I’m currently situated in Corvallis, Oregon, visiting (fully vaccinated) family for a few weeks and relaxing. My parents fashioned a guest room in their large, confusing house. On the nightstand was an old spiral-bound notebook.
When they moved my parents discarded a fair amount of stuff, but not nearly as much as most would. The process tilled the earth, so to speak. I left more evidence of my arrested development than I thought I’d ever produced. The notebook is about 15 years old, and what parts my mom didn’t use as scratch paper over the years contain a few diary entries from a trip I took with Habitat For Humanity when I was 19.
I was fairly self-obsessed just out of high school, having dirtbagged my way to a degree with a 1.2 GPA. I was working at Wal-Mart, on academic probation at community college and suffering from gravel in my kidneys accrued over years of drinking coke instead of water. My bosses let me take time off for the trip and, in retrospect, must have marked me as someone to cut from the workforce ASAP (not that retail management cares about anyone). 2006 was a year of formative experiences.
It’s always surreal to find journals you don’t remember writing (everyone should journal - mostly I don’t, I wish I would), to see from the outside what you notice and fail to notice about the experience chronicled.
Here’s what I’ve got from that trip, which took place, far as I can tell, in May or June of 2006:
Wed. 19th - Somoto
First day of work. Toured city’s new institutions. Old folk’s (sic) home least depressing old folk’s (sic) home ever. Liz harassed by lecherous local, spent day hand-mixing concrete and wire-binding rebar. Badly sunburned, but cured in 3 hours by white vinegar. Nicaraguan Ind(igenous) day.Found scorpion in bed last nite. Very large insects. Skulked around shanties. Open-air disco, white people dancing.
Kylie Minogue
Sat. 22nd - Somoto.
Gap in journal = Lost pen.
4th day on job. 2 days on in-progress house, 2 days on new house foundation.
Weather surprisingly pleasant. Prodigious insects. Millipedes, whip scorpions (?), wasps. Street dogs. Good hotel (electrically heated water), monkeys and (ra)coons locked up in courtyard.
Unabashed imprisonment not quite enough to ruin monkey magic. Reaches out when approached. Is cute.
(cont’d)
I spend work-time with Slade and Chris, off-time with identical twins Liz and Alyssa. Alyssa is the smart one, all proper and cool. Liz is the spaz, all smiles and laugh. Both nice to be around, being the only kids my age here who aren’t stiff from church. Partial to Liz.
Slade and Chris aren’t with our group, but they know the pastor’s large family, so they come along. Nice guys, hardworking. Nomadic, calm.
(Cont’d)
Che murals. Sandonista (sic) “rallies”. Anti-CAFTA graffiti. Spain and the US fucked the place and dumped it on the curb. Over bananas. Quartzite soil, hurricanes, earthquakes. Marxist “scaring off” foreign investors. No future here. Break a leg and spend your life with one shorter than the other. Catch a bug and wait to die.
No doors, dirt roads. 300 lbs of donated OTC drugs (that we brought) won’t last long. Complete lacks of upper / middle classes. “Consider yourself wealthy if you have shoes” (ed. unclear who this is attributed to).
(cont’d)
Been living on rice and tortillas. Giving rest to kids. I don’t feel generous. 1 hour of Wal-Mart slouching in US pays more than 36 hours hard labor here.
I’m not very personable a person in the States, and when I’m here among the Spanish-speaking people of Central America, I’m rendered mute and dumb. Como se llama? Shake, shrug. I have to exert myself to make eye contact, never for more than a few seconds. This whole country is like high school to me.(Cont’d)
Our group meets as a whole twice a day. My alienation seems to be unique, as everybody else is going on an exciting and enlightening journey. “The people here are so hospitable”. The people we build houses for (“work on” houses for) will cook for us, kill their hens for our soup, and it’s been fulfilling to crudely communicate when I briefly do, but to 95% of the people here , we’re all just slumming tourists. I feel guilty because of it, like the next kid I meet will look at me and
(cont’d)
be able to tell that I spent enough money on nylon clothes before the trip to send him to school for years, or buy life-saving medical treatment in Managua. I’ve made more money resenting my employer than he will ever see. I can’t go anywhere alone, because I need somebody to hide myself through, and if I don’t, my chest gets tighter with every person I pass. I feel powerless. Building homes is noble, but there are still beggars and children and amputees that plead for money, and even more who need but do not ask. And I
(cont’d)
want them to have all they need and more, but I can’t do anything. Throwing cordobas around town serves nothing but inflation (ed. Where did I get this stuff??) No one is educated, school costs too much. Nicaragua and its people are stuck here for at least another 40 years.
