Day -36: More faces

Laura Jean and Pastora Celia Manzanares, during our recent trip to the Northern Regional Assembly. Celia is currently pastor of the Eighth Church in La Colonia, although she and her husband may soon be moved to another church in the 3-year rotation that comes after every national assembly. La Colonia was the church that hosted the theological classes for that region so we got to know Celia and her family really well during our visits. In particular Quinn and her grandson, Cristian, are thick as thieves. Her she is showing off her diploma for completing the 2-year course on ministerial formation.

Speaking to the Listening Heaven

The First Church of La Misión Cristiana is located in Acahualinca, a densely populated and very urban neighborhood of Managua. But the majority of La Misión Cristiana's churches are in the countryside -- small churches serving small and widely flung communities, sometimes a day's journey or more from the capital. Just like in the U.S., there can be a real cultural divide between rural and urban congregations, especially when travel and phone communication are not so easy.

Bridging that divide has been one of the goals of the First Church. For two years now, they have organized youth group trips to plant trees at a farm beyond Waslala owned by the church, and to visit the rural churches in the northern region. This past October, Magyolene and I got to tag along on the trip. There were 11 of us in total: Pastor Enrique, Sonia, Johanna, Mayito, me along with the jovenes (youngsters) Joelia, Melissa, Cinthya, Darichela, Karina and Carlos.

Cinthya and Mayito on the bus.

Just getting to the farm is itself an adventure. We left Managua before dawn on the express bus to Waslala. After arriving around noon, we ate a quick lunch and caught an incredibly packed local bus that dropped us off at the farm in a heap of suitcases, hammocks, rubber boots and provisions. The next morning we awoke with the rooster and tramped up the hill to plant trees.

The farm is known as Las Jaguas. For several years now, la Misión has been working to create a viable dairy operation on the property. With the help of Disciples church from Idaho they have build milking structures, planted fodder and build fence posts. This coming year they plan to purchase their first heads of cattle. The farm itself is fairly large and is quite hilly, with sections cleared for pasture and crops, but big swathes left wild. The paths to the upper fields head straight up the side of the hill, which Juan, the local caretaker, and his family seem to run up without any visible effort. But for the rest of us city slickers, getting to the top without slipping and falling in the mud was an accomplishment to be proud of.

Starting small.

I had a line of poetry from Tagore stuck in my head during our trip: "Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven." Given how important forests are in moderating the local climate and water cycle, you could almost read that line of poetry as an instructive ecology text. In many parts of Nicaragua, farming and cattle ranching has driven some extreme deforestation, even deep in the heart of the Bosawas reserve. The good news is that the government does seem to try to enforce the law where they can: last year the church had to get a permit just to cut a few of their own trees to make fence posts. But beyond just caring for the environment, re-planting trees is important for the long-term viability of the farm. It rains a lot here (and I mean A LOT) and floods and erosion are very real threats to Nica agriculture.

Carlos and Joelia, resting for a moment in the shade.

The view.

Uff.

Cinthya, Karina and Melissa.

Hydration is important.

We spent two mornings planting acacia trees. This involved lugging the saplings up from the nursery to the place where they would be planted. Carlos and I were in charge of digging the holes in the sticky, muddy earth, which we did with shovels and a narrow-bladed tool with a replaceable wooden handle. The rest of the group would then plant the saplings along the fence-lines. We got some awesome blisters.

Our goal was to build "living fences" that lined the edges of the fields that were planted with corn. The trees planted by the group last year had survived and were already a decent size. All of us worked pretty hard. We think we planted more than 300 trees during two days, and each night we slept hard in our hammocks.

The group, hiking to visit the ojo de agua.

After lunch on the second day we decided to hike to the ojo de agua (fresh water spring, literally, the "eye of water") that gives potable drinking water for the farm, and the cattle. A few years ago the church paid to run a PVC pipe from the spring down to the farm house, a distance of nearly 2 kilometers. It was a beautiful walk, running through the forest and along the stream bed, following the white thread of pipe through the greenery. We visited the part of the farm where they had planted cacao trees that would soon be giving their first harvest. Of course, halfway to our goal, the daily afternoon downpour caught us, soaking us completely to the bone.

