Jan 13/18, 2012

This week was the swearing of Daniel Ortega for his second consecutive term.  From the streets of San Dionisio, it appeared to be a quite festive event.  Although I stayed home, I could hear from my house the party going on down the street in front of the mayor’s.  My host dad and brother went to enjoy the festivities for awhile, and left me to watch on TV from home.  The inauguration took place in the Revulotionary Plaza, where there was a church decorated with lights and memorabilia, a statue of Sandino and Ruben Dario, the national poet of Nicaragua, and another building looking very stately.  I recognized a few famous world leaders on the stage with the president and his wife, who is head of public relations for the Sandanistas.  There was Mahmud Aminindjimagad, Hugo Chavez (looking quite chubby, with a half inch of hair and suffering from cancer) and the president of Costa Rica, whose name I do not remember.

 During the inaugural speech, Ortega hit his principal points made by the FSLN often, talking about how to develop all of the country leaving no one behind, and how Christianity is a focal point of the way forward for Nicaragua.  All the time, the state run radio and TV stations played the party theme songs, sometimes cutting off the speech as the songs faded in and out during pauses in talking.  The most vivid song the Sandinos have is an upbeat version of “Stand by me” which calls for 1 more election for Ortega to move the country forward. 

                Also this week, I have been trying to get all the final details of camp in order.  I have been having trouble getting young Nicaraguans interested in helping me as counselors; I have tried to schedule several meetings but they have never showed up.  I am not very confident that the next week they will be willing to show up and be there for 4 hours a day if they can’t even make a half hour meeting to plan.  The issue of sustainability comes up often as a PCV, and in this case, I am a little pensive on how anyone would be willing to do this on their own in a year or two if they no one knows the drill for these weeks.     However the kids seem to be enthusiastic and eager to start, so that is a relief. 

 Today I am getting ready to head to Esquipulas to enjoy their Fiestas Paternales, where the Catholics celebrate the town’s patron saint for a couple of weeks…

And I’m back from my trip to Esquipulas!  The patron saint of the town is called black Jesus, and, according to a friend has its traditional roots back in Guatemala.  Apparently, in a town named Esquipulas, the citizens started worshipping a Jesus that more accurately reflected themselves as dark native people.  The idea spread and today the festival is vibrant in several cities around the area.  For my part, I arrived on Friday after spending the day trying to plan camp a little better.  When I got there, the streets were active, but not yet vibrant.  30,000 people were supposed to be there the next day, but the town did not look any different.  The next day, we took a bus back to my site, where a pilgrimage walk was to begin back to Esquipulas.  The walk started at around 12, and was pretty fun, although the final few miles were tough because I was ready to eat and thirsty and tired.  But, I suppose a pilgrimage involves a little sacrifice.  By the time everybody got to town, it was truly a big mess of people everywhere.  Most everybody were scattered on the street, and found bits of shelter under parked trucks, or extended roofs, or did without.  My group slept outside on a balcony of a house and we were pretty comfortable.  It rained a bit, and I felt bad for all the thousands left in the cold and wet.

The next day we stayed around the house, only venturing out to go on an hour hike and to buy provisions for meals.  The hike was pretty spectacular; there is a small hill just outside of town that has a great view of the town and the surroundings.  The hills are really pretty around here, and the colors from different fields are slightly different shades of green depending on the crop.  Most of the hills have trees left on the drainage areas and the top, presumably to prevent erosion and preserve the soils.  The soils on the hills are poor, and most of the space is just grassland for cattle.  By mid day, most people had cleared out and all that was left was massive amounts of plastic bottles and Styrofoam plates covering the streets.   That night, we went to a rodeo and watched people bull ride for awhile, although we were all tired and a bit uncomfortable standing along the fence of the ring. 

I got back from the trip on Monday morning and had to focus on my camp.  My site mate and I made signs, got the activities ready, and the kids started trickling in.  All in all, 23 showed up the first day, and we had 21 the second.  Also, I have had some Nica helpers, although they weren’t the ones I was trying to meet with last week.  The first day we did introductions and nametags, and then had the kids draw a map of their communities.  After a few ice breakers and name games, we went to the school and I taught them the rules of capture the flag.  They seemed to get a kick out of the game, and played for about an hour. 

