How I Learned to Sing in Nicaragua

How I Learned to Sing in Nicaragua

The Ministry of Education came up   with  a a good  idea.  It organized and sponsored an English song competition with the  intention of motivating the high school students to learn more English.  What’s brilliant about the idea is that everyone could participate.  While Nicaraguans can and do have “pena” (shame) about speaking English, they have none whatsoever about singing.  They love to sing and the quality of one’s voice matters not at all.  The tone of Nica singing is notable for its nasal quality and volume and for the pleasure everyone gets in joining in.  They sing with gusto any chance they  have..

However good the idea, it nearly got drowned in bureaucracy.  At the recent meeting of TEFL volunteers the head of the MINED English program told us about the program.  None of us had heard of it, even though a 4 page memorandum had been sent out to all the local delegations 5 months ago, describing the competition and the rules for participating.  What had happened to the memo once it arrived at the local level is anybody’s guess (lost on a desk is a good one), but when volunteers got back to sites, even though we had only 1 ½ weeks to get something organized, we somehow managed to get the Festival up and going. My principal might have been disinclined to participate on such short notice, but when she saw my copy of the memo she was all over the idea. After all, she doesn’t want to be the one to blow off a directive from on high.

I moved fast.  I came up with 5 songs in English, one for each grade.  I had the enthusiastic co-operation of 2 counterparts and the somewhat willing cooperation of the third.  I got the local internet café to make CDs for each teacher with the songs for her grades on them and I copied out the words for each song onto  big pieces of papelogrofo. I taught all my classes the pronunciation of the words to their songs.  The older kids sang songs with which they were familiar, By the Rivers of Babylon and We are the World, but the other three songs weren’t known to the kids.  So I taught not only the words but the melodies to Dancing Queen, Down in the Valley and This Old Man.

Nicas may not have pena about singing, but I do.  As a kid in Catholic school, I had many opportunities to sing—Christmas carols, Gregorian chant, the Latin high mass—and there I learned I had a bad voice. Sister Someone, patrolling the rows of singers with an ear to ferreting out the sour voice ruining her chorus found me out and told me to stop singing and mouth the words.  I never sang again with anything like confidence even though I took a set of lessons from a singing teacher who said failure to carry a tune is the result of not imagining the melody well enough.  I failed to develop the required imagination and, as a result, anything like a confident tune-holding voice, UNTIL the last couple of weeks when I belted out Dancing Queen maybe 15 times, and This Old Man maybe 30.  And I sounded OK. Anyhow, the Nica standard for voice quality is fairly low and my students are generous.  No one laughed.  They wanted to sing.  And so did I.

So I had the heady of experience of watching my 300 students get more and more excited about their various songs for the competition, their teachers taking over from me by leading the practice sessions, so that in a little more than a week in which each class met only 2 or 3 times, we were ready for Festival day. During that week however, I witnessed some touching scenes.  One day, after school twenty 7^th graders gathered outside a classroom to practice their song for the 15 minutes available to them before the school space was occupied by the elementary kids. Their teacher  had the CD player(there is one in the school) plugged into the one plug in the classroom and the kids were gathered around her to practice with the “pista”, a CD version of This Old Man without words. The kids had learned the hand jive to accompany each verse and were co-ordinating hands and voices with huge enthusiasm.

My lovely daughter in law came to visit in the midst of all this and so before we took off for other parts of Nicaragua on a well earned vacation week, I put her to work as one of the judges of the festival competition, along with 3 Peace Corps volunteers I dragged in for the job.  The Festival went off an hour behind schedule (the sound system brought in from the mayor’s office failed to function so we were without amplified announcement, introductions, etc), but the school was packed with kids, many more than I had ever seen at an event at the high school, Mother’s Day included. They were literally hanging off trees, jammed up to the front to hear better. I think that by teaching all the kids one song, we got tremendous buy in for the groups finally selected to sing the song.

Eleventh grade won with their soulful We Are the World, but the seventh graders were my personal favorites.  Amazing that kids who had been studying English for 4 months could pull off their song with such clarity and enthusiasm. Today in class, a week after the competition, while my counterpart was writing something on the whiteboard, a voice rang out, “This old man, he played one…” Others joined in, remembering the glory days.

