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.