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?

Two Weeks Off

Two Weeks Off

I returned to my site 2 days ago after two weeks away.  As always the homecoming was a relief.  It never fails that after time away a return to this little community only makes me appreciate it more.  But the two week break from school routines and my life here was welcome, too.  I spent one week teaching in a camp over a one week break from school.  The Access camp brings together 115 students from 6 cities in Nicaragua, even from Bluefields on the Atlantic coast. These kids have been studying English for one year, 5 days a week for 2 hours each day, with a Nicaraguan English teacher.  Those teachers, and 5 Peace Corps volunteers, staffed the camp. What an experience it was for everyone. The kids were amazing, many leaving home to travel in their country for the first time.  Access mixes them together in dorm rooms of 4 students and in “state” groups of 14 to 25 students organized by English ability level.  At first, predictably, the students were shy but after 2 days there were new best friends.  In Nicaragua it’s OK to show affection, to hold hands or embrace or lean against friends.  Even boys are touchy with each other.  That’s what was happening to kids from opposite coasts or from the north and south of Nicaragua.

Access camp couldn’t happen without Peace Corps. “Camp” isn’t an idea with which Nicaraguans are familiar, but Americans know how camp should be even if, like me, they never attended one.  PCVs brought half of the expertise and most of the fun to camp. We taught electives like sign language and yoga (my contribution and popular—about 80% of the camp elected it—big pressure on me to make it good).  We led the “field day” events like 3-legged races.  We made up chants for each state group, taught everyone the electric slide, provided lively lessons—all to a wildly appreciative audience.

The Nica teachers are an impressive bunch.  Their English is excellent and they are very professional. They have studied hard to be as good as they are and some have studied in the U.S. thanks to State Department programs. They lack American goofiness, but we supplied that in spades while they brought a seriousness of purpose.  Their students know how great is their opportunity to learn English and how important that skill will be to their futures.  I learned a lot co-teaching 3 classes every morning with Ricardo and I think he learned from me. From Victor, whose family has a coffee farm in Jinotega, I returned with a small sack of excellent coffee and fond memories of a most gentle man.  In fact I became friends with most of the counterparts, a darling group of people.

The highlight of camp was a field trip to Granada, Nicaragua’s colonial city.  Most students had never seen Granada’s restored and brightly painted architecture.  They explored the center of the city in their “State” group (ours was New York) on a “digital scavenger hunt”, finding sights in the city and taking a group photo or acting out a directive like taking an order from a tourist in a restaurant. That night there was a slide show and the next night a riotous talent show.  These students love to sing and dance and work hard to make a professional routine.  The Bluefields kids with their tululu (google and youtube it-you won’t be sorry) brought down the house but a group from another city did an amazing dance from Grease complete with combs in their hair, white t-shirts and swing skirts.  I could not imagine a group of teenagers in the states dancing like that outside of a stage production, but the Access kids love music and dance more than they fear ridicule.  They don’t mess with “cool” as that would get in the way of all the fun.  Would that I could bring back some of that attitude to the states.

As you can imagine, camp ended with tears and not a little relief from the volunteers and teachers who worked hard from 5:30 a.m. until 9:00 at night and THEN planned classes for the next day.  I was beat. I had a 1 ½ day break between the end of camp and the start of a week of in service training close to Managua, and so, instead of riding 3 ½ hours back to my site, stayed 2 nights in beautiful, if touristy, Granada where I treated myself to a hotel room and some quiet, although I ended up hanging out with Peace Corps volunteers who had the same idea.  They had volunteered at a different camp.  All of us deserved the break.

The Peace Corps meeting, 4 days long, took place at the beach near Managua. I will admit that I arrived at IST needing a boost.  The last month of teaching in my instituto had left me despondent.  What had hit at the end of the semester was a glimpse of the enormity of the challenge here, something I hadn’t really seen fully before because of all the excitement in getting started and trying out all the slick new techniques Peace Corps had taught me.  The schools are like all institutions in their intractability, but they suffer an enormous set of challenges as well.  Start with no resources, add on many teachers with insufficient training and skills, students who have inherited anti-educational attitudes, and a society that has insufficient jobs for people who finish school. After the initial grim realization, it dawned on me that, yes, this is what a third world country looks like and this is why we’re here.

I’m happy to say that I got the needed shot in the arm during training.  It helps a lot to trade experience with the others.  A few of the younger volunteers like and admire me and their good opinion fortifies. I came back here to the North with a bunch of ideas for the next semester.  Today I took the first steps to starting a new project and, guess what, I’m happy with an idea of somewhere to go and something new to do.  So here I am sitting on my porch watching the setting sun turning the sky apricot, the folks passing in the street.  It’s too dark now to continue typing, but I’m content, counting my blessings, which are considerable, again.  Thank God for that.  Despair sucks.

