Parlez-vous Español?

This is my last post. This afternoon, Levi and I begin the five day journey back home. I won't even bore you with the details of our itinerary, except that:

MAMAN: Je reviens lundi a 15:30, United Airlines.

We're back in Granada because we're like Rick Steves and think it's heaven on earth. We've been staying at the overflow house for a hostel with two older Italian men. One goes to bed at 8 p.m. after mixing himself a few rum and cokes. The one with a gimpy arm got himself a hooker last night. It was awkward saying good night to her as she left through the living room. We were absorbed in cable TV, watching Scrubs and said our usual, chipper, BUENAS!!! because we're masters of saying hello and goodnight in Spanish now. She was a chick my age, dressed in jeans like I might wear, and not all that interested in speaking with us. We like that guy, though, as he is very patient with our Spanish and refuses to kill spiders.

As any one close to me knows, I am the spawn of unapologetic, heart-hemorrhaging liberals. I remember chanting "No more guns, no more war, U.S. out of El Salvador" from atop my daddy's shoulders as a little girl. I remember hearing about Auntie Mary's forays into Nicaragua in the 1980s and wondering why on earth she was interviewing gorillas. I first met a Republican as a freshman in college. He was one of those schmucks who takes a single economics class and decides that digging on free market economics is synonymous with loving George Bush.

For the most part, I agree with my parents. But I draw the line when it comes to Daniel Ortega and his fellow Sandanistas. That's Daniel, signed in cursive across a hot pink billboard with a bubble over the "i". The guy formerly known as El Comandante.

TEN REASONS WHY DANIEL IS LOUSY SCUM:

1. While campaigning, he never proposed a plan. His billboards tell the people that there will be zero unemployment, zero illiteracy and zero corruption. The first two claims -- not possible. The third? That brings me to the next point.

2. In the late 1990s, Ortega signed a deal with President Arnoldo Aleman. The deal is still unknown to the public, and Ortega refuses to release it. But we do know this much: The pact grants deputy status to former presidents. Deputy status means two things: about $100,000 a year for doing nothing and judicial immunity. Why would either man want this?

Well, Aleman was about to get roasted for keeping all Hurricane Mitch relief dollars to him and his buddies. And Ortega was about to get a human rights lawsuit slammed on him for massacring villages during the second guerrilla war. (He has since apologized for killing those people. Anything for votes, I suppose.)

But there was something else gnawing at Ortega. His stepdaughter, Zoila America, had come to him earlier asking for an apology for nearly a decade of raping. When he turned his apology into a recounting of every sex act, she told him that she would press charges that he started molesting her when she was 11 and started raping her when she was 15. Her mother, Rosaria, remains Ortega's wife and has called her daughter a slut.

Aleman's immunity was nixed and he was sent to jail. He has since manipulated the system so that his "prison" is the entire department of Managua.

But apparently that's not good enough. Now Aleman wants that immunity back, and it looks like he's going to get it. For that to happen, the Sandanistas in the Assembly must give him their vote. Normally, Sandanistas don't ally themselves with Aleman's party but it seems as though they just might this time around.

3. Ortega swears that he has changed since the Aleman pact. But he seems to be up to his old tricks. For example: Daniel has reported a net worth of $600,000. But what about that mansion that takes up an entire city block in the capital city? What about that Range Rover and that fleet of Mercedes Benz?

4. To be fair, he has changed a little. He used to support a woman's right to choose and now he doesn't. He used to be an atheist and now he attends church every Sunday.

5. And about hating the Americans? Please, they're all part of the same club. Last year, Ortega was invited to U.S. Ambassador Paul Trivelli's Christmas party as the guest of honor. When Ortega showed up in jeans, everyone was aghast. C'mon, though! Hardly a revolutionary act. More like a petulant teenager who wants a bigger allowance.

6. Daniel refuses to speak to reporters. Instead, he blares John and Yoko's "Give Peace a Chance" and talks about love and peace. He paid a Madison Ave. agency to dilute his image as an incompetant, corrupt mass murderer.

