True Tales of Terror from the Peace Corps

The Eye/Ojos en la Oscuridad
Let me start this all with a bit of a disclaimer. This was in no way written to discourage people from enlisting in the Peace Corps. I spent two and a half years in Nicaragua and those experiences, while trying at times, are some of the best memories of my life. These stories are being written to help people realize what it was like to live in another culture/environment and the inherent horrors and joys that that entails. These are just a few of the stories that could be told. I had been in La Quinta, my site, for about a year. I was used to living in that small community of five hundred people. Everyone knew my name or at least one of my many nicknames. For the sake of brevity I will only list three of my nicknames: Gringo Lobo, el Picaflor, and Travis Cumba. I will leave it up to your imagination as to why I was named “The Wolf Gringo” or “The Hummingbird.” As for Travis Cumba, it was their attempt to pronounce my surname, which they had difficulties with. Fun fact: a cumba is a type of machete with a hooked tip used for cutting wood. For a few weeks, some people literally assumed my name was basically Travis Machete. I would never have another nickname that badass ever again in my life.

My average day consisted of waking up early and visiting the houses in my community. I would visit ten to fifteen houses to pitch my projects, see if there was anything I could do to help, or just to talk. In the afternoon when the guys would return from their crops that they had planted up in the mountains, we would do a variety of work ranging from vaccinating chickens, building ovens, or castrating pigs. I enjoyed my schedule and the work I did.

The sun set at about 7 or 8 o’clock and everyone would go to bed. I do not mean that everyone would return to their house, I mean that everyone would be in bed and asleep by about 8 pm. I could never really get into that sleeping schedule so I would have three or four hours to myself until I was able to drift off. I typically spent this time reading, writing, or reclining in my hammock.

One night, I had been reclining in my hammock and reading a short story by Harlan Ellison, “A Boy and His Dog”. I was smoking a Belmont Suave. I have mentioned this before, but every drag from a Belmont Suave cigarette felt like you were punching yourself in the lungs. The Evangelical part of my community was not a fan of people smoking cigarettes (“Su cuerpo es un regalo de Dios.”) so I kept some of my vices under wraps for as long as I could so I was viewed in a positive light and could continue my work with them. It was in the middle of my cigarette that I looked over and saw someone watching me through the wall. To elaborate on this situation a little, my house consisted of dirt floors, and bricks up to about shoulder-level. At this point, my Nicaraguan grandmother had run out of money and used wooden boards to bridge the gap up to the tin roof. This set-up worked in a pinch, but it had the drawback of leaving two-inch gaps between each piece of wood. The lack of privacy didn’t really bother me all that much until this moment when I noticed that someone was looking at me through the slats in my wall.

I figured the person was just looking into my room to see if I was awake or not before knocking as it was about nine o’clock. I decided to not let on that I had spotted them to try and save ourselves the awkwardness of having caught me in two awkward situations. I was smoking and since I wasn’t wearing a shirt, my tattoo was visible. (“Su cuerpo es un regalo de Dios.”, “Solo los criminales y pandilleros tienen tatuajes.”) I would leave it up to them whether they wanted to knock on my door and confront me or if they wanted to save themselves the embarrassment and walk away.

I continued to read and occasionally take a drag from my cheap and crappy Belmont Suave. About fifteen minutes later, I had finished a section and my horrible cigarette. I turned in my hammock and snuffed the cigarette on the floor. While doing that, I took a peek at the gap in my wall. The eye was still regarding me through the crack.

At this point, I was more frustrated than anything else. Their persistent invasion of my privacy had finally made me confrontational. I swung on the hammock and set my book down on the wooden board I used as a shelf and threw on a shirt. I opened up my door and stepped outside. I walked around the outer wall of my room, but I turned up nothing. The person was gone. I visited the latrine and then returned to my room.

I finished up my book and went to bed around eleven o’clock. While that may not seem like a late hour, let me point out that most people had been asleep for about three hours now. In their opinion, I was a regular night owl. Later when they found out about my smoking and tattoo, I was also labeled a rebel and a gangster, which now seems ridiculous in retrospect.

As you can tell from the photo, my bed wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. I would get a few hours of sleep every night before I would toss and turn and try to find a more comfortable position. I woke up around three that night and rolled over in my bed. In doing so, I found myself making eye contact with the eye that had been watching me earlier that night.

