How I Spent My Summer Vacation
During the summer, some people head to the mountains. Others may migrate to the coast. I went to a place that made me think I was in the mountains but was referred to as the “coast”. Since this sounds rather confusing, perhaps I ought to start at the beginning.
I was looking forward with mixed emotions to the summer vacation which would be between my two years of study for a Master’s degree in Social Work. I wanted a job but the employment situation in my city was very tight. Once I graduated I would probably take a job which only allowed two weeks of vacation per year. The prospect of just loafing for three months did not tantalize me. Some of my classmates were looking into summer courses, but I was academically exhausted. With the most likely courses of action eliminated, I had to start going through my inventory of more exotic plans. Summer camp counseling? No, five summers of that was enough. Work my way around the world on a streamliner? (I was prone to seasickness. Volunteer work in my own city? (I had done a fair amount of that already. Nothing wrong with it, but not quite what I really wanted to do for my last college vacation.) Finally, from the far recesses of my brain, I recalled an invitation I received more than a year before. ” Nuestra casa es tu casa” which in English means “our house is your house.” To me, this meant a chance to do volunteer work in a new and interesting environment.
The invitation came from a Franciscan sister who was on her way down to Nicaragua to establish a missionary position for her order. If you have to dig out the old atlas to locate Nicaragua, don’t feel bad. I used to confuse it with Uraguay, but then this sister was from Wisconsin and I kept getting that mixed up with Connecticut.
A few letters between Sister and myself confirmed that I was still welcome. After I knew there was really a possibility that I could go there, fears began to creep up. My letters were filled with logical questions like what were my chances of being swallowed by a giant boa constrictor or getting caught in the crossfire of a revolution? I think Sister was a little anxious to have company from the states so she tended to be moderate with the information she divulged. She admitted it was the rainy season but somehow neglected to explain that this meant the annual 200 inches were falling!
Although once I arrived in Nicaragua, my room and board would be provided to me free, I had to arrange and pay for my own transportation. An unbelievable amount of phoning and writing went into my travel plans. It seemed like travel agents knew little about travel in Central America. Since I was pulling money from my savings account for the venture, I was seeking the thriftiest reasonable mode of travel. I finally settled on a bus to Mexico City and a flight from there to Managua, Nicaragua’s capital.
On the fifth day after I had left the United States. I set foot on Nicaraguan land for the first time. I was scared. If my more dramatic fears had been allayed, my smaller ones popped up to take their place. What if I got some jungle disease or was bitten by a deal insect? What if they only ate really strange food that made me sick? What if I could not find anything helpful to do? By the time I got through customs, I was petrified. Sister had promised to meet me but if she wasn’t there I had no number to phone nor address. My Spanish, which was bad in the classroom was even worse in stressful situations. She could be there and miss me if we had both changed radically in appearance since the last time we saw each other. it was early evening and I nervously scanned seemed like hundreds of expectant faces, all poorly lit and unfamiliar. Suddenly, I spied her. She really hadn’t changed any and I guess I hadn’t either. After a quick welcoming embrace and a great sigh of relief, a few fears dissolved.
It turned out that I was luckier than I realized to have been met by Sister since her truck had been towed away and incarcerated for illegal parking. (There were no signs posted.) We spend a long frustrating hour the next morning getting it out of the police stockade. Perhaps I wasn’t that bad an ordeal but my nerves were already somewhat frayed after a night in the capital city. Our room was above what had to be one of the busiest streets in the country. The word on noise pollution has not yet reached this little Latin American country. I would recommend mufflers on any foreign aid program! The crowning blow was the sharp explosions that awoke us a 6:00 A.M. “The revolution has started” l thought leaping out of my bed. It turned out just to be firecrackers set off to celebrate who knows what. That episode really started my adrenalin flowing.
Sister’s “convent” was not in Managua but 120 miles east of this bustling city. if she was trying to get me to forsake city life, she couldn’t have done a better job. We spent the morning and early afternoon of my first day in Nicaragua running errands. The market place could either be considered the highlight of the final straw. What chaos! Besides crowded stalls with people and merchandise everywhere, some people were driving cars down the aisles. To this day I marvel I didn’t at least have a few toes run over. After that market experience, I couldn’t have been readier to head for the hills. That is precisely what we did.
I mentioned before that we would be heading east to a village 120 miles away. What was surprising to me was that also meant we would cross from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of this small country. The village where I was to stay was technically considered “coast” although we were miles from the ocean. Another geographical surprise to me was that the country was divided into states. On the Pacific side are many tiny little states but on the Atlantic side there is one giant state called Zelaya. I was told this was the under-developed region and the first tangible clue to the significance of this statement was the road which led us there.
