One week in

We've been in Nicaragua a week now, and I'm still not sure what to make of it. We enjoyed Granada, but the heat guided our move up to Esteli, where we arrived yesterday. It's still quite warm here, but the breeze is cooler, and it cools off much more at night, so we sleep a bit better.

I learned yesterday that Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the western Hemisphere, coming only behind Haiti in that category. We've been faced with some of the poverty- lots of beggars and heart-rending stories. That, and the fact that civil war is a pretty recent memory make this a complex and difficult place to know. I was walking down the street yesterday, and walked past a pretty teenage girl sitting on a chair on the sidewalk. As I glanced down, I got confused for a moment when the foot that I saw on the ground looked like it belonged to a store mannequin. It took my brain a few moments to register that it was a prosthesis, most likely for a limb blown off by a land mine. Those kinds of stories aren't uncommon around here, where the fighting was most intense. In fact, there are local wilderness areas that are popular hiking destinations, but the guidebooks all point out that you need to make sure to stay on the established paths, no bushwacking, as there are still landmines left out there.

So it's a complex place, and sometimes I'm not sure what we're doing here. It's hot, and uncomfortable, and not as pretty as home. In addition to that, I'm being faced with uncomfortable truths I'd rather not think about, regarding wealth, poverty, and the responsibility of us who claim to be followers of Christ to do what he said regarding the poor.

This hasn't been an easy trip. It's certainly nothing like traveling around europe, or visiting a vacation spot in Mexico. That said, we start language school today, and we're going to travel around town looking for a spot to rent for the month. We'd like to settle in a bit and see what we can learn. Learning spanish is an important part of this trip, but there may be even more important things to learn while we're here.