I watched the eye for a good couple of minutes. I don’t know how long I stared and I don’t know how long they had been watching me. I became painfully aware that the locking mechanism for my door was a small piece of metal that I slid into a catch that consisted of two intersecting nails. (In other words, the only way my lock could have been flimsier was if I tied my door shut with dental floss.) I was glad I slept with a cumba by my bed, the necessity for which will be evident in the third story. Eventually they left and I went back to sleep.

To this day, I have no clue who it was that was watching me through the slats in my wall. To me, that was the most frightening part of the whole experience. It has even inspired some of my earlier stories. Not the invasion of privacy when I was at my most unguarded moment, but that this person eyed me in my hammock for at least fifteen minutes and then watched me sleep for an unknown period of time. I lived with these people for another year after that experience. It could have been anyone, a man I built an oven or vaccinated chickens with, a woman I gossiped with who taught me how to cook. I have no clue. I lived in La Quinta for two years with a person who was so focused on me that they once watched me sleep.

The Ear/Auriculares
While I was in the Esteli region for my service, one of my friends was working in a small village in Matagalpa. He came into the country at the same time I did and we both worked in the agricultural group. While my work was more focused on animals and improving methods of eating/killing said animals, he was working to organize community banks and even managed to build a much-needed bridge in his village. While I am all right with divulging my name, I do not feel the same way about giving away his personal information so freely. (He did give me permission to write about his experience, so there’s that.) For that reason, I will call him by his nickname, Botas. (Boots.)

While not the most awesome nickname ever (“Travis Cumba” or “Gringo Lobo” has that title), it was fairly original. He was awarded that nickname because when we all came into Nicaragua, we had a two-month period of training. During this time, he visited a boot maker and had an amazing pair of boots made. The boots were apparently so resplendent that his entire community was angling to try and get those boots from him before he returned home to the United States. The community wanted his boots so badly that a few of the guys began calling him “Boots” and the name just stuck.

This is a small aside, but I feel like it needs to be said. Boots is a great guy and I am privileged to call him one of my friends. While he was in Nicaragua, he lived in a small community in Matagalpa. While La Quinta was located along a stretch of road an hour or so away from Esteli, he lived in a more mountainous region. This had its benefits and drawbacks. He wouldn’t have to deal with missionary groups, whom if I may attach another small side note, missionaries are some of the worst people I have ever met in my life. Surprise visits from the bosses were a non-existent problem for him.

The major drawback he experienced was his transportation. If he wanted to get into Matagalpa, he had to wake up at 4 am and walk to the bus stop to catch a 7 am bus to his closest city. From there it was a five-hour trip into Matagalpa. From Matagalpa, it took an additional five hours to reach Managua. Managua, by the way, was where the Peace Corps building was located and the Nicaraguan capitol also happened to have the only hospital we were allowed to visit. This of course was worrisome and it became much more problematic later in the story.

Boots spent a lot of his time in Nicaragua taking pictures and working in his community. He was always working in his community. One of his biggest ways of relaxing after a hard day of work was through music. He had brought an iPod with him with a gigantic high-class set of headphones that looked like more like earmuffs. He would put on those headphones every night and drown out the sounds of the wildlife and community around him.

It was about six months into Boot’s service that he began to hear the noises. He described it like this; pick up two or three rocks or pieces of gravel and begin rubbing them together in your hands. The sound you would hear from the stones grinding together was almost the exact same sound he began to hear that day. One day he woke up to that sound. At first he assumed it was the sound of construction. He assumed that somewhere in his community, someone was building a new house and that was the source of the omnipresent, but almost inaudible sound.

Boots ignored the sound for most of the day, assuming that it was just construction. When he went to lay down that night and he was still hearing those sounds, he began to have his doubts. No one could possibly be working that long and that late at night. He decided to check it out the next morning. He popped on his headphones, turned up his music, and went to bed.

The next morning Boots went around his community and asked if there was anyone building anything. No one was doing any construction in his community. So, after turning down a number of offers to trade his boots for a chicken or pig, he went back to his house. By now the sound had grown louder, but was only a minor annoyance. He said at this time that it was no louder than the whirring of a computer monitor or the oscillating sounds that come from a fan.

