By REBECCA LEE
N.C. School of Science and Mathematics
In less than three hours of flight time, I had experienced the dramatic change in temperature from the chilling 30-degree air of Durham to the scorching 100-degree heat in Managua, Nicaragua. Before coming to Nicaragua, I had pictured the country to be more “tropical” and humid, but was welcomed with a clay landscape of the savannas in Africa. “It is the dry season,” Chelsea Sokolow, an NCSSM alumna who served as our guide for our weeklong Nicaragua stay, told us.
During our trip, our mini-term group visited three places: Finca Esperanza Verde (an organic coffee farm at the top of the mountains doubling as an ecotourist lodge), San Ramón and Granada.
As our school group drove in a bus for three hours from the airport in Managua to Finca Esperanza Verde, we were exposed to the harsh reality for Nicaraguans. Bouncing our way up the rocky roads of the mountains, I was shocked at how all the houses were roughly constructed out of clay and tin roofs. Electricity and running water was hard to come by and outhouses were built alongside the house. Also outside, small children were seen running around playing games in their school uniforms while the rest of the family stayed inside to gather around a 15-inch screen television to pass time.
In contrast, Finca Esperanza Verde (FEV) seemed a paradise at the top of the mountain amongst the poverty-stricken village. FEV consisted of newly constructed wooden lodges with hammocks and a mountain top view from where we ate meals. We were offered warm showers and freshly ground coffee from its coffee farm every morning. FEV, run by an American guy named Giff who married a Nicaraguan woman, provided jobs to the local Nicaraguans to pick coffee beans for $1.75 per bucket. Children were usually denied the job, but FEV paid more per bucket of coffee cherries than other farms which ranged from $0.80 to $1. Like most coffee farms in Nicaragua, FEV earned more money off tourism rather than their coffee beans.
(Since the 1900s when coffee was decided to become the major export crop of the nation over the other profiting business of cattle ranching, most jobs have centered on coffee. At FEV, we learned how time-consuming and tedious the process was to make coffee beans. From hand picking and sorting the red coffee cherries from the plants grown at high altitudes (for best quality) to the unshelling and hours of drying and roasting, it is no wonder that Nicaragua’s main source of money comes from ecotourism.)
At the bottom of the mountains of San Ramón was the city of San Ramón itself. During the tour of the city, we learned that San Ramón did not meet all the full requirements to become a city. They lacked a bank and a market. The area of their “city” was only a bit bigger than our high school campus back in Durham. However, because of a municipal passed every 100 years to make a town into a city, San Rámon was the lucky one.
We stayed in our assigned guest homes in San Ramón because there was no hotel for us to all stay together. Paired up two each guest house scattered throughout the city, I braved speaking in Spanish from dawn to dusk for two days. With four years of high school Spanish, I found that it was easier to hold conversations with the local high school students and our hosts of the guest homes because of similar cognates and the increasing schooling that taught English starting from the ninth grade.
In talking to San Ramón’s local high school (our sister high school), I learned that most kids after primary school never earn the chance to attend secondary school because it is impractical for students to go to school if their only immediate source of money will come from coffee farming or the marketplace. It is a sad fact for each upcoming generation, because here in America we are told to dream and to work the best we can for a living we want to build. Here in Nicaragua, such a dream is crushed by the surrounding poverty which seems impossible to come out of due to the lack of jobs and opportunities to do so. However, the Nicaraguans still seem to enjoy and become content with what they have. For this, I loved the people in San Ramón.
Not only did I love the people in San Ramón, but I loved the small city of San Ramón because everyone knew each other like a huge family and could look out for one another. Even the police department was of no use because the townsfolk all knew who were the thieves, drunks and town fools. Everyone liked to sit outside or lounge around their clay homes with their cut-out windows (covered in bars because thieving is common) and doors open. Children spent most of their time creating their own games on the street or on the one playground in front of the main building at the center of the city. This building served as a gym, auditorium and a lecture hall.
Our mini-term group also went to go watch a baseball game held between San Ramón’s own baseball team against a baseball team from a nearby town. Baseball and volleyball was the common sport of Nicaragua, surprisingly not soccer of “fútbol.” During the cool evenings, you could buy scrumptious choco-bananas (bananas covered in frozen chocolate) and plantanitos (banana chips) for less than 40 U.S. cents.
Dancing was also a huge mark in their culture. At every dinner hosted at a house or event or festival, a local band (a singer, an accordion player, bass player and acoustic guitar player) were brought over to create the festive background music. However, there was a cultural gap. The dancing style is more classical and old-fashioned such as the country dance of Spaniards with the lively clapping, tapping and twirling one’s partner at an arm’s length away.
I also made friends with the tour guides (Maricela, 19 and Sonata, 16 who are both cousins) and I also still chat online with a college student, Larry from time to time who goes to the internet café every Friday night as a treat to connect with his online friends around the globe to Skype video chat or post Facebook walls.
As I parted from San Ramón, I looked forward to the new environment and people I would meet at Granada, Nicaragua. Granada, unlike San Ramón was an official city. Granada also was at even lower altitude than San Ramón and averaged a constant 100 degrees throughout the entire day.
There were many hotels and tourist shops and vendors throughout Granada, showing that Granada’s main source of money was through tourism. As was expected of an American tourist, I poured the rest of my money on the overpriced souvenirs such as the coconut-shell earrings and knit bags. During dinner, I even hit myself a good deal with a teenage boy who was selling me a hammock that he had knit. The first half-hour he was persistent enough to walk around the table we were sitting at showing everyone at the table the length, strength and quality of the hammock. His price started at $20 for the hammock and stooped down to a $4. By this time, I bought the hammock not only in admiration of his persistence to earn money (even if it is $4) and because I was incredulous that a hammock would cost less than my earring souvenirs.
At the end of the day we were invited to eat dinner with Sokolow’s friends with whom she stayed at in Granada. Chelsea, who has been living in Nicaragua as part of her gap-semester from Brown University, found comfort in living at the Casa Loca or “Crazy House” with artisans who had given us a fire-dance performance on the streets during dinner and made souvenirs for tourists for a living. I could understand how Sokolow could find comfort in her Nicaraguan friends. I think, perhaps, because of how poverty is common and a binding factor that Nicaraguans that they cannot shake off, they all understand each other in the same way and can help each other out as well (like the townspeople of San Ramón). Also, even though there were very persistent children and beggars on the street desperate for food and money, it is their forwardness that I find more relieving and honest in comparison to the discreet and sly ways Americans would put on to get what they want.
Nicaragua showed me a third-world country still struggling to rise out of impossible poverty, a society with the highest illiteracy rate in Latin America and a culture still influenced by indigenous tastes. However, I realized that poverty did not seem to affect the people themselves — only us tourists who felt sympathetic to the locals. Even though there were Western influences in dress and slowly increasing attempts to advance in technology with internet cafés, the Nicaraguans seem to be apathetic to these. The aspect that I loved the most while living in this country for a week was how Nicaraguans live at their own pace despite how slow the pace is in comparison to the rest of the world. It is as if Nicaragua is enclosed from the rest of the world only to be found to the extreme delight of people such as our school miniterm group.
