Thankgiving in Nicaragua

Despite being in a foreign country where people don't really know what Thanksgiving is, we had a great Thanksgiving here at the Manna house! Each person in the house contributed by cooking at least one dish, and our spread was impressive - the only big item missing was sweet potatoes, which sadly don't exist in this country. Our meal included turkey, stuffing, squash risotto, cornbread, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, beets, apple pie, and chocolate pie. It was all delicious, and I particularly liked that every person made something.

We converted our office table into a dinner table, and it was the first time we've all sat around one table and eaten together. Props to my housemates for some great decorating, both of the table and of ourselves...we had pilgrim and indian costumes. See the picture below to realize how awesome we are. Spending time eating together, playing a game, and watching a movie made for an amazing Thanksgiving. :-)


There are many, many things I am thankful for this year...far more than I could ever list in this blog entry. But, here's a sampling of things, big and small, which I am particularly thankful for this year.

• Communities, both here in Nicaragua and back in the US. In particular: the communities I have the privilege to serve in here, my housemates, and the young adult community at St. Clares back at home.
  
• My Spanish being good enough to communicate what I want to, most of the time.
• Bug spray. (things I am NOT thankful for: the crazy number of mosquitos)
• The fact that the weather is a bit cooler nowadays, at least in the evenings, and that it's not raining all the time.
• Hugs.
• All the freedoms and opportunities that I've been given in my life in the US: education, a well-paying job, a fair political system, safety, etc.
• Friends who constantly challenge me to grow, support me, and hold me to a higher standard.
• Public transportation that allows me to explore this beautiful country.
• Open doors and welcoming smiles.

The hard questions

If asked to summarize what I've learned in my first 4.5 months in Nicaragua, I think I'd say this: there are a lot of questions and very few clear answers.

That answer, or lack thereof, is contrary to everything that my natural personality would want to say. Let's face it: I was raised by two mathematicians, and have a degree in engineering...I have been taught that questions have concrete answers, and that there is a way to solve any problem given to me. I mention this to explain that I have struggled a lot to admit that simple sentence - "there are a lot of questions and very few clear answers" - and wish more than anything that I could have more answers. Not necessarily less questions, but definitely more answers.

Four years ago, I visited Nicaragua for the first time, as part of a group through the Catholic Student Center at my university. We spent two weeks working in a small remote village called Dos Quebradas. Dos Quebradas has 75ish residents, no electricity or running water, and a one-room schoolhouse. They make a living selling firewood and farming beans and corn on the hills around the village. I struggled a lot during that trip to understand what we could provide to Dos Quebradas that they would really want or need. Was an American understanding of basic necessities the same as theirs? Was the school we were repairing really the best thing we could give them? Is there anything wrong with the poverty they live in if they're happy and mostly-healthy? What does development look like for Dos Quebradas?

I have been faced with similar questions in my work in La Chureca and Cedro Galan. What is the lasting effect of our child sponsorship program? Is there a way we could help Chureca more? How can a mother in our program afford to buy enough alcohol and cigarettes to be drunk and smoking when we see her, but not to feed her family? Do the residents of La Chureca really want to move out of Chureca, like the Spanish government is trying to help them do? How can the moms and kids living in a trash dump still be smiling most of the time? Are we having any long-term impact?

Are English classes really what will help the residents of Cedro Galan and Chiquilistagua? Is me being here for a year really helpful to the people I work with and get to know? How can I possibly transition from this lifestyle back to my eight-to-five job at NASA without feeling like I'm being untrue to myself or the people I'm serving this year? Is my lifestyle here in solidarity with the community members, or am I living too extravagantly? What does success mean here?

I have always connected with music, and the album of the past year of my life has been Beauty Will Rise by Steven Curtis Chapman. He wrote this album after the unexpected and tragic death of his young daughter, and the songs show both his struggles and his faith, woven intricately together. One song is called Questions, and the lyrics include a lot of the hard questions that he had for God at that time. The chorus goes like this: And if you know my heart / The way that I believe you do / You know that I believe in You / Still I have these questions. It brings me comfort to remember that questions and faith are not opposite - I can have all the questions above, and so many more, and yet not doubt that there are answers, even if they haven't been revealed to me.

