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.   

Mothers’ Day

Mothers’ Day

Silly me, I thought Dia de Las Madres in Nicaragua would kind of be like Mothers’ Day at home, some phone calls, dinner for Mom and a few gifts.  But where in the States Mothers’ Day is supported by greeting card manufacturers and has the feeling of obligation weighing it down, here the government is all over the holiday and yet families embrace it, too.

I’ve been hearing about Dia de Las Madres since the first of May.  The day itself is May 30 and the month builds toward it.  There were three public Mothers’ Day celebrations in my town, the first put on by a NGO which supplied actual printed invitations, a glossy magazine styled booklet condemning domestic violence and praising mothers and a gathering in the sports stadium which was  attended by about 20 dignitaries in seats at the front, and about 45 spectators although there were chairs for 200.  All the dignitaries got slick diplomas—not the photocopied kind.  I don’t know why this event happened.  I’m sure the organizers had a goal, but judging by the turnout, despite the slick invitations, they must have been disappointed. The second event for mothers was in the same place but this one was mobbed.  It is held every year and there are give-aways, big baskets of food and colorful items distributed  by lottery, all paid for by the mayor’s office.  There was an MC who kidded with the ladies, made them dance or compete for a date with him.  The moms, there in droves with their kids, loved it. The third event happened at the high school.  School was not closed for the day but there were only a few teachers in classrooms. The rest were preparing for the event which included the teachers cooking lunch for the moms, a poem recited by a member of each class and dances.  The moms came to that, too.

But the real Mothers’ Day is at home. The day before the 30th, I came home from school to find that my host-mom redecorated the front room, by which I mean she changed the slip-covers on the chairs to one with a bright red and coral print, changed the curtains from white to red, got out her red artificial flowers to fill containers and put up old Mothers’ Day cards and gifts.  All this was in preparation for the events of the next day.  Early in the morning she was cooking rice and chicken for expected family who did indeed show up, some with gifts, but all to wish her a happy Mothers’ Day and spend time with her. This day was very important to her as it was to other mothers.  All day long you could see people walking in the streets dressed up, carrying packages to visit a mother or beloved grandmother.

It’s easy to be cynical about Mothers’ day here or in the States.  The government here often doesn’t have much in the way of good news for its citizens and so celebrations of one thing or another serve to keep spirits up. But in my view the mothers of Nicaragua deserve all the celebrating and more.  Here mothers run the houses, raise the children, take care of the elderly are the social security system when the kids can’t live on their own.  They often do all this without the help of a man. I mean often, not always.  There are some really good men here, but there are a great number of households headed by moms.  How women do all they do given their lack of financial support and few jobs is a mystery.

To put a face on it, let me describe my host-mom who I called Indiana in an earlier post (not her real name). She’s 71. She had six children who lived, two who died.  She never married but lived with the same man, the father of her children, for 30 years. He worked on farms.  He left her for another woman. They are amicable now.  He visits often.

Indiana bought the house we live in with the help of her parents and a bank which partially financed it.  To start it was a simple two or three room house with a large horno (beehive shaped oven) outside.  Indiana began making rosquillas to sell.  She was a dependable worker and found a distributor to buy her rosquillas.  She employed 8 other ladies to help make them.  Her days were amazingly long.  She got up at 1 or 2 in the morning to get the oven going and begin the preparation of the dough.  She worked long days, also caring for children, and then 2 days a week, Wednesday and Sunday, she loaded up huge bamboo baskets with bags of rosquillas, got them stored on the roof of the 4 a.m. bus for the 3 ½ ride to Managua where a taxi took her and the rosquillas to the distributor who paid her in cash.  By 9:30 in the morning she was back at the bus station for the 3 ½ hour ride back to town.  She told me that she slept on the bus, her money hidden in the band of her underpants and her hands folded over her stomach. She did this for decades.

I am not clear on why she stopped making rosquillas.  What I do know is that a time came when she couldn’t pay the mortgage.  The kids were grown and so she got work in Miami caring for an elderly Cubana.  She worked for 3 years, paid off the mortgage, got rid of the horno, and added on to the house.  She made three more trips to the U.S., each on 6 month visas, caring for children of Cuban businessmen.  She returned for good to live in her house and retire.  That was 6 years ago.

Indiana has a third grade education.  Of her 6 surviving children, all but one studied after high school.  All take fine care of themselves, a couple of them do pretty well. She is devoutly Catholic, but open to new things.  She has a cell phone and a gringa in her house. I think she secretly hopes I’ll convert, but she is never pushy.  I go to church with her once in a while to be companionable.

