New Photos on Flickr, Plus Three-Week Word Vomit

Hello everyone! Firstly, since a picture´s worth a thousand words, you should check out my new Flickr photos. I´ve included my worksite, retreat with the community in the mountainous north, and a pilgrimage to El Salvador for the Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Oscar Romero. Will have to caption them next time, since uploading the videos (of dancing with Casa Romero, and singing ¨Wild Rover¨ with a Northern Irishman on flute and Thomas on guitar) took up all of my internet time. La Garnacha was beautiful, a farming community in the cooler north where you can see Honduras and the two highest volcanoes in Nicaragua. We sat around candles deep into the night. We brought guitars out to a field underneath the stars and sang Bob Dylan songs. We took a sunrise hike to a nearby hill. We ate cheese made in the house next to our cabin. El Salvador was peaceful. Interesting, since all my Nicaraguan co-workers told me to be careful in such a gang-infested city. But there is strength in numbers, and the Casa de la Solidaridad community took care of us, and there´s nothing quite like marching through a dangerous area of downtown, surrounded by 10,000 Salvadorans, Central Americans, and gringos in the name of peace. Some pictures on flickr. Work is right. Right for me. I am growing to love children, their energy in spite of hunger and abuse, though they require much patience. We are preparing a Book day celebration. I´ve had fun dancing lately. A Rio-imitation Carnival passed through town, and three friends and I joined the crowd to see the parading dance troupes, decked-out in scanty glitter with trombones (yes dad! great brass!) and Caribbean drums bringing up the rear. That´s all for now. I am happy, healthy, challenged. Gracias a Dios. Peace friends, H

Pasen Buenas Noches

I stepped differently into bed that night. Because though the sheets were just as crisp and inviting as always, I couldn’t shake the image of that seventeen-year-old, skirt splayed wide on a corner post, waiting for a customer to pass her territory on the abandoned industrial highway that curves north to Mexico.

I remember her lazer blue eye shadow, bulging black leggings, and the way her manicured hands turned the condoms over and over again, like curses, or Christmas presents.

And I remember the moment we said goodbye. Pasen buenas noches, she whispered. Have a good night. Igual, I ventured. Same to you. But as we left her alone in the dark to the trade that feeds her family, I wondered whether she ever could.

We visited more than twenty prostitutes that Thursday between 9 and 10pm. They all recognized the Casa Samaritana truck and left their benches or potential clients to come over to our window. Sometimes they inquired about our health or the next workshop the Casa would be offering. Self-esteem, good parenting and meditation are all common at Casa Samaritana, the Jesuit-founded prostitution support center down the alley from our Managua home. Other times, they took their weekly condom ration and retreated, eyes down, with a quick gracias.

The first two were in their 50s and emaciated with missing front teeth and makeup that caked decidedly lesioned skin. But they greeted us caras nuevas (new faces) like old friends. I could sense no shame. They joked with Nacho the driver and Fr. Arnoldo, the project’s founder, about family scandals and the price of frijoles, looking at us cheles (gringos) for laughs every once in a while. I felt quite powerfully that the universe between us shrank and we were equal under heaven, a truth I’ve always heard sung on the wind, but never fully understood.

But it was a struggle to feel this truth cut into my heart, because my naivete and their oppression continued to surface. We couldn’t even leave the truck, due to the dangers of the highway. My guilt asked me why. Why are these women cold and exposed and alone, even when in bed with paying strangers, while I observe them under the microscope of privilege? Why must I sit stupidly in front of a computer screen, feeling as mute as powerless as they must? Aren’t we all entitled to pasar buenas noches?

I cannot answer these questions; they will rightfully continue to break my heart. But with the help of my community I had answered one question by the end of the night, perhaps the most important question of all. What was I doing there?

I was there to do no more or less than be with them. I was there to feel that we are the same, that beneath my clean sweats and their old sequins we are all beautiful, loved, dignified, remembered. The Managua Jvs have resolved to join Casa Samaritana at least one night a month, but I hope I find it in me to go more often. Because a piece of my heart won’t have a good night until that fleeting moment when they wish me one again.

For the Women of Nicaragua

“You know how the Jews were slaves in Egypt? I feel like them.”

My co-worker Yelba is a middle-aged mother with innocent brown eyes and a tired face. She recently exposed some of her deepest hurt to me.

I considered saving this post and its theme for Mother’s Day or International Woman’s Day or something, but decided the best way to comprehend and overcome suffering and strength is to share them.

We were in the library before a meeting, praying over a passage in the Bible about peace and freedom, when Yelba told us that her mother-in-law had chewed her out the night before for being a bad mother. The suegra had stood defensively behind her son, chastising Yelba for allowing the children to run freely in the street and develop horrible habits like swearing and neglecting their studies.

My own common sense and experience kicked in. Yelba’s three children are the best-behaved children and most avid readers I’ve met in this country. What’s more, I know that Yelba reads to them every night and rushes home during meal breaks to cook for them.

Then Yelba dug deeper. She told us of her husband. He is an angry, catatonic and abusive macho who sits in front of the television all day waiting for Yelba to get back from work so he can be served meals. Sometimes he beats his children with his belt without giving them a reason for it. Yelba confessed that all her family and friends have wanted her to leave him for years. “But I stay with him because I know what it’s like to grow up without knowing your father, and I don’t want that for my children. I am a slave to him because I love them.”

Perhaps her logic is flawed, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is her love for her children and her commitment to a life she compares to hell, for their sake.