But about love and peace -- People here say what people in the United States told me when they voted for George Bush -- our families are screwed. If our family lives were better, we´d do better in life. Hence why they like family values.

7. His rallies were totally canned. At one, he invited amateur sports players. When one athlete told Daniel that he would love to go pro, but he doesn't have money for a gym membership, Daniel proclaimed that if he wins, all poor people will have access to gyms. Are you kidding me? That reminds of me of high school, when Isheh Beck promised everybody free McDonalds if she became ASB president (the difference, actually, is that Isheh lost).

8. In case you missed this point: He raped his stepdaughter for years.

9. I don't want to dwell on the 1980s, as he swears that he's changed. But it should be noted that the Sandanistas confiscated lands from the rich landowners and some of the middle class ones too. Ortega lives in a mansion that he confiscated from his -- get this -- current vice president. The VP assures everyone that he has been fully compensated. Weird.

10. You really need number 10? Okay, fine. The Sandanistas were linked to the death of a reporter who criticized Daniel's corruption. The Sandanista judge who tried the case said there wasn't enough evidence.

I will be balanced and post my father's reply to some of my concerns around the time of the elections:

I have to admit I prefer Ortega to Montealegre.
Politics is usually about choices between lesser evils.
In my adult life I've lived under lots of presidents/heads of government
(Liam Cosgrave, Jack Lynch, Valery Giscard D'Estaing, Charlie Haughey,
Garret Fitzgerald, Ronald Reagan, Bush senior, Bill Clinton, Bush junior),
and I've only liked one: Bill Clinton. The problems of Nicaragua are
problems of poverty and development, and it seems that Ortega may
combine social policies with development, whereas the other guy would
mainly serve the business community. Let's hope that the US doesn't
try to interfere too much this time - unlikely since Bush has his hands
full elsewhere.

A Christian Science Monitor article from 2005 worth reading if this interests you.

This blog is supposed to be titled Why You Should Also Hate Daniel Ortega. Maybe it will be, but for now, I´m going to post a well-written and introspective opinion article by three students from my alma mater. Why post this article?
1. It´s about how teaching (gasp) is hard. Even for Ivy Leaguers (double gasp).
2. To prove that not everyone who emerges from that snooty bastion is spoiled for life. Dick Clever, the man who told me that my shit don´t stink, saved me from complete ruin. The jury is still out, though.
3. Because I´d like to throw a shoutout to my old college newspaper. Don´t believe the campus socialists who never even read the rag. It was pretty damn good, even when I was there.

Also, two of my former Spec colleagues are writing a questionable blog called IvyGate. I just discovered this today after Googling myself. (I have an hour of free internet at the hostel, and Levi is watching a movie that I don´t want to see and my book just got soaked in the rain. And I´m lazy.) I thought that we all wanted to escape that legacy, but Nick and Chris have done a nice job of mocking themselves.

Yesterday, Levi and I visited "la basura," Leon´s dump, where people live and eke out a living.

Somehow, though, the cabbie got the impression that we wanted to visit El Fortin, a small fortress located a ways past the dump. (For the history junkies: This fortress is where Anastasio Somoza tortured and killed his political prisoners. It was overthrown by the first guerilla war in 1979.)

As we started on the winding road to the fortress, we had to stop, as the trash had spilled all over the road.

No problem, I said to the cabbie. Can we walk? My intention was to speak with the folks who work the garbage, but he thought I wanted to trek through hills of trash to El Fortin, ankle-deep in syringes, bloody gauze and rotten bananas. All of which, by the way, is smoldering, on fire or being attacked by swarms of flies.

So we did it. Alphonso, the cabbie, was wearing his Sunday best, as it was one of the year´s biggest Catholic holidays. He kept stopping to polish off his shoes, whining like a school boy. On our walk back from the fortress, he looked out over the vista of trash and cried, "Donde esta mi carro?"

In the trash there are makeshift homes and small herds of cows grazing. There are horses that appear totally lost on some random trash cliff. There are thousands of flies everywhere, except where there are small fires. Small children, women and men hunt sift through with bare hands, dodging the needles, looking for gems that might pay for their next meal. A woman named Mariella Martinez had found a new pair of girl´s panties. Her grandsons were loading up plastic bottles. There are expired fruits and Daniel Ortega fliers, bottles of expired antibiotics and empty paint cans.

