More about El Lagartillo

Bairon milking the cow

Monument to the fallen of 1986

Community Cistern, to be filled by the new pump

Swimming at the waterfall

El Lagartillo was founded as a cooperative in 1982, where the land was held in common by the members of the community. This was a very unique time in Nicaraguan history. Since the time of the Spanish conquest, land had been divided and held in the hands of the wealthiest families. In 1979, the hated dictator Anastasio Somoza fled the country in a wave of public outrage that had been rising over the previous years. The Sandinistas (FSLN) stepped in and began to support land reform, purchasing (and confiscating) land from the wealthy owners who had either not been paying taxes on the land or claiming very deflated prices. The land was then offered to cooperatives such as those in El Lagartillo.

Life was good initially for the community, and it began with a handful of families who all held the idea of holding property in common. However, the US, believing that its empire was threatened, financed and armed the Contras who targeted cooperatives (and literacy teachers) in particular, fearing that they were the harbinger of full communism. The contras attacked El Lagartillo in 1984 and six members of the community were killed by the Contras. There is a monument to the fallen. When 1990 came and the Nicaraguans, tired of fighting the US embargo and the Contras, elected Violeta Chamorro, she began a reversal of land reform and passed laws to remove support for cooperatives. El Lagartillo held a vote and decided to let anyone who did not wish to be part of the cooperative, to opt out and receive a share of land. When 1996 came and Arnoldo Alemán was elected (he is now under house arrest for embezzlement), he passed laws making it even harder to financially sustain as a cooperative and the community decided to apportion the remaining land.

Currently there are a few things held in common: the water system, a small forest, the library. There are about 150 people that live in the town. There is a primary school, taught by members of the community and a couple of teachers from Achuapa, a nearby town. There is also a secondary school that serves the region, although they are in need of an English teacher and a science teacher. There is a medical clinic, where once a week a resident physician from a nearby town comes for half a
day. The school, Hijos del Maíz, began in 2004 as a way to support the community. There are 8 teachers, who all underwent an extensive training in teaching Spanish. Most houses use a solar panel and a car battery to supply basic electric needs such as lighting. There are no flush toilets, just outhouses. There is one Clear modem which is shared by the community, and to use it, you have to walk about 10 minutes to where there is a radio tower in sight.

Yesterday, the water system (see previous post) was tested and proved to be quite sufficient. Using 8 solar panels, the pump moved 16,000 liters (about 4000 gallons) from the well in about 2 hours.  To celebrate this, we took a 30 minute hike to a nearby waterfall to take a swim and relax. There were natural rock slides diving spots. We are winding down our week here and there will be a lot to miss.

A Day in the Life, by Liam

Dad´s alarm clock

Me & Yomar, mi profesor

El campo de fútbol

My dad usually wakes me up around 7am. The roosters wake him around 5am. Good thing I'm a sound sleeper. It is a little cool at night I sometimes wake up with bug bites. There is about an hour and a half to get ready for my lesson. For breakfast, Yajaira gives us a galleta with jam on it and some fruit, like fresh pineapple, banana, or papaya. My dad drinks coffee.

My teacher, Yomar, meets me at 9am. We go over verbs, and how they go with different subjects, like yo, tú, él, nosotros, and ellos. We do regular verbs like hablar. comer, and vivir. We do irregular verbs like ir. We talk a lot about new words and what they mean. He makes me do conjugation of verbs for different pronouns. Yomar is the brother of Juan Ramon, our host.

After the lesson, I usually go home and read or play with Monchito until lunchtime. For lunch, Yajaira makes a drink called refresco natural, water with fruit juice. She usually makes something with beans and sometimes rice. After lunchtime, I get to read or play baseball in the road with Monchito and the other boys: Mario, Gabriel, Claudio, and sometimes Juan Ramon. Juan Ramon has a big hammock I like to lie in when it's hot.