Her story is one of many. I wrote about my campo mother, Cándida, who feeds the drunk and abusive father-of-her-children lunch and dinner everyday without a complaint. Then there are the almost 500 women who come to the Project where I work in hopes of obtaining small loans to build their businesses--making tortillas, mending hammocks, selling fritanga (street food).

The truth is that my life in Nicaragua has been full of powerful women. There are six female JVs in the country and three males (who are wonderful, to be real). I work with 15 women and 3 men. We’ve met three US groups of students in Nica for the semester, and 80% of them were women. My boss is a woman, my favorite neighbor is a woman, and the people who come to me when I’m confused on a new bus route are caring old women.

I have always been a feminist, according to my own definition. But in the macho culture this country has revealed, I must resist sexism, because I fnd myself asking, what do men do here, exactly?

The answer is too often that they work all day and go off on their own to spend their earnings, or if they can’t find work, drink all day, returning “home” for meals and nada más.

And what do the women do? Bread-winning, raising children, cleaning, socializing, holding together broken but intimate families, welcoming strangers, starting businesses, organizing communities, all the time dealing with the difficulties that “their men” dish out.

In other words, life isn’t fair for them. To the point that they call themselves slaves. I hadn’t heard it put so pointedly before Yelba began to cry.

And so I compose this post for the silent heroines I know in Nicaragua, in the hopes that spreading the word of their silent strength somehow sends them more.

New Flickr Photos!

Most of these are from my week spent at Spanish school in a VERY Sandinista campo community called El Lagartillo. Enjoy their randomness.

Campo Lessons

Picture a herd of staring cows followed by a grinning six year old, a pig lying every yard, and Spanish teachers decked in colorful bufandas (scarves) bustling about a single central dirt road, making sure all of their students are ready for class and happy with their families. This was the final week to my one-month orientation. The five new JVs spent January 2 through January 8 at language school at a tiny mountain community called El Lagartillo. This was a community torn by US-trained contra troops in the 80s, who pillaged and destroyed families to fight the pueblo-raised revolutionaries who abounded in the area. Now, the community is pulling itself out of poverty.

I have learned much in the campo (for those who haven’t read…okay, memorized…my other blogs, “campo” refers to rural Nicaragua), and a week of Spanish school cemented these lessons. At the risk of glamorizing poverty (thanks Jess Vega, JV in Anda, Peru), which I’m probably doing, I’d like to present a list of life lessons, as observed and practiced for a week by yours truly. What’s funny is, these are things I’ve always had to try really hard to do in the US, and sometimes in Managua. They’re counter-cultural things…but not in the campo. They’re default, like it or not.

Waste Not
On day one, I arrived with my burdensome backpack and asked for a basura (trash can). I had a plastic bag I wanted to discard that came from my lunch enchilada. Yelba, my 23-year-old host mother, looked at me like I look at abstract art. She took me to the edge of their property, where there was a shallow cement pit that contained a five-gallon rice bag and a single cookie wrapper. “I guess you can throw it here,” she said, and explained this was all the trash they had used in a year’s time. I felt silly at the time, but loved living the intimate, earthly-friendly campo life during the week that followed.

Buy local
I ate rice, beans, cuajada (a spongy cheese), plantains, pineapple, mandarins, and eggs during that week. Sure, I missed cereal and peanut butter, but all but the rice and beans were obtained within a ten mile radius of my host family’s house. Sure beats the 2,000 miles that food travels on average from farm to fork in the US. Or was it 200,000?

Water is precious
This is a recurring theme, resurrected when I see silly Managuans spraying their dusty doorsteps twenty times a day, or when I realize I’m enjoying long showers too much. In the campo, I used a latrine--which requires no water at all! How magical!--and took bucket showers, to the point that toilets and showers anger me now. How wasteful, to let that dying breed of sustenance drown me for 10 minutes a day. And yet I keep doing it!

Love your community
Yelba, Oswaldo, and their son Oswaldo Jr. lead simple lives. Yelba plays with her son, cooks meals, goes to the market, and cleans their two-bedroom house everyday. Oswald walks a few feet to the library to work and comes back for meals. As such, the highlight of their days was when a next-door-neighbor would come over, just to sit and talk about the weather or what so-and-so accidentally swallowed the day before. It takes a lot of thinking for me to remember the last time someone came over to my dorm room or apartment just to be there, no TV or favors or homework involved.
Another occurrence that reminded me of this point. Yelba told me I was one of her favorite students because she loves the students who make an effort to talk, regardless of whether it’s convenient or easy to understand. ALL people are beautiful; many aren’t given the chance to prove it.

Dirty is okay
This, especially with latrines, is still a struggle for me. I read a sentence in Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth recently, which called a clerk-monk with too much money “pale, pudgy, spick and span with inactivity.” Shoot, I thought, lying on my back in my campo bed reading this, that’s me. And the campo, and Nicaragua in general, challenge that. I didn’t have much chance to wash my hands. Oswaldo Jr. ran around all day with soiled hands and diapers. And things smelled bad, not going to lie. But I’m tired of living in fear of that; I’m tired of the toxic, wasteful habits of cleanliness that my culture has instilled of me. Easier said than done, of course…I don’t like getting sick or dirty. But that’s life, says the campo. You’re right, I say. Though I do miss sparkly clean! Won’t be seeing it for some time.

To close out this post, I present you with a silly poem.

Heather in the Campo: A Love Story
Sun burn, milk churn
Tales of war, bugs galore
Didn’t spend a dime, mountain climb
Bucket shower, mixed corn flour
Fed a pig, taught a jig
Went on walks, Dirty socks
Ate too much of such-and-such
Fried things, grew wings
Passed too fast, had a blast!!