What a woman!  And there are a bundle like her.  Mothers to celebrate.

Rainy Season

Rainy Season

Rainy season started about 3 weeks ago with a shower or two, the first in several months.  But now we get daily rain, often in the afternoon and sometimes all night.  The first effect of rainy season I noticed was weeds flourishing where there had been nothing growing for months. I KNOW these weeds.  I have been yanking them out of my garden for years, the exact same varieties.  It’s like a 40th class reunion, running into the gang of the meanies you never liked in high school.  I have their number, although I couldn’t tell you their names.  Tough guys, those weeds.  They thrive in multiple climates.

Last week I bought cow’s milk for the first time.  (Leche de vacca as opposed to milk from the store.)  I’ve known where to get it for a while, but during the dry season, it wasn’t available much.  The cows were drying up, fed on dead stalks from last year’s harvest.  Their milk was thick, I was told, and there wasn’t much of it.  The milk I bought was plenty rich and creamy.  I boiled it for 5 minutes to kill any germs and had a cup of it warm with a little sugar and cinnamon—absolutely delicious.  What café con leche it makes with dark Nicaraguan coffee! Whole grain oatmeal with local honey and cow’s milk—a dream.

There are some down sides to the rain besides weeds.  My high school sits at the highest point in town. I have to climb up to it every day. On Tuesday the rain was so hard that it brought down maybe 4 inches of mud, rock and debris that covered the street just below the school.  Four days have gone by and more debris collects but none has been removed by the weekend.  With the rain come more bugs, certainly mosquitoes, but others as well. The rain cools things down but raises the humidity. It’s nice to wake up cold in the morning when I fell asleep under only a sheet, but I did enjoy the dry air during the “summer”, November through February.

But the best part of the rainy season is how beautiful my site is.  I stood at the bus stop from which I can see a hill.  I have spent hours staring at that hill, watching the green disappear little by little, but now it’s brilliant green again. This past weekend I took a hike back out to the barrio where I lived for 2 months.  I went just for the walk and to see how things are coming now that there’s rain.  I’m happy to report that the cows are eating grass, that the fields are planted and little corn sprouts are up in orderly rows that follow the curves of the hills.  Very pretty.

The rain affects classes.  If it rains heavily in the night and into the morning, some kids don’t come to school.  I see some of those kids around town so wonder if that sense of rain being bad for health is here, too, in the north, as it was in my training tow. But someone explained to me that out in the surrounding communities, the rains make the roads impassable and so kids can’t get to school.

The rains come as I am finishing my first four months of teaching and I am experiencing the first real disillusionment.  It’s an interesting process, At first I was so excited to be doing my job, full of big plans and excited to try out techniques.  But after a while the enormity of the challenge becomes apparent. It’s not even the paucity of resources that depresses me or my struggles with discipline in the classroom; it’s the habits absorbed by my students from many years of mis-education. It’s the tradition of doing little because little is expected and there appears no good use for the content school has to offer; it’s the lack of preparation for intellectual challenge.  For instance, there is no tradition of reading to children, no books in the houses of most people, even educated people. All of this influences how my students behave and what they can do. If someone had explained all this to me before I came I don’t think I would have understood. This was not within my range of experience.

What this means, of course, is that I have to start over, now that I better see how things are because of course there is somewhere to go here. 

Meanwhile, there still are some very sweet moments and they come often—today, for instance.  My 11^th graders are the most challenging, a big class with a half dozen disrupters. I started to explain to them how to use an outline, a new idea for the class, and how to convert an outline into a short essay.  I dreaded this class, figured without a sexy topic it was doomed.  As I expected the class didn’t have much patience for the explanation, but they got the idea.  We started them on making an outline on one of 2 topics, the purpose of government or gender equality.  After working for about 25 minutes the class was interrupted by a man announcing the availability of graduation pictures. (Eleventh grade is the last year in the high school.) This is a sexy topic, and the man had the students’ attention. I was standing at the back of the class, listening, too.  One by one some students turned around to signal me to their desks and held up their notebooks to have me check their progress or supply a word or answer a question.  The lesson trumped the photo man! At least for several. Made my day.

