This is an interesting culture of contradictions, I’ve learned a lot about this country in the past three weeks, but I’m not going to lie and say I understand the half of what goes on down here.

Our first week here, when it came around to garbage day, the whole city put out their garbage in the street, waiting for it to get picked up.
A day goes by, all the garbage remains, sitting out in the hot sun, getting pounded by the rain at night, and strewn around the city by the millions of stray starving dogs.
Two days, three days, a week goes by. The garbage has not been picked up… we note that people are starting to burn it in little piles on the street (in case you were wondering, the aroma is HEAVENLY!). We were naturally curious whether this was just garbage protacal? Put it in the street, and let the weather and the dogs take care of most of it and then burn the rest?? A total mystery.
So the next week, it’s garbage day again, and we think… ok… time to add to the garbage in the street again. This time it got picked up by garbage men.
I find out from my teacher, Maria-Lydia, that the city didn’t have the money, or wouldn’t pay the garbage men the money (the difference was lost in my translation…), so they didn’t get the garbage… but they paid them this week, so the garbage got taken.

They have huge respect for mother figures here… because the women are the one’s who do everything in this country as far as the family is concerned… grandmothers and mothers are highly respected. Yet one out of every four women is beaten by her husband. (And this is an improvement, before the Sandanista Revolution in the 80’s, it was one out of every two women. Half of the women in the country.) A weird and sad contradiction. Ultimate respect for the role of women, yet the majority are battered.
It’s a sobering thought to realize that, statistics wise, five of the twenty men who daily attempt to pick us up when we walk anywhere, go home and beat their wife.

There is garbage all over the city all of the time. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination clean. I would not walk barefoot here! (and let me just point out that I have walked the Vegas strip barefoot, and walked around the streets of Paris barefoot… I’m not easily wimped out by germs.) It’s pretty filthy, and there’s constant mystery water run off all of the time on the sides of the road, murky mystery water run off growing algae.
Yet, on a daily basis, there are women out scrubbing the sidewalk in front of their houses. Daily! Everybody litters here like nothing else… but they scrub their sidewalks with soapy water!
(side note about the mystery water, when it rains really hard… which is mostly every day right now… the water pretty much takes over the road… and since it was 100 degrees prior to the rain dumpage, you are wearing sandals… and there is no choice but to walk through all the water with who knows what floating in it, and God only knows what contaminating it. I’m pretty sure I’m getting exposed to a lot of disease! Haha)