Boots assumed that the sound might be his eardrums popping due to the altitude he lived at. (He lived in a mountainous region and his community was actually built into the side of a mountain high above sea-level.) He was tempted to go into Managua and talk with one of the doctors, but he ultimately decided against it. It was a two-part trip that would take two days to get him into the capitol. It was a lot of work for something that he was certain would pass.

The next day was a Sunday and by now the noise had grown exponentially. He described the volume as being the equivalent of someone rubbing rocks around just inches away from his ear. Now Boots was concerned. Unfortunately, the transportation system didn’t work on the weekend. He would have to wait a day to get into the nearest city.

The next day, the sound was almost completely gone. He was relieved at first until he tilted his head and he felt a liquid substance trickling out of his ear. It was straw colored and smelled like earwax. He walked down to the bus stop and began the arduous process of getting into Managua. He missed the last bus to Managua and had to spend the night in Matagalpa.

By the time, he made it into Managua, Boot’s left ear was inflamed. He went into the Peace Corps office and got a doctor’s appointment. The doctor asked if he would be all right with waiting a day and he told her right to her face that he wasn’t going to wait. She was nonplussed about his insistence, but she had him sit down on an examination table.

The doctor pulled out an otoscope and examined right ear and then his left. When she looked into his left ear, she gasped and said these words exactly, “Sangre de Cristo!” (“Blood of Christ!/Christ blood!” This is a common Nicaraguan colloquial exclamation.) She dropped the otoscope and when he asked her what she saw, she told him that when she looked into his ear canal, she saw insect legs. Apparently the insect had crawled into the lining of his headphones one day, enticed by the residual smell of earwax. When he went to bed that night and put on his headphones, the insect was driven out of the headphone lining by the vibrations of the music and into the safest spot it could find, his ear canal. That night, it locked its pinchers/mandibles into his ear where it stayed for over four days. You may find yourself asking what the bug was doing those four days and wondering about the noise that sounded like rocks being rubbed/ground together. There is a simple answer to both of those inquiries. The sound Boots had been hearing was the bug chewing its way through his eardrum and worming its way deeper into his head.

My very own stalker/"Todo Va a Estar Bien.”
My final story goes back to Esteli. Of the twenty-five volunteers that started out in my group and the fifteen that completed their service, five of us were based in the Esteli region. Of the sixteen departments in Nicaragua, (There are technically seventeen, but one region has been subsumed into the others.) a large number of volunteers were concentrated in the Esteli region. This is because some regions like the coast were extremely difficult to reach in an emergency and others were hostile. Female Peace Corps volunteers were discouraged from selecting Chinandega to work in due to a cultural climate that was hostile towards females.

One of my friends lived in a small community that was midway between Esteli and Jinotega. The communities’ name was Numanji (I pronounced it as “Nu-manji” like the movie ‘’Jumanji’’. This got me into trouble on more than a few occasions, as the pronunciation was laughably incorrect.) She was about two hours away from either city by bus. To get to her bus stop, she had to walk about an hour and a half and cross a river, which would overflow in the winter and be impassable for weeks at a time.

Due to the events that passed in her community, I am also going to refer to her by her nickname. Her community called her “La Tita”. Tita isn’t actually a Spanish word, but a suffix thrown onto words to indicate something that is small or precious. For example, ‘perro’ means dog, but ‘perrito/a’ means puppy or little dog. La Tita earned this title of the “little one” due to her stature and cuteness. Despite this not being a competition, “Travis Cumba” is still a cooler nickname to have. La Tita came in with my group and she lived about an hour away from me. Even now, when trying to describe her, the only words I can think of are “laid back” and “cute”. I must confess that I had a bit of a crush on her during training. I am in no way ashamed to admit that. My childish crush evolved into a friendship over time and I am glad for that. She had the type of personality that could deal with any situation and face it in a relaxed and unruffled manner.

La Tita lived with a family in Numanji for two months before moving out on her own. She used her savings from the two hundred dollar stipend we received every month (Four thousand and six hundred cordobas.) to rent her own place. This was allowed, but she needed to get approval first and live in the community for three months. (Neither of which she had done.) She liked the idea of living by herself, cooking her own meals, and being independent. It was about a week after moving to a small house that was about twenty by twenty feet that she began to get nightly visits.