Later, during a meeting of English Club my kids wrote silly poems.  Here are a few:

Three violet butterflies                    Two brown horses             Two red chickens

Playing with a ball                          Eating grass                        Dancing to reggae

Say” Pass it to me”                         Dream of little angels          Live in the house of my mother

  

Various

Various

I read an article in the newspaper here recently that reported the results of a survey of Nicaraguans by apparently righteous public opinion pollsters.  Asked if they would move out of the country if they could, somewhere between 54 and 57 percent of Nicaraguans said they would. (The estimation results from my faulty memory for the exact number and not any vagueness in the poll results).  I am astounded by that number.  Can you imagine if between 50 and 60 per cent of your countrymen and women  wanted to move?

Finding a way out obsesses many people and many people make it, if not to the preferred destination, the United States, then to the next bests: Costa Rica, Panama and especially Spain. Sometimes it seems that every family has a son or daughter living abroad.  I live with a woman who has six children, two of whom now live abroad, one in Spain and one in San Francisco.  Today at the pulperia I met a woman named Maria with a son in Los Angeles she hasn’t seen in 5 years.  Such sadness in her face.   When people ask where I’m from and I tell them, they tell me about their family member in Miami or Los Angeles or Texas, sometimes New York. I ask for how long they’ve been gone.  Two, five, ten years.  Do you visit?  Never.  Do they come to visit you? They came once, maybe twice.

I have met several people who want to improve their English so they can emigrate.  For them the language is the key.  They haven’t figured out yet about visas and money and jobs abroad.  They just think if they work hard enough to speak English, doors will open.  And maybe they will.

This exodus is a killer. Not only does it deprive Nicaragua of the talents of many ambitious people, but it wreaks havoc with family life—and the family is the heart of this country. There are, of course, the grieving mothers and fathers.  But the children take a hit, too, when their parent leaves to work somewhere else.  Grandmothers raise their grandchildren and people complain that the source of discipline is absent when parents aren’t there. It does seem to me a double cruelty: Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere, and also suffers not only a drain of talent but an assault on its strongest institution.

 ( I could also write about the other problem here, the lack of financial responsibility of men for their offspring under the law.  There are laws, but as in the U.S. 30 years ago, they are not enforced.  And besides, who has a job and wages with which to pay child support?) 

Something cheerier: Avocadoes and mangoes are in high season and falling off trees.  It’s a bonanza if you happen to have the right trees in your yard.  I do not, but people share.

I tried to start a community English class but made some miscalculations and it may not work out. It has been a good experience from which I learned a lot about how to do this kind of thing.  Maybe it’s not moribund.  We’ll see.  But it has caused me to sit outside the community center waiting for students between 6 and 7 some nights. And that is the most beautiful time.  Across the street is the park which now is filled with amazing trees dripping with bright red flowers from its crown down, and from its branches hang giant black pods, like those of a locust at home but much, much bigger.  The sky darkens slowly, a few people walk in the street. The air is cool, there’s a little breeze. I secretly hope no one comes to class so I can sit a little longer.

In contrast I have started a successful English Club at my high school.  It’s voluntary for kids who want to learn more English.  It’s a pleasure to teach motivated kids without the constraints of a curriculum and the need to share the planning.  My goal is to improve the ability of the 10 to speak meaningful English, and their confidence to try to say things.  I taught them how to say “What does____mean?” and “How do you say______in English?”  With the ability to ask, they do it all the time.  What do they want to know?  What does “download” mean? A translation for “I love you” and “Love me”.  What does Black-eyed Peas mean?   Love and computers and music. I reminded them that in class they studied how to say “I want” and “I need”.  We did an exercise where each said what s/he wanted.  I started with “I want a million dollars”.  They wanted to visit Brazil, to be a doctor, to drive a big car, to speak English.  One said, no lie, “I want to kiss Elsa” (another student in the group.)  Elsa was sanguine. What a thrill to see all those dreams popping out in English!

I have my low days, but the highs are so high that I’m getting addicted to Nicaragua.

A Good Hand

A Good Hand

It’s time to try to get writing my impressions of teaching school in Nicaragua.  I really don’t know where to begin so I’ll start with 2 limited observations and try some more later.

Three mornings a week at the instituto there is formación.  All the students assemble in their blue and white uniforms in the dirt plaza in front of the flagpole, each in lines organized by grade.  Usually the assistant principle makes announcements and then she may lecture a bit about the theme of the month (the mothers of Nicaragua for May) and the obligations of the students.  Then it’s the turn of a teacher to expound upon a virtue to be practiced like “solidarity” and to harangue (my admittedly loaded , but nevertheless accurate, word) the students into behaving better.  There’s a lot of talk of “indiscipline,” lack of respect, et cetera. The students stand and listen, but they pay little attention, talking to their friends, poking each other.  One time a girl at the head of her line was filing her nails, with impunity, in plain sight.  The other teachers stand on the sidelines paying no attention to the students and to what is being said to them.  They talk among themselves also. This is a familiar scene in other contexts—people being harangued and paying no attention to the speaker, indeed talking among themselves, but accepting the obligation to submit to the lecture.  As you can imagine this is a hard one to adjust to. It may not be, but it feels like disrespect to me, because in the States people usually accept the responsibility, if not to pay attention, at least to zone out quietly.

