Various

Every morning on Sandinista radio you can hear a lovely song, Nicaragua, Nicaragüita, written by Nicaragua’s most famous composer, Carlos Mejia Godoy, whose family hailed from my part of the country.  I urge everyone to google the words and look for a way to hear it on line.  It’s a waltz and when I first heard it I thought it was a love song.  It is, but it’s also a song of the revolution and the words are tough.  The singer says that he always loved Nicaragua but loves her more now that, drenched in blood, she is free.  I told my Spanish teacher I wanted to learn the words.  As it happens he is also a guitar teacher and so at our last lesson we sang the thing maybe 6 times to his playing. 

Spanish lessons occupy 6 hours a week.  Until school starts in February, I’ve been spending another 6 hours (15 if you count time for transportation) teaching a bit of English to the guides at the only tourist attraction in these parts, the Somoto Canyon.  The canyon is a good distance from where I live, but I love going because I get out into the country.  There is not much going on in my quaint pueblo, no markets or stores except for the little pulperias which sell a few necessaries.  There is no place to go for coffee or a beer (actually there are two bars but decent folks don’t go there.)  There is no restaurant or café.  For those amenities I travel by taxi 15 minutes to Somoto.  In Somoto there is a grocery store (Pali, owned by Walmart), street vendors, a municipal market, eateries, 2 hotels and dozens of little stores selling used American clothes and plastic items.  Somoto is hardly a metropolis but it saves my life.  I love it when two days a week I have to be there between activities.  I buy myself a frugal but delicious lunch.  I check out the post office.  I use the cyber, buy fruit and vegetables. I check out the bakery hoping against hope that they have whole wheat bread (I’ve found it twice) and, begrudgingly I enter the Pali to buy things I can’t buy anywhere else.

I also have been working with 2 of my 4 counterpart teachers.  One of them is a single mom who lives in town with children aged 14 and 2 and with her grandmother who is ancient and toothless.  I have been showing up 2 to 3 times a week to help this teacher, call her Domitila, study for a huge test she has to take in March comprising all she has learned in English.  The topics she has to study are complex—like verb forms people don’t actually use much. But she has a very limited ability to speak English thanks to an educational system that prizes grammar over communication. Domitila is a large loud woman whom I have grown to like a lot.  She is a survivor.  She complains with big gestures.  She calls herself “gorda” and when I politely insist that she is merely “hermosa” she roars.  So funny, that gringa. The opportunity to help her out during vacation here has made a bond.  I think we’ll be able to work together when school starts, and I tell her that by the end of 2 years she’ll be speaking English, which she will at some level.  She roars at that idea, too, but it pleases her mightily.

I have spent some time with another counterpart, call her Erica, a slight woman who lacks confidence.  She is married to Juan Carlos and has a one year old, Juan Carlito.  I have visited with her several times, but she invited me for lunch one day.  She and Juan Carlos both trained to be English teachers and they very much want to speak fluently.  They want me to give them lessons, really conversation opportunities, on some kind of regular basis.  Peace Corps warns us that there are all kinds of people who want that deal.  But these two are so earnest, so plagued by the difficulties imposed by the educational system (for instance, in order to be able to teach one or two sections of English, the job for which they were trained, they have to teach 3 or 4 sections of something for which they have no training or love, e.g. music), that I am inclined to find a way to accommodate them.

Saturday I’ll be leaving my present home to an interim house out in one of the barrios of my town.  The house I’ll be living in is one of the houses the government builds for the people who have nowhere to live.  It’s basic but acceptable.  I’ll have a room and kitchen privileges although the kitchen has no refrigerator or oven, just a two burner stove top.  I will move again in early April to take over the room of another volunteer in my site when she returns to the States.  Her place comes with a mini fridge, stove in a good sized room.  I’ll spend the rest of my time in that space and I’m excited to get there.  In the meantime, I’ll be living like a Nicaragüense.  I’m probably going to be eating a lot of peanut butter ($6.00 a jar and worth it) and oatmeal.  You could do worse.