More on Candida

More on Candida

In my post for Mothers’ Day I told the story, as I then understood it, of Candida, my host mom.  I called her Indiana in that post in deference to her privacy, but that’s not her name and I don’t like the alias.  Her name is Candida and she is something.

After I wrote that post, Candida had a visit from her grandson Joan who lives in the States. Joan told me some details about his parents’ lives and those details peaked my interest.  So one afternoon I asked Candida to explain.  After our conversation I wrote the story and am attaching it here fairly unedited.

Candida’s story continued

These notes are so I don’t forget.  Joan, Candida’s grandson from the States, visited for a day last week.  He is the son of Reynaldo who lives around San Francisco.  Reynaldo is married to a Nicaraguense and Joan is their only son.  While he was here, Joan told me that his father had fled Nicaragua during the wars with the Contras because he was being hunted for his politics.  Reynaldo determined that he had to leave the country.  His wife left first, pregnant with Joan, and he followed. Joan was born 2 months later. 

I was interested in this story so yesterday afternoon I asked Candida about it.  She said Reynaldo was a liberal in a Sandinista part of the country and that his wife’s parents were liberal and that Reynaldo changed his politics from Sandinista. She told me that he had to flee the country or be killed and so he walked out over the mountains.  It took him 8 days of walking to cross the border.  She wasn’t sure what border.  His wife was able to fly to the States and wait for him there.  Two months after he reunited with her, their baby Joan was born.  The family settled  in Daly City, Joan told me, and Candida said Reynaldo worked as a truck driver.  His wife studied to be a nurse in Nicaragua and retrained in the States.  She works for Kaiser hospital in San Francisco.

Joan also told me that Candida had visited them in the States.  I knew she had worked in Miami, but not that she had visited San Francisco.  So I asked her about that.  She went the first time with the mother of Reynaldo’s wife.  The second time she went alone.  This second visit was occasioned by an accident that Reynaldo had while driving. I’m not sure of the actual reason for the visit (Reynaldo wasn’t injured in the accident), but she took care of Joan while the parent(s) worked,.  He remembers her bringing him to school every day and back home.

The afternoon of our talk had been a hot one.  Both Candida and I had slept a bit and were sitting in the living room at about 4 o’clock, trying to stay cool.  After a half hour of talk Candida wanted to switch the topic to tell me about her trips to Miami. This conversation, or really narration, lasted for 2 hours as it got darker and darker and finally when it was so dark we couldn’t see each other, she tried to turn on the light and we discovered the electricity was off, so she talked in the dark for another hour.  In the dark I lost some of my ability to understand because I could not see her face and my brain was fatigued from the effort to follow the Spanish for so long.  And I was hungry and my mind drifted to wonder if we could take a break to get food and continue over dinner.  When, at about 7, the lights went back on, the magic was broken.  Candida went for the bathroom and I headed for the kitchen to warm up some chili. Just before we each went our own ways, we had a general conversation to the effect that her life had been hard, and she had had to work hard without much help. It occurred to me that she might ask me about my life.  Happily she didn’t.  It would have been hard to tell the story of my privileged life with its minor bumps after her story.  Here’s the rest of what she said that afternoon, reordered a bit for the sake of chronology.

Candida’s father was a farmer who lived outside Condega and sold his produce in this part of Madriz.  Candida and Enrique lived with her parents (there were 4 other children).  Enrique, the father of her children, didn’t make much working on farms.  Their first child was born when Candida was 18.  The children followed at 2 year intervals except the last two who were born a year apart, and from what I gather Candida moved some because the children were born in different towns in the area.  She couldn’t feed them well.  Enrique earned 5 pesos a day, 25 cents in today’s money. They lived on a diet of beans and tortillas.  The youngest child Myra has limited intelligence and Candida believes that her brain didn’t grow for lack of milk as a child. Candida says her daughter’s brain is “smaller” than hers and I know that Myra couldn’t do well at school and never studied after high school.  Myra works in Spain now as a domestic and calls her mother weekly.  Those calls are Candida’s great pleasure.  Anyway, Candida’s father urged her to get a house and helped her buy the house in my town. The house had 3 rooms and a cubby.  Candida slept in the cubby and the boys in one room, the girls in the other.  The house had a stone floor and the roof was of adobe tiles.  In the back yard was the place to make food, the latrine and ultimately the horno. When she moved to this house Candida had 3 children and was pregnant with a fourth. Candida stopped to ask how much weight I’d lost in Nicaragua.  I told her 30 pounds.  She asked what I weighed now.  I told her 125 pounds. She said at this time in her life she weighed 90 pounds. (She is my height but wears a size 18 or 2W now.)

