Semana Santa on the Atlantic Coast

Holy Week is arguably the biggest Nicaraguan holiday of the year. During “Semana Santa,” as it's known here, most people have at least a long weekend of vacation, if not the whole week off. As Semana Santa is also the very hottest time of year, the object of the week is to find a cold pool of water to dip your toes in.

In this regard, we went all out. We didn't just buy one of those inflatable kiddie pools that people sell by the sides of the streets at this time of year; we took on the entire Caribbean Sea. With a few of our volunteer friends who work in Managua and Matagalpa, we made the long bus journey across the sparsely-populated Nicaraguan inland, and where the road ended took a boat along the Escondido River to the Atlantic coastal city of Bluefields.

Bluefields – it doesn't sound very Spanish, does it? That's because it's not. The Afro-Caribbean population on the Atlantic Coast actually speaks a Creole English. The complex history of this region makes it feel almost like an entirely different country from the rest of Nicaragua. The Spanish had long since colonized the Pacific side of Nicaragua when, in the mid-19^th century, British colonists and their African slaves moved from Jamaica to the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast. There, the English-speaking Afro-Caribbean people intermarried with the Miskito and Rama indigenous groups that had occupied this territory until then, to produce a richly diverse culture that you won't find anywhere else in Nicaragua.

So Semana Santa was the perfect opportunity for us to get to know this culture and also visit some of the most pristine beaches in Nicaragua. We traveled first to Bluefields by land and then flew to the Corn Islands, two tiny white-sand-and-palm-trees islands in the Caribbean Sea. Of course we did all of the things required when one finds oneself in a tropical island paradise: eat lobster and fish at almost every meal, drink coconut water straight out of the coconut, sunbathe on fine white sand beaches, and swim in the turquoise sea all day long.

This was all amazing. But the part of the Atlantic Coast that impressed me the most was, in the end, not the beaches; it was the people. We arrived in Bluefields on Saturday, and the American priest who we stayed with there invited us to an ecumenical Palm Sunday march through the city the next morning. We were pretty exhausted from our long journey but curious enough about where we were that we decided to get up at 6 a.m. to walk through Bluefields and wave some palm fronds around. We were glad we did.

Gathered in Bluefields' central park to start the march were at least 500 people: people from Catholic churches, people from Baptist churches, people from Moravian and Presbyterian and Lutheran churches. There were English-speaking Creole people, Miskito-speaking indigenous people, and Spanish-speaking Mestizo people. There were people of all shapes and colors. Together, we all marched through the streets of Bluefields, clutching palm fronds and celebrating together this special day in the Christian calendar. We sang songs in Spanish and we sang old hymns in English. Priests and pastors read from the Bible first in Spanish and then in English. It was amazing. No where else in Nicaragua – or maybe even the world – have I encountered such a perfect, peaceful, balancing act of so many different religious beliefs and cultural heritages. (In San Nicolas, the Evangelicals and Catholics, the only two religious groups that really exist, are constantly at each other's throats; nothing like this would ever happen here.)

I have to admit; part of my love affair with the Atlantic Coast was also food-induced. There is a whole different cuisine on this side of Nicaragua, based much more on seafood and coconut than on corn. During our week on the East Coast, I probably ate at least five loaves of coconut bread, a delicious springy yeast bread made with coconut milk. And then there was the pati, a spicy dumpling with a mixture of meat and beans on the inside, and the ginger beer and the “soda cakes,” or ginger cookies. We met a woman one day named Emmalina who explained to us the secrets of making coconut oil. Even the food on the Atlantic Coast reflects the diversity of the area.

I realized that I often still feel like an outsider in San Nicolas. As a gringa, I am certainly an outsider with power and privilege, but that doesn't stop the little kids on the buses from staring at me. So during this holy week, it felt good to be in a place where people are so open, where diversity is the norm, where I fit in because of, rather than in spite of, my difference.