Cuando Estoy in Nicaragua...Bluefields Edition

Hola a todos! Looking back on my blog posts, I realize that I should have done this type of blog posting three times by now (I think I said once a month which was rather ambitious of me).  My bad. The good news is that I’I've waited long enough that now I can do a Bluefields themed "Cuando Estoy En Nicaragua". So without further ado, this is a little taste of my life so far in Bluefields.

Well Water: There is no official water infrastructure in the city of Bluefields. Apparently, there have been attempts to construct one the past with the help of foreign aid, but since the water ended up being contaminated with salt water, people stopped paying for the service. Now nearly everyone gets their water from a well, which can only be used for washing and cleaning thanks to fertilizer runoff and tiny microbes.  Drinking water has to be purchased and tends to be pretty expensive. It’s no wonder no one here drinks water…

An Anthropologist’s Paradise: There are six different ethnic groups living in Bluefields, each with a distinct cultural identity and language. The largest ethnic group is, of course, the Mestizo.  These is the part of the population that we generally think of to be “quintessentially Nicaraguan.” The next largest group is the Creole. They are descendants of the Caribbean Slave trade and speak Creole English. What is English Creole? The closest thing I have to compare it to are the English dialects spoken in the Caribbean.  The words are derived from English but many have evolved to have different meanings. The grammatical structure also varies from traditional English. The next ethnic group is the Garifuna, and since that group has more recently come from African , so you tend to see that influence in a lot of aspects of the culture, especially the dancing. The last two groups are the indigenous groups: The Miskito, Suma, and Rama. These three populations were descended from the original inhabitants of Nicaragua.

Wait…country music?: Thanks to my neighbors, I have now listened to more country music in the past month than I have in the past year. Why is that? It is because Creole people love country music.  Every time I hang out in a Creole bar, country music is played. If you don’t believe me, come visit and see for yourself.

Coconuts…are in everything: Coconut trees are everywhere on the coast. Therefore, they put Coconut in everything. My food is fried in coconut oil (which, by the way is actually way healthier than using vegetable oil), the most common type of bread made here is coconut bread, and my gallo pinto is made with (wait for it…) coconut milk. I used to think that the only way to eat coconut was shredded. But I was wrong. So, so wrong.