What A Difference a Year Makes

In Catholic Nicaragua, the month of December belongs to the  Virgin.  We celebrated Nicaragua’s exclusive holiday, La Purisima, on December 7, and 5 days later Our Lady of Guadalupe had her day of parades attended by little Juan Diegos with corked mustaches. Now the Catholics are getting ready for La Navidad (I am told, by a Catholic, that the evangelicals don’t celebrate Christmas and I’ll watch to see if that’s true.) I’m in my pueblo for the holidays, as I was last year, unlike most volunteers who return home to the States. I worried about that decision, but now that it’s made I am content to be here, in part because this Christmas promises to be so happy and rich compared to the last one.

Candida is in full preparation mode.  The tree and assorted decorations went up two weeks ago, but now she is cleaning every square inch of this house and washing every washable item and painting faded walls and hitherto unpainted surfaces.  The old blue and yellow slip covers are gone.  Tomorrow or Friday the red slip covers will appear.  The Christmas food is bought. I have had the traditions recited to me and, bless her and her family, I am included in them all.  On the 24^th the family will stop by our house bringing gifts for Candida and she will have been cooking since the early hours so she can feed all and sundry who drop by.  Then at 8 we go to church—a three hour mass!- which I will attend in the spirit of the season, while reserving the right to leave from time to time when the wooden pews get too much for my back as they assuredly will.  At 11 we open presents.  At midnight  there are fireworks—lots of loud fireworks—and then there is a dinner at the house of Candida’s sister Celia.  Not much happens on the 25 except recovery from the full Christmas Eve.

My contribution to the festivities will be Christmas cookies which I have been planning for some time.  I got recipes from the internet.  I searched out and bought big round pans which will serve for cookie sheets.  One of my friends from the States brought me decorations and real vanilla.  I hunted up baking powder and powdered sugar and real butter so I am ready to go. I have great plans to bake , ice and decorate three kinds of cookies, wrap them in cellophane and deliver them to my friends in town: Yamileth who taught me to make tortillas this week (while the kids in the family laughed their heads off at the sight of me and my misshapen tortillas); the family of Doña Dora who never charges me the customary 10% to  put more time on my phone; my directora and counterparts; the family of Doña Marisol which is always sharing food with me; Laydi, the lovely librarian and my co-teacher of the little kids; Isolina, the custodian and my friend at the high school; Hazel, the school secretary; Adriana, the owner of the ciber who gives me a discount and solves my computer problems; and the large extended family of my host mom.

I am filled with happiness these days, beginning with my return to the pueblo after a week’s absence and finding people so glad to see me back.  The place feels like home.  Grooving on this spirit for the past week (I’ve learned to groove while you can because something somewhere is going to change the mood—that’s the lesson of emotional life for volunteers here) , I couldn’t help but reflect on my last Christmas here.  I had been in my site for a month, with nothing to do but try to “integrate” into the community.  My Spanish wasn’t even passable by Peace Corps standards, I was living in a house where I felt like an unwelcome tenant, I knew no one (the teacher counterparts disappeared as soon as vacation started) and I was engaged in a daily struggle to lift up my heart and keep on going.  On Christmas Eve I lay awake in my bed listening to the family open gifts and prepare to set off fireworks, feeling as isolated as a plague victim. Nothing like that this year. I’m interested in why the shift, aside from the obvious answers—your Spanish is better and you have a good home to live in and you know more people.  Some of the change comes from a change in me.

Instead of assuming I’m a bother to the people of my town, they have taught me that I’m useful, interesting in a foreign kind of way, funny sometimes in a laugh- with as well as a laugh- at way, and, best of all, part of the landscape.  When I walk into a store I feel that I provide a vague sort of diversion, as though people would say over lunch, “That gringa was in today.  She bought tomatoes and rice.  She lives in Pensilbania.” Or “She likes Nicaragua.” And the listeners would say, “Ah, si.”

 I am certainly not a tourist.  I like to think that to the people in my pueblo, I am their gringa. I trust that in a crunch people would take care of me.  Fantasy?  Entirely possible.  Why should my impressions, so madly wrong in the past, be any more accurate about this?  No reason, but it’s my belief anyhow.

Mood soberer:  Not 10 minutes ago (it’s Christmas day now) 3 ragged children came to the door.  I took me a few tries to understand that they wanted me to be the “madrina” for one of the boys who looked to be 8  or 9. That’s “godmother” but implies someone who will provide financially for the child.  The boy was wearing the kind of rubber boots people use to work in wet fields.  He wanted shoes.  I explained that I cannot be a madrina because so many people would want my help and I can’t help them all. I told him where he might be able to get shoes (Tom’s operates in this part of Nicaragua). But he looked at me so steadily, the way people here who want something look, as if to say I am asking and hoping. When you say no, the look doesn’t change.  It says, “You can’t blame me for asking and I can’t blame you for saying no, although I want you to say yes.”  This look tears me up.  It also makes me defensive (What are you asking me for?)  In Ocotal one day recently a girl asked me to buy oranges with the same look.  When I said know, she said “Soy pobre.”  “I’m poor.” What do you say?  I’m sorry. There’s no getting around the request or the need to say no.

Merry Christmas to all.

The Usual Mix

The following is a list—with elaboration—of what’s gone right this week and what’s gone wrong. Or as we say in the ever-positive Peace Corps, what were the successes and the challenges:

1.      One of the kids who got into the Access program dropped by to tell me all about it, already using double the English he could before, and so pleased with his opportunity he practically floats.

2.      Candida bought collars and leashes for the dogs, after they escaped one day this week while she was in the shower. Help, she called to me as I walked in from a morning of teaching.  I asked some people in the street who miss nothing of the little that is going on, including the direction taken by run-away dogs.  The dogs headed for the highway which runs by the town, and by the time I got down there I could see in the distance their tails on the OTHER side of the road.  They were headed off into a barrio, but by the time I got there they had disappeared into it.  Disheartened I returned to tell Candida that I had lost their trail, at which point a group of about 6 neighborhood boys ran up, triumphantly carrying the 2 dogs.  I learned later that while I was running all over, Candida, much smarter, had offered a small reward to the group of kids who just happened to be passing, and they spread out all over town till they found the dogs. The dogs don’t much like the collars and leashes Candida bought the same day as the great escape, but she likes them a lot.  She ties the dogs up on the porch and, proudly, she takes them for a one or two block walk, Dogi trotting along compliantly but Bobi refusing to move his legs so that the “walk” is more like a “drag”. Dogi and Bobi don’t appreciate their good fortune. They are pampered dogs.  I can count on one hand the number of dogs in this town that have collars, never mind leashes.

3.      I didn’t teach much this week.  Usually I have a full load, but PC has a rule that we don’t teach if we haven’t co-planned the classes with our counterpart teachers.  Various and sundry circumstances intervened to scotch the co-planning (my teachers and I are really good about this usually.)  So I had time on my hands—and I enjoyed every minute.   This is an advance for me.  For a while here I relied on work here to a large degree to keep me kind of balanced and centered, along with other techniques which would make an interesting blog paragraph sometime. This week I had no trouble staying centered and happy without much work.  I did some yoga, read a bit more, took a few naps, did a fun presentation on 2 American holidays—Halloween and Thanksgiving—for the Access class in Somoto, traveled to a town a half hour away to pick up my medicine from another volunteer who brought it from Managua and to have an altogether delicious ice cream cone (chocolate with almonds), observed a few classes, ran into another volunteer in Somoto and had coffee with her just like in the States.  In short, I enjoyed just living. Back to the grind next week.