On Friday, I had the chance to go back to Dos Quebradas, for the first time in almost 4 years. Very little has changed. My favorite kid is in the same grade he was in four years ago and still not wearing shoes, and yet his smile still has the ability to truly light up the world. People still live in their mud houses, jump in the back of the truck to get a ride to town to sell firewood, and get excited when presented with a jump rope or a frisbee. One can ask if our work there really did anything helpful...but then little Henry, who was 5 when we were there and 9 now, asks if we can play duck duck goose like we did last time I was there. And in that moment, the questions don't really matter anymore, and I realize there's more to life than finding answers to all those questions. Maybe what really matters more than any of those answers is a quick game of duck duck goose.

Dos Quebradas, January 2008

Election Day

Today is election day here in Nicaragua, and as Nicaraguans head to the polls to vote, I want to try and give you a bit of an insight into Nicaraguan politics to help you understand both the importance of this election and the fragile state of democracy here.

To have any hope of understanding the current political situation, it's worth taking a minute to look at the past. Last week, I finished an incredibly well-written book about Nicaraguan politics called Blood of Brothers, written by former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer about Nicarguan history and the war in the 1980s and 1990s. I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the history of this little country, and will personally buy you a copy if it's not at your local library and you want to read it (yes, I think it's that important to understand more of the history of Nicaragua and Central America). But here's your one paragraph summary: after a 43 year dictatorship by the Somoza family, they were overthrown in 1979 by a political group called the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas were named after a man named Sandino who, in the 1930s, launched a guerilla war against the pro-U.S. government. After the Sandinistas took power, they themselves started to resemble a dictatorship, and many of the things they had fought against (censorship of the press, large human rights violations, etc.) were still occurring. So the contras (literally meaning "against") began to form an army, mostly based in Honduras, to have a second revolution. This led to a long and violent war - many of the contras were from Somoza's National Guard, and were incredibly brutal. The contras were illegally supported by the Reagan administration (many of you may remember the Iran-contra affair, where money from weapons sold to Iran went to help the contras here in Nicaragua). A peace agreement was finally reached in the 80s, and Nicaragua has been a democracy ever since, with multiple different political parties holding power during the past 30 years.

Daniel Ortega, the current president, was a big-shot in the FSLN (Sandinista party) during the revolution, and was president in the 1980s before losing power in a 1990 election. He then ran and lost in every election, until the 2006 election where he won again after, through a pact with then-president Arnoldo Aleman and his political party, changing the Constitution to allow a candidate to win with only 35% of the vote. The Constitution forbids a president from running again while in office, so Ortega shouldn't be running in this election. However, the Supreme Court (controlled by the FSLN party) ruled that it was a violation of Ortega's human rights not to allow him to run again, and changed the Constitution to allow him to do so. The other two candidates in the election are Fabio Gadea, a 79 year old from the radio industry, and Arnoldo Aleman, another former president who was EXTREMELY corrupt during his presidency in the 1990s. It's widely belived that Aleman is running as a way to thank Ortega for getting him out of arrest (for embezzlement of funds during his presidency), and is splitting the opposition vote to help Ortega win.

Still with me? That was a lot of information in two paragraphs, but I think it's important to understand the background. My point in telling you all of that was to make it clear that even though this election is "free" and "democratic", there's obviously been a lot of sketchy events to get us to this point. There have also been accusations of the FSLN-controlled voting authority expediting voter applications for Sandinistas and not having time to give IDs to the opposition. Ortega held 58% of the vote in the last poll, with Gadea having 15% and Aleman having 3%. This is not unexpected given that Ortega has used lots of money (mostly from his buddy Hugo Chavez in Venezuela) to have a HUGE campaign, and limited the campaigns of his opposition. He's also started handing out a lot more food, generally being more helpful, and doing things like improving roads in the past few months before the election. He also refused international observance of the election until very recently, meaning that all of the sketchy things were done before any observers were allowed to be here.

