X-Street Children in Nicaragua

On the way back from León on Sunday we sat in the last row of the bus, behind what looked like a couple – or rather, they sat in front of us. The man, who was remarkably unattractive, was stroking the woman´s hair. He put his face right up to hers, which was turned away from him towards the window. She kept turning even farther away from him, putting her head down to escape him, and then he gravved her by the back of her head and kissed her. She was shaking. He grabbed the rest of her and forced her into his arms, and he grabbed her breasts, and other lower parts of her body. She grabbed the back of her headrest with one hand, and the seatback in front of her with the other, and pulled herself away from him and his violating hands.

¨You know, we´re in public,¨I finally said in Spanish. He ignored me, though I´m sure he heard, and forced her hands lower on his body.

If this is how he acts in public, I can´t imagine what he does to her in private. The men sitting infront of them realized what was going on, and did nothing.

I wanted to give her a hundred dollars and tell her to run. But I didn´t.

What could her situation be, that she is with this horrible man? Is he her fiancée? What could her families´situation be, that they would allow her to stay in such an abusive relationship?

Two hours after we got off the bus, as I wrote this, I was still shaking.

What is this world we live in? What can we do?

Go to pronica.org/donate and earmark your donation for the Acahualinca Women´s Center

It all started when I got lost, walking to the library where I work every day. Directions were never my fortê, but luckily a wise bearded man once told me that you´re not lost unless you think you´re lost. So I kept walking in what I knew was probably the wrong direction, and then I suddenly came upon a sign:

ACTION ALREADY!
Investigative Center for Women´s Assistance
Hostel for victims of domestic violence

I walked past it alhamdulallahing, and then stopped in my tracks, wondering why I was passing by. I turned around, took a deep breath, and walked in.

¨Hi I´m Dina I come from the United States and I go to a university for just women and I am interested in women´s rights I saw something on the bus yesterday that upset me because a woman was being maltreated by her fiancèe and I want to work with you since I´m here in Esteli as a volunteer I work at the library but you know they have a lot of resources so I´m looking for other organizations to work with I can make you a website or a publication and try to raise some money or do anything maybe talk with the women I don´t know but you do can you tell me about what you do?¨

And then I was out of breath. And I did present myself that clumsily, in that single run-on paragraph (my creative writing classmates won´t be surprised) because I knew if I shut up for one second I would forget my Spanish and begin stumbling about while standing still and they would think I was a mess and wouldn´t want me to work with them.

I kind of was a mess, I was so excited, so desperate for someone to explain to me that there is help for abused women here.

When I had said my piece, I held my breath. I had to work with them. I had to do whatever I could to make them money, to reach out to more women, like that woman on the bus, who I should have … should have done something for.

The woman I spoke with, a brilliant and compassionate Lawyer named Rosa, invited me to sit down beside her.

¨We are a women´s help center, working with women who have experienced domestic physical and psychological abuse. We encourage women to leave their abusers and come here to our safe house to get help. We have psychologists, social workers, doctors, lawyers, security personnel, and teachers here for the women. We have group and individual therapy, and a solidarity group made up of former victims of domestic abuse who we have worked with. The women who were formerly abused, and had no self-esteem are now leaders. They aren´t afraid anymore; they go out in teams to the barrios and encourage maltreated women to come here and get help.¨

The office I walked into was the safehouse for the women who had just taken the step to leave their abusers. Rosa explained, ¨They stay there and attend therapy, get medical attention, human warmth and care, the feeling that they aren´t alone in this. And…¨she paused. ¨We keep them on suicide watch. It´s really hard to take this step in Nicaragua. Women often think it´s normal to be abused. They think they deserve it, that it´s their fault. We´re open 24/7 to deal with emergencies at any time. We always have a security team. We don´t hide here, we´re into outreach. I can´t tell you how many drunk abusers have shown up on our doorstep. But their wives don´t even know when they´re here. That´s how protected they are in our safehouse.¨

Acción Ya lawyers have helped many women win divorce cases and custody of their children, so they can begin a new life without abuse.

When a woman is ready to leave the womens center, Acción Ya staff visit the woman and her children in their new home at regular intervals to ensure they are doing well. Acción Ya provides each woman with a micro-credit loan and qualitative support to begin her new, independent life.

ALHAMDULALLAH.

They enthusiastically agrees to let me do their website and work on publications for them. They also invited me to go and talk with the women, and I´d like to take them to the library to show them how to use computers and internet. This is all moving at Nica pace, so we haven´t a schedule yet, but I have faith.