Various

Amazing Sights

I keep getting blown away by things I see.  I wonder how long it takes to be so acculturated that common sights lose their ability to astound.  Until that happens, I’m enjoying the constant surprises.  Here are a few:

Sunday, there was such a clamor on the patio of the house I live in.  The parrot in his cage was squawking wildly and there was other noise I quickly identified as a cock fight, but as it occurs in nature.  We have roosters and hens and chicks roaming around all the time.  Two cocks got into it and someone in the family had to intervene to stop it.  One cock was placed in the shower to segregate him from the other and life returned to peace.  I was reminded not to open the shower door.  This morning I walked around the house to the lavadero, the cement basin in which we wash clothes and dishes.  There stood the señora of the house with a dead rooster in the lavadero.  She was plucking it. I was taken aback first because the señora has a responsible job in the world and I’m always amazed that her status doesn’t insulate her from the hardest household work, including apparently, plucking roosters. Second, I wasn’t aware of this additional use for the lavadero.  A little later I went to take my shower.  The only sign of the deceased rooster was a fair amount of ñaña on the floor of the shower.  Por eso always wear flip flops in the shower.

Speaking of chickens, a week or so ago I was traveling into the country in a cab.  This sounds kind of posh, but it is a common form of transportation in my part of the world where busses pass by infrequently and nearly no one has a car.  When I take a taxi I expect to share it with at a minimum of three and a maximum, in my experience, of six extra people, not including the driver and children who sit on laps.  We all pack in somehow.  On this one trip, however, there were only two of us in the back seat until the cab stopped to pick up a woman who carried a large bag, the kind people buy rice in, plastic but reinforced with cross hatched string or thread. In the bag she cut two holes and out of each stuck the head of a chicken. I did the proverbial double take. On the way home, I caught the bus along with a lady who had two chickens tied together at the feet.  No bag.

One day my packed taxi stopped to pick up another passenger.  There being no room inside the taxi, he climbed into the trunk which was left open to accommodate him as we sped down the road.  I’m used to that one now as it happens fairly often.  I am hoping to find out how much the trunk riders pay.  I bet it’s the same as those of us who ride inside.  Everyone pays for the ride so the cab driver is motivated to shove in as many people as he can.  No one complains.  Everyone is glad to have the ride.

The father in the family where I live was taking down the dry laundry from the line.  As he took each piece he folded it into a neat square and put in on top of his head.  By the end of the line he was balancing a tidy stack. 

 His mom is a charming and unassuming señora, very warm, in her mid to late 70’s I’d guess.  She came to visit and was very interested in me and kind to me.  She asked about my children and I took her to my room where I have pictures of my family and friends.  She was much taken with a snap shot of Alex and Tina on their wedding day.  It’s the only wedding picture I brought with me.   The señora asked for the photo and when I handed it to her she left the room with it clutched tightly to her breast.  I wasn’t sure that I could get it back, but knew it was gone when I saw her a few minutes later.  The wedding picture was tucked inside her bodice, the edge peaking up over the neckline of her dress.  She left with it.  These are the kinds of misunderstandings that are impossible to negotiate with my level of Spanish.  Easier to ask Alex and Tina to send me another snapshot.

In the campo life is even more traditional than it is in my pueblo of 2400 people. I always see ancient ladies walking along the road with heavy loads on their heads.  I see men riding burros bareback.  I see women gathered at the one well in a village early in the morning with their barrels and pails talking as I imagine women have been doing for all time.   In the house where I give lessons, a very old señora naked but wrapped in a towel from the waist down makes her slow way over the packed dirt floor to shower. I love to watch the oxen walk in the road.  They are various and complex shades of cream and taupe.

I am reading a very good set of short stories, Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber (thank you to whomever recommended this one) and in one story a character thinks back on his years as a tourist when he would look at amazing sights as if his seeing them somehow validated them, as though in a way they weren’t  real until he saw them.  Not sure I explained this right but I think I recognize the idea.  I’m still a tourist here and these sights make me want to turn to a companion to say, “Did you see that!!” as though the sight was placed there to blow me away.  In time the sights, and maybe I, will just be a part of the landscape. Not sure I’m looking forward to that time.  My life now is very vivid.   The visuals are a part of the sensory overload that makes me sleep a solid 9 hours every night.

