My thoughts on Nicaragua

Nicaragua is ranked the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Guess who the poorest country is? Yes, Haiti. Both are third world nations, recovering from political turmoil and a number of devastating natural disasters. So I expected Nicaragua to be much the same as Haiti.

 

In ways, I was right. Housing conditions, inaccessibility to water, availability of health care, variety of food were all very similar to Haiti. But in other respects, I was shocked to see the differences. In the village near Campo Alegria, the children in 1st to 4th grade could actually read and write capably, a skill many Haitians cannot claim even though they're in equivalent grades. I didn't see any children with the red hair that marks protein deficiency or the swollen bellies and tiny arms of general malnutrition. People did not call me "gringa" (white person) the entire time I was there, and though I can't be sure no one cussed me in Spanish, I can say that no one cursed me in English as they do daily in Gonaives.

 

In Rivas, the small city near Campo Alegria that is perhaps a third the size of Gonaives, there is a Maxi Pali, the Nicaraguan version of Walmart. Walmart! Need I say more?

 

 

The real shock came when we spent time in the capital. In Haiti, the capital is not much better than the rural areas, but in Nicaragua, the capital seemed to me like a first world city! There were MacDonald's and Burger Kings, Subway, Payless Shoe Source, TGI Fridays, a Hilton, a Holiday Inn, a Best Western, a cinema, a Sbarro's and a Papa John's pizza. Roads were paved, traffic laws were respected, fast food restaurants had children's play areas, and buildings were actually built, not half-constructed relics like Port-au-Prince boasts. Only one man hit on me and most people acted unfazed to see Americans strolling around.

 

I was riding up an escalator in one of Managua's two malls eating frozen yogurt when I officially decided, "If this is third world, than Haiti must be fourth - no, fifth world!"

 

It was an interesting mix of modern and pleasantly old-fashioned. Horse drawn carts and bicycle taxis instead of the choking fumes from Haitian taptaps.

 

 

 

 

Baseball gloves for sale in the city! Baseball being played on real diamonds with stadium seating!

 

 

Colonial architecture that has survived earthquakes, hurricanes and volcanoes.

 

 

And some industry. In the fields by Campo, acres and acres of sugar cane are harvested and carried by horse cart, ox-cart, and huge tractor trailers...

 

 

 

...to this factory that processes it and produces sugar for export. I wish I knew how many jobs that provides.

 

 

And just when I was feeling comforted by how Haiti-esque the sugar cane harvesting is, I noticed the huge sprinklers that water the fields. That's third world??

 

 

Haiti has lots of goats; the part of Nicaragua I was in did not. Instead there were cows everywhere and men herding them on horse back like old-time cowboys.

 

 

Out of everything, what struck me most poignantly was the greenery. Nicaragua has not ruined their own ecosystem by deforestation and erosion. I live in the most barren region of Haiti so the change was more marked than it might have been for someone else, but I couldn't get enough of the trees and the grass and the water.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Haiti-Nicaragua comparison will be complete for me until I have seen their dump ghetto, their Jubilee. And honestly, how can I make any judgments until I've lived there for 6 years and speak the language fluently, like I do in Haiti? What I can say confidently is that I loved the 18 days that I spent there - loved them for what I saw but even more so for who I was with, because, let's be honest, relationships are what life is all about. When I'm with these kids, my heart is always cheery.

 

Ode to Canada

 

 

 

You may not realize it, oh dwellers of civilized America, but sinks, toilets, and shower heads, particularly ones that drain, flush and have water pressure, are amazing commodities. For the past 8 months, I've lived with a toilet that only flushes when you dump a bucket of water into it, no sink in the bathroom, a kitchen sink that drains straight onto the floor, and a shower with an open pipe instead of a head. 

 

Living without the wonders of American plumbing really doesn't bother me; I tend to forget until someone visits and is disgusted by our primitive ways. Sometimes, though, we are spoiled by our friends and given luxuries that make our lives just a little bit nicer. While I was in Nicaragua and Grace and Chris were in America, our new Canadian friend, Phil, installed a sink, a flushing toilet, and a shower head in the Safe House. He also fixed our kitchen sink, changed the broken lock on our door, and convinced a friend to fix the light fixture in the bathroom.

 

 

 

Phil wasn't the only one to bless me while I was traveling. His wife, Ang, taught my nursing assistant classes - documentation, bed-making, bed baths, taking temperatures, and putting in IVs. She has been helping in clinic as well, and together, she and Phil have befriended and are mentoring JB, the student that I hope will replace Oscar when medical school begins. They even babysat Tug for us while we were gone!

 

Phil and Ang arrived in February for what was supposed to be a 3 month trial run, giving them a chance to see if they liked the work and environment of Gonaives and giving us a chance to see if they fit the community. I think the trial run truly only lasted a few weeks - we knew and they knew very quickly that this place is right for them.

 

In case you were wondering, I felt that way before they gave me modern plumbing!

What's going on in Haiti?

I started caring for a man named Amoni whose hand had gotten very infected from a poke with a nail. He claims it was a voodoo curse; I don't exactly believe that, but I can't deny that everything we did for him failed, even with the advice of a wonderful infectious disease doctor in the US. When the swelling climbed all the way to his elbow, I loaded him into our truck and took him to the hospital in Port-au-Prince. He spent 4 days there, had surgery on the hand and lots of IV antibiotics, and came back to us on Monday looking a lot better.