4.      Every night at 6 o’clock the synthesizer at the evangelical church up the street and around the corner starts up for two hours of musical renditions.  There also may be drums and a guitar.  There is always amplification and there is always singing so that the whole town is treated to the religious expressions of others.  The singing, always by only one person, is heartfelt but is amplified dissonance.  The guitar is way out of tune. (I hesitate to suggest that this might be an evangelical tradition, but in one house I lived in there was a family of evangelicals with a horridly tuned guitar which was played by and accompanied a man with an equally tuneless voice; and my Spanish teacher of several months ago, also a guitar teacher, told me that he was so offended by the sound of the guitars coming from an evangelical church that he offered his services gratis to tune the guitars, an offer declined by the church members. Draw your own conclusions.) Someone told me that this nightly service is attended by only 4 or 5 people, but they obviously get a lot from the amplification and the chance to sing.  I have grown accustomed to the 6 o’clock serenade, but nearly every night I think that it would never be tolerated in the States.  The police would be called.  Petitions would be got up.  An ordinance would be passed.  But people here don’t complain at all.    People don’t have the kind of ego that is readily offended by the actions of others. They don’t take the actions of others as intentional assaults on their own sensibilities.  Or maybe they eschew confrontation or the imposition of their own will on others. There is a modest sweetness to the lack of indignation, to the live and let live tolerance. The longer I’m here the more I admire it.

5.      I have been bitten by bugs during the night for the last couple of weeks. They leave painful welts.  I know they are not mosquitos.  I tried to study the pattern of the bites—often two close by, only on my torso, usually in front, only while I’m sleeping. I didn’t think they were bed bugs, too big.  Maybe spiders, but it slowly dawned that they had to be in or on my bed. Or maybe in my nightgown.  I started wearing a long sleeved shirt to bed.  No help.  So I called a PC doctor who said to strip the bed and wash the bed clothes.  He said to use bug spray on the bed and set it in the sun for a couple of hours.  I told Candida about the problem and showed her the bites.  I followed doctor’s orders except for the sun part.  We don’t get direct sun at my house, usually a great blessing. After taking all these steps, I came home from school to find that Candida went one further.  Although not two weeks ago I had thoroughly cleaned my room, she cleaned it again and more thoroughly, moving the heavy bed and the wardrobe to get every speck of dust—I’m embarrassed to say a dustpanful—which she showed me as if to imply that my notion of thorough missed the mark by a good bit.  She’s right—I’ve always valued tidy over clean. I was ashamed that she had had to clean my room, but grateful, so that night I made a big batch of macaroni and cheese, a favorite of hers, to share.  No new bites have appeared. I have my fingers crossed.

You can see that the successes outnumber the challenges, but the just plain living is what it’s all about.

Turning 68 in Nicaragua

It’s true—I just celebrated my 68^th birthday and will celebrate one more before I leave Nicaragua next year.  How did I get so old? Pushing 70, but feeling 50.  On reflection, I wouldn’t take the reverse, pushing 50 and feeling 70.

My birthday was pretty great.  I got to talk to my two sons.  I made a carrot cake, the first baking I’ve done here in Nicaragua because people are pretty reluctant to use ovens due to the cost of gas. But since I pay for half of the gas in my house and use much less than half of it, I asked Candida if I could celebrate my birthday by making a cake. Of course, she said yes. The cake went together pretty well.  I found all the ingredients except baking powder so added a little more soda and hoped for the best.  The oven has 4 settings—1,2,3,and 4.  God knows to what temperature they correspond.  I set it at 4 and took my chances. Probably it was a little too hot as the bottom of the cake had just started to burn when I rescued it from the oven.  But the burn didn’t affect the taste and the cake was pretty good.  Candida and I tried it warm with queso Americano (kind of like cream cheese) on it.  Then I cut it into pieces and took some of them around to people in town I like, people who have been kind to me.  I’ll deliver some more tomorrow if the election permits.

Tomorrow the municipal elections in Nicaragua take place. They are really important as the municipality is, I’d guess, the biggest employer here, so jobs are connected to election results. And political feelings are high, conflicts between the sandanistas and the liberals.  Elections are occasions for possible violence and so Peace Corp has us on “stand fast”, confined to our sites for 3 days. Tonight I was talking to Candida and learned that there had been some fighting in town today. I hadn’t seen or heard it.  It involved about 10 people, she said, but no weapons.  So I’ll take this one seriously and stay inside, as she advises.

I spent some of the day cleaning my room, getting rid of cobwebs and moving stuff around to mop the floors. This is the first thorough cleaning I’ve given it and, aside from staving off boredom, I thought it was a good thing to do to mark not only my birthday but also the year-to-go mark.  At this time next year I’ll be packing to leave.

The best birthday present of all came in a telephone call I received from Carlos of the Access program.  If you read the blog entry entitled “If God Wills It” you know that I was pretty bummed by the slim chances that my 5 students had to be accepted into the program.  Well, God apparently willed it because Carlos called to say that he could take 4 of the 5, the fifth one being too young for the program by a couple of months.  I am dumbfounded.  I thought for sure the kids were out of luck.  And I’d hop in a taxi or walk down to their community tomorrow to give them the good news but for the stand fast. So tonight I am a happy camper, stuffed with carrot cake, heart bursting with happiness for my kids, the room cobweb free and swept. But there are two more days of stand fast and I can feel signs of cabin fever growing.

The Best Day Ever

The Best Day Ever

Well, maybe not the BEST day, but a damn fine one.  There were no classes today.  Instead the teachers broke into teams to visit the communities and to chat with the parents of failing students.  (An aside: The 23 communities are widespread.  No one uses mail to communicate.  There is no delivery and it costs to send letters. Telephone communication costs money, too, and besides no one to my knowledge has all the phone numbers.  So the teachers visit.  I’m betting this is a requirement of the Department of Education, left to the end of the year by our school.  With two weeks of classes to go, you wonder what effect can come from the parental contact.  Why didn’t they do this at the start of the second semester when there’d have been time for the visit to do some good?  Ask and despair.)

Anyway, I jumped at the opportunity to sit in on this one and showed up early at the bus stop of a near-by community to wait for the others.  A teacher from my school lives in that town and was just leaving the house of a relative on his way to another community.  This teacher and I like each other.  He tries to speak English and this morning he was doing just great.  We had a brief exchange in English during which he invited me into the house for coffee and rosquillas. Of course, I went, with time to spare and someone new to meet.  Profe Ozmán had to take off but he left me in the loving hands of his family who could not get enough of me.  It’s hard to describe what it’s like being the object of such beaming affection by people who have so little.   There is such kindness, no sense of me as the rich American and they the resentful poor, only a genuine pleasure to meet a new and different person whom they have decided they already like and to find out what they can about her.  This is the famed Nica hospitality at its best. Eventually, I had to go, but any time I am invited to return to that house for more coffee, rosquillas and conversation.

We started out the family visits in teams of two, I with a counterpart.  She and I decided to speak only English as we walked from house to house.  She, too, was in good form today and we had real communication as we walked around the town.  I watched her in action in one household, the parents pulling out the ubiquitous plastic chairs (2) for us to sit in while they stood (no other chairs) with the kid present to witness the teacher explaining that he was intelligent but refused to obey rules or do any work. I admired her skill with this awkward situation, the boy and his parents humiliated, having to respond, to agree with the authority, but trying to find reasons or excuse themselves.  Had this conversation taken place a few months ago it just might have done some good.