The talking while authoritiy figures are talking extends to the classroom.  During a conversation with a counterpart about the abysmal discipline in our classes of 7^th graders (ages 11 to 16, believe it or not) she told me that paying no attention was a cultural trait about which we could probably do little. (I don’t believe that because I have observed classes where there is no talking over the teacher, but I do think that there is a lack of indignation, a kind of resignation that many teachers have in the face of what is, maybe, based on my limited experience, a pretty widespread attitude.  I also think the tolerance for noise, which I noticed and wrote about soon after arriving here, is part of it. People put up with all kinds of noise which Americans wouldn’t tolerate as invading their own right to silent surroundings.  We have a word for it—“noise pollution”—but it is apparently the right of Nicas to make what noise they will.  No one tells anyone to pipe down. It also occurs to me that maybe there is no intention of disrespect which we norteamericanos associate with talking while others are presenting something. However, that still leaves the behavior, value-free, to deal with. 

The formación ends with three songs: the national anthem, a national song for students and the song of my particular instituto.  Students are then dismissed to class which, on the three days of formación, is shortened by the 20 minutes or so formación takes.

In the classroom, I can usually get everyone’s attention to start, but as the long (hour and a half) class wears on, it’s hard to keep.  The best technique is to keep them busy.  We try all kinds of innovative techniques to keep the learning interesting but the one sure-fire way to quiet the class and focus the students is to require that something be copied.  Understand that in my school there are no textbooks, no copying machine, obviously no power point, video or audio equipment.  Nothing, nada (The entire school has 6 miserable, small and inaccurate Spanish/English dictionaries which inspire sentences like, “The boy similar the girl” when the student wanted to say, “The boy likes the girl.”) The students have notebooks and the teachers have a whiteboard and large sheets of paper on which they can write out a reading, for example, or a practice dialogue. That’s it.  Therefore, there is a lot of copying of material into notebooks. 

The students are so used to copying things, tedious as it would be to you or me, that they are actually avid about it.  I sat to the side of class the other day and watched them copy, their bodies bent over their work, faces anxiously raised to the board and back down to their notebooks with what I can only describe as the eagerness of full engagement.  They really like to copy and most do so with precision and flair.  For instance, most students carry a pencil case with multiple colors of pens, erasers and white-out pens.  The work needs to be perfect and it needs to be pretty.  Students actually decorate the page on which they copy with curlicues—and not just girls.  They use multiple colors of ink.  God help us if we teach vocabulary with pictures.  They copy not just the word in English, supplying the Spanish, but they copy the picture! For this reason copying takes a lot of time.

For what it’s worth I’ve developed some theories about the copying, the emphasis on a   beautiful page and decoration in general. One is that in a country with few photocopiers and computers for word processing, a “good hand” as my mother used to call it, is prized.  When I was small, we practiced penmanship, but my children didn’t.  And when my mother was a child, a good hand indicated an educated person, a mark of good character.  How writing looked mattered because clarity mattered.  The teachers here are, I suspect, a little appalled by my scrawl when they look at my notes.  They spend a fair amount of time painstakingly copying a new plan for classes every two months, because the plan is submitted to the principal and the superintendent.  It better be good, clear and even artful.  For that reason they sell a lot of rulers and white-out here.

 Like many requirements, the requirement of a good hand has become internalized so that the students get a kick out of a perfect page.  I can feel them wince when I ask for their pencil or pen to write a correction or translation on their pages.  I try to use pencil.  I suspect they erase my offensive note, apply white-out to the error, and copy the correction.

I want to end by saying how poignant I find the perfect page to be.  It seems to me like other small islands of precision and beauty in this impoverished world, like the perfectly combed, gelled and adorned hair of my students, like the carefully planted flowers and plants in front an adobe-floored house, like the photos of a friend with her baby, photo-shopped onto a photo of a luxurious hotel room, nothing like the humble home in which she actually lives. What’s not to admire about people making what little they have as beautiful as they can?

