The Aged P's Visit San Nicolas

We can write blog after blog and email after email. We can see your faces on skype and tell you the names of our students and how cows wander the streets of San Nicolas. But until you have walked those cobblestone streets yourself and talked to those students, we can't fully express to you what San Nicolas is like.

This past week we got to fully express that to my (Sarah's) parents, who were here visiting us. They told us that instead of traveling further afield to beaches and other tourist attractions, they just wanted to see our daily life, and we took them at their word.

When my parents got here on Tuesday, we took them on the tour of San Nicolas, which lasts all of ten minutes. We stepped over cow pies, visited the baseball field (the largest space in town), and said “adios” to the students we passed.

On Wednesday we would usually have co-taught with the high school English teacher, but there was a fair going on in the community of La Laguna and we wanted to show my parents the sights. So we hitchhiked in the back of a pickup truck heading that way and got off in time to witness a baptismal mass and a cockfight. We also met my friend Nidia, who is studying English and was thrilled to practice saying “Oh, wow!” with my mom.

In our after-school English class at our house, we just happened to be studying family vocabulary, so my parents helped us out with some live demonstrations of family relationships, while our students got into a heated debate about which of my brothers and cousins is the hottest.

That night we went to visit our friends Jarol and Eliza and their daughter Jaraeli. (I just discovered that her name is actually a combination of her parents' names). Eliza whipped out a bag full of artisan jewelry, most of which my mom ended up buying to sell with her fair-trade business in the US. We played hangman with Jaraeli and Jarol taught my dad a more complicated Nicaraguan version of tic-tac-toe.

On Thursday, we showed my parents the school, impressing them with the fairly nice school building and unimpressing them with the rowdy students and row of broken latrines. Then we caught the bus up the hill and got off to walk three miles through chamomile and potato fields to La Garnacha, the organic farm where we work on Thursdays. We showed them the lookout over hills of farmland towards distant volcanoes and the building where the La Garnacha goats live. We introduced them to Padre Patricio, the Italian priest, and other La Garnacha friends. And then we hitched another pickup truck ride back to San Nicolas.

On Friday we all crammed into the old American school bus and chugged up the hill again to Esteli, the closest city, where David works at the market on Fridays. We stopped by the La Garnacha stand, too late to catch the man who sells “pan de coco” (coconut bread) from the trunk of his little red car on Friday mornings. Instead, we settled on lunch at our favorite Cuban restaurant in Esteli. Then we visited the house of a woman who makes paper from recycled materials. We each made a few sheets of paper with old screens attached to picture frames, and my mom bought some recycled-paper cards to take back to the US to sell.

Our primary school students had planned a surprise party for my parents, so at our Saturday-morning class they made an early appearance (for the first time ever) so that they could jump out and say “Surprise!” when we arrived with my parents. Then they drank five liters of pop and continued jumping.

Later that day, we made a steep, hilly trek to my friend Maria's house out in the campo. I tutor Maria in English and she had invited us to her house to learn how to make chicken soup. I made orange juice from oranges from their trees and threw little cheesy corn dumplings into the soup boiling over their wood-fired stove. Hansel, Maria's 3-year-old son, showed my mom random items from their house (pencils, oranges, eggs) and ran off laughing uncontrollably when she said their names in English. Later, he grabbed a machete and ran outside to swing it at a tree – no big deal, just a three-year-old wielding a machete.

We have fallen into a good routine here in San Nicolas, but it was cool to lift ourselves out of that routine for a week and, in showing my parents what has become our normal life, see it through their eyes as new and exciting once again. It was a good reminder too that we're not isolated from our friends and family here – that even though you are all far away, you are thinking of us and supporting us in different ways. And if any of you want to come visit us too, we would love to host you!

Lenten Traditions in the Campo

With the start of Lent last week also began the lead-up to perhaps the most important holiday in Nicaragua: Easter. We have heard tell of all of the special festivities that happen here during Semana Santa, or Holy Week, and we're excited to experience them. But for these 40 days before Easter, the celebrations will be a bit more solemn.

One aspect of the Lenten celebration is that at least here in San Nicolas, it is only the Catholic church that observes Lent. Tensions are always rife between the Catholic and Evangelical churches in San Nicolas, with judgments flying fast both ways. When we asked a Catholic friend about how the Evangelicals celebrate Lent, she told us with distaste, “They don't celebrate it.” When we asked an Evangelical student the same question she said self-righteously, “For Catholics, only this time of year is holy. For us, every day is holy.”

For the Lent-observing Catholics, then, these weeks before Easter are a time of moderation and quiet. Traditionally, people in this part of the Nicaraguan campo don't eat meat during Lent. People wear darker, more subdued-colored clothing (you are considered a sinner if you wear red, one friend told us) and are not allowed to play loud music or shout. If there is a storm with loud thunder and lightening during Lent, superstition has it that if you grab a pinch of ash and make a cross with it in the air, the thunder and lightening will go away.