We ended up at two different houses where there were no parents, only overworked grandmothers. In one, an ancient grandmother, wearing ancient flip-flops repaired with string, invited us to sit as honored guests.  She explained that the boy about whom we had come, a very short, hyper-active kid who does nothing but make trouble, is the son of a mother who lives about 20 miles away with her boyfriend and does not want the boy. The rest of the family pitches in as they can, but the grandmother is the person in charge and she cannot control him.  He cries, she tells us, because his mother doesn’t want him with her. My counterpart and I were subdued.  I asked if anyone in the family had influence with the boy.  The grandmother went next door and brought over an aunt, a young woman who is studying at the university on Saturdays.  She acknowledges the challenge but says no one had been able to help.

At the house of the other grandmother, the story was similar.  The student’s mother lived a distance with her boyfriend and the child was left with the grandmother who could not control her.  At fourteen, she had an eighteen old boyfriend she spent time with.  He, according to the grandmother, neither studied nor worked. The girl’s poor grades are the least of her worries, it seems. (Another aside: I heard stories like this in the States often, parents abandoning their children to grandparents to raise.  But here, when added to the number of kids whose parents are absent because they work in other countries, the census of poorly cared for children further burdens an already plagued school system, has effects for classroom management and bodes ill for the institutional strength of the family.)

I got back to my town in time to get to the ciber before lunch.  My goal: to get to vote in the election on November 6.  The background:  I arranged for an absentee ballot before I left the U.S.  There was a change in the law last year and I had to register again in on the federal level.  I thought I’d done that on line, but I never received my ballot. Needless to say, I was pretty unhappy, in despair of fighting the bureaucracy from Nicaragua, and I’d given up when another volunteer urged me to try to see what I could do to get the ballot.  I called my voter registration office at home and, guess what, someone—Penny—actually answered the phone and helped me.  I had to fill out the form again and email it to her.  She is supposed to send me a ballot.  I have to print the ballot and mail it tomorrow, getting it postmarked.  So, “Si dios lo quiere,” I’ll be able to vote, just one vote, but in a swing state, and that makes me very happy.

The Best Day Ever ended with my trip to a town about a half hour away where Peace Corps has just sent a new English teacher volunteer—a compañera up here in the North.  I must say it’s been a little lonely up here and I’ve been looking forward to someone else to work and talk with.  They sent a great person, an intelligent,  self- confident young  woman.  We talked for two hours in the park, enjoying the company and the surprisingly cool breeze (the rainy season is over—we’re heading into winter, shorter days, cool nights).  The volunteer is only visiting, but will return to her site at the end of November and we’ll hang out some, I think.

So, I’m writing tonight in a long sleeve shirt, having made macaroni and cheese for dinner, tea and homemade yoghurt with honey for dessert.  No work for 4 days. Maybe I vote tomorrow. Life is good.

If God Wills IT

If God Wills It

I read somewhere an exchange among some volunteers about the attitude revealed by the phrase, “Si dios lo quiere”, which you hear a lot in Nicaraguan conversations.  It means “if God wants it or wills it” and implies that people  can make their plans but they may not happen.  To a North American ear it sounds indefinite.  “Will I meet you at 10?” “If God wills it”.  The discussion among the volunteers lamented the powerlessness they hear in the phrase. Some of them thought that it revealed a lack of commitment or strength of intention. It showed, they thought, a tendency to avoid responsibility for one’s obligations.

I was thinking of that phrase last Monday as I walked the half kilometer to the empalme to catch a bus to Ocotal, carrying with me the carefully assembled applications of five of my students for the Access program starting up in Ocotal for the first time in November.  Access offers free English classes to 24 students.  The commitment is a big one for the students—2 hours a day, Monday through Friday, for two years, but the results of the program are impressive.  Kids learn to speak pretty good English after one year.  The program is supposed to be for the poorest students and if the student lives a distance from the city, it pays for his or her transportation.  As I think I’ve written before, it’s an excellent use of tax-payer dollars.

The assembling of these applications had been a hurried affair for many reasons, but they were done. I had written five recommendations for these students in whom I believe.  The deadline for submission was noon and I was aware of the hope I carried in my bag.  It occurred to me that any number of things could prevent the delivering of these documents by the deadline.  The bus could break down, there might not be a taxi at the bus station, the taxi driver might not know where the office I was looking for was located (this last actually happened).  Just getting the documents assembled was not the end of the process and in a country where the best efforts can be easily foiled, anything can happen and who knows how God is feeling about any particular endeavor.

We don’t honor randomness much in the States.  We think we can control outcomes by working hard enough, by the force of will-power and stick-to-it-tiveness.  At least I admit to having that attitude when I worked at home.  And it dogs me still here in Nicaragua.   I was talking to one counterpart about the difference between the two outlooks.  When I explained that Americans often think they can make just about anything happen, she laughed aloud.  Then, afraid she had given offense, she went on to declare her admiration for American intelligence and work ethic, but not to acknowledge our dependence or forces outside ourselves, that was just plain silly.

What I want to address is the experience of the two points of view in my life here in Nicaragua. I can actually feel myself puff up when I am in norteamericano, getting-things-done mode.  The assembling of the Access applications is an example.  I was all over that one.  One student couldn’t get a document she needed until after the deadline.  I was shooting off emails requesting the right to submit the document electronically.  Made it happen. Puff up a little more.

But then, having delivered the documents, God apparently having been willing that I do that, I learned that there were over 60 applications for the 24 places in class, that some of my students’ application essays lacked sufficient words, and worst, that the class is only offered in the morning, when my students have their regular high school class.  Looks like they are out of luck. Ego deflation; no more puff.  I guess God didn’t will that one. 

Or maybe he will.  Maybe something will happen and the program will decide to offer two classes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon and the selection committee will be so impressed with my kids that it will pick all my students to enroll. Or who knows?   We’re in Nica waiting mode, our fates in the hands of others.

Dressing Like a Nica

In my house we have two cute little fluffy  almost white dogs, Dogi and Bobi, who like nothing better than pulling my clothes off the line and eating them.  I have rescued shirts and underpants that were dirty by the time I got to them, but not ruined.  My luck changed about a month ago. I woke up from a nap and went out to check on the progress of the clothes drying outside.  My jeans were hanging on the line looking a little dirty, but when I checked on them I found a hole the size of washcloth eaten out of the seat.  Candida had found them on the ground and hung them up, somehow not noticing the huge hole.  She was horrified when she saw what the dogs had done and had several suggestions, among them sewing the edges together, which would have left no room for my butt, and sewing a patch on the seat which even she had to admit would be hard to miss as I walked down the street.  No, there was nothing to do but buy a new pair of jeans.

The ruined jeans were my first pair of Nica jeans.  I had bought them for the outrageous price of $27. at a mall in Managua with the assistance of a younger volunteer who had scoped out the mall stores and knew where I could go.  I bought this first pair because the two pairs I had from home were much too big, I’m happy to say.  But when you make $200 a month, $27 is a big bite.  So I asked my counterparts and they told me where I could go locally to buy jeans for a better price.  I spent an hour trying them on, an ordeal just as bad in Nicaragua as in the States, worse because it’s hot work on a hot afternoon and because the dressing room is a space behind a door, but I found a good pair for half the Managua price, nice skinny stove-pipe legged jeans, dark blue.  They’re made in China, but what isn’t.  They bleed when washed, but they don’t bleed when dry. And I fit right in, now, with Nica women for whom tight jeans are a uniform, although mine are not tight all the way to the ankles as is the norm.

