A Reverse Manger Scene

It has been a painful Christmas week here in San Nicolas. 

This past Monday, a man who lives down the street from us, Tonito, was thrown from his horse and died a few hours later, leaving his wife and seven children to mourn his death just two days before Christmas. Then yesterday, on Christmas day, we heard our friend and neighbor Henry sobbing uncontrollably in his back yard. He called Davie's name through his tears and told Davie from across the fence that his uncle had just died across the street.

We had created a joyful space within the walls of our house on Christmas day, cooking some hearty American comfort foods and skyping with our families. And when we opened our front door to go to the vigil for Henry's uncle, it certainly wasn't joy that greeted us in the streets of San Nicolas, but it also wasn't the outright hopelessness that we had expected.

A huge crowd of people lingered in the street outside our house. We followed them into the house across the street from us and into its living room, where Aurelio, Henry's uncle, lay motionless on a bed in the empty room,. He had died less than an hour before. Family and friends filed into the house, crowding around the bed to lay hands on him and pray. Little kids zoomed in between people's legs to get a look at Aurelio and then went back out into the street to play games.

It seemed that most of the community of San Nicolas was gathered around Aurelio, next to his bed, in the living room, and in the street outside the house, in the moments after his death. It occurred to me that on this Christmas night, we were witnessing something akin to a reverse manger scene, with the shepherds and wise men gathered instead around a very human death.

We were also struck by the fact that this death was such a public, community event; we saw almost everyone we know in San Nicolas there. I had never really thought about how private our death traditions are in the US before – they occur within hospital walls, surrounded only by close family. In contrast, it was fascinating and beautiful to see the entire community surrounding Aurelio, talking and even laughing about his life, at the scene of his death.

This afternoon, the community of San Nicolas walked down the main street, bearing Aurelio's casket. We joined the long procession of people, and even though we didn't really know Aurelio, somehow marching down the streets of San Nicolas with everyone in town, even at this sad moment, made us feel so much a part of this community.

We walked along next to the mariachi band, who blended their violin and trumpet tunes with the wails of Aurelio's family. And there at the cemetery, with the entire population of San Nicolas looking on, Aurelio was put to rest in the ground, as the sun set over the mountains around San Nicolas.

As we're surrounded by the Christmas joy of birth and love, it is uncannily beautiful to see how the sorrow of death here in San Nicolas is inextricable from the love within this close-knit community – how, in essence, joy and sorrow can be such close companions.

Recipe: Jalapeño Chicken

One day a few weeks ago, Idalia, the director of the school in San Nicolas, came over with her daughter to teach us how to make a standard Nicaraguan dish: jalapeno chicken. 

It being a food-oriented time of year, we want to share this recipe with you. For those of you who are in a cold climate, this dish will warm you quite well. 

For the chicken:

3 lbs chicken, cut into filets

1 clove of garlic, smashed and diced finely

1 lime, juiced

2 small green peppers, diced finely

1 small onion, diced finely

½ teaspoon black pepper

1 teaspoon salt

Juice the lime and combine it with the chicken and diced garlic. Let sit for a minute and then drain the additional liquid. Dice the peppers and onion finely and combine the rest of the ingredients with the chicken. Cook the filet and vegetables, discarding the liquid, in a pan with butter until it is browned and crisp. You can also cook it over a grill if you prefer, Arrr Arrr Arrr.

For the sauce:

2 julienne-cut onions

1 or 2 julienne-cut jalapeno peppers (the more the merrier)

2 cups water

2 tablespoons corn starch

½ cup milk

½ cup sour cream

salt

Cut up the onions and peppers and saute them in oil. When they are cooked, add the water and cook until the water is hot. In the mean time, mix together separately the corn starch, milk, and sour cream. After the water is hot, add the corn starch mixture to the onion and peppers. Cook until the sauce thickens and add salt for taste. You may think, “that is a lot of jalapenos,” but the milk and cream will cut the spiciness - don't worry.

Mix together the chicken and sauce or serve them separately. Eat this dish over rice, with the side of beans that is essential to every Nicaraguan meal.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from San Nicolas, Nicaragua (Santa's vacation location)!

Graduation Season

We have been to three graduation, or promocion, ceremonies in San Nicolas in the last week, and let us just say, they are no small matter. Each ceremony is not only a graduation, we discovered, but also a reunion and a church service, all wrapped up into one four-hour-long service. All said, we have spent more time watching people graduate in the last week than we have spent cooking or eating or maybe even sleeping. (That last one is only a slight exaggeration). And when we do sleep, the graduation theme song haunts our dreams.

The first graduation service we went to was for our friend Fatima, who works at the pharmacy next door to us and was graduating from a local agricultural school. We were invited to the second graduation by our friends Samari and Tamara, sisters who were graduating from 6th grade and kindergarten respectively. The final ceremony, last Saturday, was for our students graduating from high school.

Working on the banner the night before graduation

From our estimation, here are the essential ingredients to a promocion service in San Nicolas, Nicaragua:

1. The graduation theme song, which is different from the one used in American graduation services, but equally as repetitive.
2. Balloons, especially white and blue balloons for public school graduations.
3. Female audience members wearing 6-inch heels and tight glittery dresses.
4. A rousing sermon and some heartily-bellowed hymns.
5. A large congratulatory banner; drop-shadow letters are mandatory.
6. Walking down the aisle with a parent or sibling.

10 a.m., David waits outside the locked church

We also learned this week that when someone tells you that a graduation starts at 10 a.m., they really mean that the graduates start thinking about donning their gowns at 10 a.m. If you go to the church at 10 a.m. for the graduation, the church doors will most definitely be locked, and no one else will be there. 

But in spite of the long, sometimes-boring nature of the graduation services, we were honored to be invited to attend all of these ceremonies, and to watch the pride in our students' eyes as they walked down the aisles in their graduation gowns. So many students have to drop out of school early to work in their family's pulperias or take care of a sibling or child, that graduating from high school is a huge accomplishment, and graduating from a post-high school program is even more admirable. At the high school where we teach, you can see the drop-out progression when you look at the numbers of students in each class. In our 7th grade class, there are over 30 students; in 11th grade (the final year of high school), there are about 12. 

Jarol with his mother, Dona Victoria

The school offers GED-like classes on Sundays as well for adults who never graduated from high school, and we have become friends with Jarol, one of these students. After the graduation ceremonies, we were invited to parties at a few different students' homes, including Jarol's. Jarol is this big bulky manly-man who once made fun of me for complaining of an ant bite ("Come on, you are so much bigger than it!"), but he was visibly glowing with pride after graduating from high school. 

We are so happy for all of the students who graduated from the different programs in San Nicolas this last week, and we want to congratulate them and honor their accomplishments by posting a few photos of them.

Tamara graduating from kindergarten

Samari graduating from sixth grade

Fatima and her dad

Our neighbor, Juan Ariel, with his mother Dina

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.