It’s enough just to say that Sumitaka and Akiko have been well trained by Jehovah in the art of patience and a nice smile to smooth things over). So we find another bank literally right next door to the one where the lady told us there are no ATMS except for at a gas station. It’s closed, but the guard is locking up and we ask him if he knows of an ATM nearby. He says, “Of course, it’s just around the corner.”

So our adventures in shopping for basic household goods has been pretty much just like that.

We are slowly getting accustomed to being in such a small town. Santa Teresa is by no means jungle territory, but it has beautiful heavy forests and we are up in the highlands, so the air is much cooler than in Managua. October happens to be the most rainy part of the year, and we get huge torrential rains at night, around 9pm, like clockwork. We’ve never seen or heard such rains! It’s still deafening even though we actually have a paneled ceiling. A lot of the friends here have no ceiling, but instead have a corrugated metal roof and that’s it. That’s what they see when they look up. When it rains, it’s so loud you need to yell at each other just to be heard, even if you are in the same room!

The town itself is a sleepy little place with very friendly people. In the morning, Savannah (our older dog) likes to sit in front of the door and watch the kids walk by on their way to school, and the other less fortunate dogs scrounge around for forgotten or thrown away food. When one of the dogs gets too close to the house, she’ll give a ferocious bark and scare it away, and then settles down to watch the local life walk by again. The only things she doesn’t like, for some reason, are the horses. There are a few that go by regularly, some with riders and some without, and she just goes nuts when that happens, for some reason.

When we are out and about, we constantly pass people by, who are either sitting on their front porches doing the same thing Savannah does in the morning, or are doing some kind of work. When we pass by, the proper greeting is “Adios!” instead of “good morning”, for some reason. It was a little strange at first, but it’s easy to get used to.

As I mentioned above, we’ve only been out in service once so far, but it was a nice experience nonetheless. The first door we went to we were invited in and sat down on old worn sofas sitting atop a rocky, dirt floor. The old woman listened respectfully and agreed with everything we read to her from the Bible, and a teenager who had been working outside came in to listen. It was a little hard, however, to know whether they were really interested or whether they were just being polite. I’m sure that with time we will be able to tell the difference. The friends here have told us that they don’t offer studies to everyone who appears to be interested; otherwise they would have 20 studies or more each and would have no time for door to door work (in spite of this, many of the pioneers have 10 to 15 studies. Sumitaka and Akiko have 11 together, and they are trying to get more, since they are in the low end. To their credit, they don’t speak Spanish very well yet, but they are progressing nicely. They are teaching me Japanese words little by little. One that I use often with Sumitaka is “Kiótsketé!” which means “Careful!”). Instead, they gauge the interest in their return visits, and observe to see whether the householder asks questions or gives any real input during the study. In the rural areas, we are told, the people are genuinely interested and will typically read the 4 or 5 magazines, brochures, and/or tracts that the friends leave with them by the time the next return visit comes around. It’s difficult to get to them more than once a month, I’m told, and even more difficult during the rainy season, because of the rivers. One man, however, walks about an hour and crosses three rivers to get to the meetings for the group in La Conquista, a small town very close to Santa Teresa. This is particularly amazing given the fact that he is about 65 years old and makes the trek by himself.

Now, the house that we rented, as you saw in the last post, looks like a charming little Barbie house from the outside. We have been really blessed by Jehovah because there is a bakery across the street that sells fresh bread and pastries, there is a hardware store next door to us (which is not that great because the owner is an evangelical who I ran into the first day here…he was talking about the Bible with another man, and was actually using a New World Translation with references, and in the conversation I overheard him say that all religions lead to God. Of course, my spirit was so roused within me that I had to use scriptures and Biblical examples on why this was not the case, and basically shut him up, and then later found out he was the owner of the place. He’s not hostile or anything, but rips me off any chance he gets. I’ve decided to stop shopping there and just take the 10 minute bus to Jinotepe and shop in the hardware stores there). There is also a pharmacy right around the corner and a restaurant next door as well. (The restaurant is pretty sleepy until the weekend, when they decide to turn it into a cool hangout and blast Los Bukis at an ear-piercing level. Thankfully at night it sometimes rains so hard you can barely hear yourself think, so it drowns it out nicely.) The cyber café is about 3 blocks from our house. The only thing, unfortunately, is that it’s far from the Kingdom Hall. But far in Santa Teresa terms is not far in American terms. It takes about 10 minutes walking to get there. Anyway, the house is great from the outside, but on the inside it was just horrible. The walls were a Pepto Bismol pink, and the kitchen was a horrid dark blue. The brothers helped us paint and we had to put about three coats of heavy oil-based paint because the lady before us decided to get the heaviest oil paint she could find in this disgusting color. So we finally got that done and Marlene made some nice curtains and screens for the mosquitos and it looks a bit more presentable.

