To give an insight into the mind of an eleven year-old, Harlan gave us permission to include a couple short excerpts from his diary since we’ve been here:
“The days are slowly blowing together, but it feels so slow. It feels like we’re two months in but we haven’t even been here for a month. As each day goes by I miss people more and more. To think they are doing the first year of Middle School without me…...”
“I stand in the middle of a field and look up and say the clouds and the sky look similar in the United States. I have so many reminders of the United States; everything. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad.”
“I could write for a hundred years just to give you a taste of what I am thinking and feeling, and how hard it is to be here, but the bottom line is I really want to be home.”
“We go to the city once a week. It is small but it is like a small, 5-hour break from El Tololar. Sometimes we have a special American meal too, but we always have to go back to Tololar. It is fun.”
“Costa Rica vacation is coming up soon. It is going to be fun but the problem is waiting to get there. I hate weekends here. I know it sounds weird but there is nothing to do on weekends, nothing.”
People and places are like onions and icebergs, always much deeper and more layered when you dig, and dive and peel into lives. A recent conversation with our friend Wilmar provided one such onion-iceberg moment. In previous updates, we’ve told about the social and economic challenges that are the reality for smallholder farming communities like El Tololar. But there is a much larger macro-economic story going on in places like Nicaragua and our little village that has a human face, and goes by many names like Nestor, Oscar, Paula, Franklin and Fernando. This story is very personal, and it impacts just about everyone who lives here. It’s kind of like a mosquito, sucking life instead of giving it, conveying viruses instead of opportunities. Every story is a little different, but allow us to share one from Wilmar’s perspective. He’s twenty-nine years old, and his collective experience is as illustrative as any, a mix of dashed dreams, loss, happiness and contentment, possibilities blocked by the realities of life here, complacency and perseverance, always perseverance.
The winding conversation with Wilmar, on his front stoop, but underneath one of the three types of lemon trees in his yard, began with him sharing his desire to start a small, computer repair shop. Wilmar actually went to college and studied law for several years but had to drop out due to a lack of funds. During that time he was married to Mariella, had a beautiful daughter named Rachel, and lost a son during childbirth. He currently lives in a home on the family property near our house. Mariella works in Managua (a minimum 3-hour commute away) seven days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day at a giant retail store. She gets paid very little, but it’s a job. Normally, Mariella and Rachel are in Managua for two-week stretches and then come here to Tololar every other weekend. It’s a tough life for their little family.
If the economics of life here were different, it’s possible that Wilmar, like other young men in the campo (village), would have become a farmer. And had he come of age a few decades earlier, he might have been able to make a real go of it. At that time, current President Daniel Ortega (re-elected two days before the US elections in a landslide victory that was hailed locally as being free and fair – cue the huge wink, wink here) had just come to power as the head of the Sandinistas, who many readers will recall in connection with names like Oliver North, Iran, and Contras. In short, during the 1980s the US used funds from the sale of arms to Iran to secretly funnel money to the Contra Rebels, fighting against Ortega’s Sandinistas. Like other socialist movements across Latin America and the world, the US feared a domino-effect of leaders like Ortega and Castro coming to power and took great efforts to support opposing rebel groups like the Contras. If you were a young man like Wilmar living in a rural Nicaraguan village in the 1980s, though, Ortega and the Sandinistas symbolized hope. They had overthrown the previous brutal dictatorship of the Somoza family, which lasted from 1937-1979. According to Wilmar, in the early years the Sandinistas delivered on their promises, providing land, tools and economic opportunities to impoverished rural families. But the party didn’t last long, and Ortega and others soon began taking for themselves what they had promised to give to the people. Back to the wink-wink from above, despite Ortega’s recent “landslide” victory with some 72% of the vote and legitimized by international observers, few people in Tololar, if speaking on condition of anonymity, would have anything good to say about the current government.
For Wilmar and others, there have been moments of hope, times when things were looking up. Like the time several years back when Elio, our new Cuban friend who married a local woman and has lived here for twelve years, tried to start a local producer group of farmers who could use strength in numbers to buy a tractor and obtain bank investment. But because the bank would only provide a loan with a 24% interest rate at best, they lost money and ended up worse off than before. Another time they had a bumper crop of yucca, one of the best ever. But so did many others, and the market price was so low that they couldn’t make any profit. Compounding the challenges were basic things like transportation: their land was far away and they couldn’t afford to buy or even rent a truck to haul the yucca to market. And they didn’t have a tractor. Economies everywhere and anywhere need to have at least a few key elements in place in order to foster real opportunity; supportive government, access to investment, suitable infrastructure for moving goods, technological advancement, realistic tax rates, etc. The proper mix and inputs depends on your perspective and personal ideology, but with Nicaragua remaining the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, clearly something is not going right.
