Touch Culture

Walking down even a busy sidewalk in a US city, people weave their way in and out of the throngs, carefully maintaining a personal bubble of at least a few inches in order to avoid brushing arms with strangers. Here in the campo of Nicaragua, no one seems to mind rubbing shoulders with their fellow street-walkers. On the narrow sidewalks of Esteli, people coming towards you push past you full-force, rarely bothering to dodge into the street so that you can pass without touching.

The whole culture of touch is different here. From the very moment you meet someone, you're kissing them on the cheek in greeting. There are some rules. For one, the kiss is really just a cheek-touching and a kissy noise. And for another, this greeting never happens between two men, though a man-woman cheek kiss is perfectly acceptable. That aside, almost every encounter between people begins with a kiss.

One day a group of students swarmed me outside of class, pressing in on me, asking if we were going to have class. They persisted and persisted and then one of them grabbed my arm and started shaking it around. By instinct, I grabbed my arm away and said, “Don't touch me.” To me, the touch felt like a breach of the respect that is owed a teacher, but for them, it was hilarious that I would tell them not to touch me.

Touch customs between strangers get even more interesting. Standing in the line at the grocery store, I always feel like the person behind me is standing uncomfortably close. So I edge forward the tiniest bit, and the person behind me inevitably edges forward as well. Sometimes I feel a little indignant; are they in such a hurry to get through the line? But it's not that at all – it's just that people here don't seem to mind being close to each other.

This phenomenon is carried to an extreme when boarding the bus. Fifteen minutes before the bus from Esteli leaves for San Nicolas, it pulls into its designated parking spot. People have already formed a line, but when the bus pulls up, all sense of orderliness implied by the line explodes. Men run from the back of the line to the back of the bus, where they know they can get in the second door to get a seat before they're all taken. Everyone else pushes forcefully forward, pushing each other out of the way with all their strength to get in the front door. Bottlenecks ensue and sometimes it takes a while before anyone at all can get in the door. Even family members, neighbors, and friends compete fiercely with each other, and no one seems to mind in the least the aggressive pushing and touching that takes place.

The only exception to this rule that we've noticed is between married couples. It might be different in different parts of Nicaragua, but here in the campo, you rarely see married couples together in public, and you almost never see them being affectionate – physically or otherwise – with each other. We haven't figured out if this stems from the machismo view that the woman's place is in the home, or if it's just plain old physical modesty. Whatever the cause, romantic touch in public between a married couple is almost nonexistent.

But for the most part, physical touch is a much more comfortable part of everyday life here, between strangers and friends alike. I have heard this same observation made of other cultures; it makes me wonder if the American culture of physical distance is really the anomaly on a world scale.

Semana Santa

Last week was the biggest holiday week in Nicaragua: Semana Santa. School was closed, inflatable pools were purchased, church was observed almost daily, and everyone went on vacation.

We are also approaching the hottest time of year; even up here in the mountains, the sun blazes down so hard during the middle of the day that you can hardly see your shadow. It hasn't rained in months and the hills are all brown and crusty. Sometimes when I see an old wrinkled man sporting a cowboy hat and riding a horse out of the mountains, I forget that I'm not actually a character in an old Western film.

On top of it all, we've been feeling some of the strongest earthquakes Nicaragua has endured since the 1972 earthquake that destroyed Managua. In the course of a week we had three earthquakes ranging between 6.1 and 6.8 on the Richter scale. We're safer up here in the north, but in Managua, which is built on fault lines, people have been sleeping in the streets.

Despite all this, we all managed to enjoy a perfectly relaxing Semana Santa. The Easter bunny doesn't make much of an appearance in Nicaraguan Easter celebrations, but here are some Nicaraguan Semana Santa traditions that we did get to celebrate:

-- Going on vacation. We spent Monday – Thursday in the beautiful colonial city of Granada, next to Lake Managua. We visited at least four cathedrals with soaring Spanish architecture, swam in the mountain-ringed crater lake La Laguna de Apoyo, canoed to the “Isletas” on the lake where rich expats have built mansions, and checked out the famously sprawling artisan market in Masaya.

