Wires hang awkwardly from his roof, tied in a crude knot, “Dem are for de hurricanes” he explains. I lift an eyebrow, mystified. He says, “My neighbors all laughed at me when they saw me wid a ladder, putting dose wires on. But I was the only one whose roof wadn’t blown off – had me a full house of people, standing neck to neck.”
He’s is 54 years old, but passes for 30. Lean, fit, muscular, a body sculpted from a lifetime of physical work, his gaze was commanding as it was sultry, his face smooth and young. His wife and him were easygoing, a marriage of 30+ years, and for a moment I was nostalgic for their ideal relationship. Then I found out he had multiple girlfriends in town.
His son, Milton, is a buzo – a diver. A lobster diver, to be more specific. His job description includes going out to sea for some 10-14 days, diving around 20 times a day to catch spiny lobsters one at a time, with a small hook fused at the end of a metal rod. They get paid per pound of lobster caught. The price per pound of lobster 5 years ago was around 16 US dollars/pound, making it the most lucrative job in town for the average laborer (who earned $4.50/lb). Today, because of the global recession, the price has dropped to $8.50/lb, and the buzos are earning only $1.90/lb.
These buzos, besides radically overfishing the caribbean spiny lobster, are also risking their lives on multiple counts. The most grave condition is called the Bends, which results when you dive too often and you rise too quickly – nitrogen bubbles form in your blood and essentially renders you paralyzed from one minute to the next,
“I got back into the boat and sat down… and then I knew it had happened. I couldn’t feel my legs anymore” says Oscar, one of the many paralyzed buzos in town.
Oscar sits on the floor of his house on stilts. Before the interview begins he reaches for an empty plastic bottle and puts it underneath his blanket. I hear a strange gurgling sound in my earphones, and I realize he’s peeing into the bottle, which I could hear particularly loudly because he’d already been mic’d with the lavalier. Plaintive, he says simply that he has received no aid from basically anywhere – not the boat owner he was working for, nor the state, nor any other association. I watch carefully one of the other boys in the room, Fernando, who is training to become a buzo himself, and how he reacts to Oscar’s story.
“It’s the ultimate machismo.” Brad, colleague of mine here, explains to me, “They go out to sea for weeks. Their wives and girlfriends come to see them off at the dock before each trip. They might never come back. They might die.” But still they go out and dive, with the possibility of coming back, some would argue, worse than dead: paralyzed. Brad sent me an email about 2 months ago, asking me if I might be available the month of August to help shoot a documentary he was making on lobster divers, and the lobster diving industry in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua.
I flew down mid-August to help production for two weeks on the documentary called Mi Aldea, Mi Langosta (My Village, My Lobster), and that’s how I found myself learning about buzos, langostas, Puerto Cabezas, and the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979.
Abrazos
Isabelle
