Saturday night at eleven o´clock I hear running and general chaos between my little apartment and the main house. Thinking it a family problem that has nothing to do with me, I roll over. Not a minute later, my host mother is pleading my name outside of my door, obviously in tears. In nothing but my boxers I run out to see a huge blaze not fifty yards from my doorstep. My host mother is telling me her brother-in-law´s house is on fire, and I hug her out of instinct.

I run back in to grab clothes and glasses, but by the time I run into my host father he has already given up running buckets of water across the street. The girls and my host mother are out front repeatedly screaching, ¨They never come! The firemen never come!¨ It was something I would hear over and over for the next forty minutes. By that time, two houses, a construction company the family also owned, and the boarding house of a japanese volunteer away for the weekend are in a forty-foot blaze. The exploding cans and equipment in the store continuously explodes making the scene reminiscent of war. The firemen have to come from the next department and return to it everytime they need more water. There is no hyrant in my town. The fire continues until about one-thirty in the morning. In the mean-time one man is carried onto our porch with a burned leg. He yells for water, which I get for him from our kitchen, although by the time I get back outside the story has unfolded. My host family tells me he dropped boiling paint on himself while trying to steal it from the burning store. He is hauled away by paramedics as I narrowly avoid what would have been my second appearance on national television. ¨Only in Nicaragua¨ say the girls, ¨Only in Nicaragua would someone do such a thing.¨ I almost regailed them of the looting in the States during the Rodney King Riots or Hurricane Katrina. In a country where agony and suffering are the only memorable history, I thought it better to bite my tongue.