From our observations, though, most of these traditions seem to have expired. Maybe there are older people deep in the campo who still take these principles to heart, but we haven't seen any notable decrease in hot-pink polo shirts or blasting reggaeton music in San Nicolas.

What we have noticed is a determined increase of songs relevant to Lent during masses. During the Ash Wednesday service last week, Padre Patricio blessed people by drawing a cross in holy ash on their foreheads, as a reminder of human mortality and repentance to God. This holy ash came from the burned palms of last year's Palm Sunday.

Every Friday during Lent, the Catholic church holds what is called a “Via Cruz.” A group of parishioners walks around town to different houses, singing Lenten songs, which tend to be a little sadder and slower than the typical ranchero beats of church songs here. Also, on Fridays during Lent, people don't eat meat. (This is not such a huge sacrifice, however, since it's not so often that people supplement their normal rice-and-beans diet with meat, anyway).

Though accounts differ on what constitutes typical Lenten traditions here in San Nicolas, it seems certain that Lent is a time of reflection on what it means to be human in the presence of God. During these forty days, we join the people of San Nicolas and the world in silence and prayer.

Jarol's Favorite Place

The dry season is here in full force in Northern Nicaragua; it has only rained once in the past month. The earth in our back yard is cracked with deep chasms (into which we can stick a machete, we've discovered). The hills around San Nicolas are brown and dry, and the stiff grass by the side of the road crackles in the breeze.

It was into this scorched landscape that we ventured last weekend, along the red dirt road to the community of Quebrada de Agua. Our friend Jarol lives in San Nicolas now, but he grew up in a little farm house in the campo and wanted to show us this place. Jarol's whole family came with us: his wife Elisa, who has a gruff voice and a hearty laugh, his 9-year-old daughter Ararely, who knew the name of every bird we saw along the walk; and his mother, Doña Victoria, who mutters curses through the constant cigarette between her lips.

As we walked, people called out to Jarol and his family from the stoops of their houses, shouting friendly insults or asking Jarol to help them with farm tasks. We stopped at one house to talk to some cousins of Jarol's. We sat in the dark kitchen, flies buzzing around the mounds of tortillas covered by cloths, talking with an old couple who turned out to be the parents of Maria, a woman who I tutor. The old woman stirred a cast-iron pot over a wood fire that has made the kitchen walls black over the years. When it was done, she served us all plastic plates of steaming-hot arroz con leche.

Then we continued on our way, with Ararely chattering on about the earth's rotation, the names of the trees, and the frogs we might see at Jarol's childhood home. When we got there, the house was empty, its current occupants having walked to San Nicolas for the day. It was a simple cement-slab house, with dirt floors and a little outside kitchen, but by the way Jarol showed it to us, it could have been a mansion.

He took us around outside the house, knocking down some ripe mandarins from a tree and showing us the tiny buds on the mango tree. He took us down to the well – a hole in the ground where water bubbled up from the earth – where he used to bathe and do his laundry. Ararely leaned her head over the water, looking for frogs. Then he led us through some brush up to a clearing on top of a little hill, where we sat and looked out over the land. “This is my favorite place in the world,” Jarol told us.

Even after Jarol's mother moved to San Nicolas when he was a teenager and his siblings dispersed as well, he told us that he chose to stay at this house, living there by himself for several years – an uncommon occurrence in Nicaraguan culture. It was only when he married Elisa, who refused to live so far out in the campo, that he finally agreed to move to San Nicolas.

Later in the day, we climbed up a tall hill next to the house. From there, we could see not only San Nicolas, but also lots of other surrounding communities, in all directions. We sat on piles of hay on the ground and looked out on the brown squares of farmland below. Jarol pointed out some grown-over fox-holes in the ground, where during the war Sandinista snipers would shoot down the mountains at their Contra opponents.

When we got back to the house, Elisa served us some lemon chicken with vegetables and beans. Pigs and dogs wandered into the house, watching as we scraped the chicken off the bones.

After lunch we all walked over to Jarol's grandparents' house just down the road. There we sat on their front porch, gnawing on sticks of sugar cane and talking with four generations of Jarol's family. His grandmother is 84 and blind in one eye, but she still walks for miles when she has to get into town. His grandfather, who looked limber for such an old man, claimed to be 94, but it's also possible that he just know the year he was born.

Jarol's grandmother told us that she had 19 children. As I thought about this astounding fact later, it struck me that this woman, who spent such a huge portion of her life giving birth to and caring for children, seemed like one of the strongest, most independent women I've ever met. There is this developed-world notion that women who have kids and stay at home with them are less independent and somehow not quite as hard and strong as working women. And yet Jarol's grandmother was a perfect example to the contrary, I thought.

On our way back to San Nicolas, we stopped to buy cuajada cheese at a little house along the way where Doña Victoria claimed we could find the best cuajada around. And as the sun dropped, we hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck down the mountain, with Jarol pointing up to the peak from which we had looked down on San Nicolas earlier that day.