We were cruising along in the parish truck enjoying the beautiful green countryside. Occasionally we would have to slow down for small herds of cattle. The road was a smooth pleasant one with very light traffic and no apparent hazards. I volunteered to share the driving. I didn’t let on that I had never in my whole life driven a truck and had only used a stick shift twice before. Somehow I had managed to get the gears, gas, and clutch coordinated enough so we were clipping along at forty miles per hour when we approached the bridge which marks the beginning of Zelaya . If I ever have to see a psychiatrist about bridge-phobia, it will be due to this experience. The road on the other side of the bridge was a mass of chuckholes. With careful steering and speed of ten miles per hour, the ride might have been tolerable. I hit it at forty miles per hour because it was unexpected. After the first jolt, I was afraid to hit the brakes because I knew I also had to do something to the gear shift or clutch at the same time. We almost fractured our skulls on the ceiling of the truck cab. Maybe I should have been a driver for some sort of road test magazine? Shortly thereafter Sister elected to take the wheel again. I wonder why?
The flag, seal, and coins of Nicaragua show a row of five evenly pointed peaks with a smiling sunburst emerging from behind them. This seemed to be a pretty accurate portrayal of what I saw. The countryside had many volcanic cones all very green with wild vegetation. The more manageable land showed systematic rows of crops. The men and boys I saw along the road often carried machetes to keep the weeds from reclaiming their cultivated fields and clearings around their homes.
I think Sister and I might have corresponded for many years and I still wouldn’t have had a good idea of what it was really like. This isn’t because she was not informative or articulate in her letters but just because nothing can really replace actually seeing and experiencing a place. For example, she described her village as having 100 houses and then said the buses traveled up and down the main street since that was the only street there was. I puzzled over this trying to picture a long street with 100 houses and buses traveling up and down it. There were several errors in my mental picture. First of all, I tended to imagine houses that were some sort of cross between those on my own block at home and those I had seen in Mexico. Secondly, I thought there was some sort of local bus service which was just serving the village. Finally, I was thinking of big buses which, if not air-conditioned, were at least comparable in size to school buses.
As it turned out, even my image of “street” was inaccurate. I was thinking of asphalt, it was instead, rough stones which were difficult to walk on when dry and treacherously slippery when wet. I was compelled by my instinct for self-preservation to walk with my eyes on my feet.
The “houses” tended to be much closer in design to what we might call a shack or hut. They were generally built with rough unfinished lumber and zinc roofs. Most of them bordered the street and were fronted by narrow porches where the occupants could sit and see who was passing by. It generally seemed like every other house had either small children playing or several ladies chatting in rocking chairs or both. Yet there was also constant industriousness apparent such as cooking on an open grill, feeding chickens, or sewing.
The “buses” turned out to be a real “trip.” Just seeing them made me laugh to myself. Far from being just local transportation, they traveled all the way to Managua and sometimes back on the same day. Once I did see one which reminded me of a rather small ancient school bus, but generally, they were mini-buses or vans. Transportation seemed to be free enterprise at its best. Anyone who could buy or borrow a van could follow the route and pick up whoever wanted a lift. Prices seemed competitively low but there did not seem to be any compensation for boarding an old crowded rough-riding vehicle as opposed to a newer one that may still have had some absorbency left in the shocks. An example of what I mean would be one particular four-seat microbus which I boarded. There were six men in the front seat – making a total of twenty-five human passengers inside and one chicken! But that wasn’t all. There were three men seated on the luggage rack on top and one hanging onto the ladder which led up the back of the bus to the rack. Just think, some people in the United States pay significant sums of money to go to out of the way places and with the supervision of trained therapists experience the same togetherness!
Until this point, I have neglected to name the village I stayed at not because I fear any reprisals, but because it has a confusing name. “Muelle de los Bueyes” translated means “fording place for oxen” I wondered if there was any time of the year when it would be feasible for oxen to cross the river which ran below the village. When I compared the significance of the name with some of the others in their neighborhood, it wasn’t really odd. There was one place called “Monkeyface”, another called “Recreation” and another called “Hope”. For short, we called the place “Muelle.”
If I was anxious to see the village, I was even more anxious to see where I would be staying and meet the rest of the ” team.” I had visions of myself lying on a cot in a hut. I would be so beat by the oppressive jungle heat that I wouldn’t have the energy to do anything. I also had worries that Sister was the only friendly person on the team and the rest didn’t really want me to come else they were expecting me to wait on them. Once again all my worries were unfounded. The parish priest, a Capuchin missionary from Wisconsin was in the rectory kitchen when I arrived. He said, “Welcome to Oxford.” The other sister gave me the old standby, “We’ve heard so much about you.”
