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?