It’s keeping me up at night. Normally it would be the means of self-improvement, but lately I’ve not been thinking of myself. I feel powerless.
Sunday July 23 - Caucauli / Somoto
Trying to be less negative about things. Going to Sunday service. No chairs, at least a hundred kids. They think we’re going to give them things. Next week attendance will drop like a rock. Church infested with several wasp’s nests. Stung by wasp, not feeling too hot. Pastor sermonizes in both Spanish and English. Takes twice as long. Sting Hurts.
Tuesday July 25th - Granada
Lots of beggars following us tourists. Felt bad for awhile after work ended, like gawking tourist. Most Americans won’t say no to a beggar, so some beggars feel entitled, and will get pretty pissed when you turn them away.
Listening to “Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2” and Autechre.
Took Canopy Wire Tour, was fun.
That’s all I have in terms of written documents from the time.
My memory is memory, so take with a grain of salt, but there are elements of context that I remember to this. The Pastor in my church, a powerlifting family man from Queens named Ed, had contacts in Lutheran communities down in Nicaragua and coordinated trips through them with Habitat for Humanity to build housing for people in poor rural areas.
I remember that Ed was rather stridently against US intervention in the region, and I’m told he hated Reagan and Bush passionately over the issue. Both he and his contacts who we met there were broadly admiring of the Sandinistas but I have to imagine, given some of the details in the journal, that they had anti-communist sympathies.
In any event, I was very depressed at the time and myopic, as I said. I lacked perspective. But the crisis I felt toward the end of the trip was deeply existential. I was horrified at the fact of poverty, and horrified that we worked maybe 8 hours of the day, took breaks, ate well, while the people we ostensibly served worked harder, for longer and with fewer amenities. My dad worked at a free clinic distributing the OTC drugs, and he’s stronger than I am, I think that work at that time would have broke me.
Technically, we didn’t even build whole houses. We dug a few foundations, put up a few walls. We provided supplies to finish the houses but the lion’s share of work even while we were there was always done by locals.
Still, I may have been dramatic about it all — hurricanes and seismic activity left much of the soil in the region rocky (hence the “quartzite soil” aside) and so it proved challenging to excavate for building or plow for fields — but I couldn’t help but hate how our last days were spent in the city, in relative leisure (I can still taste the spice profile of the best empanada I’ve ever had, there). I didn’t feel we deserved, or had earned, leisure.
Naturally I was listening to SAW2 and Autechre at the time, I chuckled a bit when I saw them listed. But what I remember — what dates the journals directly to 2006 — was that I’d actually brought two dirt cheap MP3 players with me, little dirty-grey rectangles holding 256 MB of data. One of them contained the SAW2 and Autechre tracks, the other held the (still, until quite recently) newest Tool album, 10,000 Days. I had decided I would try Tool out, see if they were for me. They were not, though it often happens that the bad vibes of a given time in my life will permanently stain what I listen to.
I remember, between work shifts and sifting bugs out of my frizzy hair, being approached by children of the town we were staying. There was a boy fascinated by my silly plastic gadget. So I gave it to him, with the headphones and charging cable. Maybe he got into Tool when I couldn’t, or maybe he sold it, maybe it broke later. I hoped at the very least that he got something out of it, because as someone without cash I didn’t know what else I could do, though the bit in there about only eating the rice and tortillas onsite is true. I remember vividly working alongside a local who seemed younger than I was by a good few years; later I was told that he was actually one of the recipients of the homes we were building, a guy actually a decade older than me with a wife, two kids. They said he looked young because malnutrition had stunted his growth.
At the time, I ended up forswearing all personal travel to the global south as a leisure tourist — including Habitat trips. I would break that oath a few years later in a wonderful family excursion to Kauai. Who was it that said a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds? My guess was George Bernard Shaw, turns out that was Ralph Waldo Emerson. But I digress.
There are people referenced in the journals that I am remembering in a bittersweet way — some of them changed, some of them are probably dead. I think often of Liz and Alyssa, who I didn’t know well but wished the best for. They were two years younger than me and at that age (and at the point I was at, with processing my abuse) my crush on Liz seemed inappropriate. They had hard lives, in some respect. I hope they’re happy now, wherever they are.
It might have been a turning point in my life — I could have went into IR (International Relations) and become either a hardcore Stalinist or an apparatchik in the undead DC think tank horde. But I didn’t know the right people, hadn’t read the right things, and my focus was, as always, on my own development emotional / mental health. I’ll just have to be content with that. I will say that a few years later, when I read Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands, I was able to recognize the essential and stark truths in it, as a result of that trip. I’d recommend that book to anyone.