Madison resident Douglas Haynes’ new book, Every Day We Live Is the Future, tells the story of neighboring families in Managua, Nicaragua. But its actual subject is a bit broader than that — the fate of the planet.
Haynes, a nonfiction writer who teaches at UW-Oshkosh, made regular visits over the course of more than 10 years to this beleaguered Central American country, immersing himself in the lives of two strong-willed but often unlucky women, Dayani Baldelomar and Yadira Castellón. They live with their families in The Widows, a shantytown near the ever-encroaching Lake Managua — a.k.a. “the world’s biggest toilet.”
Like the waters of Lake Managua, the message of this University of Texas Press book sort of creeps up on you. These two families represent untold millions of people across the globe forced to deal with disasters both natural and human made, including global warming. As Haynes observes, “Central America is one of the regions most affected by climate change and one of the least responsible for it.”
Haynes’ subjects, who he follows through major and minor life events, live in constant peril, subjected to earthquakes, droughts and biblical downpours. Dayani and Yadira work fantastically hard, getting up hours before dawn to vend at distant markets, one of the ways people in this region make money without actually having jobs. Yet they remain desperately poor and downtrodden, taking care of their families as best they can. Each has a severely disabled child. One dies; the other hangs on, treated with all the tenderness any family could muster.
These people’s lives, and their tenacity, may seem extraordinary. But the point of Haynes’ book is that they are not. This is how a huge and growing segment of the planet’s population lives — on the edge of catastrophe, packed into cities that are ill-prepared to accommodate them.
“By 2020,” Haynes writes, “two out of three workers on the planet will be informally employed.” He cites a United Nations prediction that “by 2050, three billion people might live in shantytowns and favelas — almost half of the world’s projected urban population.”
Haynes’ book, as the title conveys, is both about the realities of the present and the potentialities of the future. And the future is frightening.
