update #10
July 10, 2008
In this issue:
- Directors update
- School update
- Adelante needs
Hello all! Last week marked my 3 months of living in Nicaragua. This happy occasion was soured a little by the fact that my visa expired. In order to renew my visa, the kind immigration officers at the local foreign immigration office in Managua told me to head to the border of Honduras, leave Nicaragua, walk across the border, enter Honduras, and then return that same day so they would stamp my visa and give me another 90 days. Well after making that long trip to the border, I was disappointed to find out that not only did they require me to stay in Honduras for 3 days before returning to Nicaragua, they didn't even have the stamp I needed at that office. Instead, they kindly informed me that I needed to cross the entire country from North to South and do the same thing except on the Costa Rican border. "Breath", I told myself as all I wanted to do was look up and yell in frustration.
I tried everything I knew that had worked for me in the past so I could cut a corner or two. Generally speaking I don't like, nor do I advocate trying something that could be "mutually beneficial" for both the officers and me. However, I was reluctant to just give up and make the 5 hour bus trip back to Leon. Unfortunately neither my reluctance nor my repeated efforts to "help" them to help me made any difference. Instead I packed up my things, hopped back on the bus and headed back to Leon. I wasn't able to head to Costa Rica til the next Thursday because of my class schedule. This meant I was 3 days over my 90 day visa. So on Thursday night at 9pm, I took a rickety old yellow school bus from Leon destined for Peñas Blancas, the border town to Costa Rica. At about 11pm, the conductor woke us all up at a gas station in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua to let us know he needed to put air in the tires and we could all use the bathroom. "Good idea" I thought, "there probably won't be anywhere to use a bathroom for a long time" I said to myself. So with the 15 other passengers I entered the Stop-N-Go to use the bathroom and buy snacks for the long bus ride. I took my time, as most there were quite a few people in the women's bathroom line, and I was sure we wouldn't leave without them. Slowly I mossied out of the surprisingly clean Stop-N-Go only to discover that the bus in fact was not there anymore. I was immediately flushed with panic before my self-preserving calming kicked in. "Don't worry, everything will work out" I said to myself, trying to be calm. After the first 30 minutes went by I started to pace back and forth getting more and more nervous. Had they left with our bags? Why didn't anyone else look nervous? Was I the only one even remotely concerned that we were stuck in god-knows-where, at almost midnight?
How could they force down ice-cream, hot dogs and nachos. I knew that I was really worried when the 1 hour mark passed and I couldn't even think about eating anything. I know that when I don't want to eat – there is a serious problem. At 12:30 in the morning the bus driver came screeching around the corner in the bus and pulled up to the curb where we had all been camped out freezing. We hopped on quickly and we took off. To my surprise no one asked a single question. Where had he been? What had he been doing? Was he inflating the tires manually by blowing air into the massive tires? I guess one will never know. All I know is that I got no sleep that night as we pulled into Peñas Blancas at 3:30am. Good thing we were insanely early to the border too because the border gates opened up at 6am. I slumped back into the school bus seats trying to get comfortable, to no avail.
At 6am I crossed through the gates to go pay my fine for overstaying my visa and start the second leg of my never ending odyssey. After waiting for the office where I had to pay my fine opened at 7am, they told me I needed a copy of my passport and expired visa. "Just great" I thought. Where was I going to get a photocopy at this hour in the middle of this jungelous place they call a border crossing? They informed me I just had to walk about half a mile up the road to a store to do that, if they weren't open I'd have to walk 3 miles back outside of the boarder to get the copies. Yup, you guessed it, they weren't open yet, so I had to walk to the 3 miles back outside of the boarder to get the photocopies and then return. After I returned he gave me the necessary paperwork so that I could go join the other massive amounts of people trying to officially leave Nicaragua so they could officially enter Costa Rica.
I navigated the lines and paperwork and people walking into Costa Rica where I encountered a very nice immigration officer who politely asked me "What the hell is wrong with you, why didn't you go to the border of Honduras?", after I calmly explained to the officer that his fellow officers at that border had informed me that there was, "no way in hell I could do it at that border", he frowned and said, "well you can go into Costa Rica but you can't come back today. You must stay at least one day in Costa Rica." I quickly stopped him mid sentence and simply said, "no" shaking my head. "I'm sorry there is no way I'm staying in Costa Rica and I was told I could enter and leave on the same day", I said. Then he tried to tell me that I had to at least wait till the afternoon, to which I also said no. Then he said, I should at least stay for a couple of hours. I agreed. I walked the couple miles to the Costa Rican side of the border where it took me about 2 hours to get through the entering Costa Rica line, and then the leaving Costa Rica line and then walk back to the same officer who then just shook his head and told me to go wait for another couple of hours.
At this point I was so fed up and frustrated with the entire system I didn't have the energy to explain to him what I'd already been through nor did I really want to talk to him. So I told him, "fine, I'll be right here till you decide I can come in". I took about 10 steps back, stood there with my arms crossed looking at the officer, and decided I would wait the 2 hours out there. Who was he to tell me I couldn't come back into Nicaragua. Not one person knew exactly what the legal process was as they all gave me different versions. About 5 minutes into the staring competition he decided to try and enter into an arguing competition, one which at this point in my sleepless journey he was not going to win. Within 2 minutes we were laughing, shaking hands and vowing that we would never see each other again. At 4pm on the 4th of July I returned back to Leon from my 19 hour saga to renew my visa. Why couldn't the foreign immigration office in Managua do this for me? Good question. Why do they even have a foreign immigration office if they can't even renew a visa? Yet, another good question.
For the 4th of July I met up with a group of Peace Corps volunteers living and working around the Leon area. It was very nice to relax and recount my story… in English. It felt like it had been months since I had spoken English, and it was nice to commiserate with some other fellow Americans who were also living and working in Nicaragua.
In the grand scheme of things though, if you compare what I went through to what foreigners have to go through in the United States, I feel very lucky to have only been asked to do this.
School update: Classes continue to go well. We have just finished week number 4 of the 6 week course. A couple weeks ago I put a sign outside of my house advertising the English school, and have been visited almost daily by people interested in taking the class. At present I have 8 people on the waiting list to take classes when the next course begins on August 4th.
Adelante needs: As continues to be the case, we desperately need Spanish-English dictionaries for students to use during the course. At present I have 7 that are lent out between the 12 students. In August there will hopefully be another 12 students in the morning time. As you can imagine 7 dictionaries between 24 students is less than ideal, as such, any donations of dictionaries new or used would be greatly appreciated.
Mateo Garibaldi
Del Texaco Guido 2 cuadras al sur, ½ abajo
Leon, Nicaragua
Central America.
Next Update July 24th
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