All over the globe, people have made it their business to keep other people off their land.  Out of their yard.  Away.

Keep out.  This is our current area of study.  The boys and I took photos in Guanacaste and Nicaragua and have been talking about locks, gates, wires, walls, lighting, alarms, beware signs, trespassing signs, and more. We’re learning how this plays out in Costa Rica and Nicaragua as compared to what various places in the U.S.

In Central America, your front door is your front door plus an exterior wrought iron door, sans mosquito screens. Ditto for windows.  You have a levered window with eight to ten little horizontal panes that can be flipped shut, and on the outside, there are vertical wrought iron bars.  “It’s like we’re in jail!” my one son complained.  “And it doesn’t stop all the bugs from getting in,” the other son noted.

Your yard might be fenced with wooden posts and thin barbed wire. Or sheets of tin, like in the picture here.
But if you have money for an iron fence, or a cement wall with an iron gate, you have one built.

Sometimes, menacing signs help. Like this sign.  I was scared at first. But wait….Perro bravo?

My ethnically Italian sensibilities told me that this must mean “good dog” in English.  As in bravo, bravo, applause.

My bilingual friends corrected me: “It means the dog is fierce, brave. Beware of dog.”

“But where is that dog in the picture?” my son says, looking around the yard we’re standing in.  It’s a commercial business on land with what appears to be the owner’s private home in the back. Perro Bravo was nowhere to be seen.

“Well, maybe he’s asleep,” I offer.  “It’s pretty hot out this afternoon.”

“Or maybe…there IS no perro,” my other son said.

Now the kid is starting to get the picture, I thought to myself.

In between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, there is a border that is more or less two borders, because the Nicaraguans want people to enter from Costa Rica, then go through a no man’s zone, then enter their own special border that is fully theirs on both sides.

It reminded me of the mid- to late-80s when I traveled back and forth between West and East Berlin…only it was never so stinking hot in either Berlin as it was here.

If you work as a Central American truck driver, be prepared for your ass to sit at this border for the entire day. Keep out unless you are willing to enter and exit on our terms. This is the message to everyone who crosses here, even trucks carrying necessities and export goods.

I felt sorry for the Nicaraguans who spend each day here, either as officials, or as semiofficial immigration go-betweens nicknamed “coyotes,” and above all for the scores of others who peddle cashews, sweets, cold drinks, or crafts. They have jobs, though, no matter how hellish the jobs seem in the heat and humidity. It’s a better situation for them to be here in this hellhole than in many other parts of the country, where people barely get by on less than a dollar a day.  Where infants die of pneumonia in tin shacks.