In the afternoon, I have class again with Yomar. at 3pm. We usually don't study so hard, but he shows me around the town. At 4pm, all the boys in the town go to a field where there are two soccer goals and we play for an hour or two. The older boys play baseball on the same field.

Then we go home and play some games like tag or sit in the hammock until dinner. Yajaira usually gives us some gallo pinto (beans and rice together) and a tortilla. Also she gives us a drink called Avena, which is oat milk, kind of like horchata. After dinner, the adults watch the tv, a program called "La Fantasma de Elena." Then I get bored and leave. Then we have bible time, hyung time, and time for bed.

Community

Welcome sign to the village Luis hanging laundry The word "community" gets used a lot in the U.S. Probably a better word would be "population" or "group" since we usually are usually referring to a specific set of people.  El Lagartillo (the village where the school Hijos del Maíz is set - see link) is a real community. Not only do the residents live in a given place , but there is a real dialogue that happens by which the people meet, discuss, and make decisions about how to live their common life. Yesterday I managed to go to two committee meetings.The committee of water was meeting to install a new water pump and discuss and learn about the system so as to maintain and take care of it. During the dry season (sometimes called "summer" although it runs from November to May), water is often in short supply in mountainous regions of Central America. Although there is a well, there is no system of bringing the water to where the houses  are. Hence, the project which has been in the works for several years. It is a partnership of El Lagartillo, the regional government, and the government of Spain., The idea is fairly simple: use solar panels to power an electric pump to move the water from the well to a cistern close to where people live. So the installation guy (and his cadre of 2 German engineering students) was talking for about 3 hours to members of the water committee about solar panels, pumps, and maintenance of the equipment, I asked one of the women of the committee to show me notes and was quite impressed at the notes she took. At the end of the meeting they created 3 work crews to do the installation today. Last night I went to the committee of health. Prior to coming, I had offered to bring some health equipment with me and they (the committee) requested via e-mail for a nebulizer and blood pressure cuff. These I found on Craig's list. The meeting last night was to check out the equipment, learn how to use it, and more importantly, decide how it should be stored and made available for everyone. Right now, I am writing this entry from a hillside using the Clear network, using the modem owned and used in common by El Lagartillo. I am quite impressed at the community of El Lagartillo, and feel like they have shown me what community means.

Curveballs

Waiting in Miami

Landing in Managua

You know travelling definitely brings you its share of surprises. We are in Esteli which is about 70 miles north of Managua. The laptop isn't working so I am henpecking this on an iPod.

Liam and I made it fine to Miami, then had an unplanned 10 hour layover. Well the upside was that I managed to get caught up on charting, but by the time we got to Mamagua it was too late to go by bus. We ended up hiring a driver to Esteli. Not exactly chicken bus travel, but I was interested in pushing on from Managua. Then we were walking around this town of 60K and ran into our contact from our school by accident. I guess he doesn't see a lot of hueritos (crackers) walking through town with their kids and guessed it was us.
Tomorrow we bus it to El Lagartillo (see Hijos link) and continue la vida nicaraguense.

¿Why Nicaragua?

Good question. Where would be a good place to take my son for an immersion experience with a Spanish speaking family, be able to see jungle wildlife, but not follow the roads more traveled? Of course there is not just one answer to the question.
Several months back, I began to think about options from Mexico to Panamá. I kept coming back to Nicaragua for its natural beauty, lack of pretention, wonderful spirit of independence, and absence of major tourism. What can you say about a country that has been invaded several times by big brother to the north and yet has managed to neither become a complete banana republic, a drug war zone, or a tourist attraction like some of the neighbors? Add to that a REAL national sport (see Wikipedia link) and that's a place I want to visit.
Next step was to figure out where to go? A bit of web searching yielded the perfect place, Hijos del Maíz (see link). We will be heading straight from Managua to Estelí, then to El Lagartillo where the school is. Hopefully we will have a chance to post from there, although given there are no cars, there might not be internet connections, in which case we will post when we can.

The Guardabarranco, the national bird of Nicaragua, posing with the FSLN (Sandinista) banner