The Summer Holidays of San Nicolas

It is summer in Nicaragua. Little purple flowers decorate the hills around San Nicolas, and the rains that should be completely over by this time of year (according to our neighbors) have at least slowed down, if not totally stopped. (Global warming strikes again, this time on the Nicaraguan bean harvest).

The school year ended about a week ago for the Instituto Publico Carolina Camas Arauz, and it's been a nonstop party since then. We're discovering that Nicaraguans love holidays, and it seems that a lot of them are concentrated around the end of the year. Here are the special days we celebrated this week:

San Nicolas Day, December 5

Where is more fitting to celebrate jolly old Saint Nick than in San Nicolas, Nicaragua? Answer: NOWHERE. (Although I'm still not convinced that December 25 is not the real San Nicolas Day . . . But I guess the people of San Nicolas know best).

San Nicolas Day is a big deal in San Nicolas, and rightfully so. People came from all of the 40 or so surrounding communities, walking very long distances in very fancy clothes, to celebrate. San Nicolas Day is, of course, a Catholic holiday, and when we meandered over to the church for mass in the morning, there was a long line of people stretching out of the church and through the park. We asked the guy who sells us enchilada snacks at school what they were doing, and he told us they were waiting to greet the bishop, who was coming all the way from Esteli to do the mass.

After the bishop arrived and was given a royal greeting, people made a rush for the church door. They clamored into the church – little girls in froofy dresses, women with elaborately braided hair, old men still wearing the spurs on their heels from their horse ride into town. People were packed into every corner of the church. We stood at the back in between the drunken cowboys and the offering table, which overflowed with bags of beans and rice.

During the service, lots of kids from the surrounding communities were confirmed in the Catholic Church. Afterward, they got their pictures taken with the bishop, and everyone shared a meal together in different houses around San Nicolas, since there were so many people.

Davie's Birthday, December 7

There isn't actually a Nicaraguan national holiday celebrating Davie, but maybe one day there will be. Apparently the birthday custom here in Nicaragua is to make a cake on the birthday person's head. Lucky for Davie, this culinary miracle didn't come to pass on this day. Nicaraguan birthday tradition is, we're told, to crack an egg on top of the birthday person's head and sprinkle some flour and other cake ingredients on top of the egg. It seems to me that this would result in a rather gooey cake, but maybe I will do some experimenting.

I did bake a cake yesterday, though in normal cake pans rather than on a head. We invited a few friends over to share the cake and Davie showed off our new, huge map of Nicaragua on the kitchen wall and his new baseball mitt that he got for his birthday. Then later one of our coworkers, a teacher at the Institute, stopped by to wish Davie a happy birthday too.

La Purisima, December 7 and 8

We had heard that the Purisima is a really big Nicaraguan holiday for celebrating the virgin Mary. But apart from a few bouts of middle-of-the-night firecrackers that woke us up this past week, we were not convinced that the Purisima was anything special until today.

On Sunday, instead of waking up to firecrackers, we woke up at 4:30 a.m. to loud trumpet music coming from the mayor's office next to our house. Then, during church a cheer went up several times, saying, “Who do we celebrate today? The Virgin Mary! Why do we celebrate her today? Because of the immaculate conception!”

We had been wondering why the church was so unusually packed with kids this Sunday. After the normal service ended, the religious sisters asked for some kids to volunteer to sing a song to the virgin Mary, but since the kids all stared back blankly, an old lady went to the front of the church to sing the song instead.

Then a group of people from the mayor's office brought around box after box of treats to hand out to each person in the church. We each made out with some pretty impressive loot, including a mysterious pink beverage, honeyed pumpkin, sugar cane, fruit, candy, and a bowl. It was a fun celebration, and it was cool to see the people of San Nicolas, who so seldom get anything for free, carrying around big bags of treats.

A Reflection on the Word "Mission"

Gringos are suckers for organic produce. So it's not too surprising how concentrated the Gringo population of Esteli becomes on Friday morning around the Parque Central, where we help sell organic produce for the Friday market. We usually start out our conversations with these Gringos in tentative Spanish, and when their American accents become apparent, we lapse into English.

