On posting

Even though I was in a place where some families in the city center did not have plumbing and indoor toilets (including our own office and the house next door), and often times no phone, it was incredibly easy to do post live from El Sauce.

The Geneseo office has WiFi. Once Yacarely gave me the password, I just had to choose our Geneseo network, give the letters and numbers and get typing. Often times I would be there after English class, alongside Kellan and Yacarely, til 11 p.m. posting away. Other times they were at dinner and I'd stay put, posting.

Sometimes those times were a bit surreal. It's always hot, so everyone leaves their front doors open for a little breeze. I could hear the banter outside of passing families, of bike taxis, look out and see the family across the street gathered around the day-glo lights of a TV in rocking chairs, me alone. Next door, the nice family that lets me wash my hands in their basin during the day would be sitting in the backyard, or maybe cooking on the open fire of their outdoor kitchen.

There's no real addresses in El Sauce, and I only once spotted an actual street name. There's no postal delivery; why locate it. I wondered. Marisol, the school teacher, had never seen a computer before taking Kellan's introduction class. I thought of the famers in Ocotal, who were asleep now in their small mountain homes and would wake up at dawn with the sunlight to hand harvest coffee and shed bean skins with a machine that looked like it was made in the era of the cotton gin and ride their horses with sacks of beans to town down a mountain path.

And here I was, hunched over a keyboard, sending photos of the Ocotal farmers into "space" with the zap of button and seeing it broadcast to whomever in the world happened to sign in a second later.