They considered themselves a team and I was immediately accepted on a first name basis as a team member. I can’t emphasize how important a simple thing like being on a first-name basis meant to me since I was not only the youngest but a layperson as well.
Across from the rectory and down the street was the convent. This was a little wooden building which had originally been a bigger building situated elsewhere. The two sisters and I slept there on canvas cots. We had the satisfaction of knowing we were living in a similar arrangement to most of the villagers with no electricity or running water. Outback we had a “Latrina” which didn’t exactly have running water but got a bit damp in the rain.
Zinc roofs are made from sheets of shiny rippled metal which I called tin until I learned otherwise. Since I had never lived in a house with such a roof, I assumed they somehow kept water from coming into the building. I discovered my assumption was faulty when I awoke to big drops of water splattering on my face. A zinc roof usually keeps most of a place dry and it is up to you to locate the driest location for your cot. We all had a good laugh over my trial by water.
It would be logical to ask what did I do all day? Well, as far as I could find out there was not much of a consistent routine to settle into. But I kept busy. I was so busy that the stack of books I brought down with me to read never even made it out of my suitcase.
I knew I really couldn’t do much to help people in such a short period of time so I decided to focus on something simple which could last after I left. I came prepared to teach a whole variety of games, both active and quiet, to the children. This was easily arranged with the school teachers so that I would arrive for the recreation period. (They have school almost all summer.) It is understandable that a teacher with 110 first grade pupils would be more than willing to hand them over to someone else during the break. Once the youngsters got the idea of what I was there for, they asked for more and more games with tireless enthusiasm. One morning at 6:00 a.m. a little girl knocked on the rectory door to ask if I could come out and play. Of course, I was not there and fast asleep, but it was really an ego booster.
My games were not limited to youngsters. During the course of my stay, I taught games to the team, housewives, and just about any willing group. My Spanish was so bad that I was never sure they were laughing because they enjoyed the game or because I was always using the wrong word or verb ending.
The other work I did when I was there was something I had not come expecting to do and that was to help write a grant request. A grant is an allotment of money, generally from some foundation or charity for a specific purpose. The team was asking for money from the Catholic Relief Services to establish leadership training courses. Representatives from all the little mountain communities would come for a two-week course to learn the basics of needed skill and then return to help their village. The value of such an approach had become so apparent to me that I was willing to forsake the more glamorous in-with-the-people role for some office-type efforts. One good thing was that the grant was in ENGLISH.
Another activity that I participated in although I had not really given much prior thought to it was housewife clubs and courses. The very first week I was there, I attended a special course for mothers and homemakers which was given at a nearby agricultural station. I am a marginal cook and housekeeper among a myriad of electrical conveniences. These women managed to make do on almost nothing. I learned new concepts like ” a clean dirt floor.”
What impressed me most about the course was the attitude of the participants. I have become accustomed to the idea of weekend retreats in the mountains where people relax and get to know each other. This was different These women and teenagers had come for a whole week to attend a heavy schedule of courses, sleep in a gigantic concrete granary and eat a monotonous course of beans and rice for all three meals. While I secretly felt I was doing the ultimate of “roughing it” they were having a wonderful time. What was thrilling for me to see was the friendliness and concern they showed for one another. In the end, they all vowed to dedicated themselves to share what they had learned with the women of their different communities.
Since the village where I stayed was comparatively large and connected to the main highway, it took me a while to appreciate how cut off from everything most of the people in the area were. It was only when I listened to tales about the missioner’s trips and studied a gigantic wall map that the real decentralization of the underdeveloped state made sense. The whole countryside is dotted with tiny villages. During the dry seasons, these small communities may be reached on mule or foot. Some are on rivers. For many, a combination of boat and the foot is necessary. In rainy seasons, most of the trails get very difficult to travel on because they are steep and muddy. The difficulties of such isolation are numerous.
I got to sample a little portion of what missionary trips are like by joining some of my teammates on a trip t Mian. (In my opinion, a rather presumptuous name for such a tiny place,) At first, we went by boat for about a half-hour then with the help of a 68-year-old man who came to guide us. It was an hour of steady trudging before we arrived at Milan. It was rainy and steamy so I couldn’t tell the rainwater from the perspiration. It was all worth it, though, because we got such a warm welcome. In Niciraguara rather than handshakes, they have this custom of embracing your arm with theirs. It sounds strange to describe but after a while, it begins to come natural so you can discriminate between a cool casual arm embrace and one with a lot of warmth behind it. These embraces were warm and very happy. We were brought to a large “house.” It w as made of pole walls and a thatched roof and reminded me of pictures I had seen of the South Sea Islands.
