X-Street Children in Nicaragua

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.

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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.
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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.”
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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.

I got a tattoo of a dream catcher before I graduated from high school. Aside from trying to be cool, it was an attempt to bind myself to the idealistic dreams I had about my potential contributions to the world- and a reminder for myself of the dreams and ideals I had as a naive 17 year-old who had never been outside the comforts of the world’s richest countries. Somehow, I knew it would be hard to remain as hopeful and energetic after actually attempting to change the world. Maybe the inkling came from seeing the spirit of the adults of the 21st century after many of them were done with the spirit of the sixties.

I was right. I’ve worked at non-profit organizations in post-conflict areas of extremely poor countries in the past, and learned some things that – in particularly frustrating moments – I think I would have rather not learned: that one can have all the good ill in the world, but it takes a lot more than good intentions to overcome the tendencies of the “New World Order” that has left most of the people in the world behind. And, after facing some of the obstacles in the way of poverty alleviation: politics, corporate media, instability, cynicism, hopelessness, and poverty itself- a year after I got my symbolic dream catcher tattoo, I was glad I’d gotten it… I already felt like a part of my idealistic spirit had died.

Then, last Sunday, I arrived in Esteli. (more…)

“It is difficult,” our Spanish teacher said, “Difficult to be here.”

We were in the Galeria de Heroes y Martires (The Gallery of Heroes & Martyrs): Maddie, Jane, Janique, Katrina, Maddie, Christina, Laurel, and I. The museum is a tribute to those valiant and selfless men and women who fell during the decades of the Nicaraguan revolution.

“It is difficult, because we remember their faces.”

She seemed as if she were about to cry, and I looked away. The walls were covered with photos of the faces of which she spoke, with a name, a date, and a place, as the caption… except for “los desaparecidos,” whose names and faces lacked any further caption. “Los desaparecidos” in Nicaragua refers to those revolutionaries who went to the mountains in the northern city of Esteli to join the revolution and never came back – not even their bodies. One can only guess- or try not to guess- what happened to them.

According to our Spanish teacher, many of these were kidnapped by the National Guard, and thrown from helicopters. Those men and women died alone, on an unknown day, in an unknown place… somewhere over Nicaragua, or Honduras perhaps. Their photographs, up on the wall of the Galeria, serves as their grave site, where their mothers go to grieve, and to remember.

Our homestay mother this first week, and a mother of a fallen revolutionary, Dona Guillermina Meza, opened the Galeria in the early 1980′s, for the community, and especially for the mothers who lost their children in the revolution. Many of these mothers granted their children’s firearms and clothing to the museum, and wrote out their stories (if they knew it) so Nicaraguans would never take their post-Somoza, post-Contra, post-Aleman political system for granted.

At a luncheon for the mothers of the martyrs a few days later (on Nicaraguan Mother’s Day), one woman hugged me tightly and whispered in my ear, “I’m so happy you’re here. I haven’t spent Mother’s Day with children in over 20 years.”

When she loosened her embrace, we introduced ourselves.

Before I begin this blog, a brief history of Nicaragua is necessary to contextualize the country in which I am working. The following was excerpted from the Nicaraguan section of the Lonely Planet Guidebook to Nicaragua and Esteli.

(Paige R. Penland, Gary Chandler, Liza Prado. Nicaragua and El Salvador. Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd. 2006. 55-58).

Nicaragua won independence from Spain in 1821, and the resulting power vacuum led to a civil war. In 1852 the conservatives took power for 30 years of peace, if not prosperity. For the next two decades the USA dominated politics in Nicaragua. In 1914 the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty was signed, granting the USA exclusive rights to a canal it had no intention of building, just to shut out the competition. The occupations casual brutality- torture, political killings, dragging the bodies of dead rebels through the city streets- inspired one teenage boy, Augusto C. Sandino.

The liberals mounted a noble, if ineffective, resistance to the US occupation, which wilted completely in the 1920′s. But Sandino- by now a commander of his own personal army- continued fighting. The US trained the Nicaraguan National Guard under the command of loyal bureaucrat Anastasio Somoza Garcia.

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