Kenia and Mayra, showing us a cacao tree.

Sonia, seconds before getting drenched by the rain.

Being caught in the rain is a much more pleasant experience in Nicaragua than in the U.S., where you are always a least a little worried about getting cold. Not a problem here. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that I wear glasses, I would just relax and enjoy the soaking. At any rate, we pushed on. Juan cut giant leaves to serve as makeshift umbrellas for us. We returned completely bedraggled.

¡Lo hicimos!

Hiking to Las Nubes.

On Sunday, our plan was to visit a local church named Las Nubes (The Clouds). This involved catching another before-dawn bus to nearby Puerto Viejo where we set out on foot (and horse) away from the road and headed up, up, up, up, up into the hills. It turns out that the name is literal; the church is perched almost at the top of a mountain, about a 4 hour hike from the road. Since it was the rainy season, the path was completely choked with mud. And unlike hiking trails in the U.S., Nicaraguan trails are mostly free of switchbacks. We just charged straight uphill and kept going until we got to the top.

Joelia and Cinthya, and horses.

Melissa, on the upward climb.

We got so high up we were looking down on tiny villages.

The gorgeous sanctuary at Las Nubes

The church on the hill was amazing. I have to say it was one of the largest and most beautiful La Misión churches I've seen, including those in Managua. Pastor Eligio told me it had been a six year project to build the sanctuary. The community had risen to the occasion of transporting concrete blocks, bags of cement and metal roofing up the trail we had just climbed.

Karina, Carlos and Darichela teach songs to the kiddies.

Joelia and Mayito lead Sunday School for the young adults.

The trumpet player was AMAZING.

Our time at the top was limited because we still had to return back down. But the jovenes of the first church had brought with them materials to run two quick Sunday School classes with the children and young adults. Sonia was asked to preach at the church service and then we had a hasty lunch before heading back downhill.

We returned to the road by another route, and naturally, we were caught again in a torrential downpour just while we were picking our way down a steep path. As the rains came we heard the roar of a troupe of howler monkeys (although we didn't see them). We were all exhausted and muddy when we reached the road. Thankfully the bus came and took us back to our hammocks. The next morning we caught the first of our three buses that would take us back home to Managua.

Graduation Day

December is graduation month in Nicaragua. School ends and all the kids are let out for summer. The university also held its graduation for those students finishing up the 5 year licenciatura (think bachelor's degree) in theology, as well as another group receiving their masters in feminist theology. This was one of the cohorts of students we had taught over the years and followed through their course of study, and it was very cool to see them cross the finish line.

Felicito, Sonia and Miguel celebrating the big day.

It was a big group -- some of our classes had almost 40 students. As is traditional they agreed on a group color. Purple, natch.

Dramatic Light

We passed over the mountain range, heading west as the sun was lowering in the sky. The wind was blowing hard up near the top of the pass and the clouds were swarming over the ridge. We could see the western region of Nicaragua spread out clear before us, almost all the way to the sea, bathed in a dramatic light. A series of twelve large stone women mark the path from the highway to the town of San Juan de Limay, renowned for its soapstone carvers, and one woman waited for us at the highest point.

(We traveled to Limay several years ago, when we first came to Nicaragua. I went to give a day-long workshop on climate change, which I wrote about here. This time we were coming back for the regional assembly, which will mostly likely be our last journey to Limay. For now, anyway.)

Amig@s

I have to confess a flaw. I am terrible at taking pictures of people. I'm very reliable if you need a picture taken of a mountain, a statue, a building, a tree. But when it comes to actual humans I either forget to snap photos or I worry that it's too rude or disruptive to haul out the camera. I once went to Europe and spent several weeks hanging out with friends and family and came back with a camera full of old churches and no people.

But I'm trying to do better. When I think about our time in Nicaragua, what I see most of all are the faces of the friends we have made here. So to celebrate the wonderful people in our life here, I'm hoping to post some actual human faces. First up is Romel Gauna.

