Home Shopping Network

When I was in high school my mom’s side of the family took a vacation to a resort in Mexico. One of the things my cousins and I enjoyed most about that trip was that while we were lying on the beach any number of vendors would pass, selling silver jewelry or wraps for our hair or tee shirts. We loved looking at all of the wares, bargaining with the vendors, and purchasing souvenirs, all without moving from the beach. My aunt called it “The Home Shopping Network”.

At my home in Nicaragua, something similar happens. For the most part, you can’t buy anything in my town. There are a couple of houses that have makeshift shops that sell basics – soap, sugar, homemade popsicles – but for anything else I have to travel an hour and a half to one of the bigger cities. Sometimes, however, people will come through town selling items out of a truck or out of a pack.

In front of my door have passed people selling used shoes and clothing, electronics, DVDs of American movies, ice cream bars, and pots and pans. The best is the fruit truck. For some reason the fruit guys always make the biggest commotion when they come through. They’ve got huge bull horns mounted on their trucks, and they advertise their prices as they roll through town. “Avocados three for twenty cordobas! Papayas cantaloupes watermelons! Bananas ten cordobas a dozen!” Only the acoustics are really bad (and it’s in Spanish) so it sounds like that unintelligible voice that comes through the speaker at a drive-through window. “A-WA-wa ba-ba-TA-ba dee-bee-bee-BA-ba”. You can hear them coming long before you can see what’s in the truck, so I always have to ask my neighbor if it’s the fruit guys or the guys who come by to pick up old car batteries. (Which, by the way, is somewhat of a mystery. The car battery guys seem to come through quite a lot considering that no one here has a car.)

I always go overboard on the fruit. The last time the pineapples were on special, four for a dollar. “What if I only want one?” I asked. “A dollar,” the man said.
“Let me get this straight. It’s four for a dollar, and if I only want one it’s still a dollar?”
“Yep.”
That week I ate four pineapples.