Nicaragua, Bananas, 2 more blog posts.

The thing that I notice most when talking about Nicaraguans with my family is that there is a strong stigma of lesser than I. In some respects, it feels a little bit like racism, but I don’t think that is it entirely. Whenever we talk about “Nica’s,” it is about how poor they are, how they use all of the Costa Rican benefits, clogging the system, even how they talk differently. We sometimes watch the Nicaraguan news to see what crazy thing is on it, and usually there is a body covered in blood still with the knife it that was used to kill the person. It is crazy admittedly, but we watch it to sort of remind us of the difference. Of course, my family went to Nicaragua to see some of their friends, so everything is not bad, it is just different in a big way.

The difference that I saw in Grenada from San Jose was two main things. The first was just how beautiful the city was. It was clearly meant to look beautiful, having all of the buildings maintain a colonial style with bright colors, lush courtyard and churches everywhere. This is not like San Jose, which is more like a big city bent on production. The second difference was just how much of a façade it all is in Nicaragua. There are children begging, old women sitting in doorways, prostitutes all over the road, all showing how Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the world. I saw something that illustrates my point I think. We were driving past a building that was beautiful on the outside, but I saw the door opened, and in the .3 seconds that I had to look, I saw 5 boys lying on a pile of rubble. The building was nothing beyond appearance, trying to hide the poverty that actually defined it.

I think that this is very much like the situation that we in the United States have with Mexicans. They cross our borders, do the manual labor, and we have a fairly negative stigma as a country, if not against the individuals, certainly against the whole. In fact, the whole time that I have been here, the relationship between Ticos and Nicos has fascinated me with its similarities to our situation. Of course I do not know all of the details, which is something that I believe would be an interesting question to look at. Just how similar are the two situations?

As for bananas, I must say that I don’t have much to comment on. I have seen them in more or less every fruit stand in Costa Rica. When they are presented, normally it is in big bunches and sold by the pound. They are also very cheap. Maybe not across the board I guess, but when I was in Nicoya, I bought five big bananas for something like 400 colones. It was nuts. Also, the bananas here are fresher I think, I rarely see green bananas mixed with the yellow, showing me that they are grown closer. I think it is fair to say that this proximity and availability of banana plantations is one of the dominant features of the banana market here in Costa Rica.