We met one Gringo couple at the ferria who told us about the Christian-affiliated project that they run here in Nicaragua to create and distribute machines that make chlorine to add to water so that people in the campo can have access to clean, healthy water. They asked us if we wanted to come see how it all works, so yesterday we took an expedition deep into the sticks of Nicaragua with them.

We trundled along a potholed gravel road in a monstrous Toyota pickup for two and a half hours, a distance that would have probably taken half an hour on a paved road. We passed through a dry landscape of trees with spreading branches and dangling stringy moss. We went through places where there were no houses or people for miles and miles, where the road turned into a river, where corn and beans grew on an 85-degree mountain slope. And then all of a sudden we came to the town of Yali, a thriving town of 6,000 people with restaurants and plumbing and a brightly-painted orange cathedral.

We stopped at the mayor's office, and drank a hurried cup of too-sweet coffee in a cramped room before beginning the meeting with the representatives from Yali. Greg, the Gringo man who we were with, demonstrated the process of creating chlorine using the equipment that he has developed. He poured a tablespoon or so of salt into a cup of water, connected two positive currents together and two negative currents together, turned on the car battery that they were connected to, and poured the salt water through the system five times to separate the chloride from the sodium.

In the campo of Nicaragua, one of the most common causes of death is dirty water. So Greg's idea is to provide access to chlorine by giving people the means to make it, which is far cheaper than buying it. He visits remote communities all over Nicaragua to present and distribute these chlorine-making mechanisms.

We were pretty impressed with Greg's clean water project, but it also sparked some reflection on our own “mission” in Nicaragua. When I hear the word “mission,” I most often envision a project like Greg's where Westerners come to a developing nation to improve some aspect of people's lives there. Greg's work has a clear, tangible impact on Nicaraguan people's lives. He has the keys to a better life for them, and once he has delivered those keys, he goes home.

Our “mission” is a little less clear-cut. Yes, we are teaching English here in San Nicolas, but sometimes I'm not totally sure if they really need us; after all, they already have one English teacher. And yes, we help clean vegetables at La Garnacha, but it's not like we are any better at cleaning vegetables than anyone else – in fact, we're probably worse at it.

When we came here to San Nicolas almost two months ago, we came with only one clear task before us: to accompany the people of this town. All of the other things that we do are only part of our overarching goal of accompaniment. We are not here to bring the people of San Nicolas a little parcel of something that we possess and they lack – something that will change their lives in a dramatic way. Our primary function here is to just live with the people of San Nicolas, to learn about their lives, to become friends with them over time. And hopefully in doing that, we will change their lives in a small way, just as they will change ours.

I think that each type of mission has its function – Greg's work is doing very visible good in the world, but however slowly and however subtly, I think ours is too. As the Volunteer Missionary Movement “Spirit and Lifestyle” manifesto proclaims, “It is not simply a matter of handing out money, food, or equipment. It calls for more than that. Our response is to share who we are as well as what we have.”

Our House - A Vaguely Dickensian Narrative

In Which We Describe the Joys and Woes of Residing in the Humble Structure Which We Have Come to Call “Our Home”

Being that this little pile of bricks and concrete on the Main Street of San Nicolas has the distinction of being our first house together, we think it bears some description. It is, after all, where we spend much of our time.

When I call it a “little pile of bricks and concrete,” I don't mean to disparage our house. In fact, one thing that I quite like about our house – and, for that matter, every other house I've visited in Nicaragua – is how it unites indoor and outdoor worlds. Because it is perpetually warm here, there is no need to shut out the elements. And so you encounter architectural structures where the outdoors flows freely into the indoors: a kitchen, for instance, where the roof ends and a small courtyard begins; or, in our case, a house where all doors open to the outside. There is something revitalizing about having to go outside to get from your bedroom to your kitchen, and something so vital in never forgetting the whole big natural world beyond your man-made windows.

That said, my appreciation for the whole big natural world is not quite so resounding when I have to shuffle my flashlit way outside to the latrine in the middle of the night, or when I turn on the light to find a baseball-sized cockroach with wings scuttling across the bedroom floor. But those moments are in the minority.

So, our house. When you enter from the street, the first room you encounter is a rather dingy, poorly-lit room with cardboard-divider walls. This room is used most often by the natural medicine clinic that takes residence here Monday through Wednesday; we often come home to find a line of sick people waiting on a bench. Davie has also discovered that a hole in the tin roof over this room creates quite a fascinating “camera obscura” effect - in the circle of light on the floor projected from the hole in the roof, you can watch the clouds moving in the sky. 

When you enter our proper house, you first enter the room in between the kitchen and the bedroom, which is really more of a porch. It has three walls and looks out on the grove of banana trees in our back yard. This is also where we string up our hammock.

The bedroom, porch, and kitchen all have shiny new tile, thanks to Billy and Kristin, the volunteers who lived here previously (who, incidentally, also left us non-stick pans and a complete set of tupperware). The floor tile is so nice and shiny, in fact, that I feel moved to walk about the house barefoot all the time – a custom, I have come to discover, that is highly frowned upon by the prevailing Nicaraguan social mores. (Footnote: Nicaraguan floor culture is an intriguing topic that I hope to study more. For instance, sweeping and mopping the sidewalk outside your house seems to be generally expected as a regular duty, despite the seeming futility of cleaning something that is, by its very nature, perpetually dirty.)

The tin roof over our bedroom is unfortunately a bit of a layabout at performing its only job as a roof; it has five tiny holes in it, through which stream five tiny waterfalls when it rains. We have, therefore, strategically placed five buckets about the room to catch these waterfalls and make them into lakes instead. Though malaria is not much of a problem in this area, we sleep beneath a mosquito net.

Our kitchen, unlike many Nicaraguan kitchens, has the good fortune of possessing an oven, inside which we have baked many a loaf of bread. In the style of Nicaraguan kitchen furniture, our kitchen is accented by plastic chairs and a plastic card table, which we hide beneath the beautiful embroidered tablecloth that Davie's grandma made for us.

The shower room and latrine are both outside the main structure of the house and are both quite hospitable to refugee mosquitoes and other manner of small insects that seek safe haven. The earth beneath San Nicolas is not graced with plumbing lines; therefore, we have a large water tank next to the pila, where we painstakingly hand-wash our clothes (an exercise that takes at least three hours). The city water comes on every other day for a few hours in the morning, so during these hours we fill the tank with the water we use to do dishes, do laundry, and take showers for the next two days.

The showers we take are sometimes dump-showers (scooping water from a big bucket onto our heads), and they are always icy-cold. Davie has consequently taken to getting up uncharacteristically early so he can heat up a big pot of water over the stove and mix it with the cold water from the tank.

Our back yard is a whole jungle of fruit trees waiting for their seasons. We have banana trees, mango trees, coffee trees, hot-pepper bushes, grapefruit trees, noni trees (a medicinal fruit with a repulsive flavor and smell), and another citrus tree that we have yet to classify. The rest of the yard is a bit overrun with weeds and piles of rocks that people have thrown into the yard. We put the abundance of bricks we found to good use by constructing a brick path out to the latrine, but when it rains the path becomes more of a river than a thoroughfare.

All in all, life in the campo of Nicaragua takes much more deliberation and preparation than we are accustomed to. Be that as it may, we remain quite comfortable in the little pile of bricks and concrete in which we reside on the Main Street of San Nicolas.  

Nicaraguan Cooking Classes

Any time there is a lull in conversation, food is usually the first topic we leap to. Whatever our cultural differences with the people of San Nicolas, we all like eating. I might not be able to communicate as well as I would like with people, but I am just as adept at eating rice and beans as anyone else around the plastic card table.

In the last few weeks, we've cooked and shared food with lots of people in the community. Last Sunday Idalia, the school principle, invited us to her mom's house out in the campo to bake rosquillas in her clay oven. Rosquillas are a flaky corn-based pastry that come in all different shapes. They usually have a filling of egg, sweet cream and a type of cheese they make here called cuajada.

