Living Nicaragua

By: Scott Kaplan
Staff Photographer
Published: April 15, 2010

"Hit the ground running" doesn't even come close to describing the whirlwind experience of arriving in Nicaragua.

Our first two days in the capital city of Managua consisted of going to clinics, shelters, a landfill community called La Chureca, houses door to door, the first fair trade shop in the world and a village consisting of primarily relocated residents of La Chureca.

Everywhere we went we found ourselves conducting interviews with the people we encountered. Although difficult at first, we soon grew into the reoccurring habit. The next ten days were spent in the Jalapa Valley, about 20 kilometers from the border of Honduras. Here, we lived with host families, worked alongside PIEAT (Programa Integral Educando con Amor y Tenure which means "the integral program of education with love and tenderness"), and members of the local community of La Tierra Promitera - "The Promised Land".

Once in Jalapa, we helped build a school for children, planted gardens, and even shared some contemplative practices, like yoga and other relaxation techniques. We also visited local tobacco barns, which is where a significant population of Jalapa works.

Exposure to such conditions was an important, yet frightening, experience. Only one day was spent away from our work in Jalapa, when we got a chance to spend a night in a remote mountain village and then make the five-hour hike down the following day.

My personal reasons for going to Nicaragua were based in a desire to put theory into practice. I wanted to confront my own assumptions and ideas of what poverty was, while expanding my knowledge about the situation both conceptually and contextually.

Unlike any other traveling I've done, in Nicaragua I had to immerse myself in the culture and foster a reciprocal relationship with the people on the land. It became important to ask hard questions and listen deeply. I found myself face to face with the realities of poverty, ecological destruction and socio-economic and gender discrimination more than ever before. In the past it might have been easy for me to ignore these things or have been blinded to such issues in the context of life in Boulder, but here these experiences grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go.

When I had my hands in the earth, planting fruit trees alongside the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters of La Tierra Promitera, I was feeling the sweat, seeing the smiles, and conversing with the workers. This sharing of space, time and story added an extraordinary new dimension and meaning to the work.

While these connections were nurtured through dialogue and storytelling, they all had the backdrop of working together with a common purpose. Because of the work we were doing, an inner shift started to occur. Something had begun to unravel. Truths that had been missing or obscured from our collective reality were revealed. There was an attempt by all of us to breathe in the diverse experiences of living and working with the people of Nicaragua as best we could.

The lessons we learned were found somewhere in the morning bus rides with locals and in the stories my host mother told. It was somewhere in the joy of seeing the children smile while learning to play a new game. It was in the handshakes after a house visit or after we hauled stones and mixed concrete. It was in the faces of those who worked in the fields and in the factories. It was in showing up every day in the community, being present and listening to the voices of the people.

But this trip wasn't about helping people who are helpless and it wasn't about any one group of people coming to save another. It was about finding some truth through working in mutual responsibility.

It's a humbling experience and a kind of magic that happens when people, regardless of background, come together united by a desire to change. I feel we all become liberated just a little bit more when we work in solidarity.

The experience has showed me just how much time and patience this really takes, and it has also made me believe more so than ever the quote by Gill Scott-Heron which reads "Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something".