What was supposed to be an extremely busy day today, with interviews packed together like sardines, turned out - in true Nica fashion - to be much slower paced.
We woke early for an eight o’ clock meeting, at his campaign headquarters, with former Vice President turned Presidential candidate Jose Rizo. The empty parking lot at the building was our first sign that there had been a misunderstanding. “Senior Rizo is not here,” explained an extremely friendly man once we’d been ushered inside. “He is campaigning in San Juan del Sur for the day!” At least an hour or two drive south, San Juan del Sur is a town known for its beautiful beaches, which I have read have some decent waves for surfing. Clearly there had been a mix-up somewhere along the line of communication, and we weren’t getting an interview today. We rescheduled, tentatively, and went on our way.
Flying over Managua during landing, I looked down on its roofs and busy streets and realized it had been exactly a month since I’d last seen this view. A lot can (and did) happen in a month, and yet it also feels like I never left. It’s a feeling I could easily get used to.
Nicaragua is hot, first because we’re not used to the heat anymore (thanks, Boston, you frosty, frigid iceburg of a city) and second because it actually is hotter this time. Nicaragua is allegedly in the middle of its rainy season, but we’ve not seen even a drop so far.
We’re home. Except, as after any unusual travel experiences, home now feels strange. It doesn’t help that for the last four days, Boston was about fifty degrees colder than Managua and wouldn’t stop raining. There are few things more depressing than several consecutive days of New England rain; everything just becomes impossibly gray.
But it’s sunny and something like seventy-eight degrees out today and we’re all busy, busy bees starting what I guess is called post-production work. On Wednesday, Arthur and I went to lunch with our friend, Jess Miller, who is going to be helping us edit. Jess, Arthur says, is the best editor at Emerson. She edited his previous documentary, Barang, which is an incredible piece. I’m really looking forward to working with her as well, beginning to shape a story out of all our footage. Plus Jess is just a lot of fun to be around.
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.
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