Romel is the young pastor of the 3rd Church of La Misión Cristiana, located in Managua. This picture is from the annual Día de la Biblia gathering (a celebration of the first Spanish translation of the Bible, which we blogged about here.) He was the host pastor for the celebration and so he spent most of the day running around moving chairs and speakers, passing out water and generally keeping the event on track, but I got him to hold still for a second and brandish his Bible for the camera. Romel has been very active in the ministerial formation project, helping to organize logistics and even stepping in to teach a few modules when we've run short of available teachers. He's also just a cool guy, with a very relaxed personal style that goes will with the great enthusiasm he brings to his work.

Resilience and Change

The question came from a middle-aged woman in the audience. Like many Nicaraguan women of her generation she was slight of build, but strong of voice: "But what if your husband doesn't approve of your work outside the home?" The speaker's reply was a little bit shocking, but at the same time, it brought the house down with laughter.

"We'll he's dead now, so I am free. Thanks be to God."

That morning we had gathered to hear from three women -- Aurora, Maria and Mayra -- who live and work in the area of Santo Tomas and Juigalpa, a rural part of Nicaragua known for its cattle ranching. All three are campesinas (rural women) and activists working to support and educate other women from their area -- especially small farmers, teaching agricultural techniques and organizing cooperatives. Their not inconsiderable task that morning was to explain to us how the world works, and we were lucky to be their students.

Every year CIEETS -- the theology education and sustainable development wing of the university where we teach -- organizes a cátedra (or conference) on women and gender issues in Nicaragua. This past December the focus was on the "Daily Life of Women and Adaptation to Climate Change" and we organized two days of talks and activities, one in Managua and the other in Juigalpa. I confess, I was worried the theme would be a hopeless jumble, but it worked beautifully. (I already blogged a few of the videos and songs from the conference here and here.)

What the speakers showed was that we live in interesting times and that it is the women who must navigate the big changes that have come to rural Nicaragua, just as they have all around the world. A woman's husband may still harbor old patriarchal notions of how families should work, but at the same time the "old ways" are eroding under waves of economic, cultural and environmental change. And women -- who are on the front lines of putting food on the table and keeping the household together even if the men have to travel to find work -- are the ones confronting these changes and finding solutions.

Domestic violence was brought up a lot, and unfortunately, the problem of domestic violence is a critical one in Nicaragua today. It is often said that Nicaragua is the least violent country in Central America, a fact that obscures the violence that happens behind closed doors. Nica feminist groups have done a lot to raise the visibility of the issue with an effective series of ad campaigns, marches and legal advocacy. All three women immediately drew connections between domestic violence and education for women, the importance of building self-esteem among women, of building their economic independence, and of raising the next generation in a new paradigm.

So what does this have to do with climate change, you might well ask. All three women echoed what we've heard from small farmers all around Nicaragua: the rains are different from in the past. They come at the wrong time, or not enough, or they come in one torrential downpour and then nothing, wrecking havoc with the planting and harvest schedule. This may be partially a result of global climate change, but a more immediate culprit is the tremendous local deforestation that Nicaragua has suffered in the past few decades. At any rate, there is a general sense among the farmers that making the land produce is harder now than in generations past. And as with other changes, this is something that affects women first and foremost.

The sprawling nature of the conversation is fairly typical of these events. Once you enter through one door (e.g. domestic violence), you find yourself talking about every possible related topic: education, unemployment, food prices, rainfall patterns, etc. etc. The spanish word that gets used a lot is el desarrollo integral, which means integrated or holistic development. It's the idea that we need to address multiple issues in parallel in order to make progress. It can be daunting or inspiring, depending on your mood.

For my part, I gave a brief talk on the science of climate change, the basics of the greenhouse effect and what rising levels of carbon dioxide might have in store for us in the future. The focus of the talk was on adaptation. Even if the world manages to put in place a binding treaty to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases in the next few years (a depressingly remote possibility at this point), we will still need to adapt to a wave of changes in the next several decades. This is because there is a certain amount of climate change already "baked into the cake" due to the permanence in the atmosphere of CO2 that has already been emitted.

