Happy Graduation!

We've just finished up the school year here in San Nicolas and our neighbor kids tell us that they're bored already. Lucky for them, the elementary and high school graduation ceremonies that happened last weekend, while maybe not alleviating their boredom, at least provided them some big events to get gussied up for.

Promocion, as they call graduation here, is a big deal. It's a big deal in the pomp and circumstance involved, and it's a big deal as an accomplishment. In the seventh grade class that I teach, the year began with around 40 students, which is a normal-sized seventh grade class for San Nicolas. By eleventh grade – the final year of high school here – the class size usually shrinks to around 12 students. So in those intervening years between seventh and eleventh grades, more than half of the class drops out of school. The causes for these drop-outs are numerous; students have to quit school to work at their family's convenience store, or they get married, or they decide that it's too far to walk every day, or they're just kicked out of school for bad behavior.

With the two principals of the school programs and a teacher

Of course, some of the students who drop out of normal, daily high school still have the chance to complete high school by attending a long day of classes only on Saturdays. For the students who live miles and miles away from San Nicolas and whose only mode of transportation is by foot, Saturday school is a good alternative – they can still complete high school, but they only have to walk the 10 or so miles to school and back again just once a week. For this reason, there are over 300 students who attend Saturday school and come from various tiny remote communities surrounding San Nicolas, and only 120 students who attend regular, daily high school. We are still a little skeptical that the quality of education they receive by attending class only once a week is the same as that of students who attend school every day, but it's a good opportunity for them nonetheless.

One of the Sandinista government's newer initiatives is to offer classes on Sundays as well, for adults who want to go back and complete high school. So last Saturday, in one gigantic four-hour long ceremony, seventy students graduated from all three of these high school programs. We went over to the parish the night before to help spruce up the church where the service would be held, and spent several hours painstakingly gluing block letters onto a large piece of cloth to create a banner.

Everyone arrived the next morning an hour late but dolled up in their fanciest clothes. More than 500 people filed into the church, crowding at the back. One of the starkest differences between Nicaraguan and American public school graduations is that here, the graduation ceremony, like all important events in Nicaragua, is preceded by a church service. After the church service, the graduation banner was unfurled in front of Jesus and Mary and the repetitive graduation theme song commenced.

We are so proud of all of our students who graduated from high school last Saturday, and we want to congratulate them and honor their accomplishments by posting a few photos of them.

December Holy-days

There have been so many fireworks going off around San Nicolas for the past few days that if I didn't know better, I would think the Evangelicals and Catholics had finally gone to war with each other. But this is not war – this is celebration. We were surprised to realize last December that people in this pocket of Nicaragua don't celebrate Christmas nearly as much as we do in the US. Instead of spending early December preparing for Christmas, San Nicolaseños spend it celebrating other holidays. Here are the two most important ones.

1. Las Fiestas Patronales (The Patron Saint Celebration, or San Nicolas Day) – December 5

We were woken up on December 5 at 4:30 in the morning to mariachi music and fireworks. We stumbled out of bed to turn on the lights, but the electricity was out. The day had already begun in true Nicaraguan fashion, we told each other grumpily. When we peered out into the dark streets to try to see the mariachi band strolling around town, all we could see were a few other people's flashlights down the street. Everything was dark.

Later we asked Maryluz, the woman at the parish who coordinates masses, if she had been woken up at 4:30 too. No, she told us. She had gotten up at 4 a.m. to start cooking food for the San Nicolas Day feast for the entire town. That put is in our place.

On December 5, San Nicolas celebrates its own unique holiday by holding a mass for over 500 people and subsequently feeding them all at different people's houses all around town. The bishop from the entire department comes to give the mass, and people wait on the edge of town with a mariachi band to greet him and escort him into town. A long procession snakes through town, with the bishop at its head, to the Catholic church, which overflows with people. People come from all of the 30ish tiny communities surrounding San Nicolas, some of them walking for hours to get there.

Many of these people have only a tiny plot of land and an adobe shack to their name, but they come bearing gifts nonetheless. When the bishop pulled up in his fancy pickup truck and got out, these people flocked to him, just wanting to grasp some shred of holiness from his touch. (It reminded me of the part in the Bible where everyone clamors for Jesus to perform a miracle, reaching out and touching him). Later, during the mass, they held an offering. A long line filed from the back of the church, and these same people, clutching sacks of beans and bags of oranges from their trees, brought them to the front of the church to give them to the bishop.

2. La Purisima (The Immaculate Conception) – December 8

The Purisima might be the biggest Nicaraguan holiday. It celebrates the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, and since Mary is the patron saint of Nicaragua and the Purisima tradition is somewhat unique to Nicaragua, it seems to be a thing of pride for many Nicaraguans. The Purisima represents not only a religious tradition, but Nicaraguan patriotism.

Just like the fiestas patronales, the Purisima also began with fireworks, though at a slightly later hour. And just like with the fiestas patronales, the fireworks were followed by a mass. (Mass seems to be the main way Catholic people celebrate any special occasion here in San Nicolas).

