On Friday, for our free day, I decided to take two girls from the church to a movie in Managua. They come from a very broken home and yet come to church on their own every service, and are incredibly sweet. Last service, Fernanda and I spent more than an hour making up a dance together and then wrestling in a clover patch. It might have been the best time Eleven year old Fernanda, who might be my soulmate, and her thirteen year old sister were excited in the morning. We left with a handful of guys on a cramped but beautiful hour long van ride (this is the public transportation system, a trip to Managua costs one dollar each). Our conversations are limited to my incredibly small Spanish vocalubary, but words aren't needed to express how overcome you are by the twist of mountians and valleys. When we arrived at the American style mall (I believe it is the only one in Nicaragua) that is home to the theater, I walked in forgetting that this was the first time that these girls had been in a building anything like this. They followed me closely, and wide-eyed, until we reached an escalator. 

 

     I step on and turn back to make sure they knew what to do. They were standing at the bottom looking at each other, mesmerized and stupidified. I don't even know what they must have thought in that moment. I came back down and motioned to step on to a single block of the escalator and then held their hands and counted to three. They both held me tightly and refused to move off of the stair that I was standing on. Halfway up there relief and joy washed over them and they laughed, for a moment, anyway, until they realized they didn't know what to do when they got to the top. There wasn't time for a lesson, so I gave a reassuring nod and assumed they would copy me when we got there. Instead, little Fernanda takes a leap for solid ground at least a meter and a half before the tiled floor.

 

     Needless to say, despite watching an excellent 3-D movie in a nice theater and a first attempt at Burger King, the escalator was the most memorable and entertaining part of the day. We rode it up and down at least a dozen times along with a few rounds of the, "magical," one story elevator and time spent in adornment of the soap dispenser and hand blow dryer in the washroom. We walked around a toy store and I reassured the girls that it was okay to touch the merchandise, but they didn't dare. We explored a pet store, with an apparently incredible variety of hamsters (gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs) and a stationary store that, as I attempted to explain, was colder beacuse a machine blew cold air into the room.