Work

Work

Another volunteer visited my site last week.  I was glad for the opportunity to cook for someone, and we spent a fair amount of time talking books.  He’s a serious reader and our taste in novels coincides. We both liked The Correction more than Freedom.  We exchanged lists of favorite books and among his was The Worldly Philosophers, a book on economic theories.  Since economics is a subject I never studied, and always wished I knew more about, I ordered a sample on my Kindle and am liking it a lot.  I love it when something you read sheds light on a puzzling experience you actually are having, and that’s what happened here.  Let me quote from the book:

“[A] fact … still can be remarked among unindustrialized peoples of the world :  a raw working force, unused to wagework, uncomfortable in factory life, unschooled to the idea of an ever-rising standard of living, will not work harder if wages rise; it will simply take more time off. The idea of gain, the idea that each working person may not only, but should, constantly strive to better his or her material lot, is an idea that was quite foreign to the great lower and middle strata of [ ancient] cultures, only scattered throughout Renaissance and Reformation times; and largely absent in the majority of Eastern civilizations.  As a ubiquitous characteristic of society, it is as modern an invention as printing.”

What I am observing here in Nicaragua is a lot of people not working much.  Of course, there are hard workers here, but there are many more in my part of the world who don’t have jobs and don’t work apparently.  Women work in the houses but even they spend a lot of time not working.  People sit out and talk a lot, or rather they talk some.  People have an amazing ability to simply sit for a long time. Sometimes the sitting is solitary, sometimes it’s communal, or rather familial. Kids, my students, do it, sitting out on a curb or plastic chair in front of the house not doing anything. Today I passed a young man sitting on the curb next to a dog.  I passed again an hour later and he was still there, not waiting for anyone or anything, not really waiting as that implies that something is expected—just sitting would be more accurate.

Why don’t they DO something?  Is there nothing to do? The truth is that there isn’t a whole lot to do, but often people pass up the opportunity to do something remunerative.  I can think of 2 examples.  One of my counterparts had difficulty finding daycare although she was willing to pay a fair wage.  I figured people would jump at the chance to work in a job that required the skills they actually had.  But no.  The babysitters quit after about 3 weeks and my counterpart was left scrambling.  She went through 4 of them in as many months.  Why, I asked her? They give reasons that fail to convince, like one who said she didn’t like taking care of boys. What my counterpart says is that people just want to eat.  When they have enough food, they quit.

Another example:  My host mom closed her rosquilla business when people stopped coming to work for her.  I’ve asked and learned she was a respected employer.  Candida says people just don’t want to work if they have enough.  There is no drive to earn more or get more or save for a stove or educate a child.

I used to be stumped by this.  Why, in a country with so few working opportunities, would someone pass up the chance to better themselves, but the explanation, I’m guessing is in the quotation above: the idea of gain is missing and with it the obligation or desire to strive.  Sitting on the curb all afternoon would drive most Westerners crazy; we are always up to something, making something happen, so that when nothing is happening we’re unhappy.  It doesn’t take too much to see the downside of that point of view, but once you’re brought up in it, it’s very hard to see the virtues of doing nothing.  Idleness gets you in the viscera.  This habitual doing of not much isn’t the same thing as being lazy (although Nicaraguans who have learned about striving use that word to describe others).  It’s about a difference in values.  Nicaraguan like this  aren’t into striving; they don’t feel compelled to produce.  They are OK, apparently, just living.

At a social get-together one volunteer named Molly, who was close to the end of her service, wondered out loud whether we are providing a benefit to the people in our communities by introducing them to the world of gain and striving, to the extent that we do that.  And we do do that indirectly if not directly.  For instance, I think Nica kids should read stories (which they do not; nobody reads or is read to) but when I encourage that I am introducing the longing and discontent that reading can bring, the dreaming, the prelude to striving. So Molly asked whether that’s a service, or whether people would be better left to life as they have lived it.  The longer that I’m here the more reasonable looks the life of non-striving, of not wanting too much.  I think such a life isn’t good for Nicaragua economically, but it might be good for the people.  Whatever, it will come to an end, with or without Peace Corps, in this globalized world, and that’s a little sad.

P.S.  After writing this I started paying particular attention to all the people who ARE working.  They are everywhere, selling something in the market, or walking from door to door with a bucket in arms or balanced on their heads, selling food.  They are trying to shine shoes with a home-made wooden bench they carry around to different locations, or they fix shoes in the market, or  they wash laundry (in my town the going rate is 12 pieces of clothing washed and hung out to dry for fifteen cents). So I want to be clear that we are not talking about lazy; we are talking about the end of work.  Nicaraguans know all about work to feed yourself and your family.

P.P.S. I just figured out how to add pictures!  This one is from last January.  Me on the ferry from Ometepe.  That’s a volcano in the back.  Great, huh?

Two Weeks Off

Two Weeks Off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Candida

More on Candida

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

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

Candida’s story continued

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food and Coffee

Food and Coffee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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