Riches in San Nicolas

After two months of living just down the street from us, my family left San Nicolas on the 9:45 bus yesterday morning and will fly back to the US today. They'll be glad to get back to indoor toilets, warm showers, and comfy couches I'm sure, but I don't think they'll forget San Nicolas anytime soon.

To give ourselves a little extra space, my parents and my younger brother Jon rented a house on the edge of town, right next to horse parking lot numero uno (as we call it). They arranged their cheap mattresses on borrowed beds along with a cook stove and some plastic plates in the big front room of the house and quickly settled in to washing clothes by hand and taking cold dump showers. Since they didn't have many pans to cook in, they walked down the street to our house for all lunches and dinners, so we got to see them quite often.

Every morning, they went walking or running in the hills around San Nicolas. (People already thought that as gringos they were weird, they reasoned. Running up steep dirt roads just for the fun of it only confirmed their weirdness.) And after feeding a few scraps of tortilla to a tiny street dog that they named “Paul,” they quickly became Paul's best friends and discovered that Paul's name was actually Nina.

My mom with pine artisans

During the two months that they were here, each of them had their own projects to work on. My dad, a college math professor, spent a lot of time sitting out in their back yard with the poinsettias, thinking about geometry. (His sabbatical project is to write a geometry book). My youngest brother Jon, who is a junior in high school, spent most days working on his home school classes on the internet. (One of which, quite fittingly, was Spanish). And my mom, who has her own fair trade business, sought out local Nicaraguan artisans whose art she could take back to the US to sell.

While she was here, my mom connected with three artists. When my parents visited last year, my mom had bought earrings and headbands from a women's cooperative north of Esteli that makes jewelry out of pine needles. Last weekend, we went to visit them and after watching how they make stuff out of pine, my mom bought more jewelry from them. She also plans to sell wire earrings made by our friend Azucena, who lives in La Garnacha.

Some of our students modeling the headbands

The third Nicaraguan project my mom is working with is one that she started while she was here. When she came in January, she brought down a suitcase full of old t-shirts that people were throwing out, hoping that she could find a woman in San Nicolas who could make braided headbands for my mom to sell in the US. She met Meyling, a local woman who taught me how to do elaborate french braids, when Meyling was over at our house baking bread one day. Meyling (who happened to be my mom's neighbor too), was immediately excited about earning a little extra money by making headbands, and quickly proved to be pretty talented at it too, inventing new styles of braids and knots that no one else could do. So my mom spent lots of time going back and forth between her house and Meyling's, tearing up t-shirts and designing little cloth flowers with Meyling's daughter, Rosaling.

We will definitely miss having my family around; it was great to be able to share our San Nicolas life with them, and even after we go home in September, we will always be able to remember this beautiful place with them.