Amazing Sights

Peace Corps is really good at training.  Part of training for us was preparing for the emotional ups and downs of service.  We were warned that there would be times when we’d question the usefulness of what we were doing or feel overwhelmed by the foreignness of the place.  At such times we were advised to hold off on the blog and turn to the journal.  But a friend emailed an inquiry as to what I’m actually doing now and I was struck by the two ways in which the question, “What am I doing here?” can be understood.

So, apropos of one way of interpreting the question, I’ve been in my permanent site for 3 weeks.  My job is to help Nica English teachers develop better teaching strategies toward the end of more ‘communicative” learning.  I am also charged with helping to develop materials for classroom use in this country where the only existing material is a whiteboard.  Finally, I’m supposed to find ways to teach English to interested people in the community.  I am permitted to develop other projects secondary to my main English-teaching obligations. But there’s a hold on all this work. School is out for the year.  This is summer vacation.  Classes resume in early February.  Peace Corps schedules us into the new site with 2 months during which I am supposed to “integrate” into the community, not actually work. 

Theoretically, some time for getting settled is a good idea, but as you can imagine, this integration part is hard.  For the first time we are on our own, some of us with limited language skills, living with people we don’t know who may or may not be excited to have us here.  I can tell you what I’ve done by way of integration: introduce myself to neighbors, visit and chat at various small businesses in town like corner markets, tortilla and rosquilla sellers, hang out at the park hoping someone is interested enough to stop for a chat (this actually works often), go to church for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, go to the high school graduation, visit the local Department of Education office, meet the police, try to figure out who are local leaders so I can talk with them about community needs, etc.  I have tried, but the truth is there’s still a lot of down time every day.  So I use that to reread training material and, especially, study Spanish maybe 3 hours a day. I have to feed myself so I shop and cook. There’s still time left so I’ve been reading a lot of very good novels and enjoying that. At night I listen to music, write in Spanish in my journal and read one thing or another.  I admit to playing solitaire.   I also have done a little traveling.  I have a PC site mate, Jenny, who has showed me how to get around the closest large town for food, cyber and banking needs.  She also took me to a bigger city, Esteli.  I’ve met some other volunteers from the area.

So, in short, this is a hard time for me with some up sides.  But I recently had a project that really excites me fall into my lap. Another volunteer in the small business sector let me know he’d meet a Nica guy who operates a tour service for the only real tourist attraction in Madriz, the Somoto Canyon. The owner employs 6 guides who need to learn English so they can better do their jobs. I agreed to meet with the owner. Lacking his name or phone number, but with a general idea of where his business was supposed to be in the nearby town, I headed out to find him. When the business wasn’t where I was told it was, I started to ask around in local shops.  In one, a lady didn’t know, but got her employee to put me in a car (yes, I was a little worried) and drive me to the local tourist office.  The folks there listened and knew who the guy was, phoned him and he came to find me at the office and brought me to his place. (This was an amazingly successful negotiation.  It could have as easily ended up that no one knew who I was looking for or that the guy wasn’t around or nobody understood my Spanish, but this is how business is done in Nicaragua—in person, at your house or shop, face to face.)

Long story short, I am thrilled that I am going to try to help these guides so maybe they do a better job with tourists who maybe will tip them more so they can live better in this poor part of the world. I suggested and the operator agreed that I don’t have time to teach them a lot of English, but we can do basics and maybe I can translate the things they say on the tour and help them learn how to say those thing in English. I hope this will be my project in the month and a half before school starts and maybe a little after.  So, that’s what I’m doing.

As to the other meaning of the question, “What am I doing here?” I ponder that sometimes.  I think about my kids and the lovely women in their lives, my friends, my family, my dog, my garden. I think of the odds against making any real difference.  I think of the  difficulty of knowing well another culture, or another person in that culture.  T

What Am I Doing Here?

La Purisima

In the last post I mentioned the Feast of the Immaculate Conception which apparently has two faces.  The religious holiday is December 8, but on December 7, and for a week before in large cities, there is the more pop-religious version of La Purisima.  I have only a single experience with it, and my experience is in a small town, but it was something.  To begin, I gather that La Purisima is something like Halloween.  There are no costumes but people go around to houses for treats.  But not all houses.  The house I live in, however, has a Purisima event every year.  I am not sure how many other houses in the pueblo do this, but I think not many.  I’ve never seen anything like it. 

It started at 4 p.m.  I walked out to the patio of the house which is surrounded by a chain link fence on the other side of which is a dirt road.   I was taken aback to see in the road outside the fence maybe 40 or 50 people.  Many were milling around, pulling down large palm leaves so they could sit in the dirt.  Others, including teens and children were pressed up against the gate in the fence maybe 5 rows deep and I mean really pressed against the fence and each other.  Inside the fence on the patio were a dozen plastic chairs facing a homemade shrine to Mary with lots of lights and glitter and artificial flowers.  I sat in one of the chairs and made small talk with a nine year old sitting next to me. (I am so odd to them.)  After 40 minutes or so an older señora stood and the rest of us followed as she and another woman recited readings and led us in songs.  The songs are traditional (I heard them on the radio for days in advance) and are sung mostly by women in a distinctive tone—hard to describe—a bit nasally, very loud, a combination of song and chant.  In the house the family had accumulated a vast of hand number of handouts, enough to fill two very big cardboard boxes.  The treats consisted of sections of cane, candy and fruit.  Some were packed in large plastic containers; there were smaller containers, plates and finally a huge number of bags, maybe the size of small lunch bags in the states, all with the aforesaid treats. There were also some plastic balls for children.

After the readings and songs, the family passed out the medium containers to the folks on the patio who then left via the gate, but with great difficulty because the people on the road were so packed against the gate it was hard to get through.  We then waited, maybe for a half hour.  Musicians showed up with a crew of singers and, once again, had a horrible time making it through the crowd.  When they got in and settled on the patio,  the Purisima songs started anew,  this time with marimba, and guitars and I think a mandolin.   There was another señora in this group who spoke at length about the Virgin.  When these people, musicians from an outlying campo comunidad, were done—about 7:00—they had to leave by the back entrance, the crowd outside the fence was so deep.  The musicians and singers took with them the largest plastic containers of treats.

The time had apparently come for the people in the streets to get treats, too.  But the family said that they wouldn’t open the gate until there was some order.  The deal is that a few people at a time are let in, maybe 10 or so, and they sing a Purisima song and get a bag of treats.  But the people outside, all pushing and shoving, looked like a mob and the family wasn’t letting anyone in until somehow the people better behaved.  The stalemate commenced and I must say I felt pretty awkward sitting there on the patio with one or two family members, while outsiders, obviously poor and incredibly determined to get their treats, stood, listening to Purisima songs, without moving from the fence  for 3 ½ hours.  It was a standoff and I was struck that no one on the outside took charge, said to others, “OK you guys, these people aren’t opening up until we make a line so, you people at the gate, you can go first but get in line so we can get our treats and go home”.  Rather everyone stood there without moving.  And the family didn’t move either.

I didn’t quite understand what was going on.  At first I wondered why the family wanted to provide this treat for the community when it carried such difficulty and great expense. A few days later, someone explained that the person who holds the Purisima celebration does so because s/he promised the Virgin s/he would do so if the Virgin granted a request.  So it’s an obligation owed to arrange for the songs and prayers and to give gifts to the people.  This helps to explain the attitudes on all sides: the family’s need to give is by way of paying a debt, not necessarily a display of concern for the poor.  And the poor are a part of the dynamic; their role is to accept the benevolence.  This doesn’t explain the jam up at the fence, though. 

By 8 p.m. I was pretty hungry and nothing was happening so I went to the kitchen to make some dinner.  When I looked out about 15 minutes later the gate had been opened and some people were singing their song on the patio.  I assume they got their treats.  It must have taken the family an hour or two to get through all the people who had been waiting.

La Purisima

It Comes with the Territory

I haven’t been in site very long and the real work won’t start until school resumes in early February, but I’m already registering the difficult parts of service.  The prediction is that the first six months of service are really hard. Here are some stressors:

1.     I used to worry about wearing sunglasses.  I’d think that nothing made me more gringa, but the truth is that everything about me screams gringa, from my clothes, to my skin, to the way I walk—silly to worry about sunglasses, as if by avoiding them I could fit in better.  I so stick out.  And that will never change, although people will get used to seeing me in the streets.  People are nice.  They smile and say “adiós” (Nica greeting, pronounced “adio”), but I am the “other” in spades.