We showed the following video (produced by the UN Environmental Program) about the importance of investing in climate change adaptation measures. Nicaragua has long experience with natural disasters and so the need for such adaptation and preparedness measures is an easy sell. What is harder is securing funding for what needs to be done, and getting reliable regional predictions of climate change impacts (a very hard scientific problem that is woefully underfunded).

Midnight Journey to the Other Side (of Nicaragua)

Our bus left Managua at 4:30 in the afternoon, heading for the mining towns of Rosita and Bonanza on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. If all went well, we would be in Rosita a little after dawn the next morning. Thirteen bumpy hours, traveling dark roads through the heart of Nicaragua in a cramped, crowded, converted school-bus. We were traveling with our friend Sonia to the most remote cluster of churches of La Misión Cristiana to participate in the theological education classes in that region. Or rather, Laura Jean and Sonia were going to teach, I was going for fun. Our final destination was called, appropriately enough, El Retiro -- which means "The Retreat" in Spanish.

Fast & Furious, our aptly named bus

Our route took us through Boaco, then a late dinner in Muy Muy, although we decided not to eat or drink much, worrying about the rumored lack of bathroom breaks. As it turned out we did stop in Río Blanco and Siuna, and later along the road when the bus got a flat. Beyond Río Blanco the pavement gave out. Although every seat was full when we left Managua, amazingly, they kept adding more passengers as the night went on. The center aisle of the bus was filled with upturned buckets and plastic stools for the extra passengers to sit on, until every last possible space was filled.

There were chickens and puppies traveling with us, and giant sacks of beans. The bus stopped occasionally to deliver packages to random farmhouses along the route. We traveled the whole night blasting music from loudspeakers, perhaps to keep the driver awake as we barreled through the dark, feeling every single rut and pothole. Almost as loud was the wind from the open windows, which also brought the 2 a.m. cold and the smell of diesel exhaust. By morning I almost could taste it.

It was, as you might imagine, a pretty uncomfortable night. The spacing of the seats was slightly less than the length of my thigh bone, meaning that I was unable to sit normally facing forward and spent the night twisting from one side to another, jamming my knees into cracks, trying to find a comfortable position. Laura Jean's seat was on top of the wheel well, making it even worse. Nothing we tried seemed to help for long. Allegedly I did drift off to sleep at some point because I awoke as the sun was peeking over the horizon, my eyes gunked over and woozy from the motion.

We rolled into Rosita at 5:30 a.m. Our instructions were to head directly to the bus terminal and grab the 6 a.m. bus to Kukalaya. The latrines were locked and nothing was open for breakfast, so we boarded the bus and kept moving forward.

Unfortunately, that bus was stopped in the next town of Susun. It turns out that some local farmers were staging a huelga (a strike or protest). We got off the bus, a little confused, but someone told us that if we walked through the town we could catch another bus on the other side. Upon crossing a wooden bridge we saw a crowd of thirty or so men, armed with machetes and clubs. They had dragged branches and pieces of wood across the road and were stopping and turning around all vehicle traffic -- public buses and private pickup trucks alike. They didn't seem to have any problem with pedestrian traffic and we climbed over with no problems.

Walking.

(We found out later what the dispute was about. The government has protected a large section of northern Nicaragua as the Bosawas Reserve. Large sections of the park are still pristine forest, home to indigenous groups such as the Mayagna. However, since the government has almost no ability to police the area, other poor landless farmers have squatted on Mayagna land, burning down the forest and planting crops. Tensions between the Mayagnas and the settlers have spiked in recent weeks, leading to the murder of one Mayagna leader and calls for government intervention. Apparently the people blocking the roads in Susun were the landless squatters hoping to force the government to recognize them. You can read a bit more about the conflict here and here.)

On the other side of the barricades we waited for a while at a pulperia with some other displaced travelers, waiting for the mythical bus and wondering what to do. The sun was getting hot, even thought it wasn't yet 8 in the morning. Once we saw that the protesters were setting up new barricades to trap vehicles coming from the other direction, Sonia said that we should set off walking. And so we bought some water and headed out, not entirely sure how far we had to go to reach our destination.

