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.