So what happens when there is no economic opportunity in a place like Nicaragua? Young people do one of four things. 1) They continue to try and farm, even when the deck is increasingly stacked against them. 2) They leave their families and move to another country like Costa Rica or Guatemala (moving to the US is the gold standard but beyond most people’s imagination) searching for employment 3) They join the military, a hard life to be sure but providing some sense of security, for a time. 4) They get a job with one of the big, local international companies like Yazaki. Some 10,000 people in the area work for Yazaki alone, which makes navigation systems for cars. There they work long hours for little pay, and usually only because they feel it is their only option. The fifth alternative is to have a little imagination, some skills and a little training (Wilmar has taken a computer repair class and is really good at fixing things), a bit of fortune, and a little outside help. Then you can consider starting a computer repair shop, like Wilmar. He dreams of using his hands to fix hard drives, motherboards, and microchips. And he dreams of living together with his wife and daughter, and investing in his entire, extended family with the profit from his business. One of our projects here in Tololar is to support Wilmar’s dream with an initial investment to help him get going, one computer at a time.
Colds, diseases and injuries are always a bummer. Here they take on a new meaning because it seems like in the eleven weeks since we’ve arrived, one or more of us, at one time or another, have been sick or injured. The few moments of sobriety from sickness have been filled with other discomforts, not huge inconveniences but big enough to make you say, “you got to be kidding me!” Exhaustive sickness and injury list to date: diarrhea (of course), general stomach pains, vomiting, fevers, sore throats, eye and ear infections, bruised ribs, twisted knees, strange rashes, assorted cuts, scrapes and bites, migraine headaches, and bouts of constipation. List of uncomfortable things that are really just darned annoying at times: creepy crawlys, never-ending gnats, flies on food, tarantulas in room, shower scorpions, biting ants (literally, it is hard to have a conversation, not on concrete, brick or tile, that doesn’t include at least one of the participants lifting there leg, dancing or swatting wildly, and saying something like “ahh, yah, ouch, damn, or during the all-too common multiple bite sessions, you little _ _ _ _ _ _”), multi-day power outages and the ensuing sour frijoles or pineapple, no running water for days at a time, volcanic-soil charged thunder and lightning storms, more dirt five minutes after you’ve swept, semi-feral dogs attempting to eat your rabbit, poopy rain, rainy poop, cockroaches in latrines at night, and going to bed smelly due to having no water.
On November, 5th, the weather changed. Political pundits in the USA would say it changed on November 8th, but here in El Tololar, it changed on the morning of November 5th. We arrived during the rainy season and our first two months were mostly about rain. People told us that the official winter (invierno) would end in early November and we would enter six months of the dry season, summer (verano). There is a scene in the movie Mary Poppins where the weather changes in a moment, the weathervane on the top of the captain’s house shifts 180 degrees and a new season starts. In El Tololar, on November 5th, we woke and it was cool. It was dry. It was summer. We may not see a rain drop again until May.
Our whole family took a walk last week with our neighbor Adilsa to her school. She is the librarian, and also one of the school administrators. She is also a truly amazing person. She introduced us to each class, most kids giggling and quite fascinated, especially with Harlan and Olle. We were a bit confused when several third-grade students, when asked where they thought we were from, indicated Spain. Clearly there was something missing as we KNOW our Spanish has a long way to go. Being at the school felt really good. Harlan and Olle met a lot of kids their age, and had a chance to play kickball with their new friends. Miriam and Cully spent time helping Adilsa categorize books, assigning a # to each, kind of Dewey-Decimal style. Summer break starts soon here but until the upcoming vacation and again starting in February, our goal is to go to the school once or twice a week. Harlan and Olle will attend school those days, and Cully and Miriam will teach English. Those of us who are native English speakers often take for granted the gift we’ve been given, just to know the language. When we asked the sixth grade class for a show of hands of who wanted to learn English, every single hand shot up. We look forward to sharing this gift in Tololar in the coming months.
