As many of you are sweating outside in these summer months, you may actually be thinking about climate change. But when the A/C is going in your home, work place, gym, or car, the heat slips to the back of your mind. In Nicaragua, April and May were miserable, it was so hot. In the last 137 years of recorded temperatures, the last 12 months worldwide...every single month has been the hottest on record. What does that mean for Nicaraguans?
The vast majority of the population can never get away from the heat. The buses are hot. The work place - often outside - is hot. Their little, tiny homes are hot...and at night homes are closed up and the heat builds with many sleeping in one room.* People are exhausted because the heat zaps their energy and hardly anyone can keep enough water in them. They are also exhausted because they don't sleep well in the heat, rising several times to just go outside and try to cool off. People are cranky and road rage is more common (Thank God that guns are banned!). Children are irritable and parents are short-tempered.
Josefa, our clinic administrator, walked around the clinic with a wet towel on her head when our pitiful air conditioner was broken. She was trying to lower her temperature to lower her blood pressure.
As the humidity and the heat built, the air coming in and out of my and Mike's lungs got heavier and heavier...both of us then move to the air conditioned office. Two years running I ended up in the hospital with asthma attacks during these hot, humid months...now I have the luxury of spending them in our bedroom or office with A/C.We hear people from the North talk about how Nicaraguans have adapted to hotter weather - and they have to some extent - but when the heat and the humidity rises, it is dangerous for the body. The advice given in the States of going into air conditioned areas OR getting in tubs of water does not work here. Again, the vast majority do not have those options.
Climate change is ever-present for the poor. The reason many in the States can deny climate change is that...well, they can. It does not affect them now. They can move within their climate controlled temperatures and stupidly stick their heads in their air-conditioned sand, but denying something does not make it untrue.*Even most middle class families do not have air conditioning in their home because electricity here costs about 3 times more than it does in the States.
-Kathleen