After all, just when I thought I was lost, I found what I was looking for.

Ah! They say if you´ve nothing nice to say, don´t say anything…. but someone has to; the backpackers we encountered this past weekend are way too obnoxious for the world to go on like this.

We went to León for the weekend, the first colonial city in Nicaragua. On our first night we stayed in a quaint family-run hostel, but decided to move elsewhere for the second night, since a drunken relative of the owners showed up around 2am to threaten us and tell us to get out of his sovereign nation… or else.

The owner´s response to the threats was to tell us to lock ourselves in our rooms… not to tell the man, who I will call drunk threatening guy, to leave. I got the idea they dealt with this frequently – perhaps even nightly. “No, we can do nothing, but we know him. You just have to go in your room, go! Ignore him! Go in your room and lock the door! Now!”

Stay out of the Hospedaje Viejo.

So the following day we moseyed over to the Big Foot hostel to see if they had beds. They not only had beds, they had an American college dorm building going on there, complete with irresponsible belligerent gringos not wearing shirts, who were burping loudly and laughing hysterically, and all the girls who were swept off their feet by such behavior. And screaming. Screaming a lot.

Couldn´t you do this at home???

As my friend and fellow volunteer Maddie noted, “We are in a different Nicaragua than these kids” who, upon further inspection, knew nothing about Nicaragua, flaunted their inability to speak Spanish as if they were proud of their ignorance, and dressed like they had been scrounging for garbage in La Chureca – which is, as I understand it, pretty offensive to Nicaraguan people, who take pride in their appearance, no matter how poor they are.

Why would you come to a country you have no real interest in?

I cringe to say it, but I understood the drunk threatening dude from the previous night a bit better after meeting the backpacking crowd. I don´t understand his threats, but I do understand his anger and frustration at some gringos continued exploitation of his country.

The most frustrating part for me was the backpacker´s stated conception of themselves as some sort of counter-culture, a group of kids who were “sticking it to the man” just by being in Central America. It seemed to me like they were a bunch of self-indulgent kids without responsibilities, jobs, any need of income, or any interest or concern for the people who´s country they were in … they went to cockfights for God´s sake! Could one travel any more irresponsibly? Probably, actually, but cockfights are pretty up there on the irresponsibility scale.

Yesterday I started a theater workshop at Esteli´s Municipal Library. I had passed invitations out to children and parents on the street, and posted up a few signs around the city.

However, when you pass people in the street here, they say “Adios,”(goodbye!). And that’s the encounter. There is no hello. What? I just started pushing the invitation into their hands. “Adios! Come to my workshop! Adios!” A few people did actually stop, often because they were suspicious of the bizarre looking gringa following children and handing them invitations. “I was an actress in New York. I want to do a theater workshop at the library. Everyone is invited.”

“I don´t understand.” I would explain again, smiling into the parents narrowed eyes.

“Yes gringa, but why?”

I throttled through a few paragraphs about the richness of Nicaraguan history and culture and how much I have to learn from doing this project with the kids. It seems that, despite Nicaraguans (and especially Estelians) enthusiasm for community-building volunteer work, it is hard for some people to wrap their minds around a gringa coming to Nicaragua to do something good for, not something bad to, the people. Who can blame them?

I explained it as if the theater project was all for my own benefit. Which it is, in part.

My biggest fear was that no one would come. Although at least no one called me jankee.

I passed out roughly 100 invitations and had about twenty kids, but I was pleased with the turnout on the first day. The “taller”(workshop) runs from 9-11 am and then from 2-4 pm since school is half a day, and some students go in the morning and others in the evening. Most of the students who came in the morning came again in the afternoon (turns out they had skipped class that morning, tsk tsk).

The activity on the first day was not ostensibly part of a theater program. I brought dream catcher making kits, and had each of the participants make one and then write (or draw) about their dreams for their own futures, the future of their community, and the future of Nicaragua. It helped that I have a dream catcher tattooed on my back, since that apparently meant that they must be pretty powerful.

It was striking what the kids came up with. “I want to save the environment and beautiful Nicaragua´s natural resources,” one seven-year-old explained. “I want to be a doctor because so many people in Nicaragua are sick and no one helps them,” wrote another. “Well I want to be a teacher so poor people can be doctors if they want,” or “I´m going to be a teacher because learning makes people happy.” One six-year-old said, “I want to be a true Sandinista President.” Whoaaa. He wasn´t even old enough to write that down. The taller was for kids between four and eleven years old.