-- Swimming. Since this is the hottest time of year, everyone seeks a pool during Semana Santa. We discovered ours in the most unlikely spot: along the tiny dirt road leaving from San Nicolas to the remote mountain community of Salmeron. Every year they fill the pool during Semana Santa and San Nicolaseños flock here to slip down the water slide and practice their doggy paddle. In true Nicaraguan fashion, I jumped in in my clothes.

-- Eating pisque tamales. These dense little corn bundles are definitely not my favorite kind of tamale, but they are traditional for Semana Santa. Our neighbors gave us a plate of them this week.

-- Watching a reenactment of Jesus carrying the cross. One evening we got off the bus in Granada to a huge procession of people surrounding a Jesus figure and smoky clouds of incense. At first we thought that Jesus was being carried by members of the KKK, but upon further research we discovered that these pointy white hats are called “capirotes” in the Spanish Catholic tradition and are worn by penitents, not racists. Since Granada has a lot of Spanish influences, I assume that this capirote tradition is specific to Granada rather than all of Nicaragua.

-- Attending mass on Easter morning. I have rarely seen so many people packed into church. There were some visiting priests and a whole host of charismatic missionaries, who had been proselytizing in the remote communities around San Nicolas all week. After mass, everyone ate lunch at the parish.

We also did an Easter egg hunt/egg decorating party for our primary school English class on Saturday, with our friend Erika (another volunteer visiting from Managua) helping us. Davie tried to give a short sermon on the significance of eggs, but I don't think anyone really understood the profound spiritual implications behind plastering sports-themed stickers onto colored hard-boiled eggs. Their loss.

In any case, we were lucky to be able to experience the untamed joy of Easter with the people of San Nicolas, in all of these different ways.  

Books: a Campo Commodity

Most people here in the campo have never seen any other part of Nicaragua – much less the world – besides Esteli and Managua. But even if they don't have the resources to travel, if they had access to books, as I see it, they could experience the entire world.

When I would go to the library when I was little, I remember feeling so much possibility in the shelves upon shelves of books staring back at me. I would come home with a huge stack of books and an unrivaled sense of anticipation – a magical kind of hunger.

Here in San Nicolas, the library is three cases of books housed in a dark, cramped garage, with a few hard wood benches taking up most of the space. Kids wander in and out, but they come mostly to get help with their homework, not to check out books.

The librarian Valerio, a quiet-voiced man with a limp, sits down with these kids every afternoon to help them with their homework. As a venue for homework help, the library is invaluable. But I also wish that these kids could experience the magic of reading just for the fun of it. In the next year and a half, I want to help Valerio get more books for the library, make the space more welcoming, and encourage kids to check books out for fun.

These are some pretty lofty goals, I know. And since I don't really know much about how libraries generally work around here, I've been checking out another local library project based in Esteli, called Bibliobus. Unlike the San Nicolas library, Bibliobus is a library on wheels. It's an old renovated bus, with comfortable couches on the inside, that takes boxes of books around to different communities in the campo where there are no libraries.

Last week, I volunteered with Bibliobus two days. We drove to some communities north of Esteli, stopping at five different primary schools over the course of the two days. In each class, Ligia (the program's coordinator) read a picture book about a ladybug to the kids. She passed out colored pencils and pieces of paper so that they could draw their own ladybugs, and then invited them to the bus. On the bus, we had laid out all of the age-appropriate books on a table. Each kid chose one book to read and they all sat on the couches, reading their picture books.

It took some kids ages to choose which book they wanted to read; they would pick one up, flip through it, put it down, and pick up another. And when they finally did choose a book, they would sit there on the bus, murmuring the words under their breath, unconscious to everything except the book on their lap. When they finished the book, they would dart back to the table for another.

Having grown up surrounded by books, for me it is incomprehensible that places exist where books are such a scarce resource – such a commodity for kids. But so it is here in the Nicaraguan campo. If I can help bring even a few books to even a few kids before we leave San Nicolas, I will feel that I've helped pass on the joy that books have always brought me.

Thanks to my parents, who brought a bunch of bilingual books down when they visited us, just today the San Nicolas library got 20 new books. If you have any Spanish or bilingual books lying around or know where you might find some, let me know and we can figure out a way to get them to San Nicolas. Or if you just want to donate some money to buy books, we can work that out too!