But Dogi and Bobi struck again.  Somehow they got out of their pen unobserved, streaked through my room and grabbed the top item in my laundry bag, which just happened to be one of the two bras I have that fit. I brought 5 to Nicaragua but they don’t fit any more.  My sister came to the rescue with 2 new bras, but that means I’m always washing one while wearing the other. The bra was discovered the next day in the dogs’ pen, torn to shreds. Candida, who never throws anything out and is forever optomistic, suggested hopefully that maybe I could sew it, but a serious look revealed how impossible that would be. 

Bras are a fashion statement here.  (Are they in the US?) They are to be seen either through a blouse or their straps are color co-ordinated with a top. You can buy them anywhere, in pulperias along with eggs and cheese and beans. So, clearly unable to operate with only one remaining U.S. bra, I went shopping at two local local pulperias.  At the first I was disconcerted to find that one of my students, a little 12 year old girl, waited on me.  She wasn’t at all embarrassed to show me what she had in my size (medium by U.S. standards but big here in Nicaragua where I tower over most women and many men). Unfortunately there wasn’t much, only one actually, a purple number with big baby blue circles on it. “Nothing in white or beige?”  I asked, not really in the Nica spirit.  No, she said sadly.  She would have liked to sell her teacher a bra.

 I hit the next pulperia and was waited on by the owner, a man who seemed a little worried about showing me his stock of bras.   But he put all of them on the counter along with a plastic bag.  I should help myself.  The closest thing I could find to beige or white in my size (really in any size) was a lemon yellow number.  I reasoned, most un-Nica-ly, that yellow might not show through most of my clothes and I asked the price.  Thirty cordobas, about a dollar and a half.  So I bought it.

The bra is a little low on quality. But the price is right.  It, too, was made in China. I am amazed to think of countries like China not only making clothes for first world countries like the U.S. but third world countries, too, the quality a little shakey but the price unbeatable. 

So thanks to Dogi and Bobi, I’m starting to look as much like a native as a gringa can here.  I’ve replaced a good deal of my original wardrobe with cheap ropas americanas shirts, at 50 cents to a dollar per shirt.  I have Nica hair ornaments to hold back and up my longer hair.  Only my shoes and my skin betray me.  And my hair color.  Despite suggestions from Nica friends that I might want to try to dye my hair to get rid of the gray (women of all ages here dye their hair; rarely do you see a gray haired old person), I’ve had no trouble resisting that idea.

The transformation is on-going.  I find myself in the pulperias, having bought tomatoes or eggs, lingering over the jewelry offered for sale, eying the big colorful plastic hoop earrings, the long dangles, the red or pink disks the size of can lids. Might just have to ante up the 10 cordobas to complete the look.

I'm attaching a picture of Smith, featured in my last blog entry.

Teaching Little Kids

A while back, when I was looking for projects, I headed over to the library to talk with the librarian to try out on her an idea I had.  I determined that since kids don’t have books, don’t read as a rule and are not read to, I would come to the library on some kind of schedule to read books to little kids.  The librarian’s name is Ladi and she is a gentle, thoughtful person who actually does read, the exception to the rule. The library is funded by the mayor’s office. There are books, but not many, and many they do have bear the stamp of one non-profit or another. There are some games and puzzles, too. The library is a gathering place for kids, little kids in the morning, when the instituto is in session, and big kids in the afternoon when the primary grades are in school.   Some come for help with school assignments. Ladi has patience and tolerance for all the noisy demanding kids and the skill to help them find something among her meager resources to help with an assignment or to pass the time.

I knew my idea had an obvious big flaw—my artless Spanish, but Ladi gently, quietly advised that while reading was good what the little kids really wanted was to learn how to speak English.  I really wasn’t excited about the idea of another English class, but agreed to give it if we could include 15 minutes of listening to stories in the hour each week I’d offer English. So Ladi  agreed and became my new counterpart.

The class has a core of 10 or 12 loyal attendees but the numbers swell every Wednesday depending on who is hanging out in the library at 9 o’clock and how fun whatever we are doing appears to passers-by.  The age range of the kids is wide—second to sixth grade. But, as I’ve said before, that isn’t a problem for the kids, and my little 2^nd graders hold their own in the skills of greetings, family members and animals, which, along with numbers and colors, has made up the curriculum.

I do get a kick out planning these classes. I love the elementary teacher-style materials.  For instance to practice greetings and introductions I made a cute set of finger puppets out of a couple of small pieces of folded paper which I stapled on each side to form a little pocket.  I put a face on each puppet and showed the kids how they could talk while the fingers wiggled them to life.  One demonstration ( “Hello, how are you?  My Name is Lucia.” “Nice to meet you, Lucia.  I’m fine.  My name is Marco.  Where do you live?”) was enough to get everyone drawing and stapling the supply of folded papers I brought to class.  When finished, everyone’s fingers talked to each other and then to their neighbor’s fingers—a great exercise because the kids did all the talking, practicing without embarrassment. 

But the best are the songs.  As I’ve written before, Nicaraguans love to sing.  To practice names of family members and greetings, I wrote a song to the tune of Frere Jacques: Mother, Father, Sister Brother, How are you? How are you?  I am glad to see you.  I am glad to see you.  See you soon.  See you soon.    Smash hit.  They can’t stop singing it.  I hear it in the streets as I’m walking by.  They break out in class   I thought we couldn’t top that until I taught them several animal names and then Old Mac Donald.  The chance to make all those animal noises brought the house down and, while pronouncing the words to the song posed some difficulty, there was none whatsoever with the ee-ay-ee-ay—oo. Everyone joined in on that one, loud and clear.

After 45 minutes of English I tell the kids to put their heads on their arms and Ladi reads a chapter from Charlotte’s Web (Spanish version).  I’m always pleased and gratified to watch them listening, resting and letting the words of a good story work their magic.

I now have a following among the elementary kids who flock around as they never did before my little library class.  Today school was cancelled for the Oct 12 celebration called the Day of Encounter—another story in itself.  I was attending the festivities when one of my 2^nd graders found me.  Wherever I moved there was Smith (pronounced Smit), peppering me with questions, and filling the others in on my answers. Here are two questions: “In the United States, do they hate morenos (darker skinned people)?” and “Do your sons have video games?”  Smith made sure I met his mother and his teacher.  I am his new best friend.   I’ll attach his picture to the next blog entry.

The Good Life

My host mom Candida lives on a street surrounded by her relations, most importantly her two sisters. Next door her sister Isabel lives.  The houses share a wall and in the wall there is a window so that the sisters can talk to each other without leaving their kitchens. They don’t do that much, though.  Isabel is older than Candida and they had different fathers.  Every morning when I get up early to read before the day starts, I sit by an open front door to watch the world, and Isabel, stick-thin, partly deaf and not seeing so well either, is out in the street, dressed for the day in her long skirt and old sweater before nearly anyone is about.  She is sweeping the gutters in from of her own house and Candida’s as well.  She is also trimming the plants in front of the houses by pinching off over-zealous runners and cutting off roses which end up in front of a Virgin in her house or maybe in the church. In Isabel’s house live assorted grown children, grandchildren and a great grandchild. Isabel is religious but she’s not a big church-goer unlike her two sisters. 

Abutting Isabel’s house on the other side is the house of the other sister, Dona Celia. Celia is closer in age to Candida than is Isabel, and Celia and Candida had the same father. Candida and Celia are very close.  They both spend the mornings working in their respective houses, but they spend most afternoons visiting each other.  Candida will walk up past Isabel’s house to Celia’s or Celia will walk into our house calling out for La Candita.

