Tag: memoir
-
War Moments: The Orange
I will never forget the man with the orange. Michelle and I were packed in the back of a truck, alongside twenty other hitchhikers. It was six in the morning and already hot as hell. Nicaragua during the dry season–the dust, the winds, the sun that decided to get closer to the region that day,…
-
Exploding Cows
Hitchhiking was common in Nicaragua during the Sandinista-Contra war. So was waiting. If the enemy forces–the U.S. backed Contra–were nearby, the Sandinista military would close off all the roads, to keep civilians from getting caught in a battle. Then there were the cows. And the landmines. Michelle and I sat on the edge of a…
-
Learning, and losing (at the most inconvenient times), your Spanish
In Nicaragua, Michelle and I lived way up north, near Honduras. Managua, the country’s capital, is in the south, and a long way away, especially for hitchhikers. That’s how everyone got around: standing on the shoulder, sticking out a finger (not your thumb–in Nicaragua, you point to where you want to go), waiting for a…
-
An Interview With Pico Iyer
This is an interview with memoirist and travel author Pico Iyer, about his book Sun After Dark. It is about traveling and empathy–what does it mean to dwell in someone else’s culture for a while, especially we who come from the States, who are more privileged than most of the world? What does our home become, in…
-
Weed Out the Gringos
Before we moved into the Nicaraguan war zone, the group we were with, Witness for Peace, trained us for our jobs, which was, put simply, to get in the way of Reagan’s illegal Contra army. Wherever there were gringos, the Contra didn’t attack. That would make for bad press: If Ronald’s boys ended up killing…