ballet folclórico

sunday evening, along with my friends yamileth and gabriela (of the san judas prescolar, for those of you who know them), i enjoyed a night of dance at the teatro rubén darío in downtown managua. the company performing was ballet folclórico de nicaragua, headed by francisco gonzález (who has trained in the US with the alvin ailey dance company). typical dances (barrio de pescadores; las sirenitas; palo de mayo - of the caribbean coast) were performed with a mixture of more modern choreography. while this company doesn't have a web page, i found another page for those of you interested in nicaraguan dance (my bailarina friends!):   http://www.balletfolkloriconicaraguense.com/ 

 

Foro de Migraciones

Last night I attended a Forum on Migration, cosponsored by the Jesuit Migration Service, a program run out of the Universidad Centroamericana, where I have good contact here in Managua. The Forum included an update on the status of Nicaraguans migrating abroad, mainly through data obtained from returned migrants at two border receiving facilities, one on the southern border with Costa Rica, the other near the northern border with Honduras, where Nicaraguans and other Central Americans being returned from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are processed. Many cases of human rights abuses were shared, all violations of the "Convention of 1990", an international legal framework for the protection of the human rights of migrants, which, not surprisingly, the U.S., Canada, Spain, and other migrant-receiving countries have refused to sign on to. One of the demands of migrants rights advocates here is for better documentation, e.g. for the Nicaraguan consulate to more efficiently process visas and passports so that Nicaraguans can migrate abroad with the legal protection such documents afford. Currently, an estimated 70% of Nicaraguan migrants abroad lack such documentation. Other useful information was shared, but for now I'll leave this post with a quote from event:

"Si tu dios es judío, tu carro japonés, tu pizza italiana, tu gas venezolano, tu café mexicano, tus cosméticos londineses, tu camiseta indonesia, tus zapatos brasileños, tu televisor coreano, tu reloj chino, tu marimba africana, tus cifras árabes, tus letras latinas... ¿cómo te atreves a decir que tu vecino es extranjero?" (if your god is jewish, your car japanese, your pizza italian, your gas venezuelan, your coffee mexican, your cosmetics from london, your shirt indonesian, your shoes brazilian, your TV korean, your watch chinese, your marimba african, your numbers arabic, your literature latin, how dare you say that your neighbor is foreign?

Community Needs Assessment

In La Dalia, AMC has asked me to facilitate a Diagnóstico Comunitario, or community needs assessment. Back to my roots in Public Health and Community Organizing! It feels so natural for me to do this work... I'm accompanied by Gilbert, a 17-year-old AMC promotora de salud (health promoter), energetic, committed, and passionate about serving his community. How fantastic it is to see the world through the eyes of a young person again - so hopeful about the future and his ability to contribute to development in his community. We are working with the Comité Comunal (community committee) in a rural community called Granadillo No.2, in the municipality of La Dalia. We have just begun the process of the Diagnóstico, which includes several steps, including defining the mission of the community committee and writing a history of the community. This latter activity is what community leaders in the attached photo are engaged in. More to come...

peace & love, kristin

my morning view in managua

in managua, i'm living in a neighborhood (reparto san patricio) in a small room in a family home with doña alba and her german husband (whose 86th birthday we celebrated last night with a cena in the company of their three rowdy 20 - 30 something grandsons talking about doing business in nicaragua, but that's another story!). the reparto is located at "km 8" along the carretera sur, the highway that leads southbound out of the city. further south along the highway are huge estate-style houses, home to some of managua's elite and empresarial class, several embassies, and also a fairly large U.S. expatriate community. 

in the mornings here, i sometimes bring my laptop to work in "El Coche del Café", a coffee shop with delicious capuchinos, where prices are in dólares and the crowd is a mix of Nicaraguans and expats. for example, this morning i'm sharing the space with a gringo couple and their two small children, a family that reminds me of any young family in portland or the west side of los angeles. at another table is a taiwanese couple probably in their 60s, regulars here, who share capuchinos and cut up watermelon that they bring in a plastic container. they may be one of many taiwanese business-owning families who have set up shop in managua in the last decade or so. on the couch behind me are two young nicaraguan women, one of whom is tutoring the other in portuguese (the brazilian embassy is nearby, as is a brazilian language school and a shopping plaza owned by a local brazilian family). this is the diversity in my managuan neighborhood. and, if i didn't already say it, the $1.50 capuchino is delicious (expensive for local prices, but yum!).

as i walk up the highway in the morning to the café, bracing myself against the blaring horns of the buses and the dust of the morning traffic racing down the highway, the view to my east and north is of lake managua, aka xolotlán, and the volcanic peaks rising up on many sides. it is enough for me to just look out across the lush green landscape and see the morning sun rising in the east to feel a sense of peace in the midst of what often feels like the caos of this city. (equally beautiful are the evening sunsets, when the often cloud-covered sky radiates the pinks, blues, and oranges of the end of another day.)