The purpose of this project was to gain an idea of the issues that are important to the children of Esteli. Their articulation of their hopes and dreams (which is also informative about their struggles and fears) has put us on the track to choose or write a play that deals with these dreams and struggles. Furthermore, it helped me establish rapport with them in a calm setting (ok it wasn´t really that calm) before we jump into theater games, which are hard to do among strangers since you really have to put yourself out there and be pretty silly sometimes.

Above all, the lesson we got through yesterday was that everyone is free to express themselves in the way they want to at this workshop, and there are no wrong answers here. Some of the children had difficulty making the dream catchers, and they were thrilled when I told them they weren´t wrong, they were creative, which is the most valuable thing they could bring to a theater workshop.

I was thrilled when I heard them explaining to each other that they had different dream catchers because they all had different, unique dreams for the future. And the six year-old who wants to be a true Sandinista President announced more than a few times that he was creative. I think he should run on that platform. Nicaragua thrives on creative grassroots approaches to strengthen the national community and quality of life. A Nicaraguan politician who actually adopted creative efforts him or herself, instead of “teaming up” with international financial institutions could, perhaps, carry out a real, unarmed, true Sandinista revolution.

The first one is actually getting over cockroaches the size of my fist.

Two nights ago I was laying in my bed, peacefully reflecting about the day and brainstorming ideas for the theater workshop, which I started yesterday (I´ll get to it). I was listening to what wasn´t but might as well have been Enya (I´ll say it was for the affect) when a dear little thing – ok not so dear or little – fell from the ceiling/sky/only god knows right beside me onto the bed!

And the bed actually shook. I jumped up and promptly threw my book towards the intruder. But I guess these cockroaches are at the top of the insect foodchain and have gotten a bick cocky (pun intended), because he didn´t even flinch. I would have known if he had, these guys are big enough to have faces.

I threw a number of other objects at him, but he wasn´t impressed. I didn´t want to kill it – there´s a difference between a squashed bug and a dead corpse in your bed, and this was the latter.

Finally I turned the mattress upside down and he moved; he hid under my sheets, near the pillow.

Oh God.

I was tempted to run away screaming for help, and then I thought about it for a second and reasoned:

1) That idea is, for many obvious reasons, ridiculous.

2) Flies are more dangerous that cockroaches because they can carry parasites. Cockroaches aren´t harmful. They are just nasty.

3) Cockroaches are SO nasty.

4) OK, I should just get him off my bed and then who cares what he does.

So I threw a tape dispenser. The noise woke up the rest of the house (oops) but the bug who wanted to share my bed was unaffected. I lifted the mattress and shook it as hard as I could. He finally fell on the floor with a THUD and climbed into the tablecloth of my bedside stand.

I pretended I hadn´t seen that and that he was outside.

Project Number One: CHECK. I´m over it.

The next morning my homestay mom asked me if I had slept badly. After the incident, I had actually slept like a log. ¨No, I slept very well thanks.¨

¨Oh. I thought there was an animal in your room last night because I heard you trying to kill something.¨

¨Oh, that was just a cockroach who wanted to share my bed. He wasn´t invited.¨

¨That was all for a cockroach?¨She had a good laugh. ¨I thought it was the animals!¨

Project number two: Getting over animals who make their way into my room (?) that may be more dangerous than cockroaches.

I´ll let you know how it goes.

As in many other things, the success of microfinance depends on the company, according to Roger Lecayo, Carlos Vidal, and Gladys Manzares. And in a world gone mad over microfinance enterprises, many microfinance companies are bound to be less effective, if not less “good-intentioned” than others. And, as Nicaragua’s history proves, this Central American country has been a prime target for those with less than honorable intentions.

When the question of whether or not someone is “worthy” of a micro loan depends on what they have by way of collateral, instead of what they plan to invest in and how much qualitative support they’ll have in managing their loan, it is unlikely that the poor borrowers will be able to repay it, let alone the loan and interest.

So if their collateral was their shack, they lose it.

In the world of mirofinance madness, small loan enterprises have been proliferating faster than mosquitoes in the rainy season. And many of them have just one requirement of their clients: collateral. And their collateral can be anything.

Imagine what that includes.

Be careful in selecting which microfinance companies to support. Many of them offer little more to their clients than a loan, when what capital-less pobres really need to succeed includes guidance on investment, capitalist principles, and planning skills. People who have never had money frequently could use some support in figuring out what to do with it to make it grow. Without such support, it is impossible not to default and lose everything as a result.

Finca is a professional and socially responsible microfinance company. Go to www.villagebanking.org/ to learn what they do, and why their efforts work all over the world.

