Nicaragua is about the size of
Pennsylvania, and yet most San Nicolaseños have never left it. In
fact, if you ask almost anyone in San Nicolas where they've been in
Nicaragua, most people will tell you they've traveled to Esteli (the
closest city), Managua (the capitol), and maybe Granada (Nicaragua's
token colonial city). Whether it's because they don't have the money
to stay in a hotel or because they are just content to remain in the
one place they know so well, people live their entire lives within
the three paved streets of San Nicolas.
Aside from the San Nicolaseños who
leave to work in the US or Costa Rica, most people seem perfectly
content staying in San Nicolas. But when an opportunity arises, like
it did last weekend, to check out another part of Nicaragua for a
day, people crowd onto the bus.
On Sunday, the Catholic church in town
took us all on a religious field trip to a town called San Rafael del
Norte, in the department of Jinotega, just a couple of hours from San
Nicolas. At an elevation of 3,517 feet, San Rafael is known for being
the highest elevation town in Nicaragua. It's also the birthplace of
the wife of Augusto Sandino, Nicaragua's most renowned national hero.
But probably most importantly (and the reason the church decided to
go there in the first place), San Rafael del Norte was the home to
Father Odorico d'Andrea.
For someone as locally famed as the
Italian priest Odorico d'Andrea, not many people seemed to know much
about him. We walked through the Odorico museum and saw the chairs he
used to sit in, the sandals he used to wear, and the “holy snot
rag,” as Davie called it, in which he used to blow his nose. But
every time we asked someone who he was, they just told us that he was
a dead priest. Maybe we just weren't asking the right people, we
thought. In any case, there seemed to be an odd sense of mystery
surrounding Father Odorico d'Andrea, even before we found out about
the mystique of his dead body.
I never knew this before, but in the
Catholic tradition, if someone dies and their dead body is
“incorrupted” (meaning that it doesn't start to decompose right
away), this is a sign of sainthood. This, apparently, is what
transpired with the body of Father Odorico d'Andrea, who died in
1990. And for this reason, among others, Father Odorico d'Andrea is
at least locally considered a kind of saint.
Anyway, we went to a morning mass at
the church on top of the biggest hill in town with the rest of our
San Nicolas compañeros, and lots of other worshipers, spilling out
of the church. Then we all walked around the town, checking out the
grand cathedral in the center of town and the soccer game happening
in the central park. The elaborate murals in the cathedral depict the
life of Jesus. In one notable mural of the perplexingly dark-skinned
devil tempting the milky-white Jesus, a Franciscan brother standing
near us pointed out the devil's resemblance (whether intentional or
not) to Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega.
The whole day in San Rafael, as we
walked around being tourists with our fellow San Nicolaseños, I felt
like we were a group of kids dismissed for recess or a bunch of
puppies let off their leashes. For Doña Nila, whose home has always
been San Nicolas, or Profesora Idalia, who works six days a week, not
having a specific place to be at any given time is rare. In an
unknown place with the time to explore, our group of San Nicolaseños
walked around all day with a sense of giddy excitement, buying bags
of tajadas (banana chips) and commenting proudly to
shopkeepers on how much cooler the weather was compared to San
Nicolas. But at the end of the day, everyone seemed eager to climb
back on the crowded bus and start home to San Nicolas, the place that
they know best in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment