After an intense week of being Very Professional Filmmakers, we were able to take a little time off today. By we, I really mean I, since Trevor and Arthur shot something like eight cards of B-roll today. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This morning, Trevor, Arthur, Ana, Ana’s friend Norma, and I all drove to a national park outside of Masaya, a town southeast of Managua, that featured one of Nicaragua’s many volcanos. We took a winding but paved road up to a vantage point with a small parking lot, and I looked into the core of my very first volcano.
And whoa. It’s a good thing I’m not afraid of heights, because even though I kept one hand on the cement divider at the edge of the vantage point the whole time, looking down, down, down into a pit that just doesn’t end - and knowing that it ends in a bubbling pit of molten rock miles beneath the Earth’s surface - is enough to make anyone at least a little dizzy. And it is one thing to watch PBS documentaries about volcanos from the safety of your living room or nearest tenth grade science classroom, but it is another thing entirely to be confronted by fields of black stone where grass and small shrubs are just beginning to grow. Nothing like meeting a volcano to drive home the real powerlessness of humanity against the forces of nature (and nothing like global warming to remind you how fragile nature can be as well).
Today was relatively slow, especially compared to yesterday. I’ll admit that having a bit of a breather was something of a welcome respite. We were originally scheduled to meet with Eduardo Montealegre just after lunch today, but the interview was pushed back to four-thirty. Also on the schedule was a meeting with Ricardo Teran, an accomplished young entrepreneur, which we decided to reschedule for our next trip.
We also have consistent Internet access for the first time since our arrival, so we’ve all been checking our e-mail and reading up on what’s been happening in the rest of the world since we’ve been gone. Apparently this blog is quite a hit amongst our family and friends, and now would be a good time to thank those people, who are too numerous to name, for their encouragement and assistance. Writing an essay or a poem is mostly a solitary task, but one of the biggest things I’m learning in the course of this project is that film-making is a collaborative endeavor. We’d be lost without the professors who’ve taught us, the family members who’ve supported us, and the friends who’ve been there for us on every step of this journey.
Just when I think this trip can’t possibly be any more incredible, I go and have a day like today.
We spent the afternoon with Ana, flushed and giddy with the success of our Presidential interview. Our next appointment wasn’t until the late afternoon, so we had a leisurely, relaxed lunch and took our time developing the next set of questions. Around four o’ clock, we packed up and left. Ana weaved her way expertly through the early rush-hour traffic, and we made it to the offices of La Prensa, Nicaragua’s oldest and most respected newspaper.
There we met with Christiana Chamorro, former editor and now editorialist and member of La Prensa’s Board of Directors. The Chamorros are something like the Pulitzers of Nicaragua; their family has owned La Prensa for several generations. The assassination of Christiana’s father, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, who was an outspoken critic against the Samoza dictatorship as well as the editor of La Prensa, helped mobilize popular support for the Sandinistas. From 1990 to 1996, Christiana’s mother, Violeta Barrios Chamorro, was the President of Nicaragua.
So this morning we interviewed the President of Nicaragua.
I might as well be out with it, you know? No sense beating around the bush and all.
We were told to be at the Presidential Palace at nine-thirty this morning, and that we would have a half an hour on the nose, including set-up and break-down. We planned our questions. We wore our most professional clothes. We arrived at the Palace at nine-twenty and made it easily through security. A woman led us down a covered sidewalk, past a reception desk, down a hallway, and into an elevator. We went up a few floors - two or three. We got out of the elevator. We walked down another hallway and into a waiting area with big couches and beautiful paintings by local artists on the walls.
Do you ever feel like you’ve lived a lifetime in a day? Like physically and emotionally you’ve run the entire spectrum of human experience? Today was a day like that for me. I can’t account for Trevor and Arthur. We haven’t talked much today; maybe it’s exhaustion, or maybe it’s just that there are times when language is too limited to adequately describe a place, an event. In my Holocaust Literature class this semester, we talked about trauma as a break in a story, a gap in a narrative line that you can spend a lifetime trying to recover from, to make sense of. What do you say (or write) when there simply are no words - but you cannot bear to be silent?
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