She ate what?

Chicharrón. I ate chicharrón. For those of you who have never been to Nicaragua, chicharrón is fried pork rinds. With a little hair still attached for flavor. I´ll start from the beginning...

Remember my friend Fatima from the convent who invited me to her house? Well, I didn´t see her on Friday so I wasn´t sure if I was still invited or not. But after thinking it over, because I always think things over, I decided it would be better for me to go and stand on the side of the road where she told me to stand and have her not show up than for her to wait for me and me not show up. Does that make sense? This morning I left my house at around 8 to catch a bus from Granada to Nandaime. I then asked the driver to let me off at Empalme el Guanacaste which, incidentally, is the entrance to the volcano I climbed with Lesbia last month. So it turns out Fatima lives on the road leading up to the volcano. I remember passing all those houses and wondering what they were like inside... I waited at the gate for about half an hour, during which time all the taxi drivers who were waiting to take passengers up to the volcano entrance kept asking me things like "So, who exactly are you going to visit? You don´t know her last name? Or her phone number? Or her father´s name? Or where she lives? Hmm..." Eventually Fatima did in fact meet me and took me to her house where I met her mother, some neighbors, Fatima´s 3 sisters, 2 of her 4 brothers, her grandfather, her uncle and a few other people I couldn´t quite place.

I´m not a farming expert, but I could tell that subsistence farming in Nicaragua is far different from any kind of farming I´ve ever seen in the States. Necessity replaces aesthetics for sure. Fatima and her family all sleep in one building. I say building, not house, because house would paint a picture in your mind that´s not at all accurate. The kitchen is a separate building and they cook over 2 fires, one indoor and one outdoor. It´s on this fire that her mom fried up the pork rinds, some bits of pork and plantains. Actually, it all tasted really good. Fatima also chopped up a head of cabbage with a machete and threw in some tomatoes, some salt and some lime juice to go on top of the chicharrón. I "helped" chop cabbage but it´s harder than it looks to slice with a machete. They also grow rice and beans on the farm not to sell but for them to eat, and have a few goats and a herd of cows. It was a nice morning overall. Fatima, her sisters and I were the only ones who ate but it was a lot of fun sitting on the porch of their kitchen, drinking Pepsi and talking about things like what music we like (they asked me to translate the Black Eyed Peas into Spanish) and how hard it is to learn other languages.

After lunch, the girls took me to the bus stop and said goodbye. I ended up going to Masaya instead of Granada so I could visit the market one more time before I leave next week. The bus stopped in a completely different part than I´d seen before but I made it just fine. This day has been one endless example of the way things seem to work here: nothing goes the way you plan and everything´s confused, but in the end you get where you need to be. Unless you don´t, and then you´re in a new place. Last night at dinner my friend Trista said she doesn´t like South America because she feels like it might implode at any minute. I think that´s why I love it. It may and in fact often does implode in multiple senses, but at least that keeps things interesting.