We arrived at Idalia's mom's house to find a huge family reunion in progress, with everyone fulfilling their gender roles. The women were gathered in the kitchen, kneading the rosquilla dough and holding babies, while the men sat on the porch outside and the kids watched TV and played with plastic duckies. They had all been at it for a few hours already.

We tried our hand at shaping the soft rosquilla dough into different shapes, but it was a lot harder than it looked. Meanwhile, the women were all buzzing around, shaving a huge chunk of brown sugar to put in the middle of the rosquillas and mixing together milk and corn to make atole. They only used the white of the egg in the rosquilla filling, so Idalia's mom, a classic old woman in a shawl, put the egg shell with the yolk on top of the wood stove to cook and eat.

After the rosquillas (probably about 500 of them) were all prepared, we took them out to the clay oven next to a pasture of grazing cows. The family had been heating a fire and burning it down to coals all day. Idalia's daughter helped shove all of the coals out of the oven with a long stick and Idalia's sister put the trays of rosquillas into the steaming oven, deftly moving them around with a long paddle. When they were done, we ate the rosquillas with mugs of sweet coffee. We rode back to San Nicolas through the mountains, crammed into the bed of a pickup truck with a bunch of Idalia's family, clutching bags of rosquillas.

We had also been talking to Idalia about making tostones (deep-fried plantain chips), so we bought two green bananos at the market last week and Idalia volunteered to come over with the English teacher, Vilma, to show us how to make them. They showed up in our kitchen on Tuesday afternoon and took over completely. They hacked off the skin of the unripe banana and showed us how to chop the bananas into chunks, partially fry them, smash them into discs, and deep fry them again. They also helped us make Nicaraguan rice, which involves a lot more oil and garlic than the white rice that we're used to making.

We've been eager to share our food traditions with the friends we're making here too. Last week we had a group of girls over to teach them how to make brownies, which they just called “chocolates.” They were super excited about helping; they fought over who got to wear the two aprons that we have and wanted to keep beating the eggs for about 10 minutes. Then they deep-cleaned our entire kitchen as the brownies were baking, scrubbing out the sink and sweeping the floor. When the brownies came out of the oven, they devoured them, dropping brownie crumbs all over the floor before they left.

We also have developed an ongoing food trade with our neighbors, Dina and her son Henry. We handed them a plate of cookies over the fence when we first moved in, and they returned the plate with a guirilla, a kind of tortilla made of young corn that is typical of this part of Nicaragua. Then they gave us some honey-baked squash and we gave them some brownies. Just today, they called out our names and we went outside to find Henry holding a plate of bananas over the fence. He also told us that one of the banana trees in our back yard had ripe bananas. We didn't believe him at first, so he jumped over the chain-link fence with his machete and hacked down the branch, which was indeed heavy with a big bunch of ripe square bananas.

Cooking and eating food together has been a way for us to bridge our cultures (everyone likes eating), but also a way to share and learn about each other's unique food traditions. As we continue to share recipes with each other, we will also continue to build our community here.  

So What Are You Guys Doing Here?

Sometimes I'm a little jealous of the worker ants in our back yard. Even at night, you can see this huge long single-file string of them, crawling along in an organized fashion from the anthill next to the latrine and up the mango tree a few feet away. They crawl 10 or 15 feet up the tree, cut these very precise little pieces of leaves and then descend back down the line of ants, delivering the leaf pieces to their hill. They do everything with such precision and purpose. And at the end of the day, I bet they have some pretty cool mango-leaf furniture hidden away in their anthill to show for all their work.

Davie and I, on the other hand, have no mango-leaf furniture. Neither do we have such precise daily goals; and we certainly don't have as much control over our work as our neighboring ants do. Much of that will probably come with time. I know that for now we should just embrace our role as “accompaniers,” worrying less about what we're doing and focusing more on developing relationships with the people of San Nicolas. But it can be difficult to banish the Western to-do list mentality and still feel successful about our work.

