Last week I traveled to Nicaragua with a group of professors from Boston College. The purpose of the trip was to introduce BC faculty to Nicaragua, and to open doors for future faculty involvement with international teaching and service in Central America or elsewhere.
In essence, we spent the week as students, learning about the history and people of Nicaragua. We met with students at the Universidad Centroamericana, a Jesuit university with 8,000 students in Managua. We visited elementary schools and a women's health center. We heard lectures from the editor of a Jesuit journal of culture and politics, and the director of a development research center. We went into the home/workshop of Nicaraguan potters who demonstrated their production process - from digging up the clay and preparing it, to throwing pots on a kick wheel using bicycle spokes and other found objects as trimming tools, to firing the pots in wood-burning brick kilns that they build by hand.
We traveled to an organic coffee farm near Estili, in the mountains north of Managua. We had a delicious lunch with members of a women's farming and business collective, and we sampled their coffee. The villagers showed us coffee plants, growing under the shade of banana trees. Many of their coffee plants have been devastated by coffee rust. They also pointed out hills where contra guerrillas attacked the village in the 1980s, killing and kidnapping several villagers.
We attended mass at one of Nicaragua's Christian base communities. We met with a leading Nicaraguan feminist and former Sandinista, who talked to us about the current situation of women under the Ortega government, the problem of domestic violence, and the (lack of) women's rights in both private and public life. We listened to members of an indigenous community, some of whom fought with the contras, and who are now seeking recognition of land rights that stretch back to before the Spanish invasion. We had dinner with a leader from the autonomous regions on the Atlantic coast of the country, an area populated chiefly by people of indigenous and Afro-Caribbean descent, many of whom are Moravian Christians. We heard from Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit priest and liberation theologian, explain his role in the Sandinista revolution. We saw what remains of the old cathedral in Managua, severely damaged in the earthquake of 1972 that destroyed much of the capital. We stopped by an active volcano. According to some, the Somoza dictators would drop their opponents from planes into the volcano to disappear them.
The picture below was taken in Granada. I am not sure why this image was painted on the side of this particular building, but the figure is immediately recognizable to any Nicaraguan. The man in the hat is Augusto Sandino, the much beloved national hero of Nicaragua. In the 1920s, Sandino led a nationalist guerrilla campaign to oust the US Marines who then occupied the country. In 1934, Sandino was betrayed and assassinated by General Anasastio Somoza Garcia. With support of the US, the Somoza family established a repressive dictatorship that ruled the country until 1979.