Waiting for the bus.

Our walking companions were a woman named Elizabet and her 3 kids, who looked like they ranged from age 6 to 10. They were heading in our direction and took turns carrying a heavy bag of red beans. They were extremely cheerful traveling companions, the kids were uncomplaining and told funny jokes about how we should just commandeer some bicycles to finish our trek. We knew that we were heading for a cluster of towns called California, El Black or Riscos de Oro, depending on who you talked to. Supposedly the presbitero for the northern region, José Adan, was going to meet us there and travel on farther with us.

We saw multiple buses heading in the opposite direction, but none ever returned to pick us up. We figured that the protesters had stopped them and even prevented them from turning around. So we kept walking. Sonia insisted that we had to keep moving ahead, and it was great advice, although at the time we wondered. We also noticed that this part of Nicaragua, more so than anywhere we have visited, was suffering from a terrible deforestation-- the jungle transformed by slash-and-burn agriculture into broad fields and cattle pasture. Specifically for us, this meant that there was hardly any shade and after an hour or two of walking we were hot, thirsty and sunburned.

Evidence that I've been on a horse!

Around 11 a.m. we arrived at a crossroads and found many people waiting for buses that weren't going to appear. There were a couple of pickup trucks around, but they were charging exorbitant rates, so we steeled ourselves to keep walking, even though the hottest part of the day was coming up. Someone told us that California was a 2-3 hour walk from where we were. Sonia rallied us and we pushed on ahead.

Very quickly our perseverance was rewarded. A pickup truck packed with people approached and in the passenger seat was José Adan. Hearing that we had been walking, he and the other hermanos from the church mobilized some transportation and came in search of us. We had never been so happy to see a friendly face. We piled in the truck and arrived in Riscos de Oro in no time. There we got to sit down and have some lunch with José Adan, meet his family and some of the other church members (who were themselves traveling back to El Retiro from an event at a different church).

Slash-and-burn.

After lunch, we piled once more into the pickup and made the hour-long trip to the Río Kukalaya. The pickup somehow managed to hold almost 20 people. It was a surprisingly fun trip, even given that I was exhausted and holding on for dear life. People laughed and told jokes, enjoying the wind and the carefree sense hanging off the back of a pickup. Everyone said that we were traveling norteño style. The landscape continued to show severe signs of slash-and-burn deforestation, and we even passed some fields that were still smoldering. However, one stretch of the road was seemingly untouched forest, and José Adan said that it was owned by a lumber company that was actively reforesting its lands and trying to manage the forest somewhat sustainably.

Arriving in El Retiro.

We arrived at the Río Kukalaya, which was at low ebb, and crossed it in a dugout canoe, pushed by a small boy. On the other side we mounted up on horses (a first for me!) and rode for about an hour to another river, crossed it and found ourself in El Retiro just as the late afternoon sun was bathing it in a golden glow. El Retiro is a beautiful green space, not heavily forested, with wooden houses raised up on stilts and spaced well apart from each other. After traveling through half-burned fields for hours, it seemed like a true refuge in comparison.

We stayed in the house of Pastor Secundino. After 24 hours of straight travel, and 48 hours of being awake, we went directly to the nearby river, called the Río Rarawas, to clean off the dust and the grime. The water was warm, but miraculously refreshing. After that we ate dinner, watched the fireflies come out and collapsed into bed.

The River.

We're ba-ack!

Apologies that the blog has gone silent. We spent the end of December and all of January in the U.S. visiting family and talking to churches (including some of you!) about Nicaragua. And I really don't know where February went to, but apparently we're in March already. Anyway, new blog posts will be  coming along shortly -- for now here's a picture of Quinn having fun at her school's Kermess (fair).