The Cool Braid Culture

I have always loved cool braids. Women who wear cool braids are like warrior princesses. They ride horses through sun-lit meadows and wield a mean sword hand. Since their hair is tied back in a cool braid, they can do pretty much anything.

Here in San Nicolas, these women are everywhere. Women of all ages have long black shiny hair that hangs down their backs, though they usually pin it up in a bun or cool braid. I had been noticing all of these unusual braids around town – the likes of which I had never seen before – so a couple of months ago I asked my friend Rosalind's mom to teach me how to do these braids. She told me that sometimes, she just invents new braids for fun. Here are a few braids I learned from her.

The Fish-Tail

I already knew this braid, but it is one of my favorites.

1. Divide all of the person's hair into two equal sections.
2. Take a small bit from the outside of the right section and cross it over to join the left section.
3. Take a small bit from the outside of the left section and cross it over to join the right section.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 as the braid gets longer.

The Zig-Zag Braid

This braid uses the inside-out French braid.

1. Starting from the right side of the head, gather up a small chunk of hair. Divide it into three pieces and start with a normal inside-out braid: put the right piece under the middle piece, the left piece under the middle piece, and then the right piece under the middle piece.

2. Gather up a bit more hair from the left side of the braid and add it to the left piece of hair (like you would in a normal French braid). Put this bigger strand under the middle piece.

3. Take the right strand and put it under the middle strand, without gathering more hair.

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, as the braid angles to the left. When you want to switch directions, instead of gathering hair from the left side, gather hair from the right side to add to the braid and don't add hair to the left side. The braid will angle to the right.

5. Repeat these steps, as the braid zig-zags back and forth across the head.

The Spiral Braid

This also uses the inside-out French braid.

1. Using a comb, part the hair so that you are using a donut-shaped section of hair on the outside of the person's head. Pin up the middle donut-hole section so it is out of your way.

2. Starting above the left ear, take a chunk of hair that is the width of the donut and begin a normal inside-out braid (described in step 1 of the zig-zag braid).

3. Gather and add some hair to the left section, putting it under the middle section. Put the right section under the middle part without adding any more hair.

4. In this braid, you never gather and add any hair to the right section. As you continue repeating step 3, the braid will continue down the head and then up towards the right ear.

5. When you reach the end of the donut-shaped section of hair, carefully undo the middle bit of hair that you had pinned up and create a smaller donut with that hair, pinning up a smaller middle part.

6. Continue the spiral until you've used all of the free hair. Then continue to form a normal inside-out braid and tie it off at the bottom or bobby-pin the rest of the spiral to the head.

Here are a few other cool braids that I haven't yet learned how to do:

The Aged P's Visit San Nicolas

We can write blog after blog and email after email. We can see your faces on skype and tell you the names of our students and how cows wander the streets of San Nicolas. But until you have walked those cobblestone streets yourself and talked to those students, we can't fully express to you what San Nicolas is like.

This past week we got to fully express that to my (Sarah's) parents, who were here visiting us. They told us that instead of traveling further afield to beaches and other tourist attractions, they just wanted to see our daily life, and we took them at their word.

When my parents got here on Tuesday, we took them on the tour of San Nicolas, which lasts all of ten minutes. We stepped over cow pies, visited the baseball field (the largest space in town), and said “adios” to the students we passed.

On Wednesday we would usually have co-taught with the high school English teacher, but there was a fair going on in the community of La Laguna and we wanted to show my parents the sights. So we hitchhiked in the back of a pickup truck heading that way and got off in time to witness a baptismal mass and a cockfight. We also met my friend Nidia, who is studying English and was thrilled to practice saying “Oh, wow!” with my mom.

In our after-school English class at our house, we just happened to be studying family vocabulary, so my parents helped us out with some live demonstrations of family relationships, while our students got into a heated debate about which of my brothers and cousins is the hottest.

That night we went to visit our friends Jarol and Eliza and their daughter Jaraeli. (I just discovered that her name is actually a combination of her parents' names). Eliza whipped out a bag full of artisan jewelry, most of which my mom ended up buying to sell with her fair-trade business in the US. We played hangman with Jaraeli and Jarol taught my dad a more complicated Nicaraguan version of tic-tac-toe.

