This is my job?

Rick makes his first entry about a trip to a campo village a few weeks back:

As our cab pulls up to the open air market we are getting propositioned to go to seemingly every city in the country. Multiple men crowd around us while we are still inside the cab scrambling to find money to pay the driver. They forcefully ask us "a Matagalpa?" "Jinotepe?!" "Masaya?" hoping that we'd get on one of the unprivileged/unsanctioned buses not able to enter the station. We push our way through them to reach the relative calm of the bus terminal where we learn that we had just missed a bus heading to our destination, Esteli.

We decide to wait around at the attached restaurant for an hour and a half for our next bus. It's one of roughly 6 or 7 shops and outdoor cafe's in a line. All lightly decorated with donated corporate paraphernalia all attended to by old women wearing frilled aprons to keep their money in. There we encounter the kindest lady who brings us beer and watches our bus carefully so that we can board at the last possible minute to get on. There, sitting in this group of Nicaraguan cafes while being stared at for our blatant gringoness, while being solicited by the multiple rhythmic street vendors, and even apparently propositioned by a young woman, a thought that has occured many times before popped into my head. That thought was: "Wow! What am I doing here?" This thought is typically followed with: "This is my job?" Ultimately, this process produces a smile as I can relax feeling comfortable with my tiny, mostly unknown place in this world.

Eventually my euphoria is interrupted by the lady watching our bus and we hurry over to catch our assigned seats. We board the bus to find that "assigned" is a very loose term and a defiant woman ignores the young bus attendant who asks her to move. The bus surprisingly comes equipped with TV's which are used to play black market copies of old music videos including the BeeGees, MC Hammer, and even NSYNC as drive through increasingly lush rolling hills on our way out of Managua. Along the way, I'm jolted out of my stupor to the smack of the bodies teenage boys hitting the side of the moving bus. Realizing that no one else is alarmed by this, I wait before shouting out and realize that these boys are going to ride on top of the bus. We stop a few minutes later so that large tires needing transport can be tossed to these boys on top.

We slept in Estelí that night and then took an old yellow school bus the next morning at 6am up a the storm-ravaged dirt road where we dropped of in the 2 road town of Regadio. After the bus dropped us off it backed up 1 mile before it reached the one cross-street in the village to turn around. Our organization has been bringing delegation to homes of people in Regadio for years to educate foreigners about the life of common Nicaraguans. There we spent the day talking with our contacts about foreign debt, neoliberalism, education, inflation, and their kids in the states. The knowledege that our isolated contacts had of complex trade issues was surprising and I felt rapidly educated about the hardships that many people are feeling in this country. Our main contact explained how the combination of Hurricane Felix and recent flooding throughout western Nicaragua had destroyed the harvest of many crops. This, added with 10%+ inflation and gas prices above $4 a gallon have made traditional foods such as beans financially impossible for many Nicas. Bean prices tripled over the past few months requiring the government to import them in an effort to control skyrocketing costs.

Hardships aside, we were generously welcomed wherever we went and provided coffee, oatmeal (in drink form), and fresh squeezed juice. We were even given lemons that were as big as our heads. After meeting some of our long-term contacts we decided to catch a bus back to take care of some work back in Managua. However, before leaving I had some time to stop and look out on the rolling hills of the countryside rehashing the past few days. I took a picture trying to absorb it all and said to myself "this is my job!"