* Trigger warning for sexual assault content. It's coincidental to the story, but it's in there.
The week before I was to leave Nicaragua, I had the best Saturday. I spent the day at a natural spring with some friends, swinging from tire ropes into beautiful clear water filled with tiny silver fish. We ate a watermelon, which we cut up with my huge kitchen knife. In Nicaragua, the only sizes of kitchen knife are huge and machete. Small children can be seen cutting up mangoes with a blade that we only trust professional butchers to handle. That morning when I had packed for our swimming adventure, I had tucked the knife into my backpack, flat against my back in the CamelBack pocket where it could cut neither me nor the watermelon until we were ready.
We swam, we ate watermelon with juice dripping down our chins and into the spring. It was a good day. And then there was a fiesta. Dancing, friends, screamed Spanish over loud reggaeton. It was like Merida had decided to have one giant party for my departure. My pack was left slung carelessly on the floor of my house.
And then, some idiot broke into my house that night while I was sleeping and tried to attack me. I lost my shit, fought back; he ran into the night, and I ran to the neighbors. After that, I had a really hard time going back into my house for a couple days, and I only went back to pack. I didn't eat another meal there. I gave away my kitchen supplies, my table and chairs, a pair of flip flops. I had a terrific last week, crammed in beds back to back with female friends, eating meals in the homes of people I'd come to love. I was homeless, but I also had a village of people who were furious at what had happened and wanted me to know that they were appalled someone had tried to hurt their gringita.
I went to Managua, pooped in a cup twice in 48 hours (it's a PC thing to make sure you're parasite free and a ritual about which there is much fretting - what if I can't GO?), and prepared to leave. The night before my flight, I went through my luggage, checked for metal in my carry on, made sure my pocket knife was safely tucked inside the shoes in my suitcase, etc.
It is somewhat important to check in on my mental state for this next part - I'm tired from traveling and packing, my mom is dying (which is why I was headed home), I was giving up early on a dream I'd had since I was 7, I didn't have a job to come home to yet, and my mom had spent all my savings. To say the least, I was... fraught?
I check in at the airport, proceed through security, and my bag sets off the metal detector. I tell them it has a metal frame, they search it, find nothing as expected, and I go sit down to snooze in a chair and await the plane that will carry me home. Then I am paged to return to security. I am apprehensive at best. It's Nicaragua and I'm on my own.
At security, two men are waiting for me with AK-47s, and they tell me to follow them. I do, clutching my backpack, as they lead me outside and UNDER THE AIRPORT. Guys, you might think that going under the airport would be cool, but it is not. You know you're not supposed to be down there with a bunch of machismo dudes holding submachine guns who don't speak any English. And then, ridiculously, I am asked if I have a canister of compressed air in my bag. Oh right, my canister of compressed air! Of course! It was my metal thermos, tucked in the center of my carefully full-to-overflowing pack, which I then had to dismantle and reassemble in front of them so that they would know that it was meant to contain coffee not bombs. (New bumper sticker idea right there.)
I follow my armed escort back upstairs as other tourists look away as though they might be implicated by association with whatever dumb thing I'd done that got me an armed escort in the first place. No everyone, I am not giving away free thermoses. Despite being trusted enough to be under the airport, I am told that I have to go through security again. I do, my bag goes off, I tell them it has a metal frame, and someone else searches it. As he does, he reaches into the CamelBack pocket, and pulls out this HUGE FREAKING KNIFE, and my response, like the savvy traveler I am, is to burst into tears and begin blabbering incoherently in Spanish about a man and a watermelon and my dying mother. The guard is so incredibly horrified that he tucks the knife under the table, and tells me to go get on the plane. I am humiliated, terrified, and quite sure that I will never tell this story because who can possibly be this dumb? In retrospect, I am this dumb quite often.
Also in retrospect, I am so relieved that they found that in Nicaragua. If I'd stepped into a US airport with what was basically a small machete in my bag, I would have gotten into the kind of trouble that tears cannot come close to correcting. So in summary, I'm an idiot, but sometimes life works out okay.