Candida and Celia have a lot in common. They are both taller than the average Nicaraguan. Both live alone (except, of course, for me in Candida’s house).  Both have married children and grandchildren in the pueblo, but both have unmarried daughters who live elsewhere. Both are pillars of the church, intensely religious.  There are differences, too.  Celia was a school teacher.  She is educated.  Candida refers me to her when I ask a question she can’t answer. That difference in education matters not at all as far as I can see in their devotion to each other.

Candida and Celia clearly love each other a lot, but there are occasional observable small rivalries among the sisters. For example, Celia just finished putting an addition on her house. I had observed the work from the street but couldn’t see much over the wall that fronts the house.  I had never been invited over to check out the results.  This week, however, Celia’s daughter Marta was visiting her mother.  I like Marta.  She’s 45, single and works for a non-profit in a city a distance from my town.  She has a responsible job working with orphaned or homeless kids.  She invited me over to see that addition which is really amazingly modern, tasteful and commodious. And you can see the differences in the taste and preferences of the two sisters. Celia’s house has greater formality and fewer chatchkes (sp?) like artificial flowers and tacky ceramics and religious icons. When I got back to my house Candida asked me how I liked the changes in Celia’s house. I said they were beautiful and then Candida wanted to know if Celia’s house was better than hers.  Of course not, I lied, but it was interesting to me to see the small competition.

I wondered (to myself) how Celia had afforded such a fine renovation.  She is a retired school teacher.  Candida offered, maybe by way of explanation for the differences in their houses, that Marta paid for the additions.  The plan is that Marta, when she retires, will come live with her mother, which explains a lot.  Similarly Candida’s daughter who lives in Spain will return home to live in her mother’s house.  Candida’s daughter also  is a “soltera” and probably about Marta’s age.

Isabel has her competitive side, too.  One day when we were kibitzing over the wall that separates the two houses, she proudly told me that she had way more children and grandchildren than the other two had and, further, she had a full house, while her two sisters lived alone. So her house may not be so fine, but she has what matters, in her view.  Candida and Celia might just have to agree with her.  Having family around matters a lot and the absence—or inattentiveness-- of children and grandchildren is a great burden, even if the kids live in town. I think that the expectation may be that by the time you are the age of the three sisters, the family should be taking care of you, or at least much in evidence at your house. The daughters and even daughters-in-law pick up the obligation. Candida’s daughter-in-law stops by more often than does her son.  Sons aren’t expected to be around as much although the infrequency of their visits in our house is noted.

But the relations living close by are more numerous than the three sisters.  Candida’s brother lives a block away as do various cousins, nephews, and nieces to the farthest generation. Some new person (new to me) is always dropping by looking for “Tia” (aunt). “Who was that?” I ask Candida. She explains that he is the nephew of her brother’s grandchild.

This boggles the North American mind.  What would it be like if my two sisters lived right next door and my brother a block away? Sounds like a dream to me.  Imagine dropping in on one another, familiar and comfortable like we were when we were kids. Imagine the comfort in talking about not much-- what we were making for dinner, food preferences of the grandchildren, who is doing what in his/her house. Imagine the children and grandchildren all in the same town, wandering from house to house, looked after by a passel  of adults all of whom knew all about them and had a stake in them. Imagine, also, maybe, the boredom, although Candida’s family doesn’t seem bored.  One day I asked her if she missed work, because there are times when she stands at the door watching the world as if looking for something to happen, someone to come by.  The afternoons sometimes hang a little heavy for her.  But he says, no, she’s done with work. It’s time to visit Celia.

Visiting the Comunidades

When I first started teaching here in Nicaragua I got a good idea—I would visit the small communities where many of my students live.  The instituto is in a pueblo, my home town, the  county seat of a large municipality.  But there are 22 other communities in the municipality and all can send students to the only high school in my town. I wanted to see how the kids lived, but up till recently only managed to visit two communities.  Two weeks ago I visited the third, less than a kilometer away, and a week later I walked to the fourth.  I must say these two visits were two of the best things I’ve done in Nicaragua.

The little community of Salamasi is home to about three hundred people, about 25 of whom are my students. The tiny town has one paved street dead-ending on a rutted dirt road which winds around and up the surrounding hills.  There are a couple of wells in the community, there being no running water. I’d guess that nearly every house had a pig in the yard, some of them shockingly large (pigs, not houses).  The houses are the most basic sort, made of adobe bricks, each with some sort of fencing, usually barbed wire, and a latrine. 

It’s hard to describe how gratifying it was to hear the greetings from my students as I walked by their houses. They were so surprised and happy to see me in their town, although some asked what I was doing there as though I must have a dark motive. I explained that I wanted to take a walk to get to know their communities. One boy who met me in the street –a 1st year student—told me in English he had 2 houses, one of his mother and one of his grandmother.  He walked with me up a dirt road and said goodbye at his grandmother’s house and I continued on up and down the impossible roads.  At another house I saw one of my more challenging  students out playing in a yard with 5 other kids.  They were spinning tops.  He did such a double take when he saw me, but smiled, I felt, excited that I came. We’ll have a connection back in the classroom.

A week later I walked to a further town, maybe four kilometers from my town.  As I walked down the highway I kept asking people if the town was ahead and they kept saying yes.  But I almost missed it, there being nothing on the highway itself to indicate a town.  I stopped at a house to ask again and was told I’d found it.  Almost immediately a student who lived up the hill spied me and came running down.  She introduced me to the people I’d been talking to and at once their attitude toward me changed from polite but suspicious to warm and pleased when they found out I was a teacher who had walked  a distance to see their town.  I asked my student to give me a tour and she brought me to her house to get permission.  I was introduced around and given the one plastic chair in sight and peppered with questions, but pleased questions.  Like was it easier to live in the United States and did I like Nicaragua more. Smiles all around.  I felt an honored guest. 

My student got permission to take me on the tour, so we crossed the highway and accessed the rest of the town on what I can describe as goat paths (although there no goats) up into the hills. She explained that water had to be hauled from the well by the women who carried large buckets on their heads, maybe 7 or 8 trips a day to take care of the all the family needs. From time to time the trail widened into a cluster of 3 or 4 houses, the folks gathered to sit outside in groups at the end of the day.  We stopped at the house of another student.  The girl looked shocked and then pleased to see us.  The three of us continued up the path to the house of the third student.  Her mom, most gracious, invited us in and found a place to sit for all.  She and I talked a little about the importance of education (her subject) and then she handed me from her basket a red and a green pepper to smell. My recollection of that moment, the dark windowless house made of adobe bricks, the color of the peppers in the dim light from the door and her daughter, my student, sitting inside the house still in her school uniform, the white shirt and socks glowing in the semi-darkness—that recollection I return to again and again.  We had to move on. The señora put 4 peppers into a plastic bag for me as a gift. It was getting dark and the students were going to show me where to get a bus back to my town, the highway not being safe, not because of bad people, they said, but because of fast vehicles and dogs roaming at night. We scrambled back down to the highway, passing the house of another student who was not at home and meeting up with a student who gave me the now familiar confused double-take followed by big grin. On the way I was also invited to two quinceanos parties (parties celebrating the 15^th birthdays of my 2 guides.)  I said, sure I’d come.  I hope they meant it.

Three kids waited with me until my bus came and waved goodbye in the twilight.

Today I went to the mayor’s office where Juan Pablo was glad to oblige with a request of a map of the municipality.  I left with 4 of them. (Juan Pablo loves the computer he has in the mayor’s office and he loved being able to produce not just one map as requested but 4 maps each offering a little different information.)  I took them to school and asked some students to circle those of the 22 communities that send kids to the instituto.  Because some of the comunidades are a significant distance from town, I was sure that there wouldn’t be students from them, but not so.  Nearly every one of the comunidades sends students to study.  One community, so far from any dirt or paved road that the two students who attend ride a burro over the mountains, may be too much for me to visit because of safety issues (getting lost), but the others are do-able.  If my kids can come to me, I can get to them.  This will be an adventure. I figure at an average of 3 per month, I will have visited them all in 6 months.  I’ll keep you posted. Attached. I hope, is a picture from inside a house.

