Third Worlding

I don't know whether I like the Third World. That immediate experienced notion at once demands commentary. How can one "experience" the Third World as one can, I suppose with a little imagination and enough time spent, a city like Paris, or Walnut Creek, or Ben Lomond? This amorphous concept of regional measured economic development one can no more experience than one can freedom. There is a general milieu of time and space I can call my experience so far, but of course living here in Honduras and previously in Syria are two very different cultures in significant ways. What I find similar I guess clings to me like burrs through a wild field. But what is this "experience", or this continual experiencing? It is the durable residue left from the clash of expectations and reality. One could, I imagine, expect reality, which is another way of "living in the moment" or Buddhist "mindfulness" or even the Christian "doing the will of God" to lasso all these ways of being loosely into one rodeo. Easier said than done. For if we are in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua for Semana Santa, or Holy Week Easter, on holiday, and have already bought bus tickets round trip from and back to Tegucigalpa but have yet to reserve specific seats back across the border, and with righteous foresight decide to call Trans Nica bus company in Managua five count em five full days before day of departure...and on the first day ring after ring no one answers...and on the second day no one answers...and so on...and nowhere on the Trans Nica website can one reserve seats...and even, desperate, emailing and texting a good friend Spanish-speaking in Tegucigalpa asking, pleading, she please visit the office where initial tickets were purchased, and when no one answers the phone there and the office is closed, and is still closed subsequent days, your expectation of a bus company who caters to travelers who actually travel on holidays actually being responsible to be OPEN stumbles, slips and crashes into the reality of that bus company not being responsible at all. The kind and helpful hotel manager, Andy, suggests we go through a travel agent in town. Office, you guessed it, closed, and no office hours listed. So how do our First World expectations meet Third World reality? Slap a credit card down for a flight out of Managua that afternoon. Done. What about when reality outstrips expectation? Playa Majagual, 12 kilometers north of San Juan del Sur on a dirt road through poor farming villages, an uncluttered gently swaying beach winding from a rocky cove sweeping south into tidepools, roaring tumult of Pacific ocean waves, the swirl and pump of clear saltwater currents, that briny wash and foamy spray of pure sea, and only rickety surf shacks, a few poor houses of Nicaraguan peasants, shady overhanging trees to soften the burning sun, sea-moist air and the sky throwing a spray of clouds across its pale canvas, and it's all ours, mi amor y yo, and we swim and splash and bounce in the waves hugging and tossing us, and we read, Carrie, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and me, Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, and we rest and sun and swim all afternoon, and it's free, and so are we.