Jungle Diary: American Gothic
Leaving Nicaragua, Finding Orthodoxy, Coming to the USA
November 2024. Treva and I leave Nicaragua under challenging circumstances—a kind of exodus. (Read that post here https://yolandenorrisclark.substack.com/p/jungle-diary-expurgation ).
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I am heartbroken to be away from Lee and the kids—especially little Margaret, who isn’t yet a year old—but it’s also a treat and a blessing to be able to spend some precious one-on-one time with our teenaged daughter. Furthermore, we’ve come to America’s heartland on a reconnaissance mission—two weeks to decide whether or not to make a drastic change.
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We land in this ostensibly prosaic Midwest city in the early morning. It’s a shock to be back in the “developed” world—lit up with fairy lights and Christmas cheer. I rent a car at the airport and I’m almost shocked that it just…works. All the parts of it. It has a magic little screen with a map and everything.
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Five years in Nicaragua is like dog years in reverse, or something like that. Central America is a trip back in time. Living there is a vortex, and for some—the ones who never leave, I guess—a black hole. I’ve been away for so long, I’m destabilized by efficiency.
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The late-fall air is wonderfully chilly. We’re giddy about the seasonal contrast, though Treva doesn’t own pants or a coat, so the first adventure we embark on is clothes shopping. We check out some thrift stores, but I’m scandalized by the exorbitant prices for stained trash, so we make our way to a terrible, cheap, suburban warehouse clothing store and sift through discount (but new) polyester.
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Compared with central America’s “ropa Americana”—junk piles of mildewed, sweat-stained discards (likely middle America thirft-store rejects) this is a treasure trove. I find a few diamonds in the rough: a cashmere scarf, a velvet blazer, a deep jade wool melton coat, a striped sailor shirt with jaunty gold buttons at the shoulder. I love clothes. I miss them.
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Treva and I emerge from our shopping spree in our respective new disguises—a basic American mom and her teenaged daughter (who, irony of ironies, wants nothing more than to unironically dress like a teenager from the nineties…I am horrified, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it). We blend in, noting that feeling normal and comfortable and dignified and inconspicuous really is the height of luxury.
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For the first few days, we can’t stop talking about the thrill of being able to walk through the world without being harassed, followed, and propositioned—all of which is utterly habitual on the streets of San Juan Del Sur. Everyone is on the take:
The deaf, dumb, desperate woman and her two raggedy children who wander through town. I always give her a few cordobas. There but for the grace of God, etc.
Winston, the cashew seller, who, after years of unnecessary cashew purchases, I finally cut off when he aggressively demands a $50 “advance” on my next cashew order. Winston still asks, plaintively, even though my heart has hardened towards him forever.
Elvin and Manuel, the two wretched potters--brothers—who bus in from San Juan de Oriente every morning before sunrise to trudge relentlessly through the streets of San Juan, backs bowed from the weight of their often mediocre, derivative, yet occasionally gorgeous hand-thrown pots, resistant as ever to any consideration of innovation or quality control in either their marketing efforts or their making. I have bought countless pieces from them over the years, increasingly out of pity. Each sale is preceded by a long story about another illness in the family, or their struggle to buy food—all of which, I’m sure, is true.
Jose, the Russian cheesemonger, who hounds me, hunting me down through the alleyways, foisting upon me his fermented dairy products, which, at this stage, I would appreciate so much more in the absence of his piteousness, although I am endlessly intrigued by his dedication to what is seemingly an entirely adopted (and optional) form of adversity.
The glue-sniffing, thieving, borderline psychopathic David, a young man, who has, without a doubt, been trading sex for drugs since he can remember, and who waits outside the gym, leering aggressively. (Several bleeding-heart foreigners have taken him in like a stray dog over the years, but after a bout of his relentless lying, stealing, and chaos, they learn their lesson and release him back onto the streets).
The old demented woman whose blackmail routine works every time: she plunks herself down at her target’s table and does her best to horrify them into submission, desecrating their food and drink by sticking her filthy fingers into it, then asking for money in exchange for leaving. It’s a highly effective strategy.
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Nicaragua is where gringoes go to feel good about themselves for paying a full-grown woman twenty-dollars for six hours of labour, which is almost twice the minimum wage, despite the fact that a bag of frijoles now costs…I don’t know what a bag of frijoles costs, but I know it’s too much for someone making $400 usd a month.
No wonder they hate us, a little.
How dare you! Our nanny is part of the family—she loves us!
No. No she’s not, and while she might love you, she is also, to a degree, bound.
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To be an expat in Nicaragua is to be either desensitized to the extreme poverty in one’s midst, or utterly committed to an intense level of delusion about how local people actually perceive you, or a combination of both. Every relationship is transactional.
