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.