Las disculpas que el blog se ha quedado en silencio. Pasamos el fin de diciembre y todo enero en los EE.UU. visitando a la familia y hablando con iglesias (incluyendo algunos de ustedes!) sobre Nicaragua. Y realmente no sé donde fue el mes de febrero, pero parece que estamos en marzo ya. De todos modos, nuevos mensajes de blog va a venir pronto - por ahora aquí está una foto de Quinn se divierten en Kermess de su escuela.

Family

Since Maya was born we've been lacking a really good family photo. We take a lot of photos, but since one of us is always behind the lens it's rare to get all 4 of us together in the frame. So we're grateful to our friend Carl for taking this one in honor of Maya's first birthday.

I am not a big fan of posed photos but I think this one turned out great! Although I think the following one is good too and probably more accurate...

blue and green and yellow

Detail of the new mural at Casa Ben Linder.

Today I want to study

Poster seen in Rancho Grande: "Motherhood can wait, today I want to study." Includes some stats about the risks of early pregnancy for girls. What's interesting is that this is a campaign funded by USAID (i.e. U.S. tax dollars). In our experience, the barrier for most people in continuing their education isn't the lack of desire, but the lack of resources and opportunities... especially in the countryside.

They Paved Paradise

When I was a kid there was an enormous empty field across the street from our house where we spent long hours riding bikes, catching tadpoles, getting muddy and doing all that kid stuff. Sometime in junior high it got bulldozed into a subdivision of houses. Since by then I was too cool for kid stuff, I didn't really mourn its passing, but it was a really special gift to have had this parcel of wildness just outside my door growing up. Like Joni said, "you don't know what you've got til it's gone."

Graffiti in Managua: "To lose Bosawas
(Nicaragua's largest nature reserve) is
to lose everything."

Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I think stories like this uncover a bit of our natural ambivalence toward "progress" and "development." Anyway, that was what was bouncing around in my head on during our long, bumpy trip to the campo last week (driving bad roads can be really hypnotic somehow). The dirt road from Matagalpa eastwards to the Atlantic Coast is pretty terrible in the rainy season, muddy and rutted where not washed out entirely. But we passed armies of workers working to extend the cobble-stoned sections of the road, brick by brick, in a constant struggle against the ravages of the tropics.

(Road building in the U.S. is done by machines and a handful of humans; here, where the cost of labor is shockingly low and capital equipment is expensive, roads are built by hundreds of humans armed with shovels.)

It is expected that improved roads will bring economic opportunities and a measure of increased prosperity to the poorest parts of Nicaragua, which is undeniably a good thing! But there are notes of worry and ambivalence too when we listen to the pastors in the region. With roads often come a flood of newcomers, changing the culture and the way of life, new technologies, problems from the big cities, pollution and deforestation. When we visited Ecuador's oilfields a few years ago, many people told us that the road built by Texaco in the 1960s was one of the most destructive elements of the oil exploration, overnight changing an isolated corner of pristine rainforest into a frontier town.

Liscow 2012

This last week I was in the north to teach a class on "The Church and the Environmental Crisis" and several of the studying pastors had harsh words for what they called the "fever of cattle ranching" that has swept Nicaragua in the last few decades, taming the great expanse of Nicaragua's rain forest and converting it into pasture. Since the end of the civil war, Nicaragua's great wild eastern forest--including the vast nature reserves of Bosawas and Indio Maíz--has been nibbled and gnawed, faster and faster, and is now legitimately threatened (see map). According to their testimonials, in the last 30 years, a mere generation, they have seen a drastic reduction in the local forest, and the virtual disappearance of many of the iconic rainforest species. They mentioned, changes in the local climate and rainfall have shifted planting and harvest times by as much as a month.

Apropos of all this, e360 has a really interesting article and video presentation about the planned highway through part of the Bolivian amazon that has pitted Evo Morales against some of the indigenous groups who helped make him Latin America's first indigenous president.

Bolivia has been embroiled in conflict for the past year over the planned construction of a 182-mile highway, 32 miles of which would cut through TIPNIS, a vital ecosystem — located at the geographic heart of South America — that links the Andes and the Amazon basins. The road would be an important addition to Bolivia’s woefully undeveloped highway system. Yet environmental studies predict that the project will cause widespread damage, contaminating the park’s three main rivers, opening large areas of forest to illegal logging and settlement, and altering habitats that are home to 11 endangered species and rare primates. All that would threaten the traditional way of life of the reserve’s three dwindling indigenous cultures — the Tsimanes, Yuracarés and Mojeño-Trinitarios.