On Thursday, we showed my parents the school, impressing them with the fairly nice school building and unimpressing them with the rowdy students and row of broken latrines. Then we caught the bus up the hill and got off to walk three miles through chamomile and potato fields to La Garnacha, the organic farm where we work on Thursdays. We showed them the lookout over hills of farmland towards distant volcanoes and the building where the La Garnacha goats live. We introduced them to Padre Patricio, the Italian priest, and other La Garnacha friends. And then we hitched another pickup truck ride back to San Nicolas.

On Friday we all crammed into the old American school bus and chugged up the hill again to Esteli, the closest city, where David works at the market on Fridays. We stopped by the La Garnacha stand, too late to catch the man who sells “pan de coco” (coconut bread) from the trunk of his little red car on Friday mornings. Instead, we settled on lunch at our favorite Cuban restaurant in Esteli. Then we visited the house of a woman who makes paper from recycled materials. We each made a few sheets of paper with old screens attached to picture frames, and my mom bought some recycled-paper cards to take back to the US to sell.

Our primary school students had planned a surprise party for my parents, so at our Saturday-morning class they made an early appearance (for the first time ever) so that they could jump out and say “Surprise!” when we arrived with my parents. Then they drank five liters of pop and continued jumping.

Later that day, we made a steep, hilly trek to my friend Maria's house out in the campo. I tutor Maria in English and she had invited us to her house to learn how to make chicken soup. I made orange juice from oranges from their trees and threw little cheesy corn dumplings into the soup boiling over their wood-fired stove. Hansel, Maria's 3-year-old son, showed my mom random items from their house (pencils, oranges, eggs) and ran off laughing uncontrollably when she said their names in English. Later, he grabbed a machete and ran outside to swing it at a tree – no big deal, just a three-year-old wielding a machete.

We have fallen into a good routine here in San Nicolas, but it was cool to lift ourselves out of that routine for a week and, in showing my parents what has become our normal life, see it through their eyes as new and exciting once again. It was a good reminder too that we're not isolated from our friends and family here – that even though you are all far away, you are thinking of us and supporting us in different ways. And if any of you want to come visit us too, we would love to host you!

Lenten Traditions in the Campo

With the start of Lent last week also began the lead-up to perhaps the most important holiday in Nicaragua: Easter. We have heard tell of all of the special festivities that happen here during Semana Santa, or Holy Week, and we're excited to experience them. But for these 40 days before Easter, the celebrations will be a bit more solemn.

One aspect of the Lenten celebration is that at least here in San Nicolas, it is only the Catholic church that observes Lent. Tensions are always rife between the Catholic and Evangelical churches in San Nicolas, with judgments flying fast both ways. When we asked a Catholic friend about how the Evangelicals celebrate Lent, she told us with distaste, “They don't celebrate it.” When we asked an Evangelical student the same question she said self-righteously, “For Catholics, only this time of year is holy. For us, every day is holy.”

For the Lent-observing Catholics, then, these weeks before Easter are a time of moderation and quiet. Traditionally, people in this part of the Nicaraguan campo don't eat meat during Lent. People wear darker, more subdued-colored clothing (you are considered a sinner if you wear red, one friend told us) and are not allowed to play loud music or shout. If there is a storm with loud thunder and lightening during Lent, superstition has it that if you grab a pinch of ash and make a cross with it in the air, the thunder and lightening will go away.

From our observations, though, most of these traditions seem to have expired. Maybe there are older people deep in the campo who still take these principles to heart, but we haven't seen any notable decrease in hot-pink polo shirts or blasting reggaeton music in San Nicolas.

What we have noticed is a determined increase of songs relevant to Lent during masses. During the Ash Wednesday service last week, Padre Patricio blessed people by drawing a cross in holy ash on their foreheads, as a reminder of human mortality and repentance to God. This holy ash came from the burned palms of last year's Palm Sunday.

Every Friday during Lent, the Catholic church holds what is called a “Via Cruz.” A group of parishioners walks around town to different houses, singing Lenten songs, which tend to be a little sadder and slower than the typical ranchero beats of church songs here. Also, on Fridays during Lent, people don't eat meat. (This is not such a huge sacrifice, however, since it's not so often that people supplement their normal rice-and-beans diet with meat, anyway).

