Where The Streets Have No Name

• Posted on January 31, 2009 at 9:41 AM
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THE FRAGILITY OF NICARAGUA’S INFRASTRUCTURE first hit me months before we finally boarded the plane in Ottawa. This epiphany arrived in the form of a phone call from World Vision’s Marieth Llinas.

“The office is located off the Plaza de España, half a block north of the Optica Nicaraguense,” she dictated.

“But what’s the street address?” I asked, pen poised for her instructions.

“In Nicaragua the streets have no names.”

Three flights later, with stopovers in Newark and Houston, followed by a two-hour bus ride over corduroy roads in the dead of night, I finally understand.

MID-MARCH, AT THE HEIGHT OF AN INCANDESCENT summer day in Nicaragua, I stand in the middle of one such nameless street in the city of Nandaime. Dust and dirt tunnel their way past and around me, applying themselves like a paste in my freshly smeared layer of sunscreen.

I am waiting outside the Centro Communitario Oscar Arnulfo Romero -- so-named after the assassinated El Salvadoran priest -- for ten young ladies (high school students) aged sixteen to eighteen, and my fellow chaperone, also my wife. Today we are to see the city for the first time, accompanied by our local guide Marvin Bustos.

Hardly a tourist mecca, Nandaime lies seventy kilometres south-east of the capital city, Managua, and within easy striking distance of the more popular destinations of Granada, Masaya, and San Juan del Sur.

Our arrival here was facilitated by Patrice Breton and the Quebec-based NGO Groupe Spirale, who work exclusively with the Centro Romero in establishing inter-cultural exchanges, alternative tourism packages, and fair trade opportunities. The profits from these initiatives help fund community-based projects such as folkloric dance classes, summer painting workshops, computer courses, and university bursaries for the Centro’s youth members.

This is the draw of alternative tourism. Travellers can satisfy their sense of wanderlust while being socially conscious and culturally sensitive. Outside the cost of each participant’s plane ticket, all of the money funnels directly into the community centre, and by extension into the hands of Nandaime’s poorest citizens.

Do not expect five star accommodations, however. In fact, expect to be uncomfortable – at least at first. Apart from the good your tourism dollars will do, the second half of your mission is cultural exchange.

“This is where you’ll be living with local families for most of your stay,” says Marvin -- who communicates only in Spanish -- once we have left the cobbled streets for the rutted dirt tracks of the barrio.

Although we say nothing, everyone is thinking the same thing. So this is culture shock.

Better homes in the barrio are constructed of anonymous steel-grey cinder blocks and tin roofs. They are about one quarter of the size of an average high school classroom in Canada. Other homes sprawl organically, haphazardly expanding outward in a variety of materials -- rough-hewn timber, plastic sheeting, scrap metal, and cardboard. All are hemmed in by barb-wire fences and protected by skeletal dogs and other accidents of breeding.

This initial apprehension only grows in the first days that follow as we eat meal after meal of rice and fried pinto beans, make use of outhouses where cockroaches thrive, and struggle to communicate in broken Spanish. We were prepared for this, but that does not make the experience any easier.

And yet somehow, a week into our stay, and seemingly instantaneously, like Paul on the road to Damascus, we change -- are changed -- and the shock to our North American sensibilities is supplanted by a feeling of shared humanity and understanding akin to solidarity. None of us, after living in our families, can escape it.

If we find it difficult to live this way for a week or two, we now have some small understanding of what it means to live in what the United Nations categorizes as “extreme poverty.” For Nicaragua is one of only two nations in the Western Hemisphere to have more than 25% of its population living on less than one dollar a day.

But this clinical statistic has a face for us now. In fact it has many faces, and many names. And were it not for the good fortune of birth and geography, anyone of them could be ours.

FOR TWO WEEKS WE LABOUR ON COLLECTIVE farms, gathering firewood from the bush, weeding gardens, and watering papaya saplings by hand. We take excursions into the baranca – a rural community – to help with domestic chores such as making meals and feeding animals.

On one day we job-shadow local reporters and undergo interviews at the Centro’s community radio station, 98.1FM. The topic of the day is environmental sustainability. Staff at the community centre, as well as local activists are hoping to convince the education ministry and the various levels of government to donate trees – one to every grade eight graduate in Nandaime. The problem, of course, is money.

But by far the most difficult task we undertake during our stay is a five kilometre walk to the basurero (municipal dump). There we encounter the true victims of globalization and first world apathy. Thirty children live and work amid the detritus that Nandaime casts off. Here they search through burning mounds of garbage for something -- anything -- they can sell. Plastic. Scrap metal. The average wage here is one cordoba per day.