During a rainstorm, never hold an important meeting when the following elements are present: 1) a tin roof 2) a relatively unfamiliar language 3) a local guy with a particularly strong accent that is exceptionally hard to understand. The combination above, we found out, can result in the head of a local agriculture cooperative leaving a meeting with the strong feeling that in the near future you will both be assisting him to get a visa to the USA and personally financing a one-million dollar yucca processing manufacturing plant. It is now our job to attempt to clarify our actual intent to the cooperative’s president, conveying the notion that our collecitve nods of approval were meant to impart understanding and a listening ear, not that the Lundgren family would forevermore be the cooperative’s benefactors, as much as we would like to if we could:)
“Honey, should I take the termites out of the freezer so they can thaw?” This was the question Cully posed to Miriam two nights ago, just before bedtime. The seed for the query was planted earlier in the day by a 5th-grade student named Grainer. He had interrupted a lively conversation taking place in the school library where Adilsa works when he entered, followed closely by four friends, with a partially maimed but still rambunctious owl. Grainer began gesticulating loudly and explaining that he had come across the cocoroca (Nicaraguan name for one of several types of owls) earlier in the morning in a field near his house. His assessment was that it had been hit by a hulera (sling shot) and judging by his (the owl’s) one-eye scowl and inability to open his mouth, a rock to the face was indeed a solid appraisal of his current status. Adilsa managed to coax the owl first onto her shoulder (and away from five screaming boys who were tormenting the poor fella) and subsequently onto Miriam’s. Olle, who loves animals and is really the reason we now have a cat, rabbit AND Owl, offered his shoulder as another option and there Ow-ey ( again, Olle’s work) remained for the rest of the morning. We soon came to understand that in fact Ow-ey was a gift from Grainer, who seemed grateful to be relieved of the responsibility of trying to feed a partially blind owl who would not eat.
We took the dirt road home that we figured would have less barking dogs on it with Ow-ey on Olle’s shoulder, hiding his head from the noon sun under Olle’s sombrero while intermittently digging his talons into his skin in order to keep from falling off in his weakened state. We arrived home and headed straight to the local store, as we had received a tip that the proprietor’s daughter was a veterinarian in training. Taking a short cut to avoid two large bulls that were yoked together and standing in the middle of the road, each’s opposite movements ensuring that they remained smack in the middle with no room to pass, we arrived at the store to find that the daughter was not home but that would could try back later. We returned home at a bit of a loss as to what our plan of attack should be and were lucky to find that our friend Marden had just stopped by to say hi. Marden works as a tour guide, often taking guests up the nearby Cerro Negro (black volcano) to surf down on homemade sand boards, and is very handy with exotic and wild animals, previously having shown us pictures of him holding snakes, monkeys, and anteaters he had come across on his trips. Marden immediately took over, diagnosing the owl, cleaning out the wound on his beak and disinfecting his bad eye, which by now was covered in hundreds of gnats. It was when the question of food came up that things got interesting for some, for others downright gross.
Ow-ey could barely open his mouth and with only one good eye we knew he wasn’t yet ready to hunt. Marden suggested termites, and Adilsa seemed sure that gusanos (worms) would do the trick. Upon request, Wilmar was more than happy to share his termite (locally known as comehen) mound with us. Marden cracked off the top, revealing thousands of white squirmy guys, which he assured us did not bite, proving it by eating five or six himself. We captured a small bowl full, the hundreds that spilled being quickly eaten by 10 or 15 chickens. We found a few worms in the ears of corn Don Lionel picked for us, and were ready to go. Our new ritual, roughly four times a day until Ow-ey improves enough to be set free, involves Miriam holding Ow-ey (while he digs his claws into her hand) while Cully carefully places partially-thawed termites in his mouth, washing them down with a splash of water. “Yes, honey, please thaw the termites...”
