"Beuna"

"Nicaragua is a country of blatant contradictions." I remember thinking that a lot while we were there. In retrospect and with perspective of being home in Canada, I'm not sure Nicaragua is more contradictory than anywhere else. It's all relative, after all. And in the rose-coloured hindsight of adverse experience, it's not the awful parts that stay clear. The awful parts ferment into rich comedy and respectful awe and no longer seem as traumatic as before. And the good parts? They get exaggerated and relished. We can live for years in a good memory, we can even edit the memory to make it more habitable. And we do! Whether we like it or not we do.

One of the simple pleasures of Nicaraguan life is the expectation of a greeting when passing someone on a lonely street, when entering a shared cab (almost all cab rides end up shared), when entering a shop, when catching someone's eye. Nicaraguan's like to shorten things and drop consonants. So "Buenos dias" becomes "Buena Dia", which becomes "Buena" or Beunas". (It took me almost 5 weeks there to figure that out--my Spanish is not very good and Nica's aren't exactly the most forgiving teachers.) I miss Nicaragua when I walk by someone here on an almost empty street. It's not that a greeting is out of place here, it's that no greeting at all is considered perfectly normal. We run around our lives, each of us living out almost the same lives, but very self-concious about admitting it to each other or ourselves. Best not to acknowledge our own people--if to do so might threaten our fragile individuality. It's a truism that we often hate those qualities in others that we most hate in ourselves. Could this paradox come from my desperate assertion that I am so different from you? Could it be that I am not as unique as I imagine? And could it be a useful (and humbling) admission that I am the same as you, and that maybe we should be friends--simply because we live on the same street or in the same apartment building?

Maybe it's because of the fight that Nicaraguan's have endured, but they're in it together. There's a beauty in having so little when it means that most of one's wealth lies in caring for the other. One way Nicas cultivate this wealth is with a simple and beautiful: Buena.