Day -40: La Musica

Last month we went to Rosa Grande for one of La Misión Cristiana's regional assemblies. Most nights after dinner a bunch of the more musically-inclined pastors would sit around and play. It was a real treat to listen to. I've been blogging a bit about the music that is used in the worship services, but those songs are mostly from Managua churches. In the campo it's an entirely different musical culture and a different set of shared songs. Here they are planning an accordion plus several variants of guitar (the big bass guitar is called a guitarón). The video is a bit dark, but the sound comes through nicely.

Mariposa de Alas Rotas

For a little bit of Friday night music, here is Nica singer-songwriter Katia Cardenal's "Mariposa de Alas Rotas" (Broken-Winged Butterfly). Today we sat in on a thesis defense given by a student for her Masters in Feminist Theology. It was a very powerful presentation about the sexual exploitation and trafficking of girls and young women in Nicaragua, and their perceptions and perspectives on God, and the church. It was a grim, enraging topic presented in a hopeful manner, touching on the concept of resiliency in the face of adversity. This song was the presentation's theme music, as Katia sings here ... a broken-winged butterfly, against the hurricane...

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).

The Scorched Earth

"La Tierra Arrasada" (The Scorched Earth).

The vision of this video is of a future Central America, deforested and suffering the effects of a degraded environment. (Sorry for the lack of subtitles!) The story is not so different than "The Lorax," really, but carried out with some beautiful, painted-hand puppetry. We showed this video at a conference last December on "Women and Climate Change," about which, more coming soon.

La visión de este video es de un futuro Centro America, desforestada y sufriendo los efectos de la degradación del medioambiente. El cuento no es tan diferente de "El Lorax" en realidad, pero llevó a cabo con unas hermosas marionetas de mano. Se mostró el video en una conferencia el diciembre pasado sobre "La Mujer y el Cambio Climático," de la que, más información viene pronto.

Maya Crawling

What's this?  No blog posts for over a month?  Bad bloggers!  No cookies for you!  As penance, here is a video of Maya as she is starting to crawl.  More to come soon!

3:52 down, 11:08 to go

Well, here's a little bit of our allotted "15 minutes of fame." It's up on the Global Ministries website.

Laura Jean Torgerson and Timothy Donaghy - Nicaragua from United Church of Christ on Vimeo.

It's interesting to get this glimpse of ourselves from June, when we only knew Nicaragua and La Misión Cristiana second-hand. I don't really enjoy seeing myself on video, but I'm glad nothing we said or thought then has turned out to be blatantly untrue. I remain incredibly grateful for the gifts of the churches that are supporting our work here.

Of Partnerships and Previews

Over a year ago, when we were starting to think and pray about working for Global Ministries, I did some Internet Research (yes, this is a theme in my life ;) ) looking for La Misión Cristiana, hoping to find any information about who the people of this church were and what they were about. They do not, you might not be surprised to find, have much in the way of a web presence. But I did find this video on the website of the New York Conference of the United Church of Christ.



The video is from a trip some of the staff from the New York Conference made in August 2007 to visit La Misión Cristiana and re-affirm their partnership. I watched this video quite a few times in the months leading up to our arrival, as I wondered what our experience here would be like. As things turned out, we arrived almost exactly three years after the trip in this slide show. Now that we've been here a little over 3 months, watching the video again to write this blog post was almost funny, because we now know many of the faces and places featured.

So, for those of you who are wishing for a tangible glimpse of our life and work here, this is a pretty good introduction. We have been to almost all of the churches and projects in the video, and even the Masaya Volcano! :) Doña Pilar, who was featured in the 7th Church portion of the video, is the current national president and one of my favorite people ever. Tim will be doing some teaching at the school run by the 2nd church, and I have already participated in a training at the Emmanuel Center, and that will be the location for what I currently think of as my main project -- a comprehensive series of workshops to enhance theological education of pastors. And we just realized today that Ruth, the young woman who is the current secretary in the national office, is the daughter of Raul Davila Castro, who was the president when this presentation was made. We discovered this today when she gave us an invitation to her wedding (which will be in the 7th church!).