Also, the neat thing is that the owner of the house is paying a very nice man who lives around the corner named Willy to take care of the house. This means basically watching it while we are not there and standing out in the street throughout the day in case we need anything. Some of you may think that this is a security risk and he will know when we aren’t home so he can break in or tell someone else to break in. My answer to this is simply that we really trust him. He is well known to the local witnesses here and the community in general. Plus, we also bought a new lock to the house.

Thankfully, the place was actually pretty clean because it hadn’t been lived in, really. Also, another blessing (and this is a HUGE one), is that we have AIR CONDITIONING in the bedroom! You have no idea how wonderful it is. It’s a unit that you usually hang in a window, but the lady that owns the house decided to just break a hole in the wall and so the back end is sticking out in the bathroom. Which actually is an added bonus because it gets so hot in there when the air conditioner is on that it feels like a sauna, so when you take a shower (which is always cold, of course), it actually feels refreshing and not “Oh Momma that’s Cold!”. Well, you do get the “Oh Momma it’s cold!” right when you step into the stream of cold water, and it actually makes you cry a little, but you get used to it and then it’s really refreshing.

So we finally have our things set up. Now for the reason for the title of this post. Blood and Ice. Blood, as in Marlene got her blood sprayed all over our bedroom, and ice because we finally got a fridge and we can have ice and cold drinks finally! Oh, wait. You don’t really care about the fridge? You want to know how Marlene lost a pint of blood? Okay, okay. I’m standing in the kitchen, painting it yellow. (Man, I hated that blue color! It was horrible!!!)

Oh wait, yeah. About Marlene. So I’m painting in the kitchen, and I hear her scream. I run into the dining room and she’s running in from the bedroom, and her hand is full of blood. I start freaking out, of course, thinking she’s going to die now and how in the world am I going to paint over the blood on the walls since now I’m out of white paint?

“What happened?!” I ask. She proceeds to explain to me that she picked up the fan in the room with the METAL BLADES and accidentally stuck her finger inside and the thing nearly chopped off her finger! (Thank goodness we got Tetanus shots in the US before we left!) I take a look and she’s got two really deep cuts and they are bleeding like crazy. I did NOT faint, I swear. But I did get a little queezy, you know, like when you want to throw up but you don’t? I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to explain. I suppose you can say it’s a mixture between light-headedness and nausea, but—Oh yeah, back to Marlene. So she’s a little bit panicked, too, and runs to get a towel to wrap around her finger. We put a little bit of an alcohol wipe on it, to clean it, and she starts cringing in pain. At this point, I swear I didn’t faint, either, but she did say something about me looking more in pain than she did. I ran across the street to the bakery to see if they had ice to put on it, but they didn’t. The owner’s wife, however, was very nice and took me across the street to a restaurant owner, made her open up the kitchen, and get me some ice. I took it back to Marlene, who by this time was sitting in the living room in one of the rocking chairs. I’m not sure if she thought she was going to die and was just peacefully awaiting the cold cold grasp of death while rocking in her chair, petting one of the dogs.

Anyway, her finger looks horrible and the next morning we went to the pharmacy to get some sterile gauze and some antibiotic ointment, and the owner seemed to be very knowledgeable and gave us an antiseptic rinse to clean the wound with. She did say, though, that Marlene should have gotten a couple of stitches.

Now, for the last part of this post. Today’s meeting (it was on Saturday this week because the elders have a meeting at Bethel tomorrow and so it was rescheduled) was pretty nice, and I was put to work! We had only 41 today because the other half decided to support the meeting at La Conquista, which is the group that we are taking care of, and of those 41, only three of us were brothers. So I read the Watchtower and did the sound. It was a nice lesson, which reminded us of the wonderful spiritual protection that we receive from Jehovah, but that we need to be able to preach fearlessly and efficiently. I think it’s even more important here to be well prepared for field service, because many people, I’ve noticed, can quote scriptures and even tell you where to find them in the Bible. But they still are being misled by Babylon the Great, have many questions and are very eager to learn.

On Tuesday, I have been invited to accompany a brother to visit a sister who lives out in the countryside (el campo), who cannot, for some reason, attend meetings. So the brothers visit her every once in a while to offer encouragement. I’m not sure exactly what her situation is, but I will post the experience afterwards. It is a pretty long way from here and we have to cross a river to get there, which should be quite interesting as there are no bridges or boats. Unfortunately, I won’t be taking the camera because I don’t want to get it wet. Akiko and another sister, Phoebe, just got back from preaching in an isolated territory and had to cross a river that was up to their shoulders by pulling themselves across it on a rope tied to two trees on either side (this river had been quite easy to cross on their way to the study, but it rained pretty heavily during the study and the river swelled to about 5 feet deep or so). I just hope I don’t have to deal with leaches, yuck! I do hope, however, that I get to see some howler monkeys, as they are pretty plentiful in the area.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

By the way, there were a bunch of pictures I was going to upload to this post, but it will have to wait til Wednesday since the internet is especially slow today because of the weather...