Lundgren Family Nicaragua Update # 12 - Redemption Songs, Baptism by Piñata, Gone with the Wind

Redemption Songs, Baptism by Piñata, Gone with the Wind During the wet season, the Nicaraguan sky dumped buckets of water on us, almost daily. And frequent lightning storms meant that a good deal of time, we were without both electricity and running water. January has brought more stability on the electrical front (we generally have power these days) but perhaps the heavy winds, a broken water pipe, or some other variable – it can be annoying not knowing WHICH variable – has resulted in us operating without water for the majority of the time since Christmas. When the water does begin to sputter on – usually between 5-7am - we move into ‘water capture’ mode, filling our three, 5-gallon containers as quickly as possible. That way, we can at least wash dishes, have access to drinking water, and in a pinch, take a much-needed bucket shower after a sweaty, dusty, game of soccer. Living without reliable, constant, effortless access to water is hard. Without water, you actually can’t make (gulp) coffee in the morning (egads!). Without water, it’s really hard to ‘dry-wash’ your clothes. It’s harder to swallow an allergy pill with only your saliva. Without water, you can’t wash the vegetables that are part of your dinner plans. But we’re learning a lesson: take extra care of the resources you have, because they may not always be there. It’s actually a good lesson for all things, not just natural resources like water. Take good care of your family, your friends, your health, your ‘things’. Value and treasure them, always. A couple Sunday nights back we held one of our monthly movie nights at the house. We told neighbors and friends beforehand and prepped per usual by buying a boatload of soda and making copious amounts of popcorn. Sunday’s movie night was a bit more hectic than others. Olle was sick, like really sick, vomiting and not keeping anything down, since the night before. Miriam had stayed at our house with Olle prior to the 6pm scheduled showing while a sundry group of ten others, including Larry, our neighbor who has already become a soccer legend in our minds due to his uncanny ability to fake opponents out of their pants, threw water on the dusty pitch prior to kickoff to minimize the anticipated levels of dust that would rise from the ground with every kick. Not ten minutes into the game, Nestor, playing barefoot as usual, stepped on a sharp rock, opening up a gaping wound near his toe (subsequently cleaned and bandaged in no time by a sprinting, hydrogen-peroxide, triple anti-biotic toting Miriam) and ending his playing time for the day. We all returned home and began shuffling chairs, pouring soda, popping final batches of corn, and waiting for our first showing of Star Wars in Spanish. Technical difficulties meant the movie started late, giving us time to greet guests while intermittently checking on Olle, sequestered in Miriam and Cully’s room and armed with his own blue-ray player and a barf bowl to boot. About 7:00 pm, Yader and his sister Jessica showed up on a motorcycle, transporting freshly made salad, repochetas (fried, yummy, cheese-filled tortillas) and re-fried beans lovingly made for us by their mother, Mayra. They were carrying a box containing two, loudly chirping baby chicks, Yader helping to fulfill Olle’s Christmas wish only two weeks tardy. The chicks, one black and one striped white, have since been named ‘Pagi’ and ‘Malam”, morning and night in Indonesian (we know, strange….). There was a lot going on during movie night, what with storm troopers yelling ‘adelante’ and Chewbacca being the only one who sounded the same in English and Spanish, and it was such a great example of Olle’s generosity of spirit that even in his diminished state he peeped his head out of the room to profusely thank Yader for the pollitos. Miriam and Cully finally have a new bed. After multiple sleep-deprived nights, we finally broke down and ordered a custom-made, hardwood bed, made lovingly by Yader’s dad, also named Yader. Our old bed (which was never ours to begin with but our neighbor Belkies bed) now sits in our kitchen until we can find a new home for it, precariously perched on the brick wall and once falling on our rabbit while sweeping, nearly flattening poor Rainer. The new bed has an absolutely gorgeous, hand-carved frame, and for really a song (about $100) we procured it with only 1 ½ weeks lead time, delivered to our house one afternoon while Miriam’s parents were still here, by pony express. It truly is beautiful, but unfortunately it hasn’t yet proven to be nearly as comfortable as it looks. Next stop – mattress store! Over the past four plus months, our friend Fernando has already shown us his many talents, most of them artistic in nature. First hand-carved and delicately inscribed bowls made of a local fruit called jicaro showed up in two separate installments, followed in short order by a delivery of homemade red, green, gold and silver Christmas ornaments. Two weeks back he showed up with three original paintings, all lovingly carved on the same pale-red roof tiles that beautify many of the our neighbors roofs, at least those that aren’t made of the