peace & blessings from managua 

Red de Mujeres Migrantes

In Managua, I've begun working with the Red de Mujeres Familiares de Migrantes (the Network of Women Family Members of Migrants); this group is one part of a binacional network of women migrants and their families. The main branch of the Red is based in San José, Costa Rica, and consists of Nicaraguan women migrants living there. The Red has as its goal to promote actions, laws, and programs in both countries (Costa Rica and Nicaragua) that take the particular situation of women migrants and their families into account. For example, they work to end labor discrimination (most Nicaraguan women migrants in San José are employed as domestic workers and labor for little pay with few protections), promoting rights to documentation (e.g. legal status for themselves and their children), and increasing access to sexual and reproductive health services. Yesterday in Managua I met with a small group of women from the Red of family members, and we spent several hours reviewing one of my questionnaires (a pilot interview of sorts; "cognitive interviewing" in social science methodology - I asked them what they thought of the questions, they gave me their feedback, etc.). These women, several of whom are grandmothers caring for grandchildren left behind by migrants, are extremely open to sharing their stories with me and told me, "it's about time someone paid attention to us, the grandmothers"!  I'm looking forward to conducting more in-depth interviews with them and getting to know their families over the next few months, and to collaborating with the Red in their work. I feel incredibly blessed to be here, doing this work, in the presence of women with such incredible resilience, strength, and perseverance.  peace & love to all my friends and family, kristin 

food and other facts of life, in La Dalia

just a quick glimpse at my life here in La Dalia, where I am working with an NGO, Acción Médica Cristiana (AMC) and doing fieldwork as part of my research:

food - today my meals were generously provided by Mariana, the neighbor next door to the AMC office. the office also serves as my hospedaje/place to stay while i´m here. as a side note, people usually think it´s wierd i´m a vegetarian, and i kinda do too out here where chickens, pigs, and cows roam patios and streets and are precious sources of protein, but anyway 23 years as a veg is a very long time... so i explain i don´t eat meat (no, not pollo or mariscos either!), and people just nod and think it´s wierd. Mariana made me lunch of a soup of boiled cabbage, red beans, and potatoes (yum!), and knocked on the office door and surprised me with a cena of a bowl of platanos maduros (fried plantains) and gallo pinto (don´t know what that is? spend a day in nicaragua and you might have it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, i´m not kidding! beans and rice, fried together). ok, that´s food pretty typically plus or minus a banano, tajada, maduro, tostones or two (bananas in all their wonderful incarnations), here in La Dalia.

heat - it´s hot. it´s not raining enough. people are worried about the harvest. deforestation is a problem. it´s hot. mornings and evenings are very nice and temperate, but the afternoon sun blares and basically people just sweat it out, spending as much time as possible in the shade, wherever they can find it.

bathing - this is a real adventure of sorts. out back of the office is a cement water receptacle pit type thing, where water comes in via an open spigot those few hours a day water is actually running in town. i stand in the cement/mud, shivering, as i pour hand-held bucket after bucket over my head. whoo ha!

letrine - not one of life´s pleasures here, to be sure. let´s just not describe the smell, nor the need to run from my mosquito-net covered bed through the coffee plants out back up the hill in the mud in the middle of the night... you get the idea... so i definitely view toilets with seats as a right not a priveledge, but i´ll leave that for another post...

music - so the sensory experience here is not complete without a quick description of the reggaeton music blaring at all hours from every house, storefront, taxi, bus, cellphone. i´m serious. the only thing that even comes close to competing in the auditory airwaves is evangelical christian music, shouted loudly usually via microphone (and off-key) each night from the many small churches all over, or the guitar-accompanied catholic folk tunes earnestly sung in churches and homes here in town.

despite these various (dis)comforts, i´m happy here in an odd way. it´s nice to come back to work in a place, to feel a sense of history with this community, people´s generousity and warmth is incredibly humbling, not to mention the appreciation i have for my friends and colleagues at AMC, who have received me with wide-open arms (and hearts). i feel an enormous amount of gratitude combined with a sense of humility that motivate me to continue my work with AMC and in the community here in the coming months...

paz y amor, kristin

 

food security

Last week in La Dalia, I participated in a workshop on food security and political participation along with 25 leaders and promotoras from surrounding communities. a focus of the workshop was a law passed this year by the Nicaraguan Congress (Asamblea Nacional), the Ley de Soberanía y Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutricional (Law of Food & Nutritional Sovereignty and Security), which guarantees the right to food and adequate nutrition for all Nicaraguans, along with the equitable distribution of food and nutrition. However, these admirable goals will confront significant challenges in order to become reality. For example, Nicaragua is currently experiencing a drought; it's winter here, and despite the usual afternoon thunderstorms in Managua, it's not raining enough. According to a recent report by the Nicaragua Network, these El Niño conditions will affect agricultural production, making it difficult for the vast majority of Nicaraguans, many of whom live in conditions of extreme poverty on less than $1USD/day, to obtain sufficient food. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food recently visited Nicaragua and stated, "Nicaragua finds itself in an extremely bad situation, not as bad as Haiti and Guatemala, but close to the situation of those countries", urging donor nations not to withhold vital food aid. In our taller in La Dalia, we focused on training leaders to address food security in their own communities, for example, by planting home or cooperative gardens, and by working with local municipalities to improve distribution systems. 