 Candida still needed to make money so she built the horno and started making rosquillas to sell.  At first she sold them in town and then, two days a week, at the market in Ocotal. The business grew and she hired workers to help her but she still got up early to start the process of making the dough.  The dough is heavy and requires a lot of physical strength to mix all the ingredients.  Candida did it by hand (she points to the muscles in her arms.).  Later, Reynaldo in San Francisco sent her $1000 and she saved about $800 to buy a big professional electric molido (grinder/mixer).  I’ve written earlier about the days and how they went and her trips to Managua after she increased her production thanks to the molido and her employees. While Candida was working the kids were going to high school.  There was no high school in my pueblo in those days and so the kids took the bus to the larger towns around that did have high schools. Candida says her kids were good, they worked hard, never caused her any problems and helped out at home. (I want to talk to Indiana, the daughter who lives here in town, sometime to get her recollections.)

Why did Candida quit the rosquilla business?  She says that the workers became undependable, wouldn’t show up, didn’t want to work so hard. She gave the molino to her oldest son who still has it and makes a living from it, grinding things up for people, corn, coffee, etc. I have walked by his workshop, heard the sound of the molido working away and smelled the coffee and wondered about what was going on inside.  Now I know.

Candida then tried some other ways to make money.  I’m pretty sure she still owed the bank money for her house. She worked with a relative who had a kind of small comedor (café).  She made sandwiches and hamburgers and frescos.  Although the comedor closed, she made those three items for sale from her house—and still does.  She tried selling other things and bought a glass cabinet from which to sell clothes. None of this worked out and so she looked into traveling to the U.S. for work.

Candida had a cousin in Miami, her contact, and so she flew there, her papers in order.  She travelled on the 10 year visa she had obtained when she went to visit Reynaldo in San Francisco.  But at the airport she was detained for 5 hours while something was investigated.  She had traveled with another woman who was looking for work, too.  This woman’s papers were not in order and she was sent back to Nicaragua.  Candida’s cousin had provided her with a phone number which the authorities would not let her use, and so her cousin had showed up at the airport and waited for 2 flights from Managua before returning home, figuring that for some reason Candida had missed her flight.  This was 2002, I think. Finally the emigration people let her go at 11 at night.  She walked out of Miami airport with nothing but her bag and a phone number.  Luckily she went up to a policeman who spoke Spanish.  He heard her story and let her call the number on his cell phone.  After the family said it would pick her up, he got a description of the truck they were driving and gave it to Candida and described for the family what Candida was wearing. She slept on her cousin’s sofa that night.

After 2 weeks of looking she got a job in a big, big, mansion house.  The lady described the job—cleaning the house , the pool and environs, daily, doing all the laundry and ironing, cooking --more than Candida could do, and after three days she had to leave and was not paid for the three days.  She had a bunch of other jobs and I don’t think I have the order straight.  She worked for 18 months taking care of a Peruvian lady who was a stroke victim.  This lady needed complete care—medicines, dressing, toileting, etc.  The lady had an apartment in her son’s house and Candida and she got along (the lady’s name was some version of Candida and so they had that in common.)  Candida was pleased that the son visited his mother daily.  The job ended when the lady died.

Pay for jobs in houses was room, board and about $500 to $600 a month.

Another job was in a nursing home, 6 days a week from 5 a.m. until 10p.m. for which she was paid $200 per week, and had to find, and pay for, a place to sleep.  The patients were incompetent and Candida did all parts of their care except making lunch.  She administered medication, wheeled people to the dining room, changed diapers, bathed them, changed sheets, made café con leche 2 times a day.  She was in charge of 6 patients.

She cared for other older people in their homes, but her favorite job was taking care of a little girl for about 4 months.  A picture of that “chiquita” is in a place of honor in Candida’s living room.

 In addition to the 3 year stay in the States, Candida returned  there times on six month visas.  When she got back to Nicaragua the final time, she made improvements to her house and retired for good.   That was 6 years ago, I think.

Food and Coffee

Food and Coffee

Peace Corps is supposed to be hard, but I have to say my life has been pretty cushy lately, if you exclude the struggles the work presents.  They are many and varied and one of these days I will try to write about them.  I need a little distance to see that part of life here more clearly.  Since I’m in the thick of it, I don’t have perspective.