The next day was supposed to be swimming lessons, which my site mate had taught back in the states.  However, she has been sick, and was not able to come yesterday and won’t come today either.  So, instead, we did a sort of treasure hunt I had planned for another day, with different tasks or things to find around town.  I included picking up 3 sacks of trash as one of the objectives, and it was amazing to see how excited they were to collect as much as they could find.  I have been scrambling a little to schedule other events because we had almost split the4 hours of planning almost evenly.  It is a free activity, so I am not too concerned about not going the full time, but it would be better to occupy all the hours. 

New Years Vacation

I just got back from a vacation celebrating the new years with fellow volunteers.  The first part of the trip was a stay at a volunteer’s house in San Marcos, where 4 of us went to a beach and passed the time in his city, enjoying some of the sites and hanging out at his house.  His family is fairly well to do and politically elite and his parents were on vacation in Costa Rica when we came.  His grandmother was around and made sure to attempt to clean up after our every move, and also approved our cooking methods of scrambled eggs and pasta.  The day on the beach was marked by a bottle of rum being cracked at about 11 am, and we only just dipped in the water a few minutes to cool off. 

The next leg of the journey was up to Leon, a vibrant and wealthy city that frankly did not look or feel like any other part of Nicaragua.  For starters, there were tons of gringos around and they were all strolling around, some were even getting in and out of giant tour buses.  Granted we went on an especially busy time for gringos to travel, but the rest of Nicaragua is full of Nicaraguans so the population of white people seems out of place.  Also, although it does not appear that many people on the Pacific coast are in desperate need of food to survive, there is abject poverty in the area, but it is entirely masked in Leon.  From our hostel-going, shwarma-eating, beer-drinking vantage point, it was the first time I felt masked from some of the problems plaguing the country.  It is hard to think of desperate poverty while seeing a Hummer to pull out of the American style grocery. 

Our next destination was the beaches of Las Penitas, which is a small resort community, founded about 40 years ago with the creation of a nature reserve to the south along the ocean.  We stayed at a small hotel owned by a French Canadian woman.  The hotel was really just a couple of cabanas and a dorm style room on the beach with a spacious restaurant under a thatched roof and pool.  The ocean in front of the hotel was immensely powerful and had fairly contestant 6 foot waves and a strong undertow.  Swimming was certainly possible, but it was necessary to take precautions and always be aware of your surroundings in order to avert being swept away.  I was able to body surf quite a few of these waves and cruised upwards of 200 feet on a few of them.  On the last day, I even was able to surf at an angle on a few of them, which is a pretty big rush!  We spent New Year’s Eve at the pool, and then took a boat ride into the nature reserve led by a father-son team pointing out wildlife and telling a few stories about the area.  We saw some crocs and even a sea turtle trying to lay her eggs on the ocean side of the island.  Her problem was that there were many people around (us) disturbing her, and there was a guy with a sack ready to take the eggs to market when they were laid.  That night we went from restaurant area to the pool to the beach, and finally a few of us went to a small bar a few hundred yards down the beach to have a few more rounds.  A good NYE indeed.

Overall, it was a really good time and I was able to interact in meaningful ways with many of my new friends dispersed throughout the country.  The Peace Corps is in some manners a pressure cooker of for our relationships because of the long lulls between seeing each other, isolation of sites, and relief to have native speakers around.  Relationships congeal, undergo metamorphosis and are redefined through the intense to lonely spectrum of service.  My time with the gringos seems to be spent dissecting what makes us strong and weak, defining emotions and personality traits and deciding how or why an experience in service makes us more unique or similar.  If it sounds exhausting, that’s because it is!

It is such a pleasure to see the changes in others and I hope that the changes I am going through are recognized in others, too.  I am figuring out what it means to be away from many of the normal things I have learned to take for granted while also living under the microscope of being a foreigner.  It is impossible to integrate, even in 2 years, to everything.  I will always be the tall guy with a funny accent that probably has some money and a potential ticket to the US.  I will fight a bit of an uphill battle to change behaviors that as an outsider seem inefficient or destructive, but I am also fighting “development battles” with myself.  For example, I can tell someone that it probably is not a great idea to consistently throw trash out of a moving bus, but I can’t provide the resources to build the infrastructure to collect it from trash cans in the countryside.  The Peace Corps preaches sustainability, and I think we all get the message that if a program or project that we start cannot be continued without us, it is not worth much.  This may even prevent some of us from attempting some big things in preference to staying safe and easy.  I feel at this point that as a person that gets the sustainability message, the ability to act on our intuition and make a larger difference is a little lacking.  From my weeks in service, the PC to me right now seems more about the cultural interaction than anything else.  I am relived to be back at my sight and try to figure out my summer camp schedule which starts in 2 weeks.