One year later...

I moved back from Nicaragua exactly one year ago today.  This is a crazy thought to me, but I can’t quite decide why.  Maybe it’s because I feel like so much has happened in just one year, or maybe it’s because I still feel so connected to Nicaragua and can’t imagine that it’s been a whole year.  Who knows.

I took some time tonight to reflect on the past year, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt an inexpressible sense of gratitude.  I have been amazingly blessed in the past year, and I have grown a lot.  I am a homeowner of a beautiful house which has truly become a home to me.  I have a job that I truly love, where I work with amazing coworkers on work that I feel is relevant and exciting.  Next year, I’ll have completed my certification and will be working on console in Mission Control for the International Space Station.  I am truly living my dreams, and I am constantly in awe of the privilege and responsibility of my job.

But beyond those obvious areas of growing up, I have been blessed with some amazing new friends who support me and challenge me, and the chance to grow in relationship with old friends as well.  I have read books that have taught me and expanded my knowledge.  I have worked with some amazing teens at church, and within the next few weeks will see the kids that were freshman when I moved to Houston graduate from high school.

It’s easy to ignore the growth or learning opportunities that are present in our everyday lives.  During my year in Nicaragua, I was hypersensitive to what I was learning about myself and others – since I was in a new environment where I felt like I would learn a lot, I was almost artificially aware of my growth.  Over this past year, more than anything, I’ve learned to recognize and embrace growth opportunities in the “mundane” details of normal life.  I may not be as keenly aware of my own growth on a daily basis, but I have been blown away by how I have grown in joy, confidence, and understanding in the past year.

Somewhere throughout all of that, Nicaragua has remained a huge part of my life.  I have had the opportunity to visit twice, and it has been amazing to reconnect with the people I love in Cedro Galan and La Chureca.  Speaking of growth, all the families who formerly lived in the trash dump of la Chureca are now living in nice brick houses in a nearby neighborhood, Villa Guadalupe.  It was heartwarming to have them proudly show me their new houses when I visited last month.  Whether it be through a phone call, Facebook conversation, the photos from Nicaragua around my house and office, or just a memory that makes me smile, Nicaragua is on my mind and in my heart every day.  The lessons I learned there have helped mold me into who I am today, and for that I will be forever grateful.

I’ve also realized in the past year that my connection to Nicaragua and to Manna Project isn’t over.  Although I loved my year in Nica, I learned while there that it wasn’t something I was called to do for longer.  I struggled to reconcile that with the strong, strong connection I felt to the people and communities and my desire to serve.   I’m still uncovering what all that means for me, but I now see that I can remain involved and invested in these communities even from far away, and my actions here can continue to benefit Cedro Galan, la Chureca/Villa Guadalupe, and Manna Project.  It’s been a wild ride, and I know it’s far from over.  Here’s to another year of learning, growing, giving back, and being thankful.

The right time.

On May 31st, I boarded an airplane at Managua's international airport and headed back to the United States.  Unlike the last few times I've done that, this time I didn't have a return flight back to Nica.  My time as a Manna Project Program Director was over - although PDs normally spend 13 months in-country, my contract with Manna was shorter since I only had exactly 1 year off of my job in Houston - and it was time for me to transition back to my life and job in the United States.

Over the course of the past year, I had plenty of moments where I never wanted to come back to the US and to my 8-to-5 engineering job.  Like when my students did particularly well and were really learning English.  When I was sitting with a family eating delicious food and talking and laughing.  When I was in the middle of nature in an incredibly beautiful landscape.  When 4-year-old Linette threw her arms around my neck, looked me in the eye, and said "Yo te quiero MUCHO!" (I love you a lot)  When I was walking around Cedro Galan or Chureca and random people shouted out to say hi to me by name and I never wanted to lose that sense of community.

There were also a few moments where all I wanted was to be back in the US.  When I got discouraged by how much I couldn't help in the communities and families we worked with.  When I missed my friends and family back home like crazy.  When I couldn't stop sweating for days at a time, or when I just really wanted some Thai food.

By the time I left, however, I wasn't really experiencing either of those strong, passing feelings.  Instead of any immediate desire to stay or leave, I had a deep, deep sense that it was the right time.  I was ready to say goodbye to Nicaragua and head back to the US.  I am incredibly, incredibly thankful for that sense of peace and sense that the timing was right.  I had an amazing last few days in Nicaragua - between Mother's Day (May 30 in Nicaragua) celebrations in La Chureca, good-bye parties with my English classes, a trip to Tip Top (think KFC with a different name) with a family I'm close with in La Chureca, a goodbye dinner with close friends in Cedro Galan, and solid time with my housemates.