                            

Two Women, Two Busses

Two Women, Two Busses  

I had to be in Managua last week.  There had been announcements that protestors were setting up a “tranque”, a roadblock on the main highway between north and south. The idea was to force the government to give in to their demands. The tranque stops traffic, but sometimes the protestors let busses through.  There are security issues for volunteers who get stuck in the tranque, and so the day before I left, I called the security jefe to ask if I could travel. I was told it was safe, that there might be a delay, but that the protestors were letting busses through every 45 minutes.

On the bus ride down, I struck up a conversation with a Nicaraguense who was living in the States and had been for 22 of her 32 years.  Romy lives in Washington State and speaks perfect American English.  She travels back to Nicaragua once a year or so to see her father in the north and was taking the bus to Managua to meet up with her mother. As a part of introductory chit-chat I asked what kind of work she did and she said she was a “janitor”, her word, with such candor that I liked her right away.  We talked a lot about the problems of her country and the parts that make it so seductive. She sees improvements. She remembers as a child standing in line for milk, which must have been rationed in the hard economic times after the wars.  But she is shocked that in her father’s town there is no water for days at a time, common in parts of this country. She laughed about the acceptance with which her father’s family deals with the water situation, collecting barrels of water while it’s flowing for future use, while she has gringo outrage that services aren’t reliable.  We talked about education, jobs, tourism, and we exchanged contact information.  Then we came to the tranque.

The situation had changed.  The busses weren’t going through.  Instead we had to get off the bus and walk through the tranque and on the other side get on a bus that would take us the rest of the way to Managua.  Romy sensed danger and asked me if she could go first. (One thing I’ve noticed is that although I feel I can deal with any situation here, however much hubris that statement might reveal, I am an excellent follower and so if some other volunteer or person I trust takes the lead, I happily follow.) Romy took me by the hand, literally, and we walked through the strange landscape of the tranque-- stopped vehicles, people on foot lugging their bags, opportunistic food and drink vendors, and pedicab drivers offering to provide rides to the busses on the other side.  Then we came to the protestors themselves, ex-military guys who think they are owed benefits by the government.  They wore old camo and carried vintage weapons that I imagine had been stored somewhere since the wars in the eighties. Their faces were masked.  They had set up two rows of tires across the highway, one to the north and one to the south.  The tires were scorched looking—they had been set on fire at one time.  Romy and I moved fast.  A man tried to start a conversation with me.  He spoke a little English.  Usually I take time to talk to these guys, but Romy moved me along until we cleared the tranque and found a bus.  We rode together to Managua and she made me promise to text her when I got to the Peace Corps office.  She has the address of this blog site and I hope she looks it up so she can read how much I appreciated her help.

For the ride back home, Peace Corps was advising by-passing the tranque.  This detour amounts an 8 hour ride, instead of my customary 3 ½ hours on the bus. I rode 2 hours to Leon without event and was standing in the sticky heat waiting for the bus for the next leg of the journey when another Nicaraguense started up a conversation in English.  We traveled together for a few hours.  Her story is worth hearing.  She grew up on a farm outside of Esteli.  She is the oldest of several children and traveled to school on foot an hour and a half each way.  In her final year of high school someone suggested she apply for a USAID scholarship to study for two years in the United States.  There were 24 places for 800 applicants and she made the cut, living with a family in the northern mid-west and studying at a college.  She studied business administration and entrepreneurship.  When she got back to Nicaragua, she became an entrepreneur.  She started by arranging for facilities and translators for a non-profit sending a team to work in Nicaragua, and from that beginning, she has developed a good client list.  She’s a networker, she knows how to get things done. For example, she personally visits any facility she books for her non-profits and lets them know what they need to do to get her continued patronage. The rooms better be ready, the food better be good. She accepts that she can’t live with her family all the time.  She travels home when she can.  She keeps a planner like an American, has a cell phone full of contact information and is always looking for a new marketing opportunity.  Me, for example.  In order to help out her aging father, she has arranged for her family to take in tourists who might like to live on a real Nica farm and enjoy the natural beauty in the hills around Esteli—hikes, waterfalls and the like.  $15 per person per night and you can make tortillas with the family and participate in farm life and all meals are included.  I may just go to give it a try and let you know how it is.

I don’t know any people in the capital city, and maybe there are a slew of them like her in Managua, but in my experience she is completely unique.  I have to say it was refreshing to encounter her optimistic, can-do attitude, especially here where I can see the need for people to get things done, to make things happen. So good for you, USAID, keep the scholarships coming. As for me, not too bad for a couple of bus rides over two days.

