Coming Home

Coming back home after a week away for vacation is always a pleasure.  Usually everything is the same as when I left, but this time there were differences. A sample:

1.      There is a chicken living in my house, a captive chicken as distinguished from the wandering chickens that roam around town.  This chicken is tied up in what used to be the dog’s pen, the dog having been relegated to outdoors where he does fine except when it rains. I didn’t even notice the chicken the night I got back home from vacation, although there was a kind of odor.  I saw her as I was washing my clothes the next morning, standing still, beady eye fixed.  I asked Candida, “Why is there a chicken in the house?” although I knew the unhappy answer. “For sopa de gallina,” she confirmed.  So tomorrow morning the chicken is sacrificed for chicken soup.  Candida will do the sacrificing and I will be, I hope, at school.  Will I eat the soup, if offered?  Of course.

2.      There still was a mouse in my room.  I thought maybe he had gone away on his own since I didn’t see him for a few days before I left. But my first night back he shot across my floor, the big, black mouse I remembered.  I looked up the word for poison in my dictionary and set out to find some, this mouse, for weeks, having failed to abandon my room despite the absence of food there and the nudge of the open door.  He was going to have to die. You can’t buy poison in all the stores in town, only at the store where the lady sells liquor.   She sold me a “pill” of poison for 6 cordabas and for free gave me instructions.  You crush the pill till it’s powder and then you mix the powder with rice.  Only rice will do—I have that on the advice of many people.  Then you put the poisoned rice on the floor and two days later you have a dead mouse. Under the bed, in my case.  You know you have a dead mouse by the smell in your room.  You dispose of the mouse and the poisoned rice in a plastic bag.  End of story.

3.      My friend Marisol planted an herb garden in my absence and she was excited to show it to me.  Her house has a big back area where grow trees she maintains to help feed her large family.  There are banana, plantain, and several kids of fruit trees.  She has a couple of avocado trees.  She has trees whose roots provide traditional Nica favorites like yucca and malanga.  I was admiring the flower at the end of a big bunch of plantains and so she cut down the tree with a machete to show me the flower and, of course, to harvest the plantains.  Where I protested killing the whole tree, she pointed out the stubs of trees all around and all the small plantain trees growing to take their place.  I guess that’s how it’s done.

4.       The kids at school are practicing for the English Song Festival next Monday. Last year I was pretty much a one-woman festival organizer and facilitator, but this year the principal made it plain that the English teachers should do all the work and I could help if they asked me.  I’ll be interested to see how it turns out.  Already there are signs that it will be good.  For one thing, because of a time crunch, last year I picked all the songs and we taught each grade level one song.  This year students are coming up with songs in English they want to sing.—better motivation. Also the Festival anticipated small groups of students performing and that’s happening this year.  The downside is that there’s less emphasis on getting words right and more on getting the accompanying dance routines down. Still, tomorrow I’ll spend an hour tutoring different groups to improve pronunciation.

5.      It’s Fiestas Patrias in my town.  Every town has such a festival celebrating its patron saint. I missed out on it last year except for the hipica (horse parade), which I caught.  I have been looking forward to seeing the rest of the fiesta.  In the bigger places there are extravagant parades with folkloric costumes and masks and the acting out of Nicaraguan legends. Not so in my small town.  Around the park is a food vendor, a seller of cheap plastic stuff for kids and a shirt salesman.  So much for the “feria”, the fair.   A tenth of a kilometer or so down the highway is a carnival with rides.  That I will avoid, but I am told there will be music one night, probably this weekend and I’m looking forward to that. Fiestas Patrias is an event much anticipated.  It’s a diversion from the usual, but I am kind of fond of the usual.

6.      Things have been a little slow at school.  To begin, after vacation, sometimes kids do not return to class right away.  All my teachers are either sick or caring for a sick and hospitalized family member. Because of this I’ve only been able to co-plan and co-teach half my usual load of classes this week. But the slow start to the new semester has been welcome as I recovered from my trip to Solentiname.

That’s what’s new in the north. 