omnipresent corrugated metal that burns under the noon sun and produces a furious, almost enraged clamor during a rainstorm. Two dolphins soar toward the water’s surface in the painting that hangs near our kitchen. Near Miriam’s garden hang’s an African Elephant, standing majestically in the fading light of the savannah. And in our kitchen, next to our window that overlooks our front yard, sits a lighthouse on a peninsula, surrounded by what looks like the choppy, salty, and yet somehow comforting, wild ocean of the Atlantic. Perhaps unknowingly, or more likely with a profound understanding, Fernando has in his own, quiet way given us a deeper sense of place, reminding us of the home we left behind, and the home we have here. A mystery has been solved. For the past couple months, our rabbit Rainer, a girl, has been getting increasingly frisky with our cat dulce, also a girl. Perhaps keeping such as prolific reproducer alone in the kitchen, at times with only an equally frisky cat, is not the best play, but Rainer generally loves the kitchen. She sleeps and spends most of her day there, munching on weeds, cabbages, and carrots, only wanting to get out every morning for a quick look around and a pee. But we have happened upon Rainer and Dulce, underneath our stove or in a corner, taking turns swatting at, sitting atop and jumping on each other, with Rainer often having the upperhand. Our friend Erickson, the same guy who gifted us Rainer during a downpour two months back, and also generally understood to be the local rabbit whisperer, solved a part of the mystery. Rainer is in fact a boy, Erickson recently declared while showing Miriam the goods, his initial diagnosis in error only because of the rabbit’s young, immature age at the time. We now have at least part of the answer to our increasingly perplexing query, ‘Why is our rabbit humping our cat?” But still, as Harlan astutely recently pointed out, ‘Why is our rabbit humping our cat?’ Good Day, Bad Day. We all have good days and bad days, no matter where we live. Here are two examples from our life here in Nicaragua: Good Day: We wake up early after a restful night, the distant sound of roosters mingling gently in the air with the soft bellow of cows and the occasional far off bark of a dog. Miriam and Cully take forty-five blessed minutes to exercise on our patio under our thatched roof, the soft wind caressing our skin as we stretch to meet the day, armed with plentiful and delicious Nicaraguan coffee. At times we are joined by our cat Dulce (often jumping on Cully’s lap), Rainer the Bunny (sniffing our toes and keeping a close watch out for dogs) and now our two baby chicks, who snuggle near us for warmth. The sun rises over the mostly fallow corn field, and Olle and Harlan wake up in good spirits. We have a lovely family breakfast of scrambled eggs, bread, and fresh grapefruit we picked off the branch just yesterday, blended with great conversation, a gift of connection for our family that this year has brought. The school day goes really well, and the boys find a way to concentrate and learn, in spite of the challenges. After school we have a meeting with our neighbor and excellent friend Adilsa and a group of students to whom we (you) are helping provide scholarships. Their smiles of gratitude warm our hearts. We then pick corn with the family in the nearby field, filling sack after sack. We feel good, because we know that corn is used to make just about everything and that this corn will surely not go to waste. We have a soccer game with the whole family in Don Lionel’s yard. We laugh, play hard, and get really dirty. Harlan and Olle find more time to play with Rachel and Leo, and then after showering (we have water!!) we eat a delicious meal of rice and beans, or maybe a special and anticipated offering of pasta – with chicken. Several neighbors stop by during the evening, bringing more food but more just sharing of themselves. We speak in Spanish, and on this day the flow of conversation makes us feel like we really know what we are talking about. We fall asleep after relaxing to a part of some really good movie, our room clear of bugs, our bellies full, and our hearts content. We are doing it! Living together as a family in a Nicaraguan village, learning, sharing, and feeling grateful for the experience. Bad Day: The wind has howled all night, sounding and feeling like an out of control locomotive, threatening to fling our roof into the nearby cornfield, uprooting leftover mud in our gutter from the wet season and depositing it on our floor, thus making any midnight, blind walks from our bed to our pee bucket that much more perilous. Needless to say we don’t sleep much this night. Upon waking, we are greeted by a mid-sized tarantula on the floor outside our room. We rush to kill it, and then fumble to unlock the kitchen door, dodging bunny poops in the dark and finally finding the tissues; we both have really bad allergies. The constant sneezing and coughing make it hard to focus, or taste the coffee, and Harlan and Olle also wake up dreary-eyed, coughing and sneezing. Our physical disorders are accompanied for some reason this morning by a longing for home, for friends and family, and for a cozy place