Though accounts differ on what constitutes typical Lenten traditions here in San Nicolas, it seems certain that Lent is a time of reflection on what it means to be human in the presence of God. During these forty days, we join the people of San Nicolas and the world in silence and prayer.

Jarol's Favorite Place

The dry season is here in full force in Northern Nicaragua; it has only rained once in the past month. The earth in our back yard is cracked with deep chasms (into which we can stick a machete, we've discovered). The hills around San Nicolas are brown and dry, and the stiff grass by the side of the road crackles in the breeze.

It was into this scorched landscape that we ventured last weekend, along the red dirt road to the community of Quebrada de Agua. Our friend Jarol lives in San Nicolas now, but he grew up in a little farm house in the campo and wanted to show us this place. Jarol's whole family came with us: his wife Elisa, who has a gruff voice and a hearty laugh, his 9-year-old daughter Ararely, who knew the name of every bird we saw along the walk; and his mother, Doña Victoria, who mutters curses through the constant cigarette between her lips.

As we walked, people called out to Jarol and his family from the stoops of their houses, shouting friendly insults or asking Jarol to help them with farm tasks. We stopped at one house to talk to some cousins of Jarol's. We sat in the dark kitchen, flies buzzing around the mounds of tortillas covered by cloths, talking with an old couple who turned out to be the parents of Maria, a woman who I tutor. The old woman stirred a cast-iron pot over a wood fire that has made the kitchen walls black over the years. When it was done, she served us all plastic plates of steaming-hot arroz con leche.

Then we continued on our way, with Ararely chattering on about the earth's rotation, the names of the trees, and the frogs we might see at Jarol's childhood home. When we got there, the house was empty, its current occupants having walked to San Nicolas for the day. It was a simple cement-slab house, with dirt floors and a little outside kitchen, but by the way Jarol showed it to us, it could have been a mansion.

He took us around outside the house, knocking down some ripe mandarins from a tree and showing us the tiny buds on the mango tree. He took us down to the well – a hole in the ground where water bubbled up from the earth – where he used to bathe and do his laundry. Ararely leaned her head over the water, looking for frogs. Then he led us through some brush up to a clearing on top of a little hill, where we sat and looked out over the land. “This is my favorite place in the world,” Jarol told us.

Even after Jarol's mother moved to San Nicolas when he was a teenager and his siblings dispersed as well, he told us that he chose to stay at this house, living there by himself for several years – an uncommon occurrence in Nicaraguan culture. It was only when he married Elisa, who refused to live so far out in the campo, that he finally agreed to move to San Nicolas.

Later in the day, we climbed up a tall hill next to the house. From there, we could see not only San Nicolas, but also lots of other surrounding communities, in all directions. We sat on piles of hay on the ground and looked out on the brown squares of farmland below. Jarol pointed out some grown-over fox-holes in the ground, where during the war Sandinista snipers would shoot down the mountains at their Contra opponents.

When we got back to the house, Elisa served us some lemon chicken with vegetables and beans. Pigs and dogs wandered into the house, watching as we scraped the chicken off the bones.

After lunch we all walked over to Jarol's grandparents' house just down the road. There we sat on their front porch, gnawing on sticks of sugar cane and talking with four generations of Jarol's family. His grandmother is 84 and blind in one eye, but she still walks for miles when she has to get into town. His grandfather, who looked limber for such an old man, claimed to be 94, but it's also possible that he just know the year he was born.

Jarol's grandmother told us that she had 19 children. As I thought about this astounding fact later, it struck me that this woman, who spent such a huge portion of her life giving birth to and caring for children, seemed like one of the strongest, most independent women I've ever met. There is this developed-world notion that women who have kids and stay at home with them are less independent and somehow not quite as hard and strong as working women. And yet Jarol's grandmother was a perfect example to the contrary, I thought.

On our way back to San Nicolas, we stopped to buy cuajada cheese at a little house along the way where Doña Victoria claimed we could find the best cuajada around. And as the sun dropped, we hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck down the mountain, with Jarol pointing up to the peak from which we had looked down on San Nicolas earlier that day.