The school year here in Nicaragua is drawing to an end in December, so if Davie and I want to start any new classes or clubs, it doesn't make sense to do it until February, when school starts again. In the mean time, we are plugging into a few different projects that are under other people's ownership:

 --  Co-teaching English at the high school. On Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays we put on our high-school-cool faces and help teach three or four English classes a day. Part of this involves going to the front of the class to pronounce vocabulary words like “statisticals” and “hellow” that the teacher has written on the board. The other part involves taming the students, who often leave class after the teacher takes attendance and run around and around the school, chasing each other until they collapse. Davie is beginning to perfect the stern teacherly air; yesterday he confiscated one note and reprimanded a group of girls who were doing each other's makeup during class.

--  Preparing produce for market at an organic farm. On Thursday we take the bus part of the way and then walk the remaining 3 miles to La Garnacha, a village that offers a lot of cool ecotourism activities and also has an organic farm. They make Swiss cheese, coffee and herbal teas as well. We have been helping clean carrots and green onions and package green beans on Thursday mornings. We have a few other ideas for things we could do at Garnacha: teach computer classes or ecotourism English classes, work on their web site or improve trails and trail signage in the area.

 --  Helping sell Garnacha's produce at market. On Friday we've been going to Esteli, the closest big city, to help sell produce at a cool farmers market in the town square. They usually don't need all that much help, so we'll probably start rotating which of us goes to the market on Friday.

- We have also begun to get a few requests for one-on-one English conversation sessions with people in the community. Knowing English really opens up the job market to people (or so we've heard), so we're excited to work with people who are really serious about improving their English.

When the new school year starts, we have a few ideas for projects of our own. Until then, we will continue to invite people over for dinner and talk to people in the streets. Our primary work in the next few months is to make friends.

A Morning in San Nicolas

San Nicolas, nestled in the mountains

There are few proper addresses in Nicaragua (at least in the way that Americans think of addresses). But in the province of Esteli, in the town of San Nicolas, on the house next to the mayor's office, at 5:50 a.m. a crow scratches its claws noisily across the tin roof and then leaps into the air, cawing.

Just next door, the rooster in the yard two houses down from the mayor´s attempts a crow that sounds more like a final rasp of breath. This is the 20^th crow it has attempted since 4 a.m.

A dance class performing outside the school

On the street outside, the brightly repainted American school bus announces its 6 a.m. departure for the city of Esteli by uttering seven beeps in quick succession. The grey bench seats are already full and 23 people stand pressed against each other in the middle aisle. Everyone slides back the slightest bit to make room for the 24^th person, a woman wearing a butterfly clip in her long hair. The woman with the butterfly clip is returning home to her husband and two-year-old daughter for the weekend. Every week, she leaves her family and travels four hours to San Nicolas so that she can earn enough money to support her family by teaching English at the local school. The woman with the butterfly clip likes the velvety feeling of baby's skin. She dislikes the harsh sounds of the English language.

The bus begins its slow chug up the mountain, swerving out of the way for two cows walking down the main street in San Nicolas. The cows give a lazy moo. They have large wishbone-shaped sticks hung over their necks so that they can roam around the town on their own and not escape into gates or bushes. The cows like nibbling on the beans between the cracks in the pavement. They dislike carrying the heavy sticks around their necks.

Preparing produce for market at the organic farm, La Garnacha

The cows belong to a man who wears a cowboy hat. While they are roaming around the town, the man with the cowboy hat is refilling the water tank in his back yard. The town water comes on for two hours in the morning every other day. It takes exactly 38 minutes for the tank to fill up. After he fills it, the man with the cowboy hat will climb onto his horse and ride off to the small bean farm where he works on a nearby mountain side. The man likes the feeling of putting his feet in stirrups.

