The Throwaway: “ I live under a tree full of mangoes and yet I starve” (How I Found Substack)

Another Nicaragua tale: Neo-colonies act in the same way colonies of yesteryear did. You can break a country down to who inhabits the land that isn’t from there. For instance, Belize is an American colony, because the most prevalent expat and tourist community there comes from the United States. San Pedro La Laguna in Guatemala is an Israeli colony; although most of the tourism comes from Europeans, the establishments there are mostly all owned by a youthful Israeli occupying force. Which brings me to Nicaragua, specifically the Island of Ometepe. Here you will find the largest Canadian expat group I have ever come across in my travels. You have all sorts, but the predominant archetype of the Canadian expat is the hypermasculine (whether male or female), hyper-conservative, white person, who fits every box of his American counterpart, but refuses to place himself in the same light, because for some reason Canadians have a great PR team when it comes to how the world views them, and the United States might as well be using OJ Simpson's face as our flag, the way the rest of the white world hates us.

The Canadian

This brings me to Francois, a Canadian expat who did not fit the mold of the other expats on the island. Instead, he represented something different. Something that at first seemed silly and of a movie director's fantasy, but quickly, after getting to know his intentions on the island, became scary and of a director's real-life cultural analysis. Francois at first came across as an old gay white man who, for his own reasons, decided to move to Nicaragua in pursuit of some sort of freedom his access to capital could bring him. When I met him, he had been in months-long negotiations with the Finca I had been living in to buy out the property that sat above the main building and live there for the extent it took him to build his own house on a plot of land he had bought in a different area of the island. Francois was a man who could talk your ear off, and as the months went on and I started to see him more and more on the property, the more he would talk at me and the more he would talk about his purpose and what he was doing on the island. Francois had ambitions of building out a village on the island where he would have the locals and their children live and work as a community. He would teach the practices and beliefs of some UFO-based religion, which, for this specific UFO religion, the followers believe that you could free yourself and take yourself to higher dimensions of the fourth, fifth, and even eleventh degree. Francois had the idea that he had already escaped death and that when the aliens come, he will be one of the chosen ones to transcend and leave Earth and his old useless body behind, and he wanted to teach this practice to the natives. Would I have to bring up the countless times we have seen this archetype of fringe white lunatic who moves to a remote area in the hopes of cultivating a community through religion, ultimately to take over said community as a cult?

Around the time Francois became more comfortable telling me more about his fringe ideas on religious expression, I met a girl named Serena, who had been staying at the Finca for a few days, but we never talked. For some reason, while working at the reception, I decided to strike up a conversation with her about Francois. Maybe because I wanted to warn her about the crazy man in the cabin behind the building, maybe because I wanted a reason to talk to the cute girl, or maybe it was because I wanted to show how smart I was to break down this guy and psychoanalyze him, and I would only be able to do that with a fellow English speaker. Whatever it may have been, I invited her to dinner that night, and she said yes.

At dinner, we talked about what can make a man become so fringe, where his entire ideology is built around half-baked ideas about aliens and alternate dimensions. Big religion and the Jonestown massacre aside, there is something fundamentally different about using smaller, more niche ideologies to give your life meaning. I speculated that through some sort of trauma Francois had as a child in his community led him to the beliefs that he had felt. Maybe for being teased for being a bit too feminine, or maybe for being outed as a homosexual. It could also be the bane of having to live under societal norms and never actually live as the true you. The countless possibilities everyday brings to just snap when operating in society and keeping up with the status quo becomes just too unbearable. We sat through dinner discussing these different topics around Francois, and Serena had the lovely idea of me creating a Substack to write about these topics and also the countless tales of my travels up to that point I had only been sharing with a pen pal of mine back in Oakland.

The German

“I live under a tree full of mangoes and yet I starve” is one of the first things he said to us as he entered our conversation. A German fellow, who had been listening to me and Serena yam about the crazy fringe Canadian, decided to join in on the conversation. What a choice of words, too. A statement highlighting the capitalistic system that has every human in a chokehold, where even if you are hungry, you cannot eat from the tree that sits beside you because the fruit on that tree is already accounted for and will be shipped off by the company that owns it to some supermarket to eventually be left for waste in someone's fruit container in their fridge. He told us he too was interested in making a Substack, and I, for the first time ever in my life hearing about Substack, was thrilled that two people I had relatively just met who seemed to be intellectuals were all thinking about getting this miracle app to share interesting articles with the world. But that fun was quickly halted, and me and Serena for the rest of the night gave each other those silent looks two people give each other when the third is full of it. The German fellow ultimately told us he was an acquaintance of Francois and he was aware of Francois’s rhetoric and the dangers of Francois' future cult. No big deal, we were all on the same page with that, but what made this man equally, or if not worse, than Francois was his own ideology.

For the German man, the answer to starving while under the fruit tree or to suffering in general wasn’t to pray to God or to have a socioeconomic solution to the problem. His answer wasn’t akin to freeing yourself to a higher dimension so when the aliens come they save you and leave the rest to perish. The German's answer and solution was that half of humanity needed to perish so that the other half could learn a lesson on the importance of life. When he told us this, me and Serena looked at each other, and I thought to myself, “behind every white boy fringe radical is a secret fascist, or a secret Thanos in a Hugo Boss uniform.” This man was a walking Third Reich infinity gauntlet. I started to probe and ask more questions at this point—wanting to get down to the bottom of who dies and who gets to live. I can only sum up his answers into German white excellence/supremacy disguised as “no other option”—delivered in such a matter-of-factly way he might as well have been an employee at a supermarket agentic-ly reading out the store policy.

These brash and extreme ideals are not only the thoughts of these two unhinged white men. Many of the free-spirited or alt-types I have met while traveling have this idea of a necessary cosmic ending or an ending to the human race. Whether it be mass extinction, genocide, or the transition from being a real physical person to an 11th-dimensional idea. Many of the white long-term travelers I have met hold one of these ideas or something akin to them. There is this idea of traveling the world for this great wisdom and also treating the natives in any select area as lambs that they are the shepherd for. They feel in many ways that they can be this great free-spirited white hope to a group of people that have not asked for their help, but because these messiahs know how to connect their lunatic ideas to ancient indigenous teachings that many young indigenous people of today are desperately trying to get back to, it gives them and the people a false sense of legitimacy.