2.     I can’t rely on my well-honed ability to size up situations.  I was really good at this in the States.  I prided myself on being able to read people well and to intuit what was going on interpersonally.  Here, in this other culture, I don’t know the rules and so can’t make predictions and judgments. It’s a strange feeling, because Nicaraguans are Western, they watch TV and wear clothes I recognize, so it’s easy to think they think like I do.  Not true.  In many small ways I miscalculate and that undermines confidence. 

3.     Time hangs heavy.  Perhaps this will change when the school year starts or maybe I’ll figure out what to do with the time I now have.  This is a big one—I really do hope that I can learn the “in-the-moment” thing, or, put another way, a way of being content not doing too much that’s “productive”. But aside from taking care of buying daily food to cook, there’s nothing much to do for entertainment, no one to go visit, no casual shopping, although I can get to a bigger town and plan to do that at least once a week if just for the scene change.  I asked for a small town and I got it.  I saw a little boy yesterday in the street kicking an empty plastic bottle around.  Maybe I should give that a try.  Joke.  But this is an opportunity to do things I always said I wanted to do and never had time for, like walk for an hour a day, do yoga daily, get out my calligraphy stuff and read, read, read.

4.     There are many moments about which we were warned, moments when the disconnect between life as we knew it and life as it is here becomes acute.  This morning I had one.  I was drinking coffee on the porch appreciating the view when I looked up the dirt road to see two little kids playing on the side of the road.  One was about 7 and the other about 5.  The seven year old was hacking at a tree with a machete.  No adult in sight.

I can get euphoric about not much.  Today, by asking questions, I found the home of a lady who sells tortillas.  I was invited in while one señora went for the tortillas.  Two other señoras were talking.  I introduced myself, said who I was, what I was doing in their town and shook hands.  I got such a positive response.  The two year part impressed them.  When I get bored I can go sit at the park and hope someone wants to chat.  Today I got two high school girls.  They were giggly, one more bold than the other who tagged along when her more confident friend.   Both sat down to talk.  But that was fun for me and I might have one of the girls as a student when class starts in February.

Wednesday  is the day before the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a big holiday here.  In the big cities it’s celebrated for a week with candy for kids and gatherings at people’s houses, but here it’s a one day holiday.  My family has a gathering at the house.  Should be interesting.  Today the family broke out the Christmas decorations.  (Yes, we are decorated for Christmas and Immaculate Conception).  When I got back to the house the tree was already up.  Now there is more glitter and light around than you can imagine, two crèches with a giant baby Jesus, and you know what, it’s just like home, down to the big cardboard box that holds the decorations wrapped in plastic bags from year to year.  Fireworks are sold in the streets.  It’s going to be a big holiday season.

I think I’m going to be fine here.  I am prepared, though, for 6 hard months.

It Comes with the Territory

New Home

The move from my training town to my new site in the northern mountains of Nicaragua took place on Thanksgiving day.  And it was an ordeal even though the transportation part proceeded without a hitch.  The problem was with the hugely heavy and ungainly suitcase I had to schlep along with an overstuffed back-pack and weighty day pack.  The source of all this weight was not simply my clothes but also the ton of material PC thinks I need.  I agree I need it but moving it all required transfers from taxi to bus to taxi to taxi to bus and finally into my pueblo at the top of a steep hill.  I managed it all with the kindness of strangers, and when I got here my host dad met me on the highway with his “friend” a guy who lifted probably 70 pounds of suitcase on his back and walked it up to the house while my host dad and I hefted the packs.

Thanks giving dinner consisted of a tortilla wrapped around a piece of guajara (type of salty cheese) which I bought and ate on the bus from Managua.  I add this detail not to make anyone feel sorry for me (I don’t feel sorry for myself) but to show that I’ve learned how to manage. I’ve started to get a little organized, to get out and meet a few people at the local pulperias that sell the few things I bought to start cooking for myself.  Today my site mate, a health volunteer, who sadly will only be here for 4 months or so, took me to the nearest large town to hit the bank and to buy some food for the week.  So I am ready to cook for myself—oatmeal, pineapple, a few veggies, some peanut butter and wheat bread, and yoghurt.  In another week, after I get the hang of things, maybe I’ll try a preparing a real meal, but I need to figure out the rhythms of the house first—when the kitchen is used, when I can do my wash without taking up limited line space, in what order it’s best to get a shower in the morning.  I’ve arranged to meet with each of my Nicaraguan counterpart teachers next week,  And next week I’ll get back  to work on my Spanish. For now I’m trying to take it a little easy.