Zona Franca is the Chureca of Nicaragua’s officially employed. The industrial section of Managua employs children and adults for fifteen hours a day, six days a week. Though the law stipulates that employees are entitled to fifteen days of vacation every six months, prevalent unemployment ensures that factories are never missing an employee. Privatization of electricity and other basic needs, and cyclical unemployment ensure that in the midst of nonexistent safety measures, sexual assault, and other human rights violations of factory employees, business is booming, and laborers don’t complain, even in the tobacco factories, where the use of plastic gloves is prohibited, despite the toxic chemicals employees handle for fifteen hours everyday.

At the tobacco factory, we saw a number of pregnant women standing up and preparing tobacco leaves for cigars. We asked what the protocol is if a pregnant woman becomes sick in this highly toxic environment. “She can just tell us if she is uncomfortable, and we will move her to another assembly line,” the manager said. He did not mention the thousands of Nicaraguans who are lined up to take a job if an employee complains about his or her working conditions, before changing the subject to the fine quality of their produce.

(more…)

Everyday we learn new Nicaraguan Spanish words, and try to unlearn (at least temporarily) a few of those apparently “gringo” words we picked up in Spanish classes in the U.S. The word for “kids” is a good example. I had always used “ninos,” but in the last couple of weeks I’ve picked up some synonyms: chevalos, cumiches, chiguines, cipotes, and most recently, chatel.

Chatel, literally translated as chattel, is a synonym for “kids” in Nicaragua. My Spanish language dictionary defines “chatel” as: an item of personal property that is not freehold and that is not intangible.

This fact is puzzling, not only because it is grim and even sickening, but because the advancement of young Nicaraguans and children’s rights were at the forefront of the values of the Nicaraguan revolution. During their temporary success, the true Sandinistas organized a literacy campaign. By busing privileged Nicaraguans out to the countryside, the Sandinistas were able to bring Nicaragua’s illiteracy rate from 45% in 1981 to 12% in just six months. But in 2008, roughly 50% of Nicaraguans are illiterate.

(more…)

The Masaya Consumer Rights Association (ACODEMA), began its struggle for consumer rights when former President Bolaños traveled to Spain with an aim of privatizing Nicaraguan energy in 2000. Since then, Nicaragua has privatized the distribution of energy, after Bolaños signed a thirty year contract with Unión Fenosa, a Spanish company that has repeatedly violated its contract, Nicaraguan laws, and the rights of the Nicaraguan people. According to ACODEMA, a non-governmental, non-profit organization run by and for the people, the private company Unión Fenosa has not invested much, but they have taken much.

Unión Fenosa has a reputation in Nicaragua for shutting off electricity without warning, and claiming they did so because a community that doesn’t even have street lights did not pay the electric bill for their streetlights, etc.

ACODEMA recently proved that, when Unión Fenosa distributed new electricity use meters, they were rigged. Poor Nicaraguans were charged 50% more than they had before the new meters were installed, though their electricity consumption had not changed. ACODEMA’s public outcry resulted in a recall of the new, “improved” meters.
(more…)

As our knowledge of the Nicaraguan experience has expanded, it has become clear that the preliminary Lonely Planet history I provided will simply not suffice as a contextual background for my intents and purposes. So, I’ve included the following to fill in some of the more bitter parts of Nicaragua’s history and her present struggles. Much of this information comes from a lecture by Lillian Hall, our ProNica facilitator. She moved to Nicaragua in 1984 during the post-revolution, U.S.-financed Contra war, and got up close and personal with the combat zones: “I needed to be where the war was, to see what our government was doing with our tax dollars,” she explains.

Ms. Hall traveled to Nicaragua for the first time as a college student in 1982. She describes this as the “honeymoon period” after the revolution, when the population was full of the excitement that comes from building a new society that would, for the first time in Nicaragua, govern for the poor majority instead of the rich minority, with heath care, land reform, literacy, and education as its principle values. Sandinistas had fought a revolution against the vastly rich dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and his heavily armed, U.S. supported National Guard, and they fought with pistols, dysfunctional rifles, molotov cocktails, and stones. One Sandinista said:

“If we were being logical, we never would have thought we could do it. But we weren’t logical; we were dreaming. But we allowed ourselves to dream. And we did it.”
(more…)

To donate to projects in Nicaragua that make a difference, go to pronica.org and support one of their many projects they sponsor that makes a difference in an issue you care about. You can earmark your donation, with a guarantee that your stipulations will be honored.

To enable other students to participate in international solidarity and aid work, go to haverford.edu/cpgc and contact the center.