A Reflection on the Word "Mission"

Gringos are suckers for organic produce. So it's not too surprising how concentrated the Gringo population of Esteli becomes on Friday morning around the Parque Central, where we help sell organic produce for the Friday market. We usually start out our conversations with these Gringos in tentative Spanish, and when their American accents become apparent, we lapse into English.

We met one Gringo couple at the ferria who told us about the Christian-affiliated project that they run here in Nicaragua to create and distribute machines that make chlorine to add to water so that people in the campo can have access to clean, healthy water. They asked us if we wanted to come see how it all works, so yesterday we took an expedition deep into the sticks of Nicaragua with them.

We trundled along a potholed gravel road in a monstrous Toyota pickup for two and a half hours, a distance that would have probably taken half an hour on a paved road. We passed through a dry landscape of trees with spreading branches and dangling stringy moss. We went through places where there were no houses or people for miles and miles, where the road turned into a river, where corn and beans grew on an 85-degree mountain slope. And then all of a sudden we came to the town of Yali, a thriving town of 6,000 people with restaurants and plumbing and a brightly-painted orange cathedral.

We stopped at the mayor's office, and drank a hurried cup of too-sweet coffee in a cramped room before beginning the meeting with the representatives from Yali. Greg, the Gringo man who we were with, demonstrated the process of creating chlorine using the equipment that he has developed. He poured a tablespoon or so of salt into a cup of water, connected two positive currents together and two negative currents together, turned on the car battery that they were connected to, and poured the salt water through the system five times to separate the chloride from the sodium.

In the campo of Nicaragua, one of the most common causes of death is dirty water. So Greg's idea is to provide access to chlorine by giving people the means to make it, which is far cheaper than buying it. He visits remote communities all over Nicaragua to present and distribute these chlorine-making mechanisms.

We were pretty impressed with Greg's clean water project, but it also sparked some reflection on our own “mission” in Nicaragua. When I hear the word “mission,” I most often envision a project like Greg's where Westerners come to a developing nation to improve some aspect of people's lives there. Greg's work has a clear, tangible impact on Nicaraguan people's lives. He has the keys to a better life for them, and once he has delivered those keys, he goes home.

Our “mission” is a little less clear-cut. Yes, we are teaching English here in San Nicolas, but sometimes I'm not totally sure if they really need us; after all, they already have one English teacher. And yes, we help clean vegetables at La Garnacha, but it's not like we are any better at cleaning vegetables than anyone else – in fact, we're probably worse at it.

When we came here to San Nicolas almost two months ago, we came with only one clear task before us: to accompany the people of this town. All of the other things that we do are only part of our overarching goal of accompaniment. We are not here to bring the people of San Nicolas a little parcel of something that we possess and they lack – something that will change their lives in a dramatic way. Our primary function here is to just live with the people of San Nicolas, to learn about their lives, to become friends with them over time. And hopefully in doing that, we will change their lives in a small way, just as they will change ours.

I think that each type of mission has its function – Greg's work is doing very visible good in the world, but however slowly and however subtly, I think ours is too. As the Volunteer Missionary Movement “Spirit and Lifestyle” manifesto proclaims, “It is not simply a matter of handing out money, food, or equipment. It calls for more than that. Our response is to share who we are as well as what we have.”

Our House - A Vaguely Dickensian Narrative

In Which We Describe the Joys and Woes of Residing in the Humble Structure Which We Have Come to Call “Our Home”

Being that this little pile of bricks and concrete on the Main Street of San Nicolas has the distinction of being our first house together, we think it bears some description. It is, after all, where we spend much of our time.

When I call it a “little pile of bricks and concrete,” I don't mean to disparage our house. In fact, one thing that I quite like about our house – and, for that matter, every other house I've visited in Nicaragua – is how it unites indoor and outdoor worlds. Because it is perpetually warm here, there is no need to shut out the elements. And so you encounter architectural structures where the outdoors flows freely into the indoors: a kitchen, for instance, where the roof ends and a small courtyard begins; or, in our case, a house where all doors open to the outside. There is something revitalizing about having to go outside to get from your bedroom to your kitchen, and something so vital in never forgetting the whole big natural world beyond your man-made windows.

That said, my appreciation for the whole big natural world is not quite so resounding when I have to shuffle my flashlit way outside to the latrine in the middle of the night, or when I turn on the light to find a baseball-sized cockroach with wings scuttling across the bedroom floor. But those moments are in the minority.

So, our house. When you enter from the street, the first room you encounter is a rather dingy, poorly-lit room with cardboard-divider walls. This room is used most often by the natural medicine clinic that takes residence here Monday through Wednesday; we often come home to find a line of sick people waiting on a bench. Davie has also discovered that a hole in the tin roof over this room creates quite a fascinating “camera obscura” effect - in the circle of light on the floor projected from the hole in the roof, you can watch the clouds moving in the sky. 

When you enter our proper house, you first enter the room in between the kitchen and the bedroom, which is really more of a porch. It has three walls and looks out on the grove of banana trees in our back yard. This is also where we string up our hammock.

The bedroom, porch, and kitchen all have shiny new tile, thanks to Billy and Kristin, the volunteers who lived here previously (who, incidentally, also left us non-stick pans and a complete set of tupperware). The floor tile is so nice and shiny, in fact, that I feel moved to walk about the house barefoot all the time – a custom, I have come to discover, that is highly frowned upon by the prevailing Nicaraguan social mores. (Footnote: Nicaraguan floor culture is an intriguing topic that I hope to study more. For instance, sweeping and mopping the sidewalk outside your house seems to be generally expected as a regular duty, despite the seeming futility of cleaning something that is, by its very nature, perpetually dirty.)