While the man with the cowboy hat is filling the water tank in the back yard, his wife stands over a wood fire inside the house. She mixes together corn and flour and water and heats oil in a griddle over a cement stove. The woman places the 46^th guirilla she has made this morning into the basket that she will bring to the school later on, so that she can sell the thick tortillas for 5 cordobas each, or about 20 cents. The woman likes braiding her daughters' hair. She dislikes watching the older students at the school drape their arms all over each other.

English lessons

Six miles away, at a tiny shack along the Pan-American Highway, one such student sets off from her house. She wears her favorite Aeropostale t-shirt because her school uniform is still drying on the line. It takes her 1 hour and 45 minutes to walk over the mountains to the school in San Nicolas, so she starts early, just as the sun is rising. As she walks, she thinks about the boy she likes with the swirly design shaved into his scalp. The girl with the Aeropostale t-shirt dislikes having to step out of the way for cow droppings. She likes the feeling of bright new clothing.

Meanwhile, back in the house next door to the mayors' office, the two Gringos sleeping beneath the tin roof begin to stir. In 2.25 hours they will pass the two cows nibbling beans in the street. They will enter the classroom where the girl in the Aeropostale t-shirt sits, waiting for her English class to start. At lunch they will buy one of the 77 guirillas that the guirilla woman has cooked that morning. The Gringos dislike the drops of water that creep through the holes in their roof when it rains. They like saying “Adios” to every person they meet as they walk to school.

Notes, Coast to Coast

In the last weeks, our feet have traveled four different regions of Nicaragua – and still, we haven't reached our final destination.

After our week in Matagalpa, we traded the mountains for the sea and sped off to the Corn Islands off of the Caribbean coast for a week of honeymooning. There, we stuffed ourselves with lobster, snorkeled clear turquoise waters and lay in hammocks reading Game of Thrones out loud. In the vein of footNOTES, we also found a mysterious note in a juice bottle that may or may not have led to a pirate's treasure.

Years ago, the British controlled the eastern coast of Nicaragua, bringing African slaves and the English language to these isles before the Spanish kicked the English out. This makes for an interesting cultural mix of African-Latin ethnicities who speak an array of English, Spanish, indigenous, and creole languages. Apparently, there were also pirates on these islands at one point. Anyway, we were quite busy partaking in our obligatory honeymoon beach-lying, so we didn't get to truly experience much of this Caribbean culture. Someday, we will have to return.

We got back to Managua last week and promptly left for a weekend retreat with the other VMM volunteers on the opposite coast, near Leon. The Pacific coast was a little less idyllic than the Atlantic coast, but the huge, crashing waves were really fun in a different way. We spent some quality time thinking and talking about how we've been doing with this transition to Nicaragua and what it will mean to accompany or to be accompanied by the communities we'll be living in.

This week we're back in Managua, and it is HOT. So far Managua has been like a train station for us – we've stopped over here briefly in between our trips to other places – but since we're here all week, we're hoping to learn a bit more about the capitol. I still feel pretty ignorant, but here are a few notes that I've gathered:

• Managua is sticky hot – maybe the hottest place I've ever been – especially in the middle of the day.
• The city is built on fault lines. Since the huge earthquake of 1972 leveled almost all of the city, no main city center has been rebuilt. Much of Managua was built in the last 40 years, and much of it centers around neighborhoods.
• Managua seems to have a lot of cool arts things going on – e.g. the Ruben Dario National Theater, named after Nicaragua's most renowned poet.
• There are a lot of pulperias (little convenience shops) in Managua! There are also a lot of banana chips in Managua.
• Managua is built for cars. Lots of people get around via taxi here.
• Yesterday we visited the Parque Historico Nacional Loma de Tiscapa, where Nicaragua's former dictator Somoza lived and where he also had an underground torture chamber. Now it is covered with quotes and photos of Nicaragua's biggest hero, Augusto Sandino – the inspiration for the Sandinista movement.
  
  

I'm sure there are more notes we'll take on Managua – the capitol will be the place we come to replenish our supplies of chocolate chips and peanut butter, after all. Right now, we're mostly just excited to get to San Nicolas, settle into our house, and meet the people who will be the central characters in our lives for the next years.