I am enjoying have a bit of down time before starting work, and am getting used to life in the States again.  I miss Nicaragua, but am confident that I will be back to visit before too long.  The word "home" is starting to have a lot of different meanings for me - as I was leaving Nicaragua, I felt like I was leaving home, and a few hours later, I felt like I was arriving at home in Michigan.  When I left that home a week later, I was excited to arrive home to Houston.  Cedro Galan, Chiquilistagua, and La Chureca will forever be part of home for me, and part of me will always be there.  Even when I'm not physically there, I know the communities and the people I came to love this year will travel with me in my heart and a part of me will be there with them.

I will be forever thankful for the opportunity to spend a year with Manna Project in Nicaragua, and to each and every person who helped make that possible for me - whether through financial support, emotional support, or facilitating my time off of work.  It was a blessed year and I know I will be seeing the results of it in my life for years to come.

A bible verse that has been on my heart a lot lately is Ecclesiastes 3:11, which tells us that He has made everything beautiful in its time.  As I look back on everything in my life, I see this to be true:  I may not have seen the beauty happen in the time I wanted it to, but in His time everything is made beautiful.  I have no doubt that God is making beauty out of the difficulties I witnessed in Nicaragua, even when all I could see in the moment was a beautiful, dirty, neglected child walking naked a trash dump, or a woman finding out she had cancer and not having any way to pay for treatment, or a family with no way to pay for food.  God is making it all beautiful, in the midst of the dirt and the mess.

My goodbyes in Nicaragua were hard, but they were beautiful too. It was the right time.

Linette and I during Math and Literacy class at El Farito

With my Nicaraguan momma on my last night in Nica, after an amazing dinner.

One of my close friends, Karen

Mari, Karla, Jose, and Esteven, most of one of the families I was closest with in La Chureca

One of the moms and kids in our child sponsorship program with her mother's day craft at our Mother's Day party.

A teacher's pride

Four times a week, Sam and I teach a beginner's English class - Mondays and Wednesdays to about 15 students at El Salero, and Tuesdays and Thursdays to about 20-25 students at El Farito.  There used to be only one beginner's English class, but Sam and I started the new one at El Salero about 7 months ago because some of our teen English students were clearly interested in and capable of an adult English class.  Beginner's English has been one of my favorite programs this year, and we have a lot of fun teaching the class.  Our students are fantastic (most of the time...:-)) and it's a fun level of English to teach.

Last week, since we had finished our six-ish month curriculum, we gave a placement test to our students.  The test was to determine if they had learned enough in beginner's English to move on to our second English level.  Out of the 33 students who took the exam, 20 of them received a high enough score to pass!  I am so, so proud of our students and how much they have learned - the reality is that when we only have 2 hours of class a week, there's only so much we can do as teachers, and the students have to motivate themselves to study more and learn English.  I am particularly excited for our teen English students, because I have no doubt that they will quickly advance through our English levels if they stay motivated and will be able to speak very good English before they graduate from high school.  Knowing English is a huge help in getting jobs here in Nicaragua, so it will be a very useful skill for them to have at such a young age.

Every rose has its thorns, though, and this is no exception.  The 20 students who passed the exam will be moving up to elementary, and Sam and I are very sad to see them go.  It'll be strange not to go to our English classes next week and be greeted by the familiar faces of our students, but we're hoping to have a new batch of students interested and excited about learning English!

Farito beginner's English

Salero beginner's English - the silly version.

Community

Something I have struggled with all year has been finding a sense of community here in Nicaragua.  Maybe this struggle has to do with the fact that I have an unbelievably loving, supportive, and generous community in Houston which it took me the better part of 18 months to truly become a part of, and so my standards for community are pretty high.  Or maybe it's because, regardless of how much time I spend in Cedro Galan, Chiquilistagua, and La Chureca, my life will inevitably remain different from most community members - I'll go back and sleep in my comfortable house in a gated neighborhood down the road, and eventually I'll go back to my even more comfortable living situation in the United States.  No matter what I do, I will always be an outsider, I will always be different, I will always be a visitor - or so I thought.

On the Saturday of Easter weekend, I was putzing around my house when I received a phone call from my friend Martha.  Martha is a community member who I have gotten to know well and who is very involved at the church I frequent in Cedro Galan.  Martha called that morning to ask me if I would be willing to do one of the readings at Easter Vigil that night.  I enthusiastically agreed, we discussed the details of when to arrive and what to wear, and then we hung up. 

Since high school, church has been an incredibly important community for me.  From high school youth group to the Catholic Student Center at WashU to the young adult group and youth ministry leadership team at St. Clare of Assisi Catholic Church in Houston, much of my experience of community has stemmed from my involvement in a church.  And while I go to churches here on a pretty regular basis, I wasn't involved in ministry and didn't truly feel like a part of the church community - just a visitor on Sundays.  Being asking to do a reading changed that for me, though.  I was extremely flattered that I was asked, for two reasons:  first of all, it made me feel like the community viewed me as a part of the community, and I can't even explain how much I appreciated that and how rewarding that feeling was.  Secondly, I was frankly slightly surprised that they trusted my ability to read in Spanish enough to ask me.