Drums Things are pretty stirring up here in my pueblo in the north. Nicaragua celebrates fiestas patrias, the two national holidays that just happen to be back to back, on the 14 and 15th of September. I lived through one fiestas patrias last year in my training town, and I thought I wouldn’t really need to see another, but the fiestas patrias up here look to be much more serious and energetic. The bands are out practicing, the marchers perfecting their steps, the baton twirlers drilling and the mayor’s office plastering the town with strings and placards of Nicaraguan flags everywhere, a much bigger deal than in the south. A few days ago I walked to the empalme, a highway intersection a kilometer from town. I left town to the incessant beat of the drums. The students were practicing by the highway, and no sooner had I almost passed beyond their range than I started to pick up the drums of the next community and soon the drummers themselves came into view, again down by the highway. I wonder if you could travel all the way to Managua without losing the beat. A lot of energy and resources go into this display of patriotic fervor. My English Club is temporarily cancelled because the students are otherwise occupied after school. The mayor’s office supplies plenty of drums and xylophones, an expense the school could never afford. There is a primary school band and a secondary school band, both trained under the watchful eye of ex-band members who are serious and strict and command the kind of attention I wish I could get from my students. They wear mirror- lens shades (when nearly no one In Nicaragua uses sun glasses) and hold whistles in their mouths like real drill sargeants. And the students don’t mind their 3 and 4 hour practices. It’s an honor to be chosen to play in the band. I get a kick out of watching the kids I know taking it out on drums, trying out slick moves like twirling those big marshmallow-ended drums sticks off their wrists. We’re missing a lot of school these days. The holidays are Friday and Saturday, but we won’t get back to school till Wednesday next week. We have already missed a day this week-- for band practice. Last Friday there were no classes after 9 a.m. because of the dedication of 2 new classrooms at my school. Monday, school (which only convenes in the morning, 7:15 to 12) was cancelled for (please get ready for this) the passing on the highway in the afternoon of the torch which is carried through the Central American countries as a show of solidarity. Why it was necessary to miss school in the morning for an afternoon event is anyone’s guess. Here’s mine: they snuck in a practice for the band in the morning, but one counterpart assures me that this torch tradition, which is only two years old, I think, is important to the country. Which gets me thinking about all this patriotic fervor. When the crying need is for more and better education, why cancel school so readily? Obviously there’s a hierarchy of values and here the patriotic value trumps the education value. (A Nicaragua might ask why the need for a hierarchy of values; the two can happily co-exist, and should.) I have a couple of theories. First, I think someone in government may have learned about the power of display and gesture to distract people from their problems. In a poor country like Nicaragua, it is helpful politically for the people to focus on the plusses. There not being a lot to celebrate, materially at least (the place is full of natural beauty and warm people), the folks can be distracted by noisy celebrations of holidays, old (the fiestas patrias) and new,( the torch passing.) The drums play a big role here, like they have for centuries, rallying the spirits, stirring up fervor and fervor feels good. We all love a parade. My other theory is a little less cynical. I can explain it best by telling a story of a mistake I made early on. My 11th grade counterpart was looking for a reading. The curriculum said we were studying Nicaraguan historical figures and events. There being no reading readily available, I offered to write one and I chose for my topic William Walker, a notorious American soldier of fortune who, in the 19th century, amazingly became president of Nicaragua after landing here with 60 men, at the invitation of Leon which was fighting with Granada for control of the country. Google and be astounded. Walker was ultimately ousted and killed. It never occurred to me that there would be a problem with using him as the basis for a reading which pointed out his outrageous temerity, just as in the states we study other acknowledged bad guys like the KKK. But there was. Why didn’t I write about a hero like Ruben Dario or Sandino? In the aftermath of this misstep (it was a minor error, but important to me) , one of my PC jefes explained that the country is still fragile after the revolution, that it is struggling to find a strong identity and a reminder of the miserable past is not appreciated. My guess is that this is how it was in the early days of the US when the myths that now sustain us were just being formed, the George Washington and Revolutionary War stories, the rags-to-riches- only- in- America stories, the frontier myths, all of which has created for us a sense of a country strongly grounded, special and mythically ordained. Nicaragua needs a little of this mythos, or rather its own mythos. For that reason every time you turn around you see a folkloric dance, hear a patriotic song, or listen to praise for Ruben Dario. It makes you wonder at the myriad ways in which countries are strong and rich. Or poor and weak

Drums

Things are pretty stirring up here in my pueblo in the north.  Nicaragua celebrates fiestas patrias, the two national holidays that just happen to be back to back, on the 14 and 15^th of September.  I lived through one fiestas patrias last year in my training town, and I thought I wouldn’t really need to see another, but the fiestas patrias up here look to be much more serious and energetic.  The bands are out practicing, the marchers perfecting their steps, the baton twirlers drilling and the mayor’s office plastering the town with strings and placards of Nicaraguan flags everywhere, a much bigger deal than in the south. A few days ago I walked to the empalme, a highway intersection a kilometer from town.  I left town to the incessant beat of the drums.  The students were practicing by the highway, and no sooner had I almost passed beyond their range than I started to pick up the drums of the next community and soon the drummers themselves came into view, again down by the highway.  I wonder if you could travel all the way to Managua without losing the beat.

A lot of energy and resources go into this display of patriotic fervor.  My English Club is temporarily cancelled because the students are otherwise occupied after school. The mayor’s office supplies plenty of drums and xylophones, an expense the school could never afford. There is a primary school band and a secondary school band, both trained under the watchful eye of ex-band members who are serious and strict and command the kind of attention I wish I could get from my students.  They wear mirror- lens shades (when nearly no one In Nicaragua uses sun glasses) and hold whistles in their mouths like real drill sargeants.  And the students don’t mind their 3 and 4 hour practices.  It’s an honor to be chosen to play in the band.  I get a kick out of watching the kids I know taking it out on drums, trying out slick moves  like twirling those big marshmallow-ended drums sticks off their wrists.

We’re missing a lot of school these days. The holidays are Friday and Saturday, but we won’t get back to school till Wednesday next week. We have already missed a day this week--  for band practice.  Last Friday there were no classes after 9 a.m. because of the dedication of 2 new classrooms at my school.  Monday, school (which only convenes in the morning, 7:15 to 12) was cancelled  for (please get ready for this) the passing on the highway in the afternoon of the torch which is carried through the Central American countries as a show of solidarity.  Why it was necessary to miss school in the morning for an afternoon event is anyone’s guess.  Here’s mine: they snuck in a practice for the band in the morning, but one counterpart assures me that this torch tradition, which is only two years old, I think, is important to the country.

Which gets me thinking about all this patriotic fervor. When the crying need is for more and better education, why cancel school so readily? Obviously there’s a hierarchy of values and here the patriotic value trumps the education value. (A Nicaragua might ask why the need for a hierarchy of values; the two can happily co-exist, and should.)  I have a couple of theories.  First, I think someone in government may have learned about the power of display and gesture to distract people from their problems. In a poor country like Nicaragua, it is helpful politically for the people to focus on the plusses.  There not being a lot to celebrate, materially at least (the place is full of natural beauty and warm people), the folks can be distracted by noisy celebrations of holidays, old (the fiestas patrias) and new,( the torch passing.) The drums play a big role here, like they have for centuries, rallying the spirits, stirring up fervor and fervor feels good.  We all love a parade.