The first time it happened was late at night when the rest of her community had gone to bed. She told me it was about 10 or 11 o’clock at night. She was changed and in her bed when she heard the sound of footsteps. They approached her door and paused for a few seconds. She listened for a few seconds and then the person pushed on her door. The deadbolt clinked against the holder, confirming it was locked. The person then walked away.

Understandably, she was worried about that late-night encounter. Someone had tried to enter her house late at night without her permission and was testing the door to see if it was locked or not. She had no idea what they wanted, but had a good idea. Unfortunately the percentage for sexual harassment for female volunteers is reported to be about twenty percent by the Peace Corps. Even more unfortunately that number is realistically closer to ninety-nine percent as I have only met one female volunteer that wasn’t verbally propositioned/harassed in the streets and in their community.

She hoped that it was just a case of mistakenly walking up to the wrong house and trying to enter, but this hope was trampled underfoot when the next night, the man returned and tried to push open her door again. This time the footsteps circled around her house and tried the backdoor to her house as well. After finding both locked, the man left once again. Like most volunteers, La Tita took to sleeping with a machete by her bed just in case the man would try to force his way into her house. (It is unfortunately a habit that I keep to this day, I no longer feel safe in my own bed unless I have one close to me.) These nightly visits occurred for two weeks before she broke down and called another volunteer to come and spend the night with her to try and catch the perpetrator in the act of trying to open her doors late at night.

The other volunteer never heard or saw anyone, which made her even more distraught. She now knew that the man was watching her during the day and didn’t try to enter her house because he knew that her friend was lying in wait for him. The friend stayed for a week, but the man never came any of the nights he was there. He eventually had to return to his community in Jinotega, but he advised her to call the Peace Corps and report these incidents.

Looking back, it seemed like a stupid decision not to report the activity, but if I had to guess at her reasons, I would say they stemmed from the fact that she had not received permission to move out into a new house and was worried about being kicked out of the Peace Corps. Stoicism seems to be a common trait among volunteers. I think some viewed it like being a tattletale. I viewed it as an insult, if I went to the Peace Corps with every problem I faced, I would be admitting that I couldn’t handle them myself. I dealt with my community counter-part stealing materials from my oven building project by myself. Why involve bureaucracy in a situation that they probably couldn’t even resolve? (A side note: I was and still am an idiot.)

La Tita instead opted to go and talk to her Nicaraguan grandfather whom she had lived with for two months and had built up a friendship with. She told him every detail. She told him how the person tried to enter her house every night and she was frightened for her safety. He wrapped an arm around her reassuringly and told her, “Todo va a estar bien.” (“Everything is going to be alright.”) Later she saw him talking to a few guys in front of the shop that sold guarro. (Nicaraguan moonshine.) She figured he was talking to whoever was bothering her and telling them to knock it off.

The late night visits from the man stopped for a week and La Tita started to relax and let down her guard. The man came back on the eighth night and tried to open her front door, back door, and tried to open her window. He tried to get into her house for the better part of an hour. She spent that night clutching her machete and didn’t get a wink of sleep. I would love to end this story on a happy note about how the man lost interest with trying to sneak into her house at night and she eventually went on to do great work in her community. She did work up until she left, but she unfortunately left after a year of being in the Peace Corps.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would assume La Tita quit not because of the man visiting her house on an almost nightly basis, but because she found out who it was. She eventually caved and told the Peace Corps, but there wasn’t much they could do other than offer to place her in another community. (Being transferred to another community with only a year was pointless as it generally took a year to build up a relationship with a community to carry out larger scale projects like ovens and improved stoves.) She chose to stay and put up with that man for nearly two more months before calling it quits.

La Tita had caught him a few weeks before she left. She had waited up for him to come and try to open her door. The instant he pushed on the door, she pulled it open and met him on the front step with a machete in hand. He looked at her with a shocked expression and she returned the expression. The man who had been trying to break into her house for over six months was none other than her Nicaraguan grandfather whom she had confided in and asked for help when she felt like she had nowhere else to turn. This was the same man who listened to her fear and concerns about this intruder who had looked her in the eyes, wrapped his arm around her reassuringly, and told her, “Todo va a estar bien.”