I did the reading that night, only stumbled over two words (which, let's be honest, I likely would have done in English too), and appreciated the community and the Mass even more than normal.  Throughout the next week, lots of people commented on the fact that I read and complimented me on my Spanish.  More so than any other time during my year here, I truly felt like part of the community; I truly felt like I belonged.

At the end of the day, the truth is that my life is different than most of the people I serve.  It has been a struggle for me not to feel guilty for this, or not to feel angry about the inequality.  Ultimately, I will never 100% be a part of the community - but as I stood at Easter Vigil and proclaimed the reading from Genesis, I looked out at the congregation and felt like they were my community, that I was at my church, and that, just maybe, the differences didn't matter as much as I thought they did.

There once was a tiger named Miguel...

Twice a week, I help teach a math and literacy class at El Farito.  Our goal for the class is to augment what students are learning in school and help them to succeed and advance, and we do this in two ways: by providing our own lessons and exercises, and by helping them with the homework that they are assigned in school.  I usually work with middle schoolers, but a few weeks ago had the chance to work with Maria, an 8 year old girl who is in 1st grade.

Maria can barely read or write - she can sound out words syllable by syllable most of the time, and is able to write most of the letters of the alphabet without help.  Maria's homework on that Monday was to write a short story.  We started out by brainstorming a topic for her story, and concluded that it would be about a tiger.  I asked her questions as we went along - what's the tiger's name? Where does he live? What does he do in the story? It took prompting, but Maria came up with her story and we set about writing it.

Too often, I see parents or older siblings just doing assignments like this for kids.  They assume that the child isn't capable of doing the work, and so they do it for them.  This is harmful for two reasons, the obvious of which is that the kid never actually learns what she or he is supposed to from the assignment.  The other reason, which I would argue is the more harmful of the two, is that the child is told that they aren't smart enough to do the assignment, to learn the material, and to do well in school.  When a child is told this enough by their family, either directly or indirectly, they inevitable believe it as well.  

It took Maria and I about 45 minutes to write her one-paragraph short story, and we had to sound it out syllable by syllable.  Occasionally, I would have to write down a letter on a different piece of paper to show her how to write it. I had to continually remind her to put spaces between words.  But when all was said and done, SHE had written a story - SHE had done her homework.  No one else had done it for her, and no one had doubted that she could do it herself.  As I gave her a high five and told her how good of a job she did, the pride on her face was amazing to see.

Development work can be hard.  There are a lot of times where you don't see tangible results and it is easy to get disheartened.  One key to my happiness this year has been to focus on the little victories and on the small moments.  The funny thing is that when I do that, the "little" victories don't seem as little anymore.  All Maria and I did was write five sentences about a tiger, but two weeks later I can still see her proud smile when we finished, and it embodies all the reasons why I wanted to spend this year with Manna: the ability to form relationships with community members and the ability to do my little part to help them in whatever ways I can.

I have seven more weeks in Nicaragua before my year is over and I head back to Houston.  When I look back on the year, what sticks in my head are the little moments like this.  I have no illusions that I have changed the world through my work this past year, and that was never my goal.  But I can look at the year and at the little moments and be proud of the impact that I have had, in small ways, on individual people.  At one point, I had a bucket list for the remainder of the year, of places I wanted to visit and things I wanted to do before leaving Nicaragua.  I've thrown it out the window, and I really only have one goal for the next seven weeks: recognize and cherish the small moments I'm given to impact the people I work with and to let them impact me. If I can do that, I will truly have no regrets when I pack my bags and say goodbye in mid-June.

Rio San Juan

Last week was Semana Santa (Holy Week), which is a week of vacation here in Central America. We had the whole week off, and it was a nice chance to rest a bit after a busy March with Spring Break groups. I spent half the week traveling and the second half of the week at home catching up on sleep, work, and just hanging out with some of my housemates and community members.