The tin roof over our bedroom is unfortunately a bit of a layabout at performing its only job as a roof; it has five tiny holes in it, through which stream five tiny waterfalls when it rains. We have, therefore, strategically placed five buckets about the room to catch these waterfalls and make them into lakes instead. Though malaria is not much of a problem in this area, we sleep beneath a mosquito net.

Our kitchen, unlike many Nicaraguan kitchens, has the good fortune of possessing an oven, inside which we have baked many a loaf of bread. In the style of Nicaraguan kitchen furniture, our kitchen is accented by plastic chairs and a plastic card table, which we hide beneath the beautiful embroidered tablecloth that Davie's grandma made for us.

The shower room and latrine are both outside the main structure of the house and are both quite hospitable to refugee mosquitoes and other manner of small insects that seek safe haven. The earth beneath San Nicolas is not graced with plumbing lines; therefore, we have a large water tank next to the pila, where we painstakingly hand-wash our clothes (an exercise that takes at least three hours). The city water comes on every other day for a few hours in the morning, so during these hours we fill the tank with the water we use to do dishes, do laundry, and take showers for the next two days.

The showers we take are sometimes dump-showers (scooping water from a big bucket onto our heads), and they are always icy-cold. Davie has consequently taken to getting up uncharacteristically early so he can heat up a big pot of water over the stove and mix it with the cold water from the tank.

Our back yard is a whole jungle of fruit trees waiting for their seasons. We have banana trees, mango trees, coffee trees, hot-pepper bushes, grapefruit trees, noni trees (a medicinal fruit with a repulsive flavor and smell), and another citrus tree that we have yet to classify. The rest of the yard is a bit overrun with weeds and piles of rocks that people have thrown into the yard. We put the abundance of bricks we found to good use by constructing a brick path out to the latrine, but when it rains the path becomes more of a river than a thoroughfare.

All in all, life in the campo of Nicaragua takes much more deliberation and preparation than we are accustomed to. Be that as it may, we remain quite comfortable in the little pile of bricks and concrete in which we reside on the Main Street of San Nicolas.  

Nicaraguan Cooking Classes

Any time there is a lull in conversation, food is usually the first topic we leap to. Whatever our cultural differences with the people of San Nicolas, we all like eating. I might not be able to communicate as well as I would like with people, but I am just as adept at eating rice and beans as anyone else around the plastic card table.

In the last few weeks, we've cooked and shared food with lots of people in the community. Last Sunday Idalia, the school principle, invited us to her mom's house out in the campo to bake rosquillas in her clay oven. Rosquillas are a flaky corn-based pastry that come in all different shapes. They usually have a filling of egg, sweet cream and a type of cheese they make here called cuajada.

We arrived at Idalia's mom's house to find a huge family reunion in progress, with everyone fulfilling their gender roles. The women were gathered in the kitchen, kneading the rosquilla dough and holding babies, while the men sat on the porch outside and the kids watched TV and played with plastic duckies. They had all been at it for a few hours already.

We tried our hand at shaping the soft rosquilla dough into different shapes, but it was a lot harder than it looked. Meanwhile, the women were all buzzing around, shaving a huge chunk of brown sugar to put in the middle of the rosquillas and mixing together milk and corn to make atole. They only used the white of the egg in the rosquilla filling, so Idalia's mom, a classic old woman in a shawl, put the egg shell with the yolk on top of the wood stove to cook and eat.

After the rosquillas (probably about 500 of them) were all prepared, we took them out to the clay oven next to a pasture of grazing cows. The family had been heating a fire and burning it down to coals all day. Idalia's daughter helped shove all of the coals out of the oven with a long stick and Idalia's sister put the trays of rosquillas into the steaming oven, deftly moving them around with a long paddle. When they were done, we ate the rosquillas with mugs of sweet coffee. We rode back to San Nicolas through the mountains, crammed into the bed of a pickup truck with a bunch of Idalia's family, clutching bags of rosquillas.

We had also been talking to Idalia about making tostones (deep-fried plantain chips), so we bought two green bananos at the market last week and Idalia volunteered to come over with the English teacher, Vilma, to show us how to make them. They showed up in our kitchen on Tuesday afternoon and took over completely. They hacked off the skin of the unripe banana and showed us how to chop the bananas into chunks, partially fry them, smash them into discs, and deep fry them again. They also helped us make Nicaraguan rice, which involves a lot more oil and garlic than the white rice that we're used to making.

We've been eager to share our food traditions with the friends we're making here too. Last week we had a group of girls over to teach them how to make brownies, which they just called “chocolates.” They were super excited about helping; they fought over who got to wear the two aprons that we have and wanted to keep beating the eggs for about 10 minutes. Then they deep-cleaned our entire kitchen as the brownies were baking, scrubbing out the sink and sweeping the floor. When the brownies came out of the oven, they devoured them, dropping brownie crumbs all over the floor before they left.

We also have developed an ongoing food trade with our neighbors, Dina and her son Henry. We handed them a plate of cookies over the fence when we first moved in, and they returned the plate with a guirilla, a kind of tortilla made of young corn that is typical of this part of Nicaragua. Then they gave us some honey-baked squash and we gave them some brownies. Just today, they called out our names and we went outside to find Henry holding a plate of bananas over the fence. He also told us that one of the banana trees in our back yard had ripe bananas. We didn't believe him at first, so he jumped over the chain-link fence with his machete and hacked down the branch, which was indeed heavy with a big bunch of ripe square bananas.

Cooking and eating food together has been a way for us to bridge our cultures (everyone likes eating), but also a way to share and learn about each other's unique food traditions. As we continue to share recipes with each other, we will also continue to build our community here.