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Sure, they don’t exclusively hate us. It’s far more nuanced than that. They envy us, they feel contempt for us. They appreciate us. They may love us. And they resent us. There is a they, and an us, and it’s class and conditioning and culture and money, and I hate it.
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On American soil, men cocooned in sleeping bags hold cardboard placards asking for money at highway intersections. Treva and I eat sushi at a fluorescent restaurant where the plates arrive on a conveyor belt that winds its way through the maze of booths. The waiter is a cheerful robot.
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We spend hundreds of dollars on organic groceries and there is real cream for my coffee in abundance—opulence after years of suffering the ever-coagulated UHT tetra packs of Dos Pinos crema dulce, which doesn’t even come close.
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Yes, we have to wear seatbelts, and shoes. No, there are no free dogs or chickens in the streets. But we’re also reasonably confident that the police aren’t going to be stopping us randomly to shake us down for cash.
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Everything is (relatively, comparatively) clean, functional, efficient, and well-designed. The guy who bags my groceries has clearly just smoked crack, but he gets the job done, and *fast*. To put it mildly, it’s not like that in Nicaragua.
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I find it almost disorienting to move through the world, day after day, and not to experience a continuous, relentless breakdown of everything: vehicles, electrical systems, bureaucratic institutions, roads, bodies, food, conversations, everything.
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We fall in love with wearing sweaters and customer service and cars that function and anonymity and the fact that the streets and gutters and tree branches aren’t littered with garbage. There is a special kind of security in knowing—with a fair degree of certainty—that no one is desperate enough here to steal your ancient underwear or stained sheets off a clothesline.
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Treva and I quickly realize that apart from deeply missing Lee and the kids, neither of us have any desire to ever go back to Central America.
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A favourite pastime among expats in Nicaragua—and maybe every similarly poor country?—is to publicly pontificate on the virtues of the Nicaraguan people—They’re so generous and kindhearted! The culture is so welcoming! Foreigner guilt demands a release valve. Almost-daily there is a new post in the favourite “expat” social media groups, telling a special story about a recent joyous exchange with a local person who “gave me the shirt of his back”, extolling the imaginary collective wonderfulness of the Nicaraguan people to prove the gringo’s benevolence, understanding, deep appreciation, and overall virtue, when in fact, Nicaraguans are just people—good ones, bad ones, middle-of-the-road ones—doing what people do when they’re captured by material and suppositional poverty.
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While we proclaim our righteousness and compassion in the public forums, within the protected walls of the haciendas and gated communities, however, none of the ladies who lunch and pickleball can resist eventually turning the conversation to their newest maid and the mystery of why the standards here are so stunningly low, and Why it is that the quality of domestic labour seems to be so abysmal? and Why—why indeed?—won’t they just show up on time and fold the towels and clean the toilets properly, especially when we pay so well? We fan ourselves and titter and tsk.
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Stop. I do love Nicaragua. It is wild and beautiful, and welcoming. I love it so much it hurts. I feel embraced and known by the community in San Juan del Sur—locals and foreigners alike. I also feel immense gratitude to the Nicaraguan people for, among other things, their relative tolerance of us—our family in particular, but also the collective “us” with our condescending particularities and nauseating propensity for saviourism…but more than anything I deeply appreciate Nicaragua’s embrace of our children.
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Literally everywhere we go in Nicaragua—with all eight of our kids—there is no twinge of the reluctant forced enduring of our presence that most people display to at least some degree, in the North. Instead, we are congratulated on the immense blessing that is our family, and we’re told again and again how lucky we are to have so many children. I have, not once, been informed by any Nicaraguan person in any context, that our children are too loud, or unwelcome, or a burden, and this love and appreciation for family is delightful.
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It’s also true that for our youngest four children, Nicaragua is all they know or remember—two of them *are* Nicaraguan, after all, and our youngest are bilingual. Nicaragua is fully their home and therefore *their* culture, in many ways, and so while I know I’ll never understand Central America, and I will likely be forever baffled and irritated by every aspect of life there—it’s also fascinating to see that the choice we made to move there when we did has meant that our children have a worldview and an experience that will always be “foreign” to me, their mother. I suspect this is something that all parents of immigrant children, no matter their background or their chosen country, have in common.
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Material comforts, deficits, and desires aside, our primary motivation for coming here, to this nondescript city in the middle of nowhereland, America, is the fact that, after years of inquiring into Orthodoxy, and yearning for, and then actively seeking, a church community and a religious school for our kids, I found an institution that seemed promising, and it’s here, and this Orthodox Church and school is why we came.
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On the first night—Saturday—we drive out to the east side of town—the inner city, really—to attend Vespers. The route takes us past several boarded up evangelical church buildings, one that looks burned out…and then we turn the corner on a rough residential street, and there it is—a small, unassuming little church, neatly kept, with cars lined up around the corner, and no parking spaces left in the rather large lot, adjacent.
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We enter the narthex to find the place bustling with people of every age and skin colour entering with us. There is an abundance of children, babies-in-arms, mothers and fathers, elders, and teens. The atmosphere is at once deeply reverent, formal, profoundly respectful, but also loose and open. We make the sign of the cross and kiss the icon of St. Mary, cross ourselves again to enter the nave…and… it’s a jewel-box. Each wall is adorned with gorgeously painted images of the saints, the apostles, Jesus and the Theotokos, rendered in lush colour. The choir’s strains are celestially beautiful.
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The two-hour long service is almost deliriously sublime, and I’m struck by the enigmatic amalgamation of decorum and ritual without pretension. There is no affectation or performance involved—the motions are personal and internal, yet the structure and ceremony are clearly important and meticulously laid out to be incorporated and embodied. There are no books or sheet-music. The liturgy is offered up to be absorbed.
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I am struck, too, by how integrated children are in all the goings-on. There is no “children’s room,” or “Sunday school”—children are welcome and encouraged to be present throughout the observance, which is almost entirely sung in the most beautiful lilting harmonies. It’s clear that the many many kids in attendance are accustomed to the ritual, and mostly just sit quietly, some of them looking at books, babies held in-arms, and of course mothers filtering in and out of the church—which they are evidently welcome to do—depending on their little one’s capacity. Inside the nave, fussy babies are passed around among the adults in a lovely, easeful display of community solidarity and love, and the nuns, whose convent is the little house next door to the church, flutter through, scooping up fugitive toddlers and offering gentle corrections to any chatterers.
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There are countless reasons we have become Orthodox catechumens, but perhaps the most significant and compelling “motive,” is simply that Divine Liturgy, like no other religious service I have experienced (after a lifetime of knowing Anglicanism and Catholicism intimately, and of exploring various forms of eastern mysticism fairly extensively) offers an utterly personal, private, contemplative audience with God, while at the same time creating a sense of connection and fellowship with everyone else present, without any of the embarrassing (and heretical) incontinence of protestantism. This is real, and true, and Treva knows it too.
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Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy.
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She turns to me, her eyes shining. “We have to move here. We have to bring dad and the kids here.”
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Over the course of the next week, Treva and I spend several days at the school, which is an enormous, draughty, scruffy 150 year old house with enormous windows and abundant natural light, located in a residential neighbourhood adjacent to the parish.
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I am stunned by what we find inside. It is remarkable. The atmosphere that has been cultivated among the students—younger and older kids alike—is one that I had assumed did not —could not—exist at this particular time in history: a combination of rigor, discipline, studiousness, order, along with peace, ease, and also energy and curiosity.
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The children are consistently respectful, engaged, quiet, well-regulated. It is the literal opposite of the chaos and listlessness of the public school environment.
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It’s also strictly analog—there are no tablets or apps or technology whatsoever involved. The pedagogy is rooted in a literature-based classical approach to education, grounded in an Orthodox understanding of scripture.
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This kind of scene isn’t entirely new to Treva, after all—in the years before we left Canada (the pre-Rona years), our older kids attended a beautiful, tiny, independent Catholic school in Fredericton, and Treva and Horus, especially, have very fond memories.
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After each day that we visit the school, Treva re-emphasizes her yearning to attend formally in no uncertain terms. The kids have to come here, she asserts.
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I was prepared to find this city tolerable, if slightly uninspiring and lacklustre, but I love it. It’s wonderful—full of ancient houses—dutch colonial revivals, craftsman bungalows, shirtwaists with extravagant stone foundations and pillars, brick walk-ups and glorious mansions. We visit all the bookstores, famished for literature in-hand after years of lack. The food is a thunderbolt to my senses. Whatever anyone might tell you, please know that Nicaragua is not a foodie destination.
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It’s “woke,” here, yes, of course—like any city. But somehow having the grounding and solidarity of a spiritual community opens my heart and lessens my irritation with the ubiquitous DEI signage and obsessive personal signalling, and most of the blue-haired trans-identifying young men wearing crop-tops to show off their autogynephilia who serve us coffee and sell us art supplies are very friendly and polite, and I nurture the tension between the motherly softness and sympathy I feel towards these people, and the fact that I am very aware of how well camouflaged I am (“You know mum, you really look like an obedient liberal,” says Treva). Oh yes, I am well aware. Chameleonic little me.
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I have truly learned, in recent years, that I am not a world adventurer. I don't want excitement, or intensity, except through the voyage into the inner world. I want a totally ordinary, pedestrian life. I want geraniums, and walks to the park, and visits to the library and used bookstores. I want to crochet in quiet cafes. I want to garden and play the piano with my children. I want the familiarity and predictability of my own dysfunctional culture.
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How extremist are you going? A dear friend asks, only half-joking. Full full? Is there a uniform? Will you be going door to door? Wearing a fancy chapeau? Will you be given a new name?