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?
When I tell you that the most important thing to understand about Chinandega is that it is hot, you need to really understand the kind of heat I’m talking about. This understanding is vital to your comprehension of the last twelve hours of our lives.
This is not the kind of heat that you casually observe after a few minutes outside - “It’s kind of hot,” you might say to describe the kind of heat that does not settle over Chinandega like a thick wool blanket.
Managua, Nicaragua
What a long, crazy day!
We all woke up relatively early - I’d say everybody was showered and dressed by eight-thirty - and had a good solid breakfast. Ana spent all yesterday evening working to arrange a particularly delicate interview and was going to call us if the plans came through. Either way, she was going to pick us up at noon to take us to her office at Almori where we could interview Alvaro Montealegre (who is, essentially, The Boss) and another employee to get two perspectives on the business.
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