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At the start of my five months in Central America, the plan had been to backpack around Costa Rica for a month while leaving resumes in my wake in hopes of drudging up an acceptable teaching job. However, after a couple of weeks in Costa Rica, I couldn’t imagine myself spending four months working there. It must have been a little too clean or developed, and it wasn’t going to fulfill my prior fantasies of “roughing it” in Central America. I headed north to Nicaragua and was content, eventually settling down to teach for a few months in the small city of Leon, Nicaragua.
Nicaragua is a poor country. It is also a beautiful country full of culture and easy going people, and I love it. However, this is not an account of its beauty but of my experience with its poverty. According to the U.S. Department of State, it is the second poorest country in the Americas after Haiti. With this in mind, it is not surprising that there are many full-time beggars. Some of them are crippled and tattered and incapable of self-sufficiency, and others linger idly just below the level of personal productivity that might enable one to find a job where jobs are scarce and don’t pay much.
We travelers make easy targets for these beggars, being generally recognizable as foreigners with our skin, hair, or eyes that venture away from the few shades of brown that generally characterize a Nicaraguan. We have unconventional style, and with our accents even the blindest beggars can recognize us from across a dark street to greet us with a dirty, up-turned palm.
These full-time beggars are an expected social status and are easily tolerated by both native and traveler; however, there is a peculiar social status that sometimes accompanies them on the sidewalks of Nicaragua: the part-time beggar.
The part-time beggar was first pointed out to me by a traveling companion in Leon, Nicaragua, where I taught English at UNAN, a big public university. This rare social status is used by Nicaraguans without much forethought, like a hastily thrown on costume that leaves some undergarments exposed. The status is often utilized by a plainly dressed young lady or a book bag toting child in his school uniform, even a full-grown man who is a little tipsy and wants one more beer but ran out of funds. They are poor but not homeless and far from being dependent on the charity of others for survival.
You round a corner and they spot you, señor tourista, and with one finger extended boldly between your faces, they blurt out their surprise solicitation: “Dame un peso.”
Upon his first encounter with a part-time beggar, a tourist is most likely to think, “Why, isn’t this bum using his earnings well. Just look how clean!”
Later there may be a realization that this person has a job, or at least parents with jobs, but wants to go to the movies tonight or craves a cold orange Fanta to fight the stifling heat.
When you say no, they giggle instead of frown, and you are certain. They are clearly distinguishable from the full-time beggars, who might sit all day on a bed of cardboard displaying a pleading palm framed in black and yellow fingernails. From four feet away, I have smelled toothless old men on the sidewalks of Leon that were clothed in nothing but hanging rags that only partially hid their gnarled ancient genitals. I heard terrible stories about a community that lives next to the dump outside of town. I was astounded by the worst examples of Nicaraguan poverty but became comfortable with its more common forms that are comparable to the worst I have seen back home in Louisiana.
While I became familiar with the curious, almost cute social status of the part-time beggar during my three months in Leon, I was utterly surprised by its violent, desperate older brother: the part-time armed robber.
While bare-foot but manageable third-world poverty begs and picks pockets on the side walks of Leon, Nicaragua (population 110,000), it had to take up arms to survive in the capitol city of Managua (population 1,800,000). To encounter the part-time armed robber, one must journey an hour and a half south of Leon—as I did—on the 40 Cordoba ($2.00 US) bus ride to the capitol city.
An hour before my introduction to the part-time armed robber, I was in Leon saying my goodbyes to my lovely Nicaraguan girlfriend. I took her set of keys to my apartment and went over the checklist of pre-departure chores in my mind. I had to go to Managua to buy a TicaBus ticket to San Jose, Costa Rica, where I would meet my cousin, my uncle and his girlfriend. I had been looking forward to seeing them and spending the Thanksgiving week in an all-inclusive resort in a squeaky-clean bubble of shiny, aristocratic tourism on my generous uncle’s tab.
My $80 a month apartment lease in Leon was coincidentally coming to an end, so I decided to save $20 and start a new lease upon my return a week later. I packed all of my clothing and personal belongings into my large travel pack and all of my valuables into my small day-pack, which I used to wear on the front of my body.
I boarded my bus in Leon’s dusty, sheet metal constructed station and plugged myself into my Mp3 player for the stunning, volcano-spangled drive to the capitol along Lake Managua. The cities here can be beautiful, but the rural spaces between the cities are always amazing. The sun set on my journey, which was pleasant until I realized I would arrive in Managua after dark.
