Léon

Where´d I leave off. Oh, Léon, my home for the past two weeks and for one more.

The thing to know about Nicaragua is that, while most of its people live in Managua, most of it´s tourists go to cute, cozy Granada because Managua is an uninteresting rats nest. Or so I´ve here. I spent a day there. I´m not going back.

The touristas that don´t go Granada come to Léon, which gets hazzahs for being the Sandinista stronghold that it indeed is. The town is dotted with monuments to the heroes and martyrs of the war against Samoza. They´re done in the futuristic-yet-distopian Soviet style that improves any vacation photo.

What sets Léon apart, though, are its colonial churches. The place has about 17 of them, including the ruins (piles of bricks). I was here a week before I nailed down which of the three massive churches I´d come across was the cathedral everyone uses in their directions. They´re slowly restoring the churches -- apparently it wasn´t a high priority for the Sandinistas, or anyone since. My favorite is this pink and yellow deal, which I´ll post a picture of as some future date. Looking at it, you wouldn´t know you´re in the "the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere."

Why -- you´re hopefully asking -- am I dumping quote marks around Nicaragua´s claim to the Number 2 spot? Here we go. By gross domestic product per capita, Nicaragua was in fact the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere in 2004. That little item is mentioned in most guidebooks, and bandied about by travelers here proud of the fact that they´ve come to someplace nearly as broke as Haiti.

This bothered me for reasons I´ll explain in a second that have little to do with people bragging about being in poor places. That the 2005 figures put Nicaragua on par with Bolivia and Honduras would give me a witty retort to my fellow world travelers, if not for the following.

As you number lovers already know, there´s a kink in using GDP per capita figures to see how impoverished a place is. The number doesn´t account for the division of weath. Using the same logic as the "second poorest place" people, we would argue that the residents of Bermuda, the Caman Islands and Equatorial Guinea are far richer than Americans. The Irish would be just $500 a piece short of their American cousins.

My problem isn´t with Nicaragua´s claim to poverty -- it´s well earned. The minimum wage is $17 a week, and professional people take home less than twice that. It´s under and unemployment rate has been at about 50 percent since people started keeping track. And the entire city of Léon is presently out of gas.

My beef is that, for reasons that escape me, many of the travelers from the EU I meet have taken it into their heads that all Americans are rich but too ignorant to travel. The argument goes like this. Because the U.S. has a per capita GDP about half again as large as that of their more perfect union, and because there are no poor folks in (fill in Western European nation), and because they didn´t see anyone broke when they went to New York that one time, all Americans are at least as wealthy as they are. (And -- although they´re traveling for six or eight months on saved money -- they are not themselves priveleged, but simply from a fairer country.) Ergo, Americans are wealthy enough to travel but choose not to because they are (1) arrogant or (2) ignorant, or (3) both.

Now there are great arguments for the European way of doing things. There health care is better and cheaper, their education system is almost certainly more fair. And Americans should probably learn a second language, travel more, and take a more relaxed attitude toward work and tax increases.

But when a Spanish-English woman who spent a fall in New York tells me Americans are arrogant, it grates a bit. I´d take it from a Nicaraguan or a Guatemalan, or maybe even a Canadian. But from a fellow member of the coalition of the willing, one who´s ancestors have a somewhat spotty record in Latin (Spanish) America? That just won´t do.

So, in retaliation I spent an hour dinking around on the Internet looking for average household income statistics for the European Union. At some point I realized it didn´t really matter, that folks who feel entitled enough to make sweeping conclusions about an entire nation of people aren´t really worth thinking about. Then, days later, I wrote this blog.

The next one will be more fun, I promise.

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Addendum

I should say that most of the people Isolde and I have met on this little adventure have been completely wonderful. The other night I talked about Top Gun with a Nicaraguan who refers to himself, seriously, as Maverick. (He has an unhealthy appreciation of Tom Cruise.) After the Spanish/English woman´s little kick, a Dane regaled me with his country´s role in the Iraq War. Turns out they sent a submarine to the desert war, which got there too late to do whatever it was going to do then sunk on the way home. The Australian who runs the place we´re staying at firmly believes there´s a future in Nicaraguan tourism -- and has set up a business that brings tourists to an active volcano, then encourages them to sled down it. So lots of good folks.