The week before I was to leave Nicaragua, I had the best Saturday. I spent the day at a natural spring with some friends, swinging from tire ropes into beautiful clear water filled with tiny silver fish. We ate a watermelon, which we cut up with my huge kitchen knife. In Nicaragua, the only sizes of kitchen knife are huge and machete. Small children can be seen cutting up mangoes with a blade that we only trust professional butchers to handle. That morning when I had packed for our swimming adventure, I had tucked the knife into my backpack, flat against my back in the CamelBack pocket where it could cut neither me nor the watermelon until we were ready.
We swam, we ate watermelon with juice dripping down our chins and into the spring. It was a good day. And then there was a fiesta. Dancing, friends, screamed Spanish over loud reggaeton. It was like Merida had decided to have one giant party for my departure. My pack was left slung carelessly on the floor of my house.
And then, some idiot broke into my house that night while I was sleeping and tried to attack me. I lost my shit, fought back; he ran into the night, and I ran to the neighbors. After that, I had a really hard time going back into my house for a couple days, and I only went back to pack. I didn't eat another meal there. I gave away my kitchen supplies, my table and chairs, a pair of flip flops. I had a terrific last week, crammed in beds back to back with female friends, eating meals in the homes of people I'd come to love. I was homeless, but I also had a village of people who were furious at what had happened and wanted me to know that they were appalled someone had tried to hurt their gringita.
I went to Managua, pooped in a cup twice in 48 hours (it's a PC thing to make sure you're parasite free and a ritual about which there is much fretting - what if I can't GO?), and prepared to leave. The night before my flight, I went through my luggage, checked for metal in my carry on, made sure my pocket knife was safely tucked inside the shoes in my suitcase, etc.
It is somewhat important to check in on my mental state for this next part - I'm tired from traveling and packing, my mom is dying (which is why I was headed home), I was giving up early on a dream I'd had since I was 7, I didn't have a job to come home to yet, and my mom had spent all my savings. To say the least, I was... fraught?
I check in at the airport, proceed through security, and my bag sets off the metal detector. I tell them it has a metal frame, they search it, find nothing as expected, and I go sit down to snooze in a chair and await the plane that will carry me home. Then I am paged to return to security. I am apprehensive at best. It's Nicaragua and I'm on my own.
At security, two men are waiting for me with AK-47s, and they tell me to follow them. I do, clutching my backpack, as they lead me outside and UNDER THE AIRPORT. Guys, you might think that going under the airport would be cool, but it is not. You know you're not supposed to be down there with a bunch of machismo dudes holding submachine guns who don't speak any English. And then, ridiculously, I am asked if I have a canister of compressed air in my bag. Oh right, my canister of compressed air! Of course! It was my metal thermos, tucked in the center of my carefully full-to-overflowing pack, which I then had to dismantle and reassemble in front of them so that they would know that it was meant to contain coffee not bombs. (New bumper sticker idea right there.)
I follow my armed escort back upstairs as other tourists look away as though they might be implicated by association with whatever dumb thing I'd done that got me an armed escort in the first place. No everyone, I am not giving away free thermoses. Despite being trusted enough to be under the airport, I am told that I have to go through security again. I do, my bag goes off, I tell them it has a metal frame, and someone else searches it. As he does, he reaches into the CamelBack pocket, and pulls out this HUGE FREAKING KNIFE, and my response, like the savvy traveler I am, is to burst into tears and begin blabbering incoherently in Spanish about a man and a watermelon and my dying mother. The guard is so incredibly horrified that he tucks the knife under the table, and tells me to go get on the plane. I am humiliated, terrified, and quite sure that I will never tell this story because who can possibly be this dumb? In retrospect, I am this dumb quite often.
Also in retrospect, I am so relieved that they found that in Nicaragua. If I'd stepped into a US airport with what was basically a small machete in my bag, I would have gotten into the kind of trouble that tears cannot come close to correcting. So in summary, I'm an idiot, but sometimes life works out okay.
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