My other theory is a little less cynical. I can explain it best by telling a story of a mistake I made early on.  My 11^th grade counterpart was looking for a reading.  The curriculum said we were studying Nicaraguan historical figures and events.  There being no reading readily available, I offered to write one and I chose for my topic William Walker, a notorious American soldier of fortune who, in the 19^th century, amazingly became president of Nicaragua after landing here with 60 men, at the invitation of Leon which was fighting with Granada for control of the country. Google and be astounded. Walker was ultimately ousted and killed.  It never occurred to me that there would be a problem with using him as the basis for a reading which pointed out his outrageous temerity, just as in the states we study other acknowledged bad guys like the KKK.  But there was.  Why didn’t I write about a hero like Ruben Dario or Sandino? In the aftermath of this misstep (it was a minor error, but important to me) , one of my PC jefes explained that the country is still fragile after the revolution, that it is struggling to find a strong identity and a reminder of the miserable past is not appreciated.  My guess is that this is how it was in the early days of the US when the myths that now sustain us were just being formed, the George Washington and Revolutionary War stories, the rags-to-riches- only- in- America stories, the frontier myths, all of which has created for us a sense of a country strongly grounded, special and mythically ordained. Nicaragua needs a little of this mythos, or rather its own mythos.  For that reason every time you turn around you see a folkloric dance, hear a patriotic song, or listen to praise for Ruben Dario.

It makes you wonder at the myriad ways in which countries are strong and rich. Or poor and weak.

 

More About My Students

I’m thinking more about my students these days.  I watch them all the time, when I’m teaching, of course, but also when my counterpart is teaching.  I watch them in the streets and playing ball or practicing marching for the two national holidays on September 14 and 15 (Independence Day and the Victory at San Jacinto). A few observations:

More kids than I originally thought are poor, really poor. I was fooled by the uniforms and by the selection out that poverty makes in school attendance.  The uniforms do what they are supposed to do, make everyone seem the same.  But after a while you see the differences—the condition of the uniforms tells a lot because appearances matter here and when the uniforms are dirty or too small or held together by pins , it’s an indicator of money trouble at home. Some kids carry a dullness about them.  I still don’t know what that is about—maybe fatigue, abuse, malnutrition or maybe just boredom with what school has to offer.  But, the really poor kids may not come to school at all, it being too costly to get there or to buy the uniforms and backpacks and supplies a student needs to go to school.  (Education is free in Nicaragua but it still costs parents to send their children.) I can give one example of a seventh grader named Cindi who is the younger of two daughters in a family in an outlying community. Her mother only had enough money to pay for the transportation to get Cindi’s older sister to school.  Cindi was not going to be able to go until my former site-mate and another volunteer, as a final gift to Nicaragua, gave her the “scholarship” of $15.00 per month to pay for transportation so she could go to school.  Every month I, the administrator of the scholarship, pay Cindi her 300 cordobas.  After this year I don’t know what Cindi will do.  I do know that if Cindi couldn’t attend school without outside help, there are many who are there by the skin of their teeth or not there at all.

I am always reminded by the way in which my kids behave differently than kids in the states.  One way is that they have known each other all their lives. In school kids are grouped in sections by the towns from which they come, the reason having to do with their traveling together, I think. That means that the kids in a class have grown up in the same streets of small communities, living close by, playing  together, going to the same elementary schools.  They remind me of puppies from the same litter; they are like brothers and sisters.  Although the Nica teachers think that there are too many public displays of affection, I don’t see nearly as much of that as I would in an American school. I think it’s because friends are like family.The kids are all over each other, affectionate, comfortable as much with teasing assaults on one another as with playing with another’s hair or hooking arms to walk around the school together. There are kids who think they are cool and there are shy kids, but those distinctions don’t matter much because everyone has known the others forever.

Today I was hiking back to my site along the highway and came upon an impromptu soccer game by the side of the road in which two of my students were playing. I need to set the scene.  One side of the dirt patch they were using for a field was bordered by some trees and weeds abutting the Pan American Highway where big semis and busses pass going fast.  On the other side of the dirt patch ”field” was a barbed wire fence.  At the ends of the field were homemade goals, two upright sticks about two feet high and set about two feet apart, topped by a stick that fit into the natural notches at the top of the uprights. The players ranged in age from I’d guess ten years old to 20 or so.  (This is another mark of kids in Nicaragua.  All ages hang out and play together, there being no rule that olders should disdain to play with youngers.  Quite the opposite, kids of all ages are family, playmates from earliest years and know each other like siblings.  They are who they have to play with. There’s nobody else.) All were shirtless.  The older kids looked like young Davids, bodies naturally sculpted by work and gleaming with sweat.  Three wore no shoes, one had a pair of high rubber boots, one played in flip flops and another in what looked like boat shoes except that 10 minutes after I started watching, the sole of one fell off and he played on the insole. The rest had shoes.

It was a great game.  But frequently the ball flew beyond the barbed wire fence and someone had to go for it, pulling up the crotch of his shorts to keep it from snagging on the barbs and expertly ducking to avoid getting cut.  But when play came up against the fence, people got hurt.  One player, grinning, displayed a gash on his hip to me and kept on going.  I wasn’t the only one watching.  Three other people stopped to see what was going on. The players obviously liked the audience.  We were played to, asked for decisions about whether goals were good, looked to for appreciative responses. I watched for a half hour, having the most fun I’ve had in some time, a part of the sidelines again, cheering and groaning as though my own kids were playing. Only the threat of rain hustled me along back home.

I keep thinking of something my son Adam told me happened on the Appalachian Trail.  People for whatever varied reasons would leave offerings along the trail for the hikers. Things like candy bars or beer.  The hikers called it trail magic.  I could imagine the pleasure of rounding a curve in the trail after 6 hours of hiking and finding a cooler with cold beer.  Well, that’s what the soccer game along the Panamerican Highway felt like to me today-- trail magic.  And, because you can’t take the teacher out of the hiker, I just got a connection I didn’t have before with two of my kids who will remember that I was there on the sidelines.

How I Learned to Sing in Nicaragua

How I Learned to Sing in Nicaragua

The Ministry of Education came up   with  a a good  idea.  It organized and sponsored an English song competition with the  intention of motivating the high school students to learn more English.  What’s brilliant about the idea is that everyone could participate.  While Nicaraguans can and do have “pena” (shame) about speaking English, they have none whatsoever about singing.  They love to sing and the quality of one’s voice matters not at all.  The tone of Nica singing is notable for its nasal quality and volume and for the pleasure everyone gets in joining in.  They sing with gusto any chance they  have..

However good the idea, it nearly got drowned in bureaucracy.  At the recent meeting of TEFL volunteers the head of the MINED English program told us about the program.  None of us had heard of it, even though a 4 page memorandum had been sent out to all the local delegations 5 months ago, describing the competition and the rules for participating.  What had happened to the memo once it arrived at the local level is anybody’s guess (lost on a desk is a good one), but when volunteers got back to sites, even though we had only 1 ½ weeks to get something organized, we somehow managed to get the Festival up and going. My principal might have been disinclined to participate on such short notice, but when she saw my copy of the memo she was all over the idea. After all, she doesn’t want to be the one to blow off a directive from on high.