Soon, a sizable crowd of men, women, and children had gathered and Sister started the bible lesson for that visit. Many of the stories and examples, which mean little or nothing to us sophisticated modern city dwellers, really strike home with these simple farming people. When someone gets turned on to the New Testament, there is no end to his or her enthusiasm and application. The topic for that day was the equality of all men. One of the farmers was explaining his thoughts from the reading when all of a sudden the message hit me. He was saying we should not judge another person by the amount of money or education they have nor by the color of their skin. There l was – a different color of skin with more years of education and economic opportunity than they could imagine and I was feeling equal. I had been delighted the greeted me so warmly and accepted me. I admire them for valiantly working so hard against such discouraging odds. That little episode marked a new insight for me.
There was another day that I remember with clarity because of the impression it made on me. It was Sunday which started out with bright sunshine. I was so glad to see the sun when I awoke that I brought my perpetually damp blanket and sheets out to hang on a barbed-wire fence in the sun. (Warning, don’t hang bedding on barb wire fences.) As I was out in the yard, a woman came walking up the street with a baby in her arms. Although I can generally follow the trend of a conversation I still panic when I get into one-to-one discussions. What I thought she said was she did not go to Mass that morning because her baby was sick. I said I didn’t think there had been a morning Mass and I hoped her baby would get better soon. With that, she headed back down the road and I hurried back inside so as not to attract any more conversations.
After lunch, Sister and I elected to take a couple of soccer balls and see if we could organize some games. As we walked down the road like pied pipers, we were called aside by a woman. She, although a mother of four herself, had several weeks before taken in a homeless mother of five. I remembered her since I had stopped in one day to read a storybook to the youngsters. I was idly listening to the woman speak to Sister and wishing we were on our way when suddenly I picked up the words “baby dying.” We went in and I waited while Sister went to the back of the dwelling where the mother and child were. Sister came out and solemnly announced the child was dead. Then the mother came out and sat down clutching the baby tightly and trying to get some sign of life from it. The infant was pale, its eyes unblinking and no breathing was apparent. Some other ladies who had come into the house took the dead baby from the mother and proceeded to lay it on a table. They arranged the table with white tissue and four lighted candles. The woman began weeping hysterically and fled to the back of the house.
I was stunned. Five minutes ago we had been sauntering down the road with our soccer balls. At one side of the room on the floor a teenage boy continued to sleep. The little children were trying to tease me into a game and the lady who had beckoned us in was wrapping up a piece of cake for Sister to take home. I had come from a society where drastic measures are taken to save the lives of infants and only the most serious and careful television program will speak of death. Intellectually I had known that the area had a infant mortality rate of 50% but that moment I experienced it personally. She was the woman who had approached me that morning. Had she wanted medicine? She might have asked me to help her and I didn’t understand. As we left the place, I asked Sister in bitter rhetoric, “what did it die from?” Her answer was simple as she had been through this many times before “Everything.”
Some missionaries set up schools and hospitals, others probably spend a good deal of their time distributing food and clothing. It became apparent to me that “my team” was doing none of these things. At first, I was silently critical for what I considered this lack. But slowly, I began to learn that they were doing something much more difficult and, in the long run, more valuable. They resisted the gratifying opportunities that would make them look like “miracle workers” with their modern drugs or barrels of free goods. Instead, they worked toward teaching the people to help themselves and each other. A word which isn’t in our dictionaries yet means much to the Latin American missionaries, is “Conscientization.” What this means is a bringing into the consciousness and concern of a person those things which he should be concerned about. The difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish certainly applies here. The missionaries seek out and encourage community leaders. Through lessons – right from the bible on Christian principles, they get the leaders to think of the good of their whole communities. Leaders go out of their way in both times and effort to serve their people to a degree far beyond anything we would consider generous community service. I met one man named Jose who left his wife and children and walked four days alone in the rain, swam across rivers, and carried a thirty-pound knapsack. He did this to help another community develop its leaders. He was willing to give more than a month of his time with these hardships and with no monetary compensation because the missionaries had helped him to become “conscientizized.”
When I was leaving Nicaragua, I saw a plaque which said, 11 A little country with a big dream.” These words really gave the essence of my own observations about the people. Their songs are full of pride. They are happy and hard working. In Nicaragua, people are still more important than things: I hope they can always keep this.
As the time for me to leave approached, I began to nostalgically relish each moment. Several of the children had won my heart. The team kept hiding my passport. Adult members of the village kept asking why I had to go and when I would return. The way they talked, you would think the United States was the neighboring state! I never realized how much I hated good-byes.
Even now, I find my mind will wander to some Nicaraguan scene or saying. I have a Peace Corp application on my desk and am wondering what strings I might pull to land me right back with the same people.