Solentiname

I started dreaming of Solentiname before I left the U.S. This little archipelago isolated in Lake Colciboca near the Rio San Juan and the Costa Rican border has a compelling recent history, or at least it resonates to me. What I read before I left was that the group of some twenty little islands was sparsely  inhabited and ignored by everyone until Ernesto Cardinal, a priest, poet and artist, went there in the early 1960s to found a kind of communal society, organizing the campesinos.  Cardinal was influenced by, and helped to influence, the liberation theology movement which emerged in Latin American countries as a response to Vatican II and to the social and economic inequality pervasive then.  Christ was radically conceived as champion of the poor. But to this mix of Christianity and campesino culture, Cardenal introduced a third element—art.  He gave the people paint and canvas and brought an artist friend from Managua to teach them rudiments of painting.  And they painted the world they saw in a primitive style, the paintings full of what Solentiname has in gorgeous abundance—water, birds, animals, flowers. The style and skills have been passed along to the next generation but there are still painters on Solentiname who were part of the original experiment.

When my sister and niece were visiting we explored the Rio San Juan, but I wanted to see Solentiname and so we made an overnight trip, arriving at 4:30 one afternoon and leaving at 5 in the morning the next day.  Not much of visit, but enough to tell me I had to come back.  There is magic in Solentiname and great peace and beauty.  No cars, no cell phone service, no electricity (on most islands) except what people generate with solar panels. But there is the art and it is something.   I took the opportunity of a school vacation to set out by myself on the long journey from my site to San Carlos (10 bus hours) and by lancha 2 hours across the lake to the archipelago. And I brought money.  I had seen enough on the previous trip to know that I wanted a Solentiname painting to bring home, a gift to myself after two years of service and a reminder of the natural beauty of Nicaragua.

There are tourist facilities on only two islands.  I had previously stayed on Mancarrón where I saw Cardenal’s beautiful white church.  But most of the art is on two islands,  La Venada and San Fernando, so I stayed on San Fernando, the only other choice.  In the whole archipelago there are only about 2000 people, spreadout over maybe 15-20 islands. I lucked out in the hotel I stayed in, not because it was so wonderful, but because I made friends with two nice Nicas there. Olivia, the daughter of the owners, surprised me by speaking to me in English the first morning when I came to the kitchen early looking for coffee.  We sat down there and chatted while she was preparing breakfast. Olivia explained when I asked that she learned her English on her own with the help of three lucky factors.  She studied for five years in a University in Managua on full scholarship, although she took only two English classes and those specialized for her major, environmental science.  She also was able to study abroad on scholarship twice, one full year in Germany and a month in Turkey. It was in Germany she picked up the English.  Why was she back in Solentiname cooking at a hotel? (I hope I put the question to her more delicately) Well, she explained, that’s her home and she had been unable to find work (This is the sad song of too many educated Nicaraguans.  They study but find no jobs.) I expressed surprise, suggesting that it would seem that with her major and her excellent English she could work for an NGO.  She said that when she put “self-taught” on her resume as the source of her English ability, potential employers discounted it, preferring credentialed English speakers. What a shame.  She is better than most.

The conversations continued later that morning when she agreed to lead me on a hike to a lookout and site of petroglyphs. (Hiking in Nicaragua can be dangerous solo.  Trails just aren’t marked and they criss-cross in a way familiar to the inhabitants but not to visitors.  In fact, Olivia told me, a foreigner had died on a trail on the island when he fell and shattered a leg.  His body was not found until much later because no one knew he was missing or where he had gone.) The hike was muddy.  Torrential rain fell as we huddled under an overhang at the island elementary school (two classrooms areas in one building).  The view was worth the hike and the soaking. On the way back, Olivia pointed out the houses of some artists and I looked at some paintings. She also helped me locate a man with a boat to take me in the afternoon to La Venada where a large family of artists lives.  I spent the rest of the morning at a gallery where the paintings of many artists were exhibited, a great opportunity to examine the paintings closely and consider the prices, which seem to depend only on the size of the canvas.

The boatman turned out to be a guide as well.  He took me to five different houses, all located near each other and all with a few paintings set out to view. Obviously everyone was glad to see me and there was no awkwardness in looking and moving on.     I had made a list from the gallery of artists whose work I wanted to see and I also wanted to go back to see the work of Rudolfo Arelleno, the progenitor of the other artists in this little compound.  I saw his work on the last trip and really liked it, but I couldn’t afford his most spectacular paintings, big complex pieces, museum quality, in my untutored opinion. On this trip I ended up buying one of Rudolfo’s painting, a much smaller piece, but my eye was instantly caught by a painting in the house of a relative, a largish and beautiful example of the Solentiname style.  The artist quite rightly wanted a good bit for it.  She could tell I admired it.  When I said I couldn’t pay so much she shyly invited me to bargain.  I gave it a shot, both of us laughing and saying how we were no good at “negociando”.  We made a deal.  The boatman, I think genuinely, said it was a good painting and I waited while she took it off the stretcher and rolled it so I could carry it. I went back to my hotel with a singing heart. I had got what I came for and so much more besides.