I moved fast.  I came up with 5 songs in English, one for each grade.  I had the enthusiastic co-operation of 2 counterparts and the somewhat willing cooperation of the third.  I got the local internet café to make CDs for each teacher with the songs for her grades on them and I copied out the words for each song onto  big pieces of papelogrofo. I taught all my classes the pronunciation of the words to their songs.  The older kids sang songs with which they were familiar, By the Rivers of Babylon and We are the World, but the other three songs weren’t known to the kids.  So I taught not only the words but the melodies to Dancing Queen, Down in the Valley and This Old Man.

Nicas may not have pena about singing, but I do.  As a kid in Catholic school, I had many opportunities to sing—Christmas carols, Gregorian chant, the Latin high mass—and there I learned I had a bad voice. Sister Someone, patrolling the rows of singers with an ear to ferreting out the sour voice ruining her chorus found me out and told me to stop singing and mouth the words.  I never sang again with anything like confidence even though I took a set of lessons from a singing teacher who said failure to carry a tune is the result of not imagining the melody well enough.  I failed to develop the required imagination and, as a result, anything like a confident tune-holding voice, UNTIL the last couple of weeks when I belted out Dancing Queen maybe 15 times, and This Old Man maybe 30.  And I sounded OK. Anyhow, the Nica standard for voice quality is fairly low and my students are generous.  No one laughed.  They wanted to sing.  And so did I.

So I had the heady of experience of watching my 300 students get more and more excited about their various songs for the competition, their teachers taking over from me by leading the practice sessions, so that in a little more than a week in which each class met only 2 or 3 times, we were ready for Festival day. During that week however, I witnessed some touching scenes.  One day, after school twenty 7^th graders gathered outside a classroom to practice their song for the 15 minutes available to them before the school space was occupied by the elementary kids. Their teacher  had the CD player(there is one in the school) plugged into the one plug in the classroom and the kids were gathered around her to practice with the “pista”, a CD version of This Old Man without words. The kids had learned the hand jive to accompany each verse and were co-ordinating hands and voices with huge enthusiasm.

My lovely daughter in law came to visit in the midst of all this and so before we took off for other parts of Nicaragua on a well earned vacation week, I put her to work as one of the judges of the festival competition, along with 3 Peace Corps volunteers I dragged in for the job.  The Festival went off an hour behind schedule (the sound system brought in from the mayor’s office failed to function so we were without amplified announcement, introductions, etc), but the school was packed with kids, many more than I had ever seen at an event at the high school, Mother’s Day included. They were literally hanging off trees, jammed up to the front to hear better. I think that by teaching all the kids one song, we got tremendous buy in for the groups finally selected to sing the song.

Eleventh grade won with their soulful We Are the World, but the seventh graders were my personal favorites.  Amazing that kids who had been studying English for 4 months could pull off their song with such clarity and enthusiasm. Today in class, a week after the competition, while my counterpart was writing something on the whiteboard, a voice rang out, “This old man, he played one…” Others joined in, remembering the glory days.

Work

Work

Another volunteer visited my site last week.  I was glad for the opportunity to cook for someone, and we spent a fair amount of time talking books.  He’s a serious reader and our taste in novels coincides. We both liked The Correction more than Freedom.  We exchanged lists of favorite books and among his was The Worldly Philosophers, a book on economic theories.  Since economics is a subject I never studied, and always wished I knew more about, I ordered a sample on my Kindle and am liking it a lot.  I love it when something you read sheds light on a puzzling experience you actually are having, and that’s what happened here.  Let me quote from the book:

“[A] fact … still can be remarked among unindustrialized peoples of the world :  a raw working force, unused to wagework, uncomfortable in factory life, unschooled to the idea of an ever-rising standard of living, will not work harder if wages rise; it will simply take more time off. The idea of gain, the idea that each working person may not only, but should, constantly strive to better his or her material lot, is an idea that was quite foreign to the great lower and middle strata of [ ancient] cultures, only scattered throughout Renaissance and Reformation times; and largely absent in the majority of Eastern civilizations.  As a ubiquitous characteristic of society, it is as modern an invention as printing.”

What I am observing here in Nicaragua is a lot of people not working much.  Of course, there are hard workers here, but there are many more in my part of the world who don’t have jobs and don’t work apparently.  Women work in the houses but even they spend a lot of time not working.  People sit out and talk a lot, or rather they talk some.  People have an amazing ability to simply sit for a long time. Sometimes the sitting is solitary, sometimes it’s communal, or rather familial. Kids, my students, do it, sitting out on a curb or plastic chair in front of the house not doing anything. Today I passed a young man sitting on the curb next to a dog.  I passed again an hour later and he was still there, not waiting for anyone or anything, not really waiting as that implies that something is expected—just sitting would be more accurate.

Why don’t they DO something?  Is there nothing to do? The truth is that there isn’t a whole lot to do, but often people pass up the opportunity to do something remunerative.  I can think of 2 examples.  One of my counterparts had difficulty finding daycare although she was willing to pay a fair wage.  I figured people would jump at the chance to work in a job that required the skills they actually had.  But no.  The babysitters quit after about 3 weeks and my counterpart was left scrambling.  She went through 4 of them in as many months.  Why, I asked her? They give reasons that fail to convince, like one who said she didn’t like taking care of boys. What my counterpart says is that people just want to eat.  When they have enough food, they quit.

Another example:  My host mom closed her rosquilla business when people stopped coming to work for her.  I’ve asked and learned she was a respected employer.  Candida says people just don’t want to work if they have enough.  There is no drive to earn more or get more or save for a stove or educate a child.

I used to be stumped by this.  Why, in a country with so few working opportunities, would someone pass up the chance to better themselves, but the explanation, I’m guessing is in the quotation above: the idea of gain is missing and with it the obligation or desire to strive.  Sitting on the curb all afternoon would drive most Westerners crazy; we are always up to something, making something happen, so that when nothing is happening we’re unhappy.  It doesn’t take too much to see the downside of that point of view, but once you’re brought up in it, it’s very hard to see the virtues of doing nothing.  Idleness gets you in the viscera.  This habitual doing of not much isn’t the same thing as being lazy (although Nicaraguans who have learned about striving use that word to describe others).  It’s about a difference in values.  Nicaraguan like this  aren’t into striving; they don’t feel compelled to produce.  They are OK, apparently, just living.

At a social get-together one volunteer named Molly, who was close to the end of her service, wondered out loud whether we are providing a benefit to the people in our communities by introducing them to the world of gain and striving, to the extent that we do that.  And we do do that indirectly if not directly.  For instance, I think Nica kids should read stories (which they do not; nobody reads or is read to) but when I encourage that I am introducing the longing and discontent that reading can bring, the dreaming, the prelude to striving. So Molly asked whether that’s a service, or whether people would be better left to life as they have lived it.  The longer that I’m here the more reasonable looks the life of non-striving, of not wanting too much.  I think such a life isn’t good for Nicaragua economically, but it might be good for the people.  Whatever, it will come to an end, with or without Peace Corps, in this globalized world, and that’s a little sad.

P.S.  After writing this I started paying particular attention to all the people who ARE working.  They are everywhere, selling something in the market, or walking from door to door with a bucket in arms or balanced on their heads, selling food.  They are trying to shine shoes with a home-made wooden bench they carry around to different locations, or they fix shoes in the market, or  they wash laundry (in my town the going rate is 12 pieces of clothing washed and hung out to dry for fifteen cents). So I want to be clear that we are not talking about lazy; we are talking about the end of work.  Nicaraguans know all about work to feed yourself and your family.

P.P.S. I just figured out how to add pictures!  This one is from last January.  Me on the ferry from Ometepe.  That’s a volcano in the back.  Great, huh?