This is a beautiful town.  It’s amazing what mountains do for a place.  The mountains here are more like foothills, really sharply peaked and covered in vegetation.  I’d like to learn the geology. There are lots of nice vistas. The town is muy tranquilo.  In the night and mornings—actuaslly now that I listen all day long--, the roosters set up a competition (or maybe they are just saying hi).  One starts, his neighbor picks up. And the next one and so forth till the first one (under my window) starts again.  It seems that every  house has a big parrot in a cage.  The chickens sometimes roost in trees and are very pretty there. Today while my site mate and I were talking by the side of the road, a small parrot appeared between her legs.  She bent over and he hopped on her finger.  She went to put him up on a tree branch when a woman came running out.  He had apparently escaped from the house but he hopped on the woman’s finger to return home—another Nica moment.

I’m glad for this time to rest up.  Training has been full and when school starts in early February I’ll be very busy again.  These two months are for Spanish and for talking to people the best I can and for figuring out—or starting to—what I can do here to help.  

New Home

Being Official

Yesterday I and my group of 33 trainees sang two national anthems (Nica and US), took two vows (one in Spanish and one in English) shook hands with the U.S. charge d’affairs and signed on as volunteers. (If you want to  see the Nica news report of the ceremony, go to YouTube and enter “ pc on the news”.  It’s a news spot one of us filmed from the TV,  and there’s lots of volunteer party noise in the background.  I am in one brief shot at the end). The ceremony took place in a Holiday Inn in Managua and our host families were invited and feted for their invaluable help. Each volunteer individually presented a printed certificate to host moms and posed for a picture.  It was really nice to see our crew, all cleaned up for the occasion, with their much shorter host moms.  Whatever else happens here, the connection to and among these families is the best diplomacy. I would trust my family to take care of me any time, and to always be glad to have me come back to visit.  It’s an amazing capacity for hospitality and generosity these families show.

 Some in our group felt that even a place as ordinary as a Holiday Inn was too grandiose a setting and could make our host families feel intimidated and poor. Actually the Holiday Inn was humble in comparison to the US embassy which we visited on Thursday after a lot of security to-do.  The Embassy is relatively new and when you’re in it you are in the US.  Everyone speaks English, even the Nica security guards.  There’s a contingent of Marines. There is a store where we volunteers, in a pathetic show of need, stocked up on chocolate, Snickers bars in particular.  Although they brought in pizza for lunch, I managed to buy a real cappuchino at the cafeteria. I was so happy to have that flavor again, especially when combined with a peanut M and M. 

I got side-tracked by food.  I swore I wouldn’t do that.  Volunteers spend a good deal of time talking about food, what they are eating at home, what they miss, how they plan to feed themselves at their sites.  It’s the most popular topic.  Speaking of which, after we swore in, we were invited to the home of the county director for Thanksgiving dinner, a week early. We had massive quantities of bean dip, salsa and guacamole.  We had real delicious turkey and pies with whipped cream.  We had sangria. The director’s house is lovely.  We were outside without mosquitos in her beautiful garden.  A wonderful end to a wonderful day.

We stayed in a pretty nice hotel in Managua for two days, enjoying warm showers and air conditioning for the first time in this country.  We could watch CNN. There was free wifi.  I found all of this a little hard, a hint of culture shock to come.  I didn’t really want to be in this world.  But having said that enjoyed the shower.  This morning everyone departed.  There were a lot of tears as people went off by themselves to their sites.  I admit to having been close to tears a lot over the last 2 days.  I think it was the culmination part, and the going alone part, and the great struggle that was  training was a part of it too.    We trainees were, after all, the only folks from home we knew for 3 months and it was hard saying good bye. 

But there’s adventure ahead. The next post will be from my new site.