My Warm Scottish Stomach

From shopping in Tesco to living with Nicaraguan farmers ...

Growing up in Glasgow, we bought most of our groceries from Tesco and Asda, wrapped up in plastic or cans with labels on them.

My exposure to nature was through walks, led by my father through ambitious sections of the Scottish outdoors, accompanied by the chorus of - my feet are wet Daddy, the sandwiches are frozen Daddy.

I went on occasional bramble foraging with my brother, on a strip of land between our garden and the local secondary school, turning our fingers purple as we ignored my mother calling us to come to bed.

And on summer holidays to my grandparents, who lived on an island in the Hebrides, where amongst the white sandy beaches, we would pick jumping creatures out of rock pools and I remember seeing dead things - like rotting seals and upturned sheep - which would put me off my dinner and turn me into an adamant vegetarian by the age of twelve.

The circuitous path of progress

While I had some contact with nature, I was not connected to it beyond how it looked aesthetically and what activities I could do in it. I appreciated it but I did not know it.

I was encouraged into systems where I got an education and then a job, all processes which were assumed to happen one after another, but which, due to my reluctance to find a job in commercial law in Scotland, led me to a more circuitous route (involving aggressive CV sending and evening volunteering) into the International Development sector. This ultimately led to me working in rural Nicaragua at the age of 24.

Learning to live in the Nicaraguan countryside

In Nicaragua, I noticed the ways the farmers I worked with paid attention to the natural world. Walking through rural landscapes, they saw not - pretty green things - but fruits and vegetables, which were identifiable by the shape of their leaves and which had a character, a purpose and a name.

My own relationship with the Nicaraguan countryside was based more around fear. Being in rural Nicaragua was a much wilder experience than traipsing up Ben Lomond. While in Scotland nature was conserved, contained and to some extent colonised, so that it became relate-able to humans, (the forests maintained by government bodies, the wild wolf gone). In Nicaragua, nature felt like it could take over.

Footpaths were cut before me, through thick jungles by large men holding machetes. The hillsides loomed around the villages I visited, covered with rough vegetation and wild animals. Not a site for weekend hikes and largely untouched by humans, apart from guerrilla groups during the civil war. A walk to a nearby waterfall was dusty and dangerous, as men, circled me and dogs rushed out from houses along the path, bearing their teeth: my one attempt at a Sunday stroll.

The laws were no longer my laws

More than the obvious wildness, my fear was in the unknown, in the quietness which descended at dark. The Nicaraguan countryside was no paradise, it was wildly unsettling. Not only in the unchartered paths, the gleaming machetes or the creatures which worked their way through the gaps under the doors of my rooms and clattered across the corrugated iron roofs through the night. But in the respect it demanded, in its control over the world around me.

The laws were no longer my laws, justice was not my justice and as soon as night settled in, as soon as the bus left me in rural Nicaragua, I had to accept that. Even if I did not want to.

As a recent law graduate, I did not like the intrusion of this wild creature, which did not have a written set of rules and which would not behave the way I expected.

I did not enjoy the rustle in the corner of my room after dark, or the loud stamp of the cow, as I slipped past her on my way to the outside bathroom. I especially did not enjoy the exhaustion that being in the countryside seemed to have on my body, of the way the food and long walks tore through me, leaving me tired and depleted.

The farmer’s stories

Farmers would tell me stories: of those who died by snakebites, of how they sourced their own water, grew their own food, contended with phantoms and ghosts on the path, carried the ill out on donkeys down craggy paths and across flooded rivers. I also heard stories of incest, of sexual abuse, all hidden in the hillsides. In these places where the government rarely came, where justice was a thing decided by a few powerful locals and the hillsides themselves.

I was to some degree protected by my whiteness, in other ways, at the mercy of it. As my intestines struggled with the local food and nature itself took root inside of me: a collection of amoebas which despite rounds of antibiotics and anti-parasite medication, determinedly took up residence in my warm Scottish stomach.

Fate, phantoms and farming

Nature wasn’t simple in Nicaragua, you couldn’t shut your door on it at the end of the day. No one took it for granted and the people around me knew that. They did not expect to have dominion over her, but to be in wild relationship with her, because for them, life and livelihood was shaped by an acceptance of the way nature is. They shaped themselves around that wildness, not the other way around. Fate, phantoms and farming, all built to fit that reality.

My own journey in Nicaragua had many other twists and turns, but what I took from this experience, was a necessary loss of my Western education, of the idea that I could conquer to achieve.

That I could analyse, order and understand the world into something that fit my expectations. Instead, I gained, as a young aid worker, an understanding of my own powerlessness to fix, to change or to save. Nicaragua would go on with or without me. That was the natural order of things.

Fitting into wildness

When I think of modern climate solutions, I think often of the Nicaraguan farmers, who imperfectly, let nature be what it was. Who fit themselves into her patterns. Who were in a relationship based on humility and respect - however brutal, inelegant or magical that could be.

And I have taken that with me, for better or worse, no longer believing that we can order the world the way like. We must instead find the courage to accept that we are part of the natural world and find out, not how to control her, but how to work with her.