 But, as my son Alex would say, I’m living large in other ways. For instance as I write I’m drinking café con leche.  The afternoon rain has cooled everything down nicely.  When it’s hot in the afternoon, I treat myself to a banana smoothie.  Yes, that means we have a blender and ice in this house.  The ice is  unusual but the blender is not because it is used to make frescoes, Nicaragua’s traditional fruit drink.

After months of frugal, basic cooking, I’m taking advantage of the kitchen and I’m having a really good time.  I made yoghurt from cow’s milk.  Drop dead delicious, better than anything I tasted in Europe or in the States.  I made fabulous chili from fresh vegetables, carne de soy and my host mom’s remarkable beans. (We are careful not to waste gas so she cooks my beans with hers and they are perfect.) I made broccoli-potato soup without stock, just good vegetables and cow’s milk, all pureed it all in the blender.

 A friend asked me to show her how to make pizza.  She actually uses her oven. (Gas here is expensive, and most ovens are just used to store stuff in.)  So we made sauce from tomatoes, sautéed onions and peppers as a topping, grated cuajada (local soft cheese), and made the dough just like in the States although I had to buy a half pound of yeast and guess at the right amount (no handy little packets).  If I do say so myself, the pizza was unbelievably good, perfect really.  Another friend, learning about the pizza, asked me to come to her house to make oatmeal cookies tomorrow.  Come on!  I am hoping my reputation spreads and I get more offers to cook with people. I like the parallel play part; working with people to make something is so different from sitting in their houses being served something.  And this is a way I can give back.  I buy most of the ingredients and leave behind most of the food, although tomorrow I’ll take a few cookies to give to other people as gifts.

I guess you can tell how giddy I am about the food situation.  I talk to another volunteer who has just moved into his own separate place and is cooking for himself for the first time.  We talk food.  He’s giddy, too.  Why should this be, we asked ourselves recently.  We both agree things just taste better here. A potato has such flavor, same for onions and peppers.  Milk is whole and creamy.  Fruit tastes so sweet and good.  So maybe it’s the ingredients.  But it also could be that we are cooking food we know after eating a Nica diet (in his case) or a too basic diet (in mine) for so long. Whatever, we’re having fun.

I want to write about my bus ride back from Ocotal today. I went there to draw money from the bank, buy a baby gift and food shop at the only alternative in these parts to the unpleasant Pali. I can’t remember if I’ve written about the advantages of being an old person here, but one of them is that often I get seats on crowded buses because the generation of people older than 30 years honors my wrinkles.  Mothers holding babies often stand but I get offered a seat. (An aside—I really like riding busses and if you saw the busses you’d think I was crazy, but you get to see the people and the beautiful world rushing by and breeze blows through—all of which is enhanced, needless to say, if you have a seat.)

Anyway, I got a seat up front and another senora sat next to me.  Often people on the bus don’t talk, but she asked about me and when I told her I was a volunteer with Peace Corps, she said, so you have  amor de humanidad.  I was taken aback.  No one here, including me, has ever quite put it like that.  So I said yes, feeling a little guilty because I know how various are my motives for being here.  But my perceived altruism put her in the mood to tell me that she was on her way to visit her son.  She has 8 children and they all live on a coffee farm north of Ocotal except her son who is 20 and joined the army. She misses him and is worried about him.  He is stationed a distance from their farm.  I picked up pretty early in the conversation that she is a serious evangelical.  She asked me about my religious preference.  I have a new answer to that question which seems to work.  I tell people that I was raised a Catholic but don’t go to church any more.  She could relate.  She was raised Catholic, too.

 On her lap she was carrying her purse/bag with a thermos sticking up out of the top.  Thermoses are common here because people like sweet coffee and they make it in the morning and then keep it for the day, usually having a cup in the afternoon sometime. I don’t see people traveling with them though.  She told me she was bringing coffee to her son.  Then she offered me a cup (I swear I never mentioned the thermos or hinted in any way.  I don’t even like sweet coffee,) and when I said yes ( I always say yes to offers of food or drink) she pulled out a ceramic cup from her bag and poured me a half cup, there in the bus, the aisles jammed with people watching my good fortune. She wanted to give me her phone number but we didn’t have a pen.  She wanted me to visit her on the farm. I wish I had the number.  I would have liked to visit the coffee farm. When I finished the coffee, the cup went back in her bag.

I just realized the coffee story probably struck you as unremarkable because in the States people are always drinking coffee as they travel.  Not so here.  And I think it was a sign of her special generosity to offer me some of her son’s coffee, grown, roasted and ground on her farm. That I, a stranger, am the beneficiary of such kindness always amazes me.