where the weather cannot find you. School sucks this day, with lots of outbursts, frustrations, and seemingly little learning. School sucks partly because the wind continues to blow all morning, powerful gusts hurling palm leaves and dust (polvo in Spanish, also known locally as ‘yellow snow’) all over our porch and into our rooms. After school, we try to eat beans and rice but the beans Miriam cooked two days before have since gone bad due to a day without electricity. The dirty clothes are piling up but we have no water so the mound continues to grow. Harlan and Olle are bored out of their minds in the afternoon, and they pass the time by making a trip to the local venta, where they purchase a local sweet drink known as a yuppi (wicked sweet with a ton of sugar). Olle comes back almost in tears as he stepped on a big biting ant hill unknowingly while making one of several barbed-wire fence crossings. The wind continues to blow, at times forcing huge waves of smoke from a nearby garbage fire through our entire house. The chicks are cute but insist on walking on our patio where they leave fresh poops wherever they go. By evening we have had enough but the dust prevents us from running as a stress-reliever in the nearby field without having huge coughing fits. We still have no water by dinner and so can’t shower, and damn it would feel good to scrub those four layers of dust off. Harlan starts coming down with a stomach bug after dinner, on top of his cold, and the boys go to bed tired and not at all happy to be here. We fall asleep a few hours later, covered in dust, wondering why we are here and praying to God that tomorrow will be a brighter day. As we doze off, the power suddenly comes on, and the lights that we unintentionally left on while we had electricity wake the boys up, ensuring that we are all in for a long, sleepless night. Somewhere in the distance, a rooster crows….. Olle has given us all a gift. Every animal that we either currently have or have come into contact with has come to us based on Olle’s desire and dogged determination to get an animal. First it was Dulce the cat, who was originally Don Lionel’s kitten. Don Lionel must have seen the way Olle cared for, held, and caressed the cat (a type of love and affection for animals that is rarely seen here) and he gifted the cat to Olle, despite that meaning that he wouldn’t have a future mouse hunter under his roof. Next came Rainer the rabbit, and our friend Erickson must have seen the way Olle held and stroked the soft bunny, understanding that he would provide it with a good home and love. Owie the Owl was with us for only a short time (6 days), but it was Olle who wanted to care for and nurture the sick, injured bird back to health, despite the odds. Finally came Pagi and Malam the baby chicks, our friend Yader clearing understanding that the smile they brought to Olle, who chased them incessantly as he tried to catch them at Yaders house one night, was one that could not be ignored but rather needed to be rewarded. Initiating a mini-farm at our house was not our original intention, and at times having animals in this environment can be irritating (lots of rabbit pee and chicken poop to scoop off our patio or from our kitchen floor, mouse entrails and half lizards greeting us in the morning, loud meowing and soon possibly cock-a-doodle-dooing) but in the end they have brought us a little piece of joy. It feels good to cuddle with a rabbit on a rainy night, or listen to the purrr of a cat on your lap, or to just watch as a baby chick chirps as she pecks at things to learn new about the world around her. Thanks for the animals, Olle! UPDATE: Catching baby chicks is not easy. Miriam and Cully now have a new ritual, chasing Pagi and Malam around our patio every night in order to put them to sleep in our kitchen, chicken hutch. They are incredibly fast, and only by a concerted team effort involving lots of yelling directions and multiple errant, unsuccessful dives (we feel kind of like border collies herding sheep) do we finally get them to bed. The Fiesta Patronal, or Party of the Saints, happens in El Tololar every year on the second weekend of January. It is a big deal, and from what we can tell one of the biggest community events of the year. Last week we had the opportunity to attend several events associated with the day, arriving Saturday evening to the Catholic Church with a small group of family and friends just in time to see the Virgin Mary knock her head on the doorway as the 10 young men and women carrying her attempted to squeeze she and her entire float through the church entrance. We entered to a church rocking to various music styles that somehow fit despite their lack of congruence. Rapidly shifting from zydeco to polka to R + B sounding music, we swayed and lifted our hands with the rest of the congregation, largely failing at hearing many actual words except for the extortion, in Spanish, to ‘stomp on the head of the devil’, which we did with relish (and ketchup). It was part square-dancing, part old-school evangelical (although a Catholic Ceremony) tent revival, and part sermon, all led by a singing, stomping, sweating and enthusiastic Father (Sacerdote in Spanish). Upon leaving