There is a sense, fostered by many environmental and development groups, that the twin goals of environmental protection and economic development can be wedded together through the concept of "sustainability." Sustainable development is at heart a positive, hopeful vision of a future that is prosperous, just and green -- although some have argued that it is a mirage that papers over real tensions between the two goals. I still think the concept has a lot of merit, but it's worth recognizing how hard it really is to accomplish, especially when not everyone involved is on board with the idea, even in theory (e.g. a few recent reports on the role of organized crime in driving deforestation).

Parade!

Just last night we got back home from one of our weeklong teaching trips to rural Nicaragua -- this time to the small community of Los Mangos, on the other side of Waslala in the Northern region. Traveling in the campo is always an adventure of bad roads and unexpected happenings, and that goes triple for the rainy season. This trip we saw one large transport truck that had fallen into a river after a dirt embankment, weakened by the rains, collapsed under its weight. We returned muddy, but thankfully without any incidents.

For some reason we also found ourselves in the middle of not one, but two (!) independence parades, first in Sébaco and later in the tiny village of La Mora (photo above). Nicaraguans celebrate their independence on the 14th and 15th of September (the 14th remembers the Battle of San Jacinto and the 15th, Central American Independence from Spain), but much of the month of September can be taken up by patriotic celebrations. In the case of La Mora, the parade marched the length of the town, with a baton twirler, numerous drummers and lots of flags and signs. No one was remotely bothered by the light rain. We watched until the marchers passed and then headed on our way.

This Far From Home

One useful thing about traveling in Nicaragua are the kilometer markers. No matter which road you're on you always know how far away you are from the center of Managua. We see #200--weather beaten and jutting from the greenery--whenever we visit La Misión Cristiana church #8 "La Colonia" in the small town of Rancho Grande.

Another First Birthday

This beauty turns one today! It's hard to believe that much time has passed since we brought her home from the hospital. And yet, here she is, toddling around the house, charming all she encounters. For me at least, the first year of Maya's life has felt much easier than the first year with the first baby.

Many things about our life in Nicaragua make caring for small children a little easier -- it's more acceptable to bring the kids to many of our work activities, childcare is more affordable (even relative to our income), and we both have a lot of flexibility with our work schedules. Also, I think we may have actually learned some things from the hazing that first time around

And yet, it's certainly not all the same. She's very much her own person. She started walking even younger than Quinn, and has yet to utter a recognizable word. (Tim reminded me a few weeks ago that Quinn actually said her first word before she took her first step.) This is completely unsurprising, given that she's taking in two languages. She seems to understand quite a few things in both English and Spanish.

She has a sweet smile, complete with one little dimple in her right cheek, and an impressive screech of protest (it's hard being the little sister). She adores Quinn and will sometimes walk up to her and spontaneously hug her. She's a social kid, and is fascinated by babies and children. She also will play happily by herself. She loves climbing, playing with strings or ribbons, putting her fingers in small holes, and twirling mango leaves between her fingers.

We love you, Maya! Happy Birthday!

Sunrise with Church

The sun coming up over the Christian Mission Church in San Pedro. The congregation has decided to expand the size of the building, so the red brick wall will eventually be the new front wall of the church. The old facade is visible through the archway. This church has a name in addition to a number -- "Camino Aemaus" or "The Road to Emmaus."

Sandino Vive

The Sandinista revolution of 1979 brought with it a flood of murals and street art celebrating the revolution. In Managua, many of these were painted over when the neo-liberals returned to power in 1990. However in the city of León (which is a little like the Berkeley of Nicaragua) many of the murals have been preserved and maintained. This colorful silhouette of Augusto César Sandino (with his boot on Uncle Sam's head) is one of the more famous ones and is located just a block from León's central square.