The next day I spent at the little museum on San Fernando and at the library where I found a book describing another project—a poetry writing workshop on the island during Cardenal’s time.  I shared an avocado with a maid at the hotel, Jessica, and we talked for some time. That night Jessica introduced me to her daughter.  The next morning at 5 o’clock I was standing on the dock of the hotel, waiting for the boat to take me back to San Carlos.  Made it in time to take an 8 o’clock bus to Managua, a taxi from one bus station to another, another bus to Jinotepe and a third out to LaPaz, my training town.  After a 12 hour travel day I was so glad to see my old host mom and to bask in all that love and approval.  She really is something. This has gone on too long so I won’t detail the day I spent visiting old friends there except to say that I am most fortunately included in the list of people for whom by name Doña Petrona, my host mom’s sister, prays nightly. To this I attribute my health and happiness in Nicaragua, if not for its supernatural effectiveness , then for being held so kindly in the hearts of people here.

Miss Instituto

Every year my high school ( instituto) celebrates its birthday.  It does so by cancelling classes (you correctly

hear a note of annoyance on the part of the killjoy voluntaria) and holding an “acto” with the usual dignitaries, folkloric dancing and student recitations of poems or essays about the importance of education, after which is held the Miss Instituto contest.  Note: not the Señorita Instituto contest. Last year I did not attend for some reason.  I’m sure I had another obligation, but I also remember being put off by a contest like that at our school.  I know, I know—in the states we have homecoming queens, same deal, but the pervasiveness of the glamour ideal for women, seen everywhere and almost always the sole ideal, is hard for a second wave feminist to see, let alone, participate in.  But this year I went to see what it was all about.

And I wouldn’t have missed it.  It defied expectations in spades.  First of all, boys participated as well as girls, the name of the event to the contrary.  Secondly, there were actually 3 different parts to both the boys’ and girls’ competitions.  One was the predictable runway parade in ball type gowns for girls and dressy clothes for the boys.  But there were two others parts.  In the first, both boys and girls wore home-made costumes celebrating the high school. They were elaborate with tall headdresses and trains and flowing capes painted with the symbols or scenes of the town and the school.  One dress was made entirely out of recycled soda cans and another out of all natural materials.  Some of the competitors were accompanied by little courtiers who lent more spleandor to the presentation.  The students paraded, the girls in impossible high heels, arms stretched to the side to show off the art work (and not incidentally, their bodies). They circled the sports center and then stopped to give a little speech (think Miss America on world peace).  The panel of judges filled out their score cards and the student audience went wild.

In the third part of the competition, the candidates paraded in school uniforms, but uniforms modified to fit their idea of some sexy academy in a city.  The girls’ skirts were super short, their shoes high heels, their blouses straining at the buttons.  They wore sassy little hats and carried cute handbags (in lieu of the ubiquitous backpacks) and sucked on lollipops a la Lolita. The boys, too, went sexy.  Some had ties loosely tied, for some reason a fashion item, suggestive of rebellion, maybe because ties aren’t worn here except by foreign businessmen. Everyone strutted, twirled, stood hand on one raised hip, other knee bent.    They threw kisses to the audience and the judges. And, again, there wild applause.

What do I think of all of this? I am still grumpy – and I should be—about the sexualization of girls in this culture.  Even some of the boys played into the sexual role, although some of the boys, mostly the younger ones had other fantasies, dressing as the great national hero Sandino in leather-ish jacket and big hat, or as soldiers with guns during the revolution. But the sheer inventiveness and sense of fun in some of the costumes in the first completion, the making of something spectacular out of paper, glue, paint and a little fabric, this was fun to see and it made me happy to think of my students using their imaginations, not only to design the costumes, but to figure out how to make them out of not much.

I’m not a fan of cancelled classes—but this one might have been worth it.  I’ll try to attach some pix.