Notes from Nicaragua: Back in the tropics
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 12 2nd, 2008I’ve finished the first draft of my paper! The biggest and hardest part is done. I have six minutes left at this cyber, so I’ll check in more fully later and use this moment just to let you all know that I’m back in Managua hanging out with my family, sweating again, and finally in finer spirits. And I’ll be home a week from tomorrow.
read comments (Comments)Notes from Nicaragua: Second and final from San Ramón
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 11 28th, 2008I’m in town again, writing my essay. This has been a very strange process, trying to make an academic project out of an excuse to hang out with the family and community in Horno 2. I spent too much time writing in my journal to make the kind of connections I wanted to in the community, and too much time hanging out to write a serious research essay. But the experience was muy bonita anyway, and I’m glad I did it.
There were many moments when I found myself not enjoying the marvelous and new experiences — walking through a pine forest on the way to an isolated mountain community, attending a cierre de campaña (campaign wrap-up celebration) — because I was so homesick. I have never been this homesick before, and it got harder as soon as I hit the three-week mark.
Knowing that I would be home so soon, I was thinking about home all the time. Barring a highly unlikely bout of malaria, I now have only one weekly pill left to take in this country -– I fly in twelve days.
Notes from Nicaragua: Short and sweet from San Ramón
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 11 14th, 2008Hello all! I am writing from a cybercafe in San Ramón, a pueblo of 5,000 people that is the capital of the municipality of the same name.
I have spent the past week and a half and will spend almost two more in Horno 2, a rural community an hour’s bus ride from here, with the same community I lived with for a week in September. The campo is as beautiful as ever. I eat beans and a tortilla for every meal and am loving it. My mind is being stretched in ways it never has been by the things I learn every day about poverty and wealth, nature and farming, love and family, and community and organizing.
I have very little time on this computer, so I will leave you all with the knowledge that I am quite homesick, having a truly worthwhile time, delighted to learn that Question 1 was defeated (oh, yeah, and that what’s-his-name was elected), and immensely excited to get home, see everyone, and get working in what looks like a newly electric political environment.
I will probably post again in a week.
Notes from Nicaragua: El Salvador
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 10 27th, 2008Sorry about the long gap. We were flooded with work when we got back from the Coast, and then we went to El Salvador. So I will write about El Salvador.
A moment of background: El Salvador experienced the same conquest and genocide as the rest of colonized Latin America, gained “independence” and became an economic client of the U.S. in 1821, and was ruled by a series of U.S.-backed military dictators beginning in 1932, when a peasant uprising inspired by the local leader Farabundo Marti was brutally crushed in a nationally traumatizing year of massacres.
The movement for democracy and human rights took form in civil and armed resistance in the 1970s as the government’s tactics became more repressive and violent, and in 1980 the various rebel movements consolidated as the Farabundo Marti Front of National Liberation (FMLN). Reagan was not going to allow another Cuba or another Nicaragua, so he started funding the brutal regime to the tune of a million dollars a day. The civil war claimed 75,000 lives and featured massacres by government death squads that had been trained by the U.S. military. The war ended in 1992 with peace accords that condemned the government abuses, legalized the FMLN as a political party, institutionalized democratic elections, and failed to address the underlying economic and social problems.
Notes from Nicaragua: Safe and sound, and the coast
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 10 6th, 2008In case anyone has been reading the weather news from Nicaragua, don’t worry about me! We were on the coast during the flooding which has driven five thousand Managuans into temporary refuge in schools and health clinics in other cities, and the neighborhood where we live is fine.
The coastal plain of Nicaragua has been inhabited for millenia by indigenous peoples living nomadically off the abundant bounty of the fruit-filled swamps and the fish-filled rivers and lagoons. The indigenous groups that still live there today are, in descending order of population, the Miskito, the Mayagna, and the Rama.
When the Europeans came in the early sixteenth century, the French and English fought for control of the nomad-inhabited coast while the Spanish wiped out and assimilated the sedentary farmers of the western part of what is now Nicaragua. In the eighteenth century, the French retreated, but the English could not expand their control beyond the ports they had established. In the meantime, they had brought in African slaves and had forcibly relocated from the island of St. Vincent a group of Garifuna, a unique community descended from self-liberated African slaves and the original Arawak inhabitants of St. Vincent.