We bring fresh fruit and school supplies, colouring books and puzzles. Soon we are surrounded by the children, many of whom have red-rimmed eyes, skin conditions, and respiratory disorders. But what astonishes us most is their ability to smile amid all this, the courage it takes.

We spend the morning there playing soccer and listening to their laughter.

AS RESPITE FROM THESE EXPERIENCES, BUT also as a matter of national pride, the Centro’s staff accompany us on day trips to the surrounding attractions.

For in spite of its current poverty, there is much beauty and history in Nicaragua.

We take in the yellow grandeur of Granada’s neo-classical cathedral and the breezy shade of its Parque Centrale where artisans clamour for your attention but will settle for your American dollars. The historic centre of Granada still looks very much like the colonial city it once was. Established by the Spanish in 1523, it is the oldest, and arguably the most beautiful, city in Nicaragua. Brightly coloured colonades and cool, darkened arcades abound.

A boat trip on Lake Nicaragua reveals obscene wealth on the islands and brings home the growing gap between the country’s social classes. We encounter monkeys and feed them mangoes from our outstretched hands.

Outside Masaya we are awed by the Santiago Crater -- only one of many active volcanoes forming a spine through the country’s geography -- a stark windswept landscape alive with sulphuric fumes. It appears as though someone has carved out the belly of the mountain with an ice cream scoop.

We also witness the horrors of Coyotepe. Established originally as a Spanish fortress, it existed for years as a prison of torture and detention for political dissidents under the dictator Somosa.

And in the city of Masaya itself, we satisfy our curiosity in its sprawling covered market which sells everything from shoes to hammocks, clay pottery to leg of lamb.

In Managua we walk around the Plaza de la Revolucion and lament the irreparable damage done to the ancient cathedral. Hollow and crumbling, it has stood in ruins since 1972, when an earthquake toppled the entire capital city.

And not far away, we pay homage in the Plaza de la Pax, where more than twenty thousand “contra”-revolutionary weapons lie buried. The remnants of this last, and terrible, civil war are exposed and rusting off to one side of the monument, as is an Italian-made armoured tank. A palm tree grows up through its turret.

The day before we leave, we spend on the Pacific coast in the village of San Juan del Sur, central America’s best kept secret. There we join a handful other intrepid eco-tourists and surfers from the US, Australia, and Germany in what may be the last days of wide open sandy beaches and sleepy cantinas serving Toña and Vitoria. Already three-storey hotels are springing up just back from the strip, promising air-conditioning and ocean views – a portent I once witnessed sixteen years earlier on the Costa Rican coast.

Such development is essential to the country’s starving economy, but comes in the form of a double-edged sword. Traditional tourism will bring jobs; however, they will be menial. The vast majority of the money spent in foreign hotels will eventually line foreign bank accounts. That is why supporting alternative tourism, through programmes like those offered by the CCOAR, is so essential toward building local capacity.

OUR GUIDE THROUGHOUT THIS EXPERIENCE IS Padre Santiago, an ex-patriot priest from Granbé, Quebec who has lived in Nandaime for seventeen years. The Centro is a product of his vision and that of the community’s youth.

Quoting Marcel Proust, he tells us that we do not travel to see new landscapes, but to see with new eyes.

Much later, toward the end of our fifteen-day trip he tells us a story about two men in a boat. The man in the bow is reading a book, when the man in the stern discovers a leak. Water is pouring in.

“There is a leak in the back of the boat!” he shouts to the man in the front.

“Oh,” says the other. “Not in the front there isn’t.”

The Padre nods his white head. “Nicaragua is the back of the boat. You are the front. What will you do?”

It is sobering talks like this one, alongside seminars with local staff on such diverse topics as fair trade, Nicaraguan history, and liberation theology that help us come to a deeper understanding of the Centro’s mission to achieve self-sufficiency and sustainable growth through such initiatives as alternative tourism, of which we are a part.

THE PARADOX THAT IS NICARAGUA CAN BEST be summed up by the words of Reinaldo Bustillo, our guide at the collective farm, and the father in the family where my wife and I live.

“It was a difficult time,” he says, referring to his years as an adolescent revolutionary in the Contra War, “but it was also a time of great beauty. I was proud and convinced of the job I was doing.”

That same sense of pride and dignity exists everywhere in the squalor of Nicaragua. It is what organizations like the Centro Romero are using to forge stronger communities and combat the tide of globalization.