San Nicolas Names

As we start a new school year here in San Nicolas, rosters of long, confusing names stare back at us. It doesn't help the memorization process that everyone seems to be related.

According to Latin American naming conventions, everyone has two last names: one that comes from the paternal last name on their dad's side and another that comes from the paternal last name on their mom's side. Just by glancing over an attendance sheet, therefore, it is easy to figure out who might be related; in one of our classes, six students sitting next to each other all have “Rayo” as part of their last name. There are such things, we've discovered, as “San Nicolas names,” or last names that are more common here than in other parts of Nicaragua – names like “Rocha” and “Centeno.”

We were still a little confused about the Latin American last naming scheme, though, so we asked our neighbors to elaborate. Here is what we found out:

• You carry the name you are given at birth throughout your life. When a couple is married, they each retain the last names they were born with.
• If an unmarried couple has a child and the father disappears (or presumably, vice versa), the mother can give the child her two last names.

To add to the confusion of the classroom roster, everyone also has two first names, and they often go by different names with different people. One of the little girls who we cook with is called “Scharron Tamara.” She introduced herself as “Tamara” to us but is called “Scharron” by her family and other teachers.

Many of the first names we encounter around here are similar to English names; you just have to pronounce them in a Nicaraugan accent. For example, we have friends named Henry, Vanesa, Nahomi, Natali, Cindi, and Paul. People have also asked us for uniquely English names to name their kids. And then there are the names like Xochilth and Eliezer. Here is a common conversation for me, upon meeting someone for the first time:

Me: What is your name?

Xochilth: Xochilth.

Me: Oh, okay, nice to meet you, Sochi.

Xochilth: No, Xochilth.

Me: Ooooooh, Sochil.

Xochilth: Yeah, except it has an “x.”

Me: Exochil?

Xochilth, probably tired of the conversation: Yeah, kind of.

A lot of girls' names here seem to end in “in” or “ing.” We know several Maylings and Mayerlings, and then there is Danielsin and Darling. Names that begin with j's (pronounced like a y) are also popular: Josari, Jasmari, Jasmina. In one class we realized that we had some boy students seemingly named after US presidents: Jackson, Jefferson, and Franklin.

We've also discovered that in the more remote places around here, people don't always know how to spell their own names. Once we traveled deep into the campo via bumpy pickup truck to witness a baptism in a super-remote community. Padre Patricio asked the woman whose child was being baptized how to spell her daughter's name, and she responded, “You know, it's like the name of that woman in the soap opera.”

Needless to say given all this name confusion, there are people we talk to on a regular basis whose names we still haven't figured out. It would be a bit embarrassing to have to ask them what their names are now, after all this time, so we've taken to devising sneaky tricks to figure them out. A usually-successful standby is, “So how exactly do you spell your name?”

Recipe: Banana Flower Chorizo

Here is a woman in her 60s who walks three miles here and three miles back, toting sacks of herbs and medicinal wine, to treat the ailing people of San Nicolas with natural remedies. Here is a woman who, during the Contra War of the 1980s, spent late nights making coffee for men, so that they could stand wide-awake at their posts all night long. Here is a woman who birthed 14 children, though only nine are still living.

Doña Victoria works in the natural medicine clinic in front of our house, so we have come to anticipate the “mi amors” that she showers upon us when we see her. One day she taught us how to make a dish from the banana flowers hanging from the banana trees in our back yard. When she opened our spice cupboard and couldn't find the achiote spice that was right in front of her, we realized that she has never learned how to read. She was the oldest sister of a huge flock of children, she explained, and so she always had to stay home from school to help her mom wash the clothes.

We know how impossible it might be to find banana flowers in an American grocery store, but we want to share the recipe that Doña Victoria shared with us anyway. When her family couldn't afford to buy meat during Semana Santa, Doña Victoria would go out to the back yard, hack down some banana flowers, and make this dish. She claims that her kids loved it and never doubted that it really was meat.

