The streets of Managua

I have arrived in Managua and have had the luxury of time to get used to a new country and a new city. The hostel where I am staying has notices that it is safe to walk in the neighbourhood – and then gives the border streets for the area they mean and further refines thisby adding a warning excepting a parking lot where children who are addicted to glue sniffing have robbed people at all times of the day. That, together with the warning for women to never travel alone, has limited my sense of freedom a bit. What is hard to tell is how limited women who live here are, or if the apparent increased vulnerability of women is mostly for naive foreigners like myself.

There is also not very much to see from the sidewalks, as most business and houses are behind locked gates, and the long roads I have ventured on seem to lead to nothing special. The cathedral, a modern building, is behind a wall and a huge weedy expanse, and I did not find the gate in. I have heard that these unbuilt areas are often areas levelled by the 1970s earthquakes, and the cathedral area certainly looks that way. But, more, like any big city, Managua is a place for the car and for the person who knows their way around.

I have walked around a bit and risked to take my camera out twice. The second time, the grimy boy I spotted yestrerday materialized and demanded a dollar. Since this is the introduction apparently used by the child robbers, this small boy and his even smaller girl companion, scared me much more than they should. Fear means that I walked away as quickly as possible, fumbling to get my camera into a conealing bag. And that he didn´t get the dollar he clearly needs from somewhere, along with shelter and a place to wash.

I didn´t photograph the next ironic scene: a long boulevard strung with billboards, one an election poster about power to the people, and the next advertisements for double points for using a specificed credit card  to buy luxury items.

It is ironic that the first time I took out the camera was to photograph a monument to literacy brigadistas: 105 thousand of them who apparently taught over 400 thousand Nicaraguans to read and write in eight months of 1980. That is quite an amazing accomplishment. Yet it helps me to notice that there are children on the street today, a Friday and not during holidays.  Not only the grimy boy is on the street begging, but other children are helping adults sell towels with cartoon figures, cooked food, and other items on the street. These children are not in school, and so are presumably not getting the education they need to move into other kinds of work. In fact, the local paper carried an article yestrerday that it is estimated that nearly a fifth of children under five in Nicaragua are not registered and have no birth certificate, so one supposes the state does not know they will be needing to go to school shortly. If they get registered later is unclear. In the heat, bright colours of painted capstones on walls, honking taxis and shouting bus company people, in the smiling eyes of the local women, that there are children missing basic education to help feed their families, that others are sniffing glue and robbing adults, and that the polished, gleaming new mall, stuffed with banks, TV shops promising credit card acceptance, a supermarket with everything you might want (except those wonderful Colombian tortillas with cheese inside), and shoe shops with prices not shown, is probably out of reach to almost everyone living in Nicaragua.