To start off our travels, Maggie and I hopped on a bus early Friday morning and headed to a town called San Miguelito, a small town right on Lake Nicaragua. I had found a farm online which did ecotourism, so we planned to spend two nights on the farm and explore the area around there. We were expecting a guest house or some kind of separate building for guests, but it ended up just being a two-night homestay in the house of the family who owns the farm. Eduardo and his family were amazing and made sure we had a good time during our stay. The farm is beautiful, the food was great, and I really enjoyed relaxing and being away from the "real world" for a few days. To get to the farm, it was a 45 minute ride in a wooden canoe (with a small motor) from San Miguelito out to the farm. There was no running water or electricity on Eduardo's farm, so it was pretty primitive but very sufficient. :-)

On Sunday morning, we headed further south to San Carlos, a town on the corner of Lake Nicaragua and Rio San Juan. The bus left Sam Miguelito at 6:00AM, so we has to leave Eduardo's at 4:30am in the wooden canoe. The sun obviously was't up yet, and it was an incredibly clear night. For the first half hour or so of the trip, the only lights we could see were the stars in the sky - there were no unnatural lights around. It was amazing, to put it lightly, and incredibly beautiful. After we got to San Carlos, we hopped on a motorboat to take us down Rio San Juan to El Castillo, the town we were staying in. Rio San Juan is a huge river which is the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and it has a lot of beautiful jungles and amazing scenery. During our three days in El Castillo, Maggie and I toured a fortress, went canoeing, saw crocodiles, went for a hike in the jungle, and more.

We then jumped on a 14-seater plane run by Nicaragua's domestic airline to head back to Managua last Wednesday. The airport in San Carlos was literally one room and a semi-paved runway....but the flight was great and we got back just fine!

Pictures below from the trip. :-)

This fortress in El Castillo was built in the 1600s and used to keep pirates from coming up Rio San Juan into Lake Nicaragua.
Maggie and I with the river, from the fortress.

Rio San Juan

Eduardo and his amazing family who we spend two days with.

Washing Dirty Feet

So, during supper, fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God, he rose from supper and took off his outer garments.He took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and dry them with the towel around his waist.

I'll start off with a confession right off the bat: my feet are almost always dirty here. It's not that I don't shower, because I do. But I usually wear Chaco sandals around, and it's dry season so everything is dusty. Inevitably, within a few hours of my shower, my feet are covered in dust from walking around Cedro Galan or La Chureca. It's actually slightly absurd, and I've never had dirty feet as frequently as I do nowadays. Every shower, I have to vigorously scrub my feet, sometimes multiple times, to get them clean again.

Maybe that was more than you ever wanted to know about my feet and their level of dirtiness. If so, I apologize - but I've spent more time thinking about my dirty feet lately than I ever thought I would. While at Adoration near the beginning of Lent, I was staring at my (dirty) feet while praying and got to thinking about Jesus and his foot-washing at the Last Supper. It suddenly had a lot more significance to me than it ever had with my clean feet in years past. As I sat there praying with my dirty feet, I realized that in order to truly understand how to wash others' feet, I had to first be around people with dirty feet.

A rule of our child sponsorship program in La Chureca is that the kids have to wear shoes or sandals every time they leave their house. It's a frequently broken rule, even though we provide the sandals for the kiddos. Many time, people walk around La Chureca without anything on their feet. Their feet are literally in the trash and the dirt. They have dirty feet. It's also not uncommon to see people in Cedro who just aren't wearing any shoes as they go about their daily lives. Many play soccer or walk around barefoot. They have dirty feet.

Here's the thing though - in order to be around these dirty feet, I have to be willing to get my own feet dirty. I can't sit in my clean or safe places, like offices or personal cars or my own house, and expect to be able to wash the feet of others. If I want to find people who truly need their feet washed, I have to step outside my clean, safe, comfort zone and go to the places that make feet dirty. This doesn't mean that we all need to travel to third world countries and find the dustiest or dirtiest places we can - there are people everywhere who have dirty feet, both literally and figuratively, and who need someone to wash their feet. But we have to be willing to go meet them where they're at, despite the dust and dirt that we'll also find there.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him,"Master, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered and said to him,"What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later."Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered him,"Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me." Simon Peter said to him,"Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well."

I can be a stubbornly independent person at times, and generally like to be the one doing the serving while also taking care of myself. In that sense, I can relate to Simon Peter - frankly, my first reaction to anyone, let alone my Master or teacher, washing my feet would be to say "It's ok, I can do it myself." Jesus makes it clean to Simon Peter and clear to us that we need to let others serve us too. We need to let others see the dirt on our feet and wash it off. It's reciprocal, you see - we are called to serve, but we are also called to let others serve us. One of the most beautiful things about my time in Nicaragua so far has been realizing that I am being served every time I serve. I learn as much or more from the communities I serve as they do from me, and I am inspired every day by their lives and by their love. They are serving me, helping me grow, washing my feet, as I simultaneously do the same for them.

So when he had washed their feet and put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, "Do you realize what I have done for you? You call me 'teacher' and 'master,' and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet,you ought to wash one another's feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do."

So seek out the dirty feet. Get outside of your clean and safe zone, whatever that means for you and where you're at right now. Risk getting your own feet dirty, and find someone whose feet you can wash. And then, be humble enough to let someone wash your feet, too.