We got back last week from a 10-day trip to Nicaragua. The microwave clock at our friends' house where we stayed was consistently off by several hours, which naturally bothered me a great deal. I fixed it once, and when a few days later it was again wrong by an unreasonable amount of time, it made me laugh rather than annoyed. Here's why:
For the first year that we lived in Nicaragua, we shared an apartment with my brother and his wife and the first of their three children. (They had been living in country for about a year and a half by that point.) In addition to the learning curve of sharing living space with others, there was a much more stressful learning curve of adjusting to culture and climate. Every difference between Nicaragua and the States stood out sharply, and if I’m honest, these differences seemed poorly planned, inefficient, and sweaty*. I always wanted to shake my head and say, "What a crazy, backwards country!"