On the bus ride to Managua there was another foreigner on the bus: a cute hippy girl from New Jersey, who was visiting Nicaragua for a month to study homeopathic medicine with a “medicine woman” in a village in the mountainous region to the northeast of Leon. I have always been suspicious of some alternative medicines, and hers seemed particularly rickety. While she was studying, much of the village came down with a nasty sickness of some sort. The vast majority, with their economic limitations, had to stay in the village and wait it out with the alternative medicine she promoted, while the girl was rushed to a private hospital in Managua. I liked her as a person, but for this offense, I punished her by imagining her giving a dainty cough while lounging in a fantastic sled being pulled over mud/pebble roads by a team of bare-foot, malnourished Nicaraguans.
The station at which I arrived, like all bus stations in Managua, displays the facet of Nicaraguan reality that is responsible for the existence of the part-time beggar and the part-time armed robber: constant proximity to poverty regardless of one’s own social status. Even if the majority of Nicaraguans don’t experience it, they still see real poverty every day.
While it is hard for visiting foreigners to imagine themselves as truly impoverished without realistic options of recovery, it is not so difficult for the gainfully employed, lower-class Nicaraguans to put themselves into these bare-foot shoes: if they are not careful, it will happen to them. If they want to distance themselves from this terrifying potential, they need money, and it is this reality that is responsible for my harrowing introduction to the part-time armed robber.
I stepped out of my bus onto the littered and broken pavement/earth. The air was warm and thick, and the night’s new darkness sagged down like an utter between the spaced street lamps and their naked bulbs. As always, there was a wild pack of taxi drivers aggressively soliciting the passengers with open-ended questions (they are harder to ignore) like ill-tempered baby birds fighting for a worm. They are not nice about it and pretend to be personally offended when ignored, which can’t be true.
I ignored the barking cab drivers until I said goodbye to the friend I made on the bus ride, then, I selected a driver based on some randomly selected arbitrary characteristic like “coolest shirt” or “not as fat”. I should have chosen “least likely to be violent towards me”. I had no idea how much it should have cost to get to this other bus station, so I initiated my practiced technique: pretending to be thoroughly disgusted with the driver’s offer until he seems genuinely beaten and ready to look for a different passenger. If his face betrays a wrinkle of pretense in this defeat, I challenge another driver to the same game with the credibility that is only granted to a barterer by a recent walk-away.
A short, chubby, middle-aged driver agreed on the price of 35 Cordobas ($1.75 US). He drove a real taxi with a real meter and real plates that I hardly glanced at. He was a taxi driver, among other things.
With my big pack in the trunk and my small pack at my side in the back seat, we left for the TicaBus station. I immediately zoned out, imagining myself in some unrecallable hypothetical situation, I’m sure. I paid no mind when a second passenger bartered a price then occupied the front seat of the taxi, which is customary in Nicaragua if he is going in the same direction. He would soon put me in a screwdriver-laced headlock and rob me of all my belongings.
All of the mundane details of these pre-catastrophe moments were remembered under the pretense of being discarded within the next 30 minutes, like the details of all the insignificant cab rides in my life so far. I hardly took it in. As a memory, the scene before the incident can only be played back as a slideshow of a few images and feelings that were retroactively given great importance. Moments later, after a false shortcut through a deserted back road, my memory becomes a high-budget production with slow motion replay options.
The passenger in the front seat turned around and stared at me, and after a moment, I was roused from my daydreaming but not alarmed. He was tall and skinny. He was about 25 years old, had short, gelled hair and was dressed plainly and cleanly in blue jeans and a new-looking, black t-shirt. Many friendly Nicaraguans like to stare at foreigners, especially scraggly bearded ones, like me. I’m used to it and was not distressed.
“¿Qué pasa?” I said, but he just stared. I smiled, probably.
He climbed awkwardly from the front seat into the one beside me in the back.
“¿Qué haces, amigo?” I said.
He didn’t answer but seemed to be hugging me, all of a sudden. I became confused, maybe alarmed.
I felt the hug tighten around my neck and turn into something else.
“¿Qué haces? ¡Dejame!” I screamed.
I felt cold metal on my neck and panicked. I struggled for just a moment, which he must have expected because he didn’t stab me.
“¡Para! ¡Ayudame!” I screamed at the driver, who turned to give me a sluggish, glancing punch in the face that left no mark—a set-up! He was not very good at violence, because this wasn’t his real job.
“Tranquilo, tranquilo, tranquilo,” the back seat villain whispered soothingly while he scratched up my far shoulder with the tip of the flathead screwdriver; this dual action was a semi-permeable membrane, letting the fight pass from me cleanly but sealing the fear inside. He was a better criminal than the driver and may one day, I suspect, choose it as a full-time profession.
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Copyright © 2009 David McCoy
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