The Road to Promise

Trucks, their beds piled high with produce, blast through the ruddy streets while emaciated dogs pick tendrils of flesh from the bones of curbside carcasses tossed out by the butcher. The throbbing engines send them skittering, though not for long. Their eager returns for clandestine nibbles are interrupted only by the occasional skirmish with a larger and hungrier foe.

Landing in the high-altitude atmosphere had brought on a migraine, which hit within an hour of our arrival. I had never felt such searing pain. I guessed the fact that we’d spent the better part of a month living with the air conditioning switched off in order to acclimate our bodies to the tropical heat of the Caribbean coast where we were heading had something to do with it. We were told this made sense because the humidity we would experience was similar to the summer heat in Tennessee. No one warned me we’d be plunked down in the chill of a high-altitude city beforehand.

Sequestered in the hotel room—attempting to lie so still that I could outsmart the pulsing in my temples—the walls seemed nonexistent with each sound that pummeled my head. Jim went in search of medication, which he found in a corner drugstore. I’ve often thought how lucky we were that he found someone who spoke rudimentary English, a rarity during most of our trips to the capital city.

The medication helped and by late evening, I was able to manage a walk through Morazán Park. The entire city was shrouded in a downy blanket of fog so thick that the sky glowed white as if the lights from the San Jose’s sprawl illuminated it from within. The streets were boisterous. Besides the constant blaring of horns, music emanated from bars at every turn. “The Girl from Ipanema” pulsed from the hotel next door, sounding cheeky given the exuberant organist’s take on the bossa nova song.

I reentered the hotel room feeling as shrouded in a cotton-wool glow as the luminescent sky. I leaned out the window and listed to a crowd of young men in a bar across the street. They were cheering their soccer heroes with an enthusiasm that led me to believe they thought they could make themselves heard to the players ricocheting around the screen if they simply yelled loudly enough.

Though I’d studied Spanish in high school, and had taken a refresher course just before entering the mission field, I was still challenged where the language was concerned. It would prove to be a handicap at times, but I actually liked the way my ignorance allowed the language to wash over me when I was sitting in a café or a restaurant, or on a park bench.

I descended further into the twilight brought on by the pills, and the rowdy soccer-worshiping crowd’s lament and celebration ebbed and flowed from my mind like rhythmic waves. As the sky cleared, revealing a bright jumble of stars, their cries were lifted higher into the chilling air until they were nothing more than a symphonic drone. My brain slowed similarly and I wondered about our drive the next morning, which would speed us through the mountains toward Siquirres where the fertile Caribbean coast met the edge of the jagged peaks that form the country’s mountainous backbone.