 

It's funny how one patient can so consume you - I was seeing him every single day, worrying about him when I wasn't seeing him, praying for him silently every time I thought of him. And when he was in Port and I wasn't hearing any news, I was calling contacts in the city, trying to send someone to check on him and bring me news. Fortunately, in this story, everything ended well, but the last 10 days for me have been all about "Hand Man".

 

 

 

At the same time, I've been seeing a young girl whose forehead was pierced by a piece of wood (I don't know how) and who has needed daily care as well.

 

 

I've been teaching my nursing assistant classes, every day, sometimes twice a day. Giving exams on the material that was taught in my absence during the Nicaragua trip, practicing skills they are just learning such as respiratory rates, finding pulses, and wrapping joints with ACE bandages.

 

 

I'm also teaching Creole classes 3 or 4 times a week, and now I've added 2 French classes, one for the American teachers at Jubilee School, and one for the 2nd graders. The kids and I we are reading through Charlotte's Web together and though they only understand about 50% of the French I read to them, they love the story and are constantly after me to read to them more often.

 

 

It's busy, it's tiring, it's good.

Nicaragua - work and play days

On the days when we didn't have campers, we did some work projects and some fun outings.

 

We scraped and painting a small building, picked up trash, and reorganized the art room (and didn't get bit by the poisonous snake that was living in one of the storage bins). I led a crew of teens in constructing a gaga court, perhaps the first gaga court that Nicaragua has ever seen. Gaga involves 10-25 players slapping a tennis ball with their hands off the foot-high walls of a wooden court with the goal of hitting another player's feet or lower legs. If you're hit, you're out. It's deceptively simply and delightfully fun especially for younger kids.

 

Local welders had prepared metal joints for us to frame our octagon-shaped court with but after cutting wood and drilling holes, we suddenly noticed that our octagon only had 7 sides! Much calculation and recalibration later, we realized that the welders had made the frames the wrong angle and we had to content ourselves with a heptagon instead. Fortunately, the game worked fine regardless and I had the privilege of playing and losing Campo Alegria's first ever gaga game.

 

 

 

Another morning was spent making puzzles. Strange, but necessary. When all the puzzle pieces have been dumped in the same bin, you have to put each one together to know if all its pieces are actually there. After doing a dozen puzzles individually, we spent an hour on a communal puzzle only to have it missing more than 30 pieces. What a let-down.

 

 

Some afternoons, a group of Chop Pointers would walk or drive down the beach to teach English at the local elementary school. It was a fun chance to see every day life and to reconnect with some of the children who'd come to our first weekend of camp.

 

 

 

 

On our play days, we went to a beach on the Pacific coast where my buddy Helon and I tried unsuccessfully to surf and eventually settled on a long game of beach volleyball instead.

 

 

Another day, we took a truck to the top of an inactive volcano called Mombacho and hiked around the peak in the cloud forest. It was lush and beautiful, with amazing views of the lake below.

 

 

 

 

 

We were greeted on the way down with a little surprise: a sloth, sleeping in a tree above the trail!

 

 

 

We did some tourist shopping at the market in Masaya, a lovely old building full of colorful nicknacks and souvenirs. I'm not a big shopper but I appreciated the culture and the color and the lack of beggars in an area that is clearly created for wealthy visitors.

 

 

 

I don't have photos of the 2.5 kilometer zipline that we took down a mountainside on another morning out, but I can tell you that the aerial views of the ocean and the woods and the countryside were unforgettable. We cruised through trees full of monkeys, over coffee plants, past an impressive rock face that must be a magnificent waterfall in rainy season, and towards a giant white statue of Jesus, similar to the one in Brazil. It might be the closest to flying that I've ever come and I loved every minute of it.

 

Nicaragua - camp days

 

On both weekends that I was in Nicaragua, we welcomed approximately 30 kids to Campo Alegria for a weekend of fun, good food, and Bible stories.

 

 

The first group of kids came from the village just a mile down the beach from Campo; the Chop Pointers run camp programs for them every year so those kids knew what to expect. The second group, however, was from a village close to Managua, the capital, and they have never been to camp before. For most of them, seeing Lake Nicaragua was the most water they'd ever seen in their lives and they wanted nothing more than to play in the waves all day long.

 

 

The camp programs have educational aspects too. The campers spent 2 hours in science, learning about UV rays with special beads that change color in sunlight and learning about wind with homemade windmills.

 

 

They also learned basic English, culminating in a loud and rambunctious game to help remember their colors.

 

 

 

 

 

There was sports, arts and crafts, play on the beach, and the ever-amazing game of gaga (more on gaga in my next post).

 

 

And the zipline - harnesses, carabiners, ladders, a platform, a push and an electrifying ride down the sand dunes! A few kids were too scared to try it, but the majority loved it.

 

 

During the camp weekends, I floated from group to group, activity to activity, helping out where needed and taking photos for the camp photo slideshow (on camp's higher quality camera, hence why I don't have many photos from those days). Some mornings I led chapel with a translator and with a crew of Chop Point students as the actors in our little Bible dramas. My favorite was when they all played sheep in the parable of the Ninety-Nine and the One Lost Sheep.

 

 

I enjoyed interacting with the Nicaraguan kids, but more than that, I enjoyed watching the Chop Point students, many of whom I've known for 4 or 5 years, make the step from camper to leader. It was great to see them comforting kids when they got hurt, encouraging outsiders to join in, and simply making kids laugh. I was proud of them. 

 

 

 

Back to Haiti

I am back in Haiti, back to teaching and bike riding and hugging small children and walking the dusty roads. Nicaragua was fantastic and I will try to get some photos and stories up here soon.

For now, I leave you with this: the view from Campo Alegria where I've been staying for the past 18 days.