Okay, here’s the set-up: It’s 9 p.m., full moon, on the main drag outside of Granada’s central park in Nicaragua. Happy hour has been running for a delicious three hours. With my back against the curb, I’m sitting here watching a group of 12 or so UW gringos vulture platters of 50-cent mojitos until they actually drink the bar dry. Tonight you will meet Louis, John Oliver and little Louisito.

Louis is to my right — a 28-year-old native ‘Nica’ (Nicaraguan) wearing army pants and a mud-trampled wife beater that shows off his questionable selection of a grim-reaper tattoo haloed by the letters L-O-V-E crudely inked on his right bicep. His cuff-style earrings are the colors of the Jamaican flag — one with a marijuana leaf and the other with a yin-yang (which he pronounces “jing jang”). We had met earlier that day in the central park over his table of handcrafted jewelry where I made him smile with my mad haggling skills, and I was equally charmed by his silver-toothed grin. In a country where the average salary is a measly $3 a day, it made me glow inside to know that my 230 cordoba ($13 USD) for a handmade necklace will contribute enormously to his dream of purchasing a passport (350 cordobas) that will allow him to travel Latin America as an artisan.

To my left is the legendary John Oliver (would you believe that’s his real name?), an Afro-Carribean artist with chest-length dreads and missing front teeth. He earns a living by stealing crumbled chunks of gray cement off of the local church and painting them with bright sunset scenes, using the fabric on his tattered shorts as a palette. The foreigners go crazy for them. An old gun shot wound to his right leg and a backpack bursting full of jagged pieces of heavy cement make his unmistakable staggering walk and happy approach well-known around Granada.

Charmingly round, like a darker, latino version of Spanky from The Little Rascals, Louisito and I become instant friends when he uses his pudgy little fingers to rattle off the numbers one through 70 in English. At age 9, Louisito, like nearly every other boy in Nicaragua, must act as a wage earner for his family when he is not in school. Jobs are scarce (as revealed by a 65 percent unemployment rate), so he’s had to get creative. Like John Oliver, he too wanders the streets, only instead of hoofing heavy rocks, he carries a plastic water bottle full of gasoline, a lighter and a set of torches that he uses to dazzle crowds of foreigners with a sort of fire show. Especially after a few mojitos, it often inspires them to dump wallets full of change into his little baseball cap. Despite being a gringo myself, he never asked me for money; he just wanted to talk and I loved that.

The candidness, sincerity and plain real-ness of the whole evening was so refreshing. Next up is finals week back in Costa Rica, after which much of the group will be splitting off to travel Central America on diverse itineraries. What a way to polish off my last night in Nicaragua.

Reach columnist Megan Taylor at features@thedaily.washington.edu.