Levi, the environmentalist, was stricken. He explained to me that burning disease cultures and other medicinal and hazardous waste is bad. Burning it is bad for the air, and the rains only increase the damage. Of course, Levi made it sound a lot smarter than I am now, so you´ll have to ask him to elaborate.

We´re home in a week, folks.

Check out Levi´s entry. It´s happier and explains the rest of our day.

I´m not quite sure I understand the meaning of coincidence, but then again, Alanis Morrisette didn´t have the foggiest idea about irony, and she made jillions of dollars off it.

But about coincidence as I know it --

On this trip, we´ve been getting half stories. We meet someone and then meet someone else down the road who provides the back gossip that makes this person complete in our minds. Every time, I´m surprised, though I shouldn´t be. After all, Nicaragua is the size of Ireland.

I´ll provide three examples.

1. In Granada, Levi and I became friends with Edward, a wiry old Dutch man who runs Ed´s Nica Buffet, arguably the best brekky joint in town. Ed talks about how much he hates the gringos who come to meet young women and girls, how they exploit these poor women by hanging their meager social security checks over their heads. Meantime, Ed swears to us that he pays his staff better than most. Levi and I, bleeding hearted liberals that we are, vow to return.

Then we meet Seattle Steve, who lives with gay Bobby, the 50-something alchoholic in Granada. Steve informs us that one night, the young waiter at Ed´s Nica Buffet, came over the other night because Ed and the waiter had gotten into fight. Turns out that they are lovers. Steve asked how much the waiter earns, and found out that Ed pays his boyfriend a whopping $2.50 a day. Friends, say what you will about the standard of living being different down here, but I can assure you that $2.50 ain´t squat.

So if Steve is to be believed, Ed too, knows the ways of exploitation.

2. Levi and I read Silence on the Mountain, about the silence during the war years in Guatemala. After six weeks in Guatemala, we wonder if that silence has lifted, or if the army bullying has ended. Few people want to talk about what happened. They´ll talk in circles, about the guerillas mostly, but never about the army´s involvement.

Then we meet Taxa in Nicaragua, who tells us that no, none of it has ended and that she herself witnessed her village be ransacked by the army years back.

3. Last week, we met Little Lupe on the beach, who was selling seashells. She´s about 9 years old and super smart. When we ask her if she has a boyfriend, she tells us that no, she needs to study. Word has it that Little Lupe has a 16 year old sister with a small child.

Then yesterday, we met the woman for whom Little Lupe made her first seashell creations. Two years ago, this woman, an entrepreneurial free spirit from San Francisco, told Little Lupe to keep making her creations and try selling them on the beach.

4. (I realize that I promised just three, but I can´t help myself.) Yesterday, Levi and I ate fish a la plancha at this restaurant at Las Penitas, a beach near Leon. We were surrounded by French people, including a mother who kept smacking her whiny child and a man who refused to speak to the Nicaraguan husband of another French woman. It was all pretty awful, and I told Levi that I was saddened by the behavior of French people on this trip. He agreed that they all seem think they´re superior to everyone else. (Three have been quick to inform me that they are not gringos. They don´t want to be misidentified as Americans, who have wreaked havoc on the Americas, they said. To one I said, "J'ai un mot pour vous: l'Algerie.")

But my point isn´t to lambast the home country. Rather, it´s to say what happened just as we got back to our beach front hotel. There, we met two more French people, aged 67 and 79. They were wonderful. We chatted for hours, and they invited us over to their home for olives and rum and cokes. They told us the stories of these two amorous dogs we´d seen walking around on the beach together, and the story of their son, who owns the hotel at which we were staying.

As we left for Leon, Levi turned to me and said, "I take back everything I said today."