Flor De Guineo Chorizo

3 small banana flowers, sliced and diced (Flowers are quite sticky. It helps to coat your hands with oil before you chop them up.)
3 cloves garlic, diced
1 big green pepper
1 onion
1 teaspoon achiote
5 leaves of chicoria (cilantro is similar)
2 tablespoons oil
1 bouillon cube
salt to taste

First, rinse the flowers and chop them up. Then blanch the flowers in boiling water for five minutes. Strain the flowers and blanch them again for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, dice the rest of the ingredients. Strain the banana flowers well; the water will appear black, but don't worry.

Heat oil in a large pot and fry the flowers in the oil first. After stirring the flowers for a few minutes, add the other ingredients. Cook for 10 more minutes, stirring occasionally, until it is ready. Serve with some combination of rice, beans, and a tortilla.  

School Starts Again

After a two-week vacation to Costa Rica, visiting all of the places where Davie lived when he was younger, we returned to San Nicolas this past weekend and started a new school year two days later.

The school is one of the first buildings you see as you enter the town of San Nicolas. Painted white and blue, it is very hard to miss. There are five classrooms in a row, accented by broken windows and re-bar. In front of these stands the principles'/teachers' office, a cramped space with many desks, file cabinets, and odds-n-ends. Surrounding these buildings, there are four latrines (most of them unusable), a concrete basketball court, and a run-down garden waiting to be tilled.

The school year here in Nicaragua runs from the middle of February until the end of November, and since we didn't get here until October, this will be our first full year of classes. We've conducted a survey with a representative handful of students to determine what they did over vacation, and from the data we've gathered, two primary activities emerged: 1) Sleeping, and 2) Watching TV. From these results, we have concluded that it is about time to dig out the old pens and notebooks de nuevo.

As a bit of background, San Nicolas is the municipal center, or sort of umbrella, for the 40 or so tiny communities that surround it. Most of these communities have their own primary schools, but San Nicolas has the only secondary school in the municipality. Since many of these communities are miles away on terrible dirt roads, and since very few people own cars, lots of students have to walk for hours every day if they want to get a secondary school education. For the students who live even farther away and can't possibly walk that far every day, the school in San Nicolas holds classes every Saturday.

As it is the beginning of the year, we've been working on class scheduling with the other teachers. How they structure the schedule here is a bit different from how high schools in the US usually work. Instead of the students going to different classrooms for different subjects, here the teachers switch classrooms. Each grade (7^th through 11^th) has its own classroom, and every 45 minutes a different teacher comes into each classroom to teach a different subject. This seems to work fairly well; the only down side is that the teachers don't have their own space to decorate the classrooms with educational materials relevant to the subject they teach.

Discipline is a pretty big problem at the Instituto Publico Carolina Camas Arauz (which is the secondary school's official name). Once you've spent a good half hour observing the students chasing each other madly around the school building while classes are in session, the list of school rules posted in each classroom starts to seem a little ridiculous. (My favorite rules from that list: Boys are not allowed to have long hair or long fingernails. No students are allowed to have boyfriends or girlfriends).

It is pretty much impossible to keep students in their seats, or even in the classroom for that matter, during class. The younger grades are especially crazy; we've learned that trying to play educational games just breeds shouting and chair-standing. But the second that any of the students spots Idalia, the principal, they all inevitably run to their chairs, shut their mouths, and pretend to be writing something. So far, Idalia is the only leverage we've discovered to command good behavior.

The style of education that our students are used to is rote memorization. The school can't afford textbooks, so the teachers write their lessons on the board and students copy them into their notebooks. Unfortunately, this makes for very little creativity or critical thinking. We are beginning to realize that our students are not really accustomed to thinking for themselves. One of our goals this school year, therefore, is to teach them that there are often many right answers, and to encourage them to have the intellectual self-confidence to volunteer their own unique answers.

The school already employs a full-time English teacher, so this year Davie and I will divvy up the during-the-day English classes, so that one of us will support that teacher in every class, helping with pronunciation and classroom management. We are also planning an after-school English class that we will offer for high school students on Mondays and Wednesdays, and an English class for teachers after school on Friday. Some of the little kids in San Nicolas have also expressed interest in learning English, so we're planning on doing a more informal class for them on Saturdays as well.