Corn is being cut across Nicaragua, and that means that the stalks near our home will soon come down, changing the vista from our front patio substantially. It will no longer have that eary :) feel, but again, as when we first arrived here and the corn was still nascent, Don Lionel’s horses will come into view where the corn once stood. We will be able to see Esteban’s house, along with cows, bulls, chickens and dogs, through the Eucalyptus trees. We will also eat a lot, we mean a lot, of corn. Miriam had the chance last week to take part in an eleven-step process that is an annual event in homes across Nicaragua, making tamales dulce (sweet tamales). Tamale-making includes, among other steps, picking the elotes (fresh ears of corn), de-husking then cutting the kernels off, grinding into a paste and adding sugar, cinnamon, and local cheese for the special sweet sauce, mixing the rest of the paste and wrapping inside the corn husks, boiling in the fire for an hour...and eating. Delicious, but because these specific tamales can only be made with corn when it is soft and young, they come hot and heavy for a time. We’ve eaten a lot in the past week or so, a new sweet treat, made by different neighbors, arriving at our doorstep daily and sometimes hourly.
Sweet tamales are not the only syrupy treat here in Nicaragua. Somedays we find ourselves reaching a point of sweetness overload, at least that was the case last week. We had Nacatamales for breakfast (not sweet but really rich). These were followed up by successive servings of dulce tamales, arriving in quick order by two separate neighbors. Not long after, we were served sweet, homemade fruit juice at the home of our friend Ivania; ice-cold and delicious, but very sugary. On our walk home, we ran into Fernando and Jessica, whose mother whipped up a fresh batch of banana con leche – another delectable drink but again, really sweet. We were so grateful for the hospitality and generosity, but by that point we were done, kaput, shut-off. And in front of us, with bellies full, we had to be our best for our weekly Sunday afternoon soccer game at Don Lionel’s, which has become quite an affair. Amazingly, despite the sugar high, or possibly because of it, we all played pretty well, a relative term as some of the local, bare-foot soccer players are legit amazing!
Last Friday, through a series of events, Miriam, Cully, Harlan and Olle found themselves at the front of the auditorium at Lechecuago Secondary School, preparing to judge the school’s first ever English Karaoke singing contest, along with a local judge named Carlos. Lechecuago’s English teacher, Isidro, was understandably nervous with all the things that could go wrong, but ended up fulfilling his MC duties perfectly and with panache. The competition’s five song entries included “My heart will go on”, by Celine Deon and “Baby can I hold you tonight”, by Tracy Chapman. For a time the front-runner was a handsome young man named Erbil who performed a cracking, acoustic version of “Wake me up when September ends” by Green Day. And Erbil would have won, had it not been for two previously unknown entrants who hit the ball out of the park with a stomping, crowd-pleasing rendition of “The Judge”, by the Ohio-based band Twenty-One Pilots. It was agreed by all, including our fellow-judge Carlos, that indeed “The Judge” was the best and the two singers were over the moon to have won. For the Lundgrens, it was a cultural experience to remember for sure.
A week ago Tuesday we walked as a family to the local health clinic in El Tololar. It’s about a 20-minute walk through three peanut fields to the small rectangular turquoise building that serves as the main health post for all of Tololar as well as several surrounding communities. Surely there are health posts that make due with less, but as assuredly there are others that are equipped with a lot more. The examination room is very simple, with ripped vinyl beds, a coat rack, and a couple old stethoscopes hanging on the wall. Tololar’s clinic ostensibly receives periodic medical supply donations from the government but the deliveries are very sporadic, and often sorely lacking. After a short tour, for example, we were ushered in to speak with the head Doctor, Maria. She told us that they had received several diabetes glucometers recently but that they had arrived without the strips required to do the glucose check. Strips are expensive, and they don’t have the money to purchase them. So the meters sit and gather dust. Maria also told us that they would like to get a computer to log data accurately, and that they could use among other things soap, scissors, and surgical masks. Plus, as mentioned before, basic things like fans and chairs. A generous friend has said they would donate the $300 bucks necessary to cover the basics. More in December about how you might be able to help people in El Tololar on the medical, education, or environment front.
As we left the clinic and walked home, Olle said, “It feels good to be helping.” And it does.
The first two and one-half months in Nicaragua have allowed us to laugh, cry, scream, be euphoric, depressed, stink, care for others, experience giving, love and be loved, rely on faith, family and friends, and search for meaning. It is impacting each one of us differently, and it has been hard, perhaps even harder than we thought. And the homesickness can be the hardest. The whole adventure has and always will be framed through a daily lens of rice and beans. Life here is not easy, and we hope that the experience is providing us even a taste, a glimmer of how hard life is not only in El Tololar, Nicaragua, but in Honduras, Mexico, Syria, Sudan, and in places closer to home like nameless inner-city or rural, poverty-stricken communities across the US.
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