In other parts of Nicaragua – mostly in cities, I think – the Purisima celebrations are a bit more extravagant. It sounds kind of like Halloween. Kids go from house to house, and at each house people have set up alters to the virgin Mary. The kids sing a Purisima song and then the people at the house give them candy or fruit or a bag of beans.

Here, the Purisima celebrations all happen at mass. People come from distant communities, and kids seep out the doors of the Catholic church. Lots more people appear at the end of the mass, when things really get good. This year, a brass band from Esteli showed up and played music in a corner while the local mayors office handed out treats from huge cardboard boxes. They gave out candy, sugared squash, bananas, oranges, sugarcane, toys for the little kids, and lots of other things. As they are handing out candy, someone shouts, "Quien causa tanta alegria?" and the crowd responds, "La virgen Maria!" Each person totes home a bag with all this loot in it, and I imagine that for many of the people, this is the only time of year that they have access to such luxuries. Throughout the month of December, the Catholic church travels to lots of little communities in super-remote areas and repeats the Purisima at Catholic churches all over.

It's worth mentioning that both of these big holidays at the beginning of December are really only celebrated by Catholic people, who are an overall majority in this area, but certainly not the only denomination. We were curious what our Evangelical neighbor kids thought of the Purisima. Are they jealous of all the little Catholic kids who get these big bags of goodies? So after coming home from mass yesterday, we offered them one of our bags and, well-trained as they are, they politely declined. Tensions are high between Catholics and Evangelicals, but one thing can be said for both of them: they cling strongly to the religious beliefs that guide their lives and traditions.  

How to Find a Note

I love notes. Before we came to Nicaragua, Davie and I lived in Seattle, and in Seattle we made a game for ourselves. As we walked to work or down the block to the grocery store, we scanned the sidewalks for handwritten notes that people had dropped on the ground. And when we spotted one, the rule was that we absolutely had to stop and pick it up, no matter how silly it might make us look to be scrounging around on the ground for an old wrinkled piece of paper. In this way, we collected two large shoe boxes of handwritten grocery lists, bus directions, manifestos, and love notes during the two years we lived in Seattle. We fancied that these little slips of paper told us things about the strangers that we would never know.

Here in Nicaragua, notes are an even bigger deal. Because most people don't have smart phones on which to send messages and look up directions, good old fashioned pen and paper are still the prevailing media for written communication. We've found so many notes here, in fact, that we've given up trying to collect them all.

The high school in San Nicolas is the town's note jackpot, and lucky for us, we work there. Although passing notes is technically against school rules, the town's most skilled note authors have their ways. And as teachers, we are specially authorized to confiscate these notes.

Of course, note-confiscating isn't as easy as it might sound; there is definite skill involved. First of all, you have to develop a sixth sense for note writing. The dead give-aways are the students who spend all class yawning and drawing tattoos on themselves and then, all of a sudden, start scribbling away furiously in their notebooks, forgetting even to glance up at the board.

To verify that it's a note they have and not, say, a dialogue in English, you have to wait until the note gets passed. An easy way to tell that a note is about to be passed is if a student looks up directly at you with a sort of shifty-eyed look, and if both of their hands are hidden under their desk. Sometimes this is a good time to swoop in and grab the note out of their hands. Sometimes, it's better to wait until the student passes the note. Whenever it is that you decide it's time to get your hands on that note,you sneak up on the student from behind, moving slowly, and get a firm grasp on the note before they even realize you're taking it away. If the student realizes what you're doing before the note is in your grasp, you run the risk of them shoving it down their shirt, where it's as good as unattainable to you.

The notes that do survive this rigorous note-confiscation system often go to their graves, ripped into tiny shreds, in the gutters lining the road that descends from the school. Free at last, students prance into the streets and rip up the day's secret conversations, tossing the note confetti to the whim of the wind. What they don't know is that the local gringo note-hunters occasionally pick up these bits of note later and piece them together with scotch tape like a jigsaw puzzle.

Kendall also loves peanut butter.

One of my favorite notes, however, is not one gotten in stealth, but rather given to us directly. The story that goes along with this note is about a little boy named Kendall. Kendall, who is in fourth grade, loves riding bikes. Unfortunately, Kendall doesn't have his own bike, so for a while, I used to lend him my bike. He would come knock on our door and say, "Hi Sarita, can I borrow your bike to do errands for my mom?" We both knew that he wasn't actually doing errands at all - he just wanted to ride around town and decorate my bike with Oreo stickers. But I would usually let him.

Then one day after I had lent Kendall my bike, his sister Josary came back with it and told me that Kendall had been shirking his homework and almost gotten into an accident with a truck, and his mom forbade him to borrow my bike ever again. After that, every time Kendall came by and asked if he could borrow my bike so he could do errands for his mom, I told him no.

Then, one Sunday, he showed up at our house with this note:

Translated, it says: Profe Irela (his mom). Gringos, my mom can't come. For this reason, she sends this paper. Lend the bike to Kendall, only on Sundays.

Note collecting here is a whole different sport than it was in Seattle. I suppose the main difference is that here, we're not reading the handwriting of complete strangers; we're reading the thoughts and feelings of people we know.