My (R)evolution, part 1.
That rug is just a metaphor, because I live in a place that isn’t really fit for rugs. In the tropics, we don’t have rugs. Door mats maybe, but no rugs.
Since 2005 I call Little Corn Island my home base. It’s a tiny tropical island off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Turquoise seas, white sandy beaches, waving palm trees, my own little yoga and massage studio set in a lush garden right next to my tiny but super-comfortable home.
Of course, now you all think I’m living the dream. Well, maybe I was. Until April 19 of this year. Now I’m living in what some of you would more likely call a nightmare. A friend of mine described it as “living on the edge”. Whichever way you want to label it, when the country you’re living in as a foreign entrepeneur throws itself into a revolution, you cannot help but feel as if the rug got pulled out from underneath your feet.
From one day to the next the Nicaragua people woke up from peacefully dozing to fiercely demanding that the president and his wife step down. In a month’s time more than 70 people have found their death and hundreds have been injured in riots caused by police violence and looting. Road blocks are disabling proper transport, due to which many regions (amongst which our little island) are cut off from their regular supplies of food and fuel.
I rarely have nightmares, hardly ever get stressed, and that might be the cause for my still quite relaxed attitude towards this quite awkward situation. (The fact that this little island sits so far from the mainland has kept things totally peaceful so far, which helps us to keep our calm here.)
In fact, in the past month I’ve caught myself regularly lost in thoughts tinged with curiosity towards all the possible consequences of all the probable scenarios’s for the totally unstable political situation that we currently have here in Nicaragua.
At this point, anything is possible, from a very quick and peaceful solution, to a full-on bloody revolution that might last a decade or two, like the last one they had here in the 70’s and 80’s.
And when anything is possible, we cannot really prepare for anything. All we can do is live by the day and take things as they come.
This whole situation has become an incredible opportunity to practice living in the present moment. That, combined with all the unusual thoughts, conversations, actions and viewpoints, has stirred me to start blogging about this Nicaraguan revolution, from the most personal viewpoint possible: how I’m experiencing it in my mind, my heart and my very direct surroundings, in relation to my friends and fellow islanders.
My personal evolution, affected by the country’s revolution.
I won’t bother you with details about riots, marches, debates and violence happening in the whole country, unless it will be directly affecting me. (You can read here and here a bit more about the background of what’s going on in the country.)
Over the next few weeks (months? years?, who knows) I will sketch for you what happens when from one day to the next, nothing in our life is certain anymore, other than that things are changing, every day.
I’ll be recording what that does to my thoughts, emotional states, habits, daily activities, hopes, ambitions and plans for the future, to my mind.
This is nothing more than an exploration into the (for me at least) totally new terrain of being a foreign resident in a developing country that is turning itself upside down to rid itself of a dictator and his wife.
Reporting from a country in chaos, trying to make sense of my own mind.
(This article was also published on Medium.com)