  

Fumigation, Poets and Gifts

Fumigation, Poets and Gifts

A week ago Friday my second period class was stopped by the fumigators who came to the school to kill bugs.  The high school is loaded with mosquitoes and has been since before school started.  I have been spraying on the hated OFF at home to protect myself before going to school.  (We have prophylaxis for malaria but not for dengue and the dengue mosquitoes are out during the day.)  One day, also before school started, I saw the fumigators at work in houses along the then dry river that runs by the town.  They come in a crew, each worker holding smoking can of dangerous stuff.  The workers tried to protect themselves from the poisonous mist by old t-shirts wrapped on their heads and over their faces.   I wondered then why they were not at the high school—so many kids, so many mosquitoes—as good a use of insecticide as you can imagine.  But whatever the reason, they didn’t get to the high school until Friday morning,six weeks after school started.  (Maybe you are wondering why they didn’t wait until after school.  Keep wondering.)  They moved rapidly, wrapped in their rags like lepers, from classroom to classroom, and we all stood outside and tried not to breathe bad stuff. We reentered classrooms after a half hour, and carried on class, all of us breathing as shallowly as possible.

Class is interrupted for all kinds of reasons.  I understand the need to fumigate.  I understand the need to give kids vaccinations, but this week we had another interruption. My counterpart came to me and asked what I thought about letting a man come into the class to read his poems to the students.  I told her in my view it wasn’t a great idea in an English class, but that she was the teacher and she should decide.  She decided to let him in.  The man was in his twenties, skinny as a rail, dressed in a button shirt and slacks, i.e., dressed for the occasion.  But his shoes were several sizes too large.  They curled up at the toes, and his hair didn’t have the precision cut that’s common around my site. He recited three poems and then pulled from his back pack copies of the three stapled together which he announced were for sale for 10 cords ($.50).  The students didn’t buy any but I was pretty astounded  that the school would let a salesman talk to a captive audience of students.  My counterpart argued that he really wasn’t profiting because he had to pay for the copies, but that was a weak one, and she knew it.  The copies of the three pages cost 3 cords, so the guy’s profit was 7 cords. In her defense, I’ll say she didn’t know the poet would try to self his poems.  Several of the other teachers thought he shouldn’t have been let into the classrooms.  But, like everyone else, he was just trying to make a buck.

Friday, also, in the afternoon I headed over to the house of one of my counterparts.  Her English is too limited to permit us to plan classes in English, but she wants to improve and wants me to come over to practice with her.  I really don’t mind this at all.  She has a three year old and a 14 year old.  Usually, life at her house is noisy and there are always many distractions,.  But Friday I found her sitting peacefully outside under a tree with a friend and the friend’s three year old.  I was offered a plastic chair, however, and after the three year olds were pacified with snacks, we started to speak English.  It’s amazing what you can talk about with a little bit of a language.  We exchanged views on religion.  She doesn’t like the church because, she says, you have to pay for things like baptism. She loves God and the Virgin.  Like me, she likes to go into the church once in a while just to sit.  She asked about my religion. I told her I was raised Catholic but didn’t go to church.  She asked why.  I took a chance and told her I had stopped believing.  She nodded.   Then she turned to the friend and told her in Spanish that I wasn’t a believer.  I put my hand on her arm immediately and in English asked her please not to share my religious beliefs because I was afraid people would think I wasn’t a good person.  She got that right away.

 A while later she said (we were back in Spanish), “I want to give you a present.’ (The verb in Spanish is regalar and it means to give a gift.  We don’t have a similar verb except the awkward “to gift”, but you hear regalar all the time here.) Like the stupid gringa I am I said, “Why?”  Gales of laughter all around.  Who ever heard of someone asking “why” when they were getting a present? I made it worse by adding “It’s not my birthday.”  More hilarity.  I am endlessly divertida to the people around me.  My counterpart went into the house and came back with a pair of her earrings.  I put them on right away and, of course, thanked her profusely.

This is only the most recent example of my struggles to get over the norteamericano rule of reciprocity.  I could argue that my problem with getting without giving is altruistic, people here having so little.  But the truth is that when I eat lunch repeatedly at the house of another counterpart before we start to plan classes, I feel awkward, because I can’t so readily reciprocate and make lunch for her.  It is part of this culture to give, to share, to regalar.  It’s quite lovely and all I have to do is to learn how to do it, too.  And even more, to be happy and comfortable receiving things which are, after all, signs of esteem or fondness or just the giver’s happy pleasure.