Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

At 6 a.m., minutes after the sun breaks the horizon, the howler monkeys start their barking—a friendly reminder for me to get going before it’s too hot to walk, much less run. I plop out of bed. Before I lace up my trusty trail runners, I pull on a T-shirt and my only pair of running shorts, which are, incidentally, neon green.

It’s been six months since I arrived to teach English in this rural fishing village of 500, and I still I wonder: Why did I choose the neon green shorts to bring to Playa Gigante, Nicaragua? These jarring green shorts accentuate the long legs of a 6’1’’ gringa—a height unheard of in this part of the world. And the fact that those legs are running is even more absurd.

I dart upstairs to get a quick drink of water and to greet Isolina, the cook at the hotel where I teach English. She asks, am I going running again? (A mistake, she implies, that is OK to make once or twice, but surely not every morning?) Isolina, like most of the villagers, has a physically demanding job and bikes an hour to and from work every day. The concept of exercising for pleasure is beyond her grasp. 

Sí, I tell Isolina, once again.

I jog along and dodge stray cows that stand and stare at me; I dart through wild turkeys strutting outside of Fidel’s place. Playa Gigante is a sleepy village, but, being nestled beside a world-class beach break, English-speaking surfers are becoming an increasingly common sight. Noting this, a local hotel owner offered me free room and board to come to Gigante and begin a free English-language program for residents. Word-of-mouth advertising took care of enrollment, and soon I was teaching 30 Nicaraguans, all of whom were anxious to learn my mother tongue.

Evelio is one of my 30 students, who now squats on the road, spreading out fishing nets to repair. His wife fries eggs and stirs rice and beans over an outdoor wood-burning ceramic stove, and sweet-smelling smoke wafts my way. Although my primary goal in Gigante centers around “teaching English,” my class’ success depends less on my ability to communicate verb tenses and more on my ability to inspire people like Evelio, a 45-year-old third-generation fisherman, to study irregular verbs by flashlight in the evenings.

I wave and press on, until I pass a woman who stops me, concerned, and asks if I am OK. Her reasoning, I suppose, is that a woman running alone must be hurrying to find help… or else running away from something. I try to reassure her, but despite my best efforts, she still looks troubled as we part ways.

The road carries on through “downtown Gigante,” a cluster of three restaurants, an outdoor pool table, and a strip of homes. The local men are grouped, as always, at the Ruiz house, one of the only families in town with a television. Even at this early hour, there are several men outside. After six months here, I am both a familiar face—the town English teacher—and yet still a novelty, with my bright green shorts, long legs, and the audacity to exercise—by myself, no less. 

I teach several of the men English, and morning after morning, they continue to blow kisses and yell about the green shorts. Ernesto jogs toward me. “Are you running again?” he says in English. I smile: We learned gerunds last week.

“Every day!” I say.

Ernesto brings an enthusiasm to English unmatched by any of my students. After working at a surf camp for four years, he knows words like “gnarly” and “offshore winds,” and whips out his surfer vocabulary any time we need comic relief.

“See you tonight,” I say.

Ernesto yells, “See you later, dude!”

I chug up the final hill, my feet dancing along a chaotic trajectory according to demands of the road: rocks, sticks, and the occasional crab hurrying sideways to its shelter in the dense shoulder brush. Then I see it, dark sand stretched below me. The beach. It’s mine, and mine alone, blissfully void of critters—mosquitoes, scorpions, snakes—and wondering eyes. Summiting into the blue horizon, I let gravity pull me down the hill.