Feliz Dia de La Madre!

Nicaraguan women have crazy super powers. I have seen campo women grab, with their bare hands, a cast iron pot directly from a raging fire. I have seen a blind, 90-year-old woman walk miles over rocky terrain to reach the bus station. I have heard of a woman giving birth to 18 children, all in her own home, and then raising these children single-handedly. Considering these amazing feats of strength, it is no wonder that Mother's Day is one of Nicaragua's biggest holidays. (Though a single day could never make up for all of the hardships that these women suffer every day of their lives).

Around May 30th every year, you see people rushing around with big white cardboard boxes that contain the obligatory Mother's Day cake. In school, students make decorative Mother's Day bulletin boards with generic pictures of mothers that they printed off from the internet. And in every house – Catholic or Evangelical, rich or poor – people find a way to celebrate their mothers.

In honor of Nicaraguan Mother's Day, we want to celebrate the woman who has been like a Nicaraguan mother to us: Idalia Lopez Camas. As the principal at the San Nicolas high school, Idalia has been our main supervisor, but she has also been one of our best friends. When we were first in San Nicolas we went to Idalia for everything, and like a good mother, she helped us in every way she could: patiently explaining the school system, relaying the San Nicolas bus schedule, bringing over a big bag of beans and teaching us how to make Nicaraguan rice and beans. For every request we made, Idalia would do her characteristic thinking head-wobble and figure out some way to help us.

As the school principal, Idalia is one of the few women in San Nicolas who hold prominent positions in the community. But she certainly doesn't do it for the glory; Idalia's fervor for education has driven her entire life. In a time and place when Nicaraguan women were excluded from school without a second thought, Idalia earned her high school and college degrees by walking more than 12 miles to Esteli to take classes. She told me that once her shoe wore out while she was walking, so she walked into the city barefoot.

After she had married, when she had young children and was living in the tiny community of La Garnacha, Idalia taught elementary school classes during the day. High school classes weren't offered at that time. So, realizing how empowering it could be for these campo folks to get a high school education, Idalia started giving high school classes in the evenings. She wasn't even paid for this second job. But because of her conviction that education was the path to a better life for her neighbors, Idalia volunteered her evenings to teach high school.

Idalia's belief in the power of education lives on today. Her oldest daughter just graduated from college with a degree in pharmacy, and her younger two daughters are both in good school programs in Esteli. Even Idalia herself has dreams of going back to college to get a second degree.

Idalia is also the only person in San Nicolas who seems to have any authority over teenagers. Often our students will be running around, yelling and passing notes and being generally rambunctious when suddenly a silence will fall over the entire class. When we look up, Idalia is inevitably at the door, glaring in with the sternest face I've ever seen. Sometimes I almost feel like I'm in trouble. But the second the students leave, Idalia looks at me and bursts into laughter as if to say, “Ha! Did you see how angry they thought I was?”

I've also discovered that for some reason Idalia loves to make me laugh. She'll say something in the teacher's lounge and covertly glance over to see if I heard her joke. Even if I didn't understand her fast Spanish, I'll usually crack a smile, which I know feeds her hilarity, so that she'll build on her joke. One day when this happened, Idalia said to all of the other teachers in the room, “Look, I made Sarah laugh! She thinks I'm funny.”

I do think Idalia is funny. And I think she is caring and intelligent and incredibly hard-working. She single-handedly runs the entire high school, working tirelessly six days a week, with few vacations, for the betterment of her community. Now here is a woman with some crazy super powers.