Casa de los Mejía Godoy

Last night I visited the Casa de los Mejía Godoy for the first time. This is a restaurant/bar in Managua owned and operated by the hermanos Mejía Godoy, and serves as a center for cultural life, with the brothers and different invitados playing music on a regular basis. Carlos Mejía Godoy has been referred to as the "father" of Nicaraguan folk music, and was at the cultural heart of the Sandinista Revolution. Last night, we got to see the Orchesta Juvenil Nicaragua play everything from Beethoven to Nicaraguan folk songs; the cellos in the front row reminded me of my dear neighbor, Mason Dille, cellist extraordinaire!

taller con niños

Last week, we conducted an impromtu workshop with several children and youth who stopped by the AMC (Acción Médica Cristiana) office in La Dalia, where I am now working several days a week. The workshop focused on environmental health, we talked about what "health" means to them, the relationship between the environment - water, air quality, forests, sanitation, hygiene, etc. - and their personal health. Overall, the kids were so enthusiastic and fun to work with! We did a mini-evaluation at the end of the workshop, and they all agreed that the session had been very "participativo" and "divertido" (fun!). Here's a photo.

peace, love, & blessings, kristin

la dalia, matagalpa

last week i made my first trip back to the municipality of La Dalia, in the department of Matagalpa. La Dalia is about a 3 1/2 hour bus ride from Managua, half of which is on winding mountain roads lined with potholes, forcing the yellow school buses that serve as the primary mode of public transport to constantly slow to speeds of less than 15 mph. La Dalia is where i have conducted fieldwork before (in 2006), and i was able to visit several of the families i've worked with previously. it's difficult to witness the persistence of poverty and the challenges of local development - La Dalia is essentially a community in transition. most families have settled there within the last decade, relocating from the surrounding countryside, moving off of the land into an urbanizing zone where households are made of wood panels and tarpuline walls and located on small plots with no access to cultivable land. this is the rural-to-urban transition so often studied by anthropologists, and it manifests itself in contradictions: a new internet cafe and bank now located in the center of town where before neither existed alongside persistent unemployment and a rise in pandillas (gangs) as young people finish secondary school and find themselves without options to salir adelante (get ahead). my plan at this point is to continue to work in La Dalia with the NGO Acción Médica with which I have collaborated over the past six years - they have asked me to conduct a community needs assessment (diagnostico), which will assist me in identifying families for my own research. because i also have several contacts with NGOs in Managua, i will essentially be living in the city and "commuting" to the mountains for my fieldwork. at least that's the plan for now...

day trip to León

according to recent census data, the departments of León and Chinandega have among the highest rates of emigration, as people leave for Costa Rica, the US, and other C. American cities. So I took a trip this weekend to León, to visit my one contact there, a professor of History at UNAN-León who is Austrian but resides in León with her husband and son. The passage in microbus from Managua to León en the carretera nueva is beautifully scenic, about 80km of lush volcanic lowlands, literally steaming hot, with small pueblos lining the highway. León itself has a fascinating history, including being a base of the struggle for Independence and in this century, for the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. The centro is compact and walkable, full of colonial architecture. I had the chance to visit two museums during my visit, including the museo de la Fundación Ortiz-Gurdián, with a fascinating collection of contemporary Central American art. I also stopped by the casa-museo Rubén Darío and along with a group of local high school students, took notes on the life of this famous Nicaraguan poet, who established himself in the early 20th century as one of Latin America's most important modernist writers. I'll share a few words from Darío (attached foto is of the Rubén Darío casa museo) -

"Yo tengo literatura mía para marcar el rumbo de los demás: mi literatura es mía en mí; quien siga mis huellas perderá su tesoro personal...y la primera ley, creador: crear."

desde managua

saludos desde managua. for those who know this city, i’m sitting in a Café Latino located at km. 8 carretera sur, near the casa Quinta Primavera guest house where i’m staying these first few weeks while I get situated. managua feels somewhat familiar - with its impossible-to-walk streets, expansive sprawl, and plethora of plazas where you can now access internet free for the price of a small capuchino (21 córdobas, or about $1 USD), thankfully though, no starbucks in sight! in fact, walking on the streets here as a woman requires putting up with all kinds of tsk tsks, not to mention the near constant sweat that the high humidity and blazing equatorial sun causes. needless to say, i’ve found places to run and take spin classes, and maybe even a cyclist who can hook me up with a group ride on weekends (shout out to all my cycling friends who told me to bring my bike!) in the short term, i’m working on developing my contacts here in managua, especially helpful have been the women in the offices of the UN population fund, and basically getting myself hooked up with institutions and organizations working on migration issues. there seems to be consensus that not enough is known about the impacts of mother migration on families here, and particular interest in understanding those psycho-social and emotional dimensions of the problem, since most research has been quantitative and survey (census) based. so, i forge on with my plans, despite the heat, the humidity, and the need to slowly develop trusting relationships. i miss all of you, especially my cat salvador, whom, my mom informs me, is now sleeping snuggled up in his new bed beside her dog brinca. peace, love, and blessings a tod@s.

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