I don´t know if I´ve mentioned this already, but Levi and I are staying at Big Foot Hostel in Leon, Nicaragua. It´s a backpacker hub in this gritty, bustling town, with a bar, dorm rooms and a lush garden where turtles roam. Levi and I sleep in a private room at the back of the hostel, where the walls don´t reach the ceiling and where we hear the gallos and gallinas of Leon cheer each other on during the after-glow of passion.

Gallos are roosters, gallinas are chickens. When a gallo fertilizes an egg, he starts to crow. The gallina starts to screech, and all their neighborhood pals join in the celebratory cry. This has been the norm for all the places we´ve visited in Central America. But in Leon, the rooster nearby sounds like he´s gotten a tracheotomy.

We first speculated that our cock had lost his voice box in a bad cock fight. But Darryn, the hyper Aussie hostel owner, told us the truth of this cretinous animal.

Turns out he belongs to the archbishop´s wife, a nasty woman whose home is paid for by the Archiocese of Leon. That´s right, the archbishop´s WIFE. He is married. And to a woman who loves a rooster who sounds like he spends his afternoons at the Alger Bar & Grill.

But doesn´t it make total sense? This awful rooster is protected by Catholic corruption, which comes in the form of a witchy woman who tortures the neighborhood with her cock. (Did you know that President Daniel Ortega´s wife is a witch? Well, she is. A self-proclaimed bruja.)

Speaking of corruption, don´t donate your money to Nicaragua or anywhere unless you know where it´s really going. The amount of corruption that we hear about is astounding. More on that later, though.

That awful woman who brought us French Women Don´t Get Fat is at it again with another book, which I won´t name because I don´t want to promote it. But I will promote Mireille´s quiz, dubbed, "How French are you?" It turns out that (sigh of relief) I am "une vraie française." But that´s because I lied on about half the questions.

This brings me to identity. My Franco-Irish-American identity. I´m the only American Raftery with this issue. When Finn was three years old, the verbose little guy proclaimed to my mother that he was half French, half Irish and 100 percent American. My parents have moved away from this indulgent exercise and onto people of other origins. (Rob is from the U.S. but his grandma lived in Mexico and Hana is from the Czech Republic, but she spent a long while in Germany.)

Me, I have a little more trouble. I moved to the States when I was four, and I remember missing Ireland terribly. I spent my summers in France listening to my aunts´and uncles´vehemently anti-American rhetoric. I remember my parents vowing they would never give up their European identities, remember my father walking around our St. Patrick´s Day parties, counting the number of nationalities present. Dad´s rule was that a person had to have been born in the country or be a passport holder. The highest number he reached was 14, Finn being the only American.

My parents have since become American citizens, as have many of their international buddies. My father waved that star-spangled banner after 9-11 and he took me to the voting polls when he cast his first votes. "When are you going to get your citizenship," he would ask, and I kept coming up with excuses. The lamest one was that it shouldn´t matter, as reporters shouldn´t express their opinions. He provided an all-too American response. "It´s your constitutional right!" Then he laughed. "Isolde," he said, "When have you not expressed your opinion?"

In Central America, I´ve had an identity shift. At first I said that I was from Ireland, hoping that lurking pick-pockets might have heard of the potato famine and take pity. I found out on my second day that it don´t matter where whitey´s from, so long as she´s got money. Plus, I felt as though I was lying.

Then I said that I lived in the United States. "Where?" They would ask. For a while, I said Seattle, but that too felt like a lie, since I haven´t lived in Seattle for seven years. I switched to Washington state, which brought about further confusion. "The capital!" They would exclaim. Nope, I would say, though I lived there once. "How near to New York?" And I would say far, though I lived there once too. At this point, they would have grown bored of the "hot-hot-cold-where-are-you-from" game.

But yesterday, to my teacher, I finally said it. "I´m just American. Kind of from all over the country, like most Americans. Kind of from all over the world, like most Americans." She got it.

Today, a Peruvian guy at our hostel was confused because he heard me speak French and English. "Where are you from?" he asked. "Soy estadounidense," I said, "Pero mi mamá es de francia. Entonces, yo hablo frances."

"Oh, you´re American," he said in English. "That makes sense."

I thought so too.