All signs point towards Ortega being reelected today, and many people who are a lot smarter than me believe this could be the beginning of the next dictatorship here in Nicaragua, under the guise of a fragile democracy which may not survive this election or another term of Ortega's leadership. If nothing else, I ask you to pray for wisdom for the Nicaraguans voting today, as well as for the leadership they elect.

In lighter news, the FSLN party was more or less sued for copyright infringement since their main campaign song is a rewritten version of "Stand by Me"...check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRixNma7loM&feature=player_embedded

Lastly, if you'd like to read more, here are some interesting articles from the Economist and the Washington Post:
http://www.economist.com/node/21536629
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-nicaragua-matters-to-the-united-states/2011/11/03/gIQACFOvjM_story.html?wprss=rss_opinions
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/guatemala-nicaragua-go-to-the-polls/2011/11/05/gIQAPZs1pM_story.html

Ve, que bonito. Ve, que precioso.

(I usually keep my personal hand-written journal completely separate from my blog, but I'd like to share something I wrote on my travels this past weekend, to a beautiful nature reserve called Tisey. This is more or less exactly what I wrote in my journal, which was written on Saturday night.)

"Ve, que bonito. Ve, que precioso." "See, how beautiful. See, how precious."
I couldn't even count how many times Alberto Gutierrez, the old sculptor here in Tisey who has carved 40+ meters of rock on the side of a cliff, said that to me today during our one-hour visit. He said it about everything - the incredible view of the valleys and mountains of northern Nicaragua, the 400 varieties of orchids that grow here, about other plants, even about his own work. And he was right - it was all so, so beautiful. The view stretched to Honduras and the mountains and plains between here and there - one day full of war and violence, but now full of more peace than I've found in a while. Alberto's carvings are, in his words, a representation of the culture of all of Nicaragua. How beautiful, how precious that culture is.

Alberto Gutierrez with part of his mural

As I walked with Alberto, he showed and gave me many things. He gave me an explanation of the symbology of his work, he gave me stories of his life, he gave me a bunch of limon dulce (a citrus fruit) and an orange, which he used a long stick to knock down from the tree and then hiked down a hill to retrieve it and peel it with his machete before giving it to me. He gave me a handmade bracelet and some flowers. The entire time we spent together, all he did was serve. He told me about how he dreamed of making this mural when he was young, and how lucky he is to be able to do it. He told me of all the things he hopes to carve in the future, "if it's in God's plan too." When we were finished, he walked me out to the entrance of the path and made sure I knew how to get to where I planned to go next. He gave me a better understanding of service: giving time, material goods, and knowledge to a random stranger who visits unannounced.

More of Alberto's mural

The most important thing that Alberto gave me today, though, was a new outlook on every person, thing, and experience I come in contact with. All day, his simple exclamation of "Ve, que bonito. Ve, que precioso." has been repeating in my head. Given it's been ten hours and it's still repeating, I figured it was worth reflecting on some more. So as I lay on my bed and just opened myself up to the words, I came to the realization that they're exactly what God says when he looks at any one of us. God looks at me, no matter how close or far I make myself from Him, and says, "See how beautiful you are. See how precious you are." As I sit in my cabin and let that simple yet profoundly important message sink in, I am crying. I find it easy to forget how beautiful and precious I am to God, and today's reminder from an eighty-something year old eccentric Nicaraguan artist in the middle of a nature reserve was something I needed.

God says the same thing to each dirty child I see in Chureca, to the 12 year old troublemaker who likes to make our lives hard in Cedro Galan, to every unborn child, to every person who may not believe that they are beautiful and precious, and to every person who has never heard that message before. And He says it to and about you: "See how beautiful you are. See how precious you are." Will you let yourself believe it, maybe even for the first time?

Alberto kept telling me to take pictures so I could show his work and the landscape's beauty to my family and friends. While I can easily share those, I really hope the main thing I share will be his message: "Ve, que bonito. Ve, que precioso." It is a message the whole world needs to hear.

Tisey, Nicaragua