Notes from Nicaragua: Road trip
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 09 29th, 2008I had a very strange experience yesterday.
A few of us were planning a day trip to Masaya, a small, reputedly charming city an hour from Managua. Marta’s host cousin was going to show us around, but she stayed out late Saturday and was sleeping in on Sunday, and enthusiasm for the trip dissolved. Then Katie’s host brother, José, said he and his friend, who had a car, would take us. So Katie, Gina, and I piled into the back of Pablo’s late-nineties Corolla, paid for the gas, and went.
But we didn’t go to Masaya. I had not understood that the plans had changed, and we were going to the Laguna de Apoyo, a lake on the Managua-Masaya highway.
OK, I thought, that sounds cool. Towering over the highway was a smoking volcano, and José explained to us that the Laguna de Apoyo was in the crater of another volcano. As José adjusted the radio to channel his iPod, I flashed on rides in Emily’s van full of people going back to Boston from UMass and realized that this was very different from the trip on the public bus that we had been planning the night before.
Notes from Nicaragua: Language learning
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 09 29th, 2008My comprehension of the Spanish used in our lectures and Spanish classes and even by my homestay father, with his partially toothless accent, has improved significantly. Nevertheless, I realized this past week that I become utterly lost when there are several people carrying on an informal conversation.
I have spent a lot of time in lectures, fumbling through Spanish conversations with my classmates, and having one-on-one conversations with members of my family, but instead of going to hang out with people my own age whom I don’t know very well — something that I often find intimidating even at home — I do more homework than is assigned, go to bed early, and get up at six to do yoga.
If I’m going to get fluent, I need to get out of the house! I wish I had noticed this trend earlier, but I am glad that it’s only the end of the first month and not the second or third.
Notes from Nicaragua: Daily life
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 09 23rd, 2008I am still stunned by the amount of work that everyone does.
Horno 2 has electricity and water pumped in from a mountain spring, so life was a little easier than it is in similar comarcas. The electricity in our house powered two light bulbs, and the water fed a pila (stone basin) from which we drew water for all our drinking, washing, bathing, and cooking. With no mechanized technology and hilly land, the cultivation techniques are simple and ancient.
Getting beans from the field to the plate is a process of many simple but time-consuming steps, and getting corn from the cob, grinding it, making it into dough, and cooking it into tortillas is just plain hard on the hands and arms. There are just enough dishes to go around, and no dining room; people eat in the kitchen or on a bench in the bare common room.
Notes from Nicaragua: Horno 2
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 09 23rd, 2008We all spent five nights in the campo (country) split into groups of six in three different comarcas (rural villages) in the municipality of San Ramón in the department of Matagalpa. I was with five other students in Horno 2, about a half hour from the city of San Ramón.
Horno means oven, so we were all a little worried, but it turned out that the four comarcas called Horno are so named because an indigenous tribe had had its large ovens in the area, not because of the climate. In fact, the weather was very pleasant, with sunny, dry days, occasional aguaceros (downpours), and cool nights.
Horno 2 is a remarkable place. The six of us were received in the preschool/community eatery building by a group of community leaders who had volunteered to host us. Juancito and Ismail, brothers aged 27 and 25, respectively, had come to represent the family that I was to live with. Everyone smiled a lot, and Mayra, our coordinadora, explained that each day we were going to help out with and observe different activities in the community.
Notes from Nicaragua: Pila
Posted by Sam Dreyfus in Central America on 09 6th, 2008I have done my laundry twice! I am a pila champ!
The pila is the multi-purpose basin; imagine a deep sink with a shallow sink on either side. The deep basin, which has no drain, is filled from a tap during the few hours that there is running water, and from a rain barrel the rest of the time. Water is scooped from it for washing dishes, clothes, or hands in one of the two shallow basins.
To do laundry you soak your clothes for twenty minutes in a bucket full of sudsy water and then scrub each item with a bar of soap and then your hands (and a hard brush if it’s really dirty) on a washboard built into the bottom of the shallow sink on the left.
After scrubbing you rinse with water from the pila, wring out the shirt or sock or whatever, and hang it up to dry. I love this system.