the sanctuary, before us lay a traveling carnival. Their were four rides, none of which would likely have passed any safety standards in the USA, especially the high speed ‘swing’ that Harlan and Olle tried once, whipping you around and around at higher and higher angles, threatening to either launch you towards the church or the health clinic, or into the crowd of onlooking spectators. Perhaps the most aptly named amusement was ‘El Titanic”, a scary looking boat-esque ride that truly looked like it might sink at any moment. Adilsa’s dog had followed us from her house as usual, succeeding in being the only animal to actually gain admission into the service. There were tons of dogs outside later at the carnival, however, and we remarked that the only reason they didn’t actually attend the service was because they were likely Baptist, not Catholic dogs:) Redemption and Forgiveness in action: We saw some last week, and hope to see more soon. The forgiveness happened really as a result of Adilsa and Wilmar. They were in the process of identifying the best candidates for the scholarships that you are helping us to provide to two university students and five high school students this year. They were narrowing down the list, and we came to the name of a young man who had spent many afternoons at our house playing with Olle and Harlan when we first arrived. We’ll call him Jorge. Jorge and his sister didn’t speak much English, but they had been so interested in us, spending whole afternoons at our house, chatting, playing with the boys, and generally just providing pleasant company. One afternoon, after a game of soccer, we came back to our house to find Cully’s phone gone missing. After a day or two of inquiries, we came to find out that in fact Jorge had taken it, telling his friends that it was a gift to him from the ‘gringo’. We were mad at first, but when we saw his name on the scholarship students list that Adilsa and Wilmar presented, we changed our tune. The incident also provided us the opportunity as a family to discuss on a deeper level about what forgiveness really means, and why is it so hard to actuate. When someone has wronged you, our first thought is often revenge, or anger, or hatred. But the act of forgiving someone, often only possible supernaturally, is so simple yet so hard. It can not only literally lift a weight off our shoulders, but we can play a part in redeeming another, and likewise lighten their load, instantaneously. Jorge and his family don’t have much at all in the way of material things. In fact, they are likely one of the poorer families in El Tololar. Yet Jorge is a really bright student at school, and he, like everyone, deserves a second chance. Redemption and forgiveness. Thank you for helping, from afar, to redeem and forgive. Part of learning about another culture is to experience as many cultural events as possible. Thus since we have been here we have attended multiple church services, gone with our family to the cemetery on the Day of the Dead, sang and walked our way through Tololar during the Griteria Festival on December 7th, attended a Quinceañera (15th birthday party for local girls, a really big deal), spent a rocking Christmas with local family and friends, and now also attended a post-baptism (bautizo) party. The Bautizo took place at the home of Mariano, one of the two local bus drivers we have become friendly with here in Tololar. We received an invite the week before, delivered via motorcycle by his grandson. Our intention was to arrive on ‘Nica Time’, in other words late, and we sauntered up the dirt driveway to the house a solid 25 minutes later than the 3:30 scheduled start. Clearly we weren’t Nica enough as we were still some of the first to arrive. We spent the next hour or more just sitting and watching families slowly saunter in, with the festivities finally getting going about 5:00pm. The main event came first, which was of course the piñata smashing. They had 2 piñatas, the first lasting only up until the fourth child took a solid, candy-inducing whack. The second one lasted much longer, starting out as a cute white dog with a green hat. Multiple kids took their turn (we think Harlan and Olle were just too old as the average whacker was about 5 or 6) and by the time they had gone around the circle of chairs, the poor doggy was hanging there, legless, multiple holes in his sides and head, and apparently still with a cavity of candy in him, as they kept whacking despite his sorry state. After the piñatas came food (plates of rice, bread and chicken that took a solid 45 minutes to deliver to the 200 odd guests), then soda, then ice cream, then goodie bags for the kids. THEN we went from the post-baptism party to our friend Yader’s 20th Birthday hoedown, which basically just consisted of a large table set in his front patio, reserved for our family. Multiple plates of foods and soda were delivered to us, the Lundgren Family somehow becoming the honored guests (that’s rural Nicaraguan hospitality for you) at someone else’s birthday party. As we have done now on multiple occasions, we ambled home, full to the brim with food and with thankfulness for the incredible kindness that is constantly being heaped upon us.