I intend to post a fuller report of our trip to visit the cattle farm in Waslala, but we were also chuckling in recognition of his description of the roads, and when we realized that we stayed at the same hotel in Waslala.

This partnership with the New York Conference, and the video produced as a result, was helpful to us as we prepared to come here to serve, and I hope it will also be helpful to you, whether it might be a "preview" for a visit (personal, mission trip, or people-to-people pilgrimage -- we like them all!) or simply a chance to connect with us and La Misión Cristiana virtually.

Quinn Settles In

Many people have asked how Quinn is doing, so we thought it was time for an update for her many fans.

She did have some trouble our first couple weeks, mainly because a) she was frustrated that everyone spoke Spanish (she would yell at us when we spoke Spanish to other people) and b) she didn't have many kids to hang out with. But it did not take long before she accepted that all of our new friends speak Spanish. At first she asked every time we met someone, "Does this friend speak Spanish?" but just yesterday she was talking about her cousin Grace and said "She's my friend. But she doesn't speak Spanish."

Watching her start to learn Spanish has been really quite amazing. I still expect that sometime in this first year, she will be rattling it off while I am still struggling to form sentences and learn verb forms. The first thing she mastered was "¿Como se llama?" that is "What's your name?" and she would proudly ask each taxi driver, sometimes even remembering to respond correctly "Me llamo Quinn." A few weeks after we got here, she was explaining to me that "¡Que linda!" (how pretty) meant something like "Nice to meet you." -- because almost everyone who met her for the first time had the same response. Just a couple weeks ago, she told me "Enrique" means girl and "Pa" means "boy," only to decide that she had it backwards. Luis Enrique and Paula Elena are friends in her class, so I think that is the origin of those Quinn-spanish terms. Perhaps the most interesting thing is how we don't really know how much Spanish she knows, because she always speaks English with us but at school her interaction with her classmates is in Spanish.

Which brings us to... school! Perhaps the biggest development since our arrival in Nicaragua is that Quinn has started school. She's in preschool at a colegio that goes all the way through high school, and all the kids wear uniforms (this was the case in all the preschools we visited, whether or not they were part of a larger school). Every Friday, though, the preschool and kindergarten kids get to wear whatever they want, which Quinn really enjoys. Yesterday she chose a purple shirt and red shorts -- both of which she put on by herself, with great pride -- backwards. Here are the obligatory first day of school shots:





Yesterday was also the day she got her first report card! The "grades" were "Achieved," "In Development," and "Not Achieved." We were surprised to see some of the things she can do -- like name shapes in Spanish. We were not at all suprised that she sometimes has trouble following directions (not that she doesn't understand, but that she's sometimes willful). The teacher said "We know she's still a baby, she has lots of time to reach these goals." Her teachers, Teacher Tanya and Teacher Rosita (which usually comes out "Teacher'Sita" when Quinn says it), are warm and loving, and look out for Quinn a little extra since she's still adjusting to the language and is the youngest student in the class. They can do this because she is one of only seven kids in her class.

In her free time, now that her parents got some wheels, Quinn has been venturing outside Managua to see some of the sights. A couple weeks ago, we went to Volcan Masaya, about a 20 minute drive south of Managua. You can drive up to the lip of the crater and climb stairs to a high point and look down into the smoking crater. Quinn was very excited about "the tall mountain." Dora the Explorer, one of her current cartoon idols, has lots of adventures, and they frequently involve tall mountains (or, you know, going to the highest hill). So, Quinn was very excited about having an adventure that involved climbing a tall mountain. She took issue, however, with our description of a volcano as a tall mountain with a hole in the top. Because we were able to climb up high and look down at the crater, she kept talking about how "the tall mountain doesn't have a hole at the top."


Climbing the mountain


Yay volcano!

For those of you who might have concerns about her hygiene or comfort, she is the only member of our household who regularly gets a hot bath.

Yes, this does involve boiling water. :)

And, to wrap up this Quinn update, here are some of her latest dance moves:


We think she's feeling at home here.