diplomatic? and other unintended consequences of US foreign policy

Diplomatic - and other consequences of US foreign policy

         You're special,

   the staff at the US Consulate told me 

        Every other American 

        Ever involved in a similar accident or case 

  (ie, that involved someone else dying)

        has been sent to 'preventative prison' until the case is resolved,
   which can take days, weeks or months
        (by preventative they mean preventing you from fleeing Nicaraguan justice)

I was the first (in their experience) to be given 
      unsupervised house arrest after only 

           2 days in the local jail.  

They didn't officially know how it happened, but 

they thought my whole case was 

        marked by the 

        humility and genuine sadness I and my family expressed. 

I laughed.

But surely everyone is humble and sad
  in this situation 
(of having accidentally ended the life of one of the people they 
      supposedly came to serve)?'
 All the expats I know here work in NGOs, aid agencies, or as missionaries

No, actually not.  

Other Americans have been perceived as arrogant and demanding 

of special treatment.  The Nicaraguan police, courts, and 

press don’t like that. 

Right after the accident happened the media assumed 
you would be the same, and there were  media reports of a 
frivolous, reckless gringa who cared nothing for Nicaraguans.   

                                          The reports changed tone after my first day in court, when I was so distraught and horrified that I kept a 
sheet over my head, sobbing and banging my head against the table. 


How else could I feel, trapped in a nightmare-turned-reality in which my car had somehow ended the lives of two women, gruesomely, who were just waiting to catch the bus to work?

 I can’t imagine anyone else feeling any less torn apart.  
                   But apparently such is the reputation and stereotype of Americans here
 that people assumed I was and would be 
unrepentant, uncaring, and refusing to take any responsibility for the situation. 

I wanted to throw up when the Consul General said the Embasssy wanted to learn from my case to help them deal with the next one.  
Next one, he said, 
accepting these accidents as just another
 inconvenience of living in Nicaragua.

speed bumps in Spain

Papaya

I dropped a papaya
off the roof
to watch it smash on the ground.

Then I took lots of close-up pictures of the carcass
Why?

The car accident was an act of destruction
in which I feel I was forced to participate
I was not the author of those moments,
nor an arbiter of the physics
mass
velocity
vector force of metal on flesh
I was not acting deliberately or willfully in any way
I can't even remember what happened

It has left me
unmoored,
demolished,
furious.
It has turned my skin inside out.

I DECIDED to drop the papaya,
I carried it up the stairs,
I opened the door,
I held it out over empty space, and
I dropped it.

CRASH

I documented it myself
the pulp oozing out of the rind
the juice flowing into the grass
no police or coroners necessary.

And I cleaned it up.

Finished.

2 - the plastic bag

I sat on the top bunk of the cell and looked out the window into the sunshine and trees. A plastic bag danced past, pushed along by the wind, until it crashed into the concrete fence.

Yes, of course I thought of the scene in the movie ‘American Beauty’
when the teenage kid shows his favorite piece of video,
and it’s a plastic bag being blown around in the wind,
and we all thought it was so profound,
and then the film won lots of awards,
and the plastic bag became a visual cliche.




But I must tell you, in this moment of sitting in jail,
not having eaten,
changed clothes,
washed,
been able to see (glasses smashed),
eaten more than a piece of bread, in several days,

AND having had the deaths of two young women rip through everything that ever made sense in my life,
this particular plastic bag was pretty fucking profound.