A Break in Our Story, Some Statistics, and an Unexpected Embrace
By Steph
April 26th, 2006 | Nicaragua |
Do you ever feel like you’ve lived a lifetime in a day? Like physically and emotionally you’ve run the entire spectrum of human experience? Today was a day like that for me. I can’t account for Trevor and Arthur. We haven’t talked much today; maybe it’s exhaustion, or maybe it’s just that there are times when language is too limited to adequately describe a place, an event. In my Holocaust Literature class this semester, we talked about trauma as a break in a story, a gap in a narrative line that you can spend a lifetime trying to recover from, to make sense of. What do you say (or write) when there simply are no words - but you cannot bear to be silent?
We woke this morning and had coffee in the dining room (the coffee in this country makes my little caffeine-addicted heart soar, it is just that wonderful). Arthur and Trevor wanted to shoot Padre Marcos for the promotional piece in the garden between the church and the porch near the dining room, but right next to the porch are four parrots who “call” in the morning - this “call” sounds more like screaming bloody murder, by the way - so we had to wait until they stopped before filming. It was a quick and easy shoot; when we were done, Trevor commented that Padre Marcos looks like Dustin Hoffman, which is so true!
Then we piled into a pick-up truck driven by Francisco, a volunteer at Betania, and headed to the Chinandega dump. The first thing I became aware of when I stepped out of the truck was the smell. Acrid smoke, decay, waste, a hint of something sickly-sweet - I began to breathe very shallowly. The smell and the heat enveloped me, got into my pores, infiltrated my lungs. And then I saw the people. Arthur says there weren’t as many children there this time as there were the last time he was there, which is good, because it means that this time they were in school. Nevertheless, there were people everywhere, pulling garbage off the backs of trucks with hooks, going through it to find anything useable. One boy had put cracked and scratched CDs in the spokes of his bicycle tires and was showing off to his friends. Thin, tired-looking cattle grazed on the refuse, mooing occasionally. In the distance, smoke rose from a small mountain range of trash - whether it was burning or just steaming from the heat of the day, I’m not sure. The three of us said very little; Arthur pointed out some shots to Trevor, I asked for the camera to take a picture of a sneaker on the ground. We were there maybe ten minutes. On the way out, I noticed that beyond the wall next to the road was a cemetery. The garbage of a town juxtaposed with buried bodies no longer serving their purpose - I wasn’t sure whether I needed to laugh or cry.
Thankfully, our next stop couldn’t have been more uplifting. We visited the primary school established by Padre Marcos for the children who live in the area around the dump. The school serves breakfast and lunch to its students, most of whose parents have a hard time putting food on their plates; parents work in the dining hall, preparing and serving food, and the students do most of the work maintaining the school itself. As at the playground in Managua, I was again reminded in the best way possible that kids are kids no matter what country you’re in, and we got some great footage for both projects.
Just down the street was a health clinic, again opened by Padre Marcos, that helps many of the families in the neighborhood. As I listened to Arthur talking with a woman in scrubs about the services provided by the clinic, understanding very little thanks to my virtually non-existant Spanish, I noticed a poster advising mothers about the benefits of breast-feeding.
With motherhood on the brain, our next stop hit closer to home than I anticipated. We drove about five minutes and stopped at a home for expectant and new mothers. Women can stay at the home for free, receive meals and essentially join a community of other women. Walking around the home, statistics from an article I read last night resurfaced in my mind. Thirty-six percent of Nicaraguan women become sexually active by age sixteen; the percentage jumps to seventy-three by nineteen. Only twenty-six percent of sexually active women practiced contraception; only five percent, in one study, were aware of the relationship between fertility and the monthly cycle. During the 1980s, illicit abortions were the leading cause of maternal deaths, and accounted for forty-five percent of hospital admissions. The most common reasons for seeking abortion are abandonment by the father and lack of financial support for a child. We walked through the home and to the garden in the back, where maybe twenty or so women were learning how to make paper-mache pinatas. Many of the women didn’t look much older than me. I felt suddenly and overwhelmingly fortunate to be born in a family that valued my education and in a country where I have access to knowledge about my body and the right to make choices about it.
Finally, we drove out to St. Mathilde, a community of three hundred houses built by volunteers from Betania. The houses have plots of land on which their residents can plan crops to either live on or sell, and the community also has a school. We drove through the dusty dirt roads of the community and made our final stop at the school, where classes were just letting out for lunch. The kids were so excited to see us; they were a little shy at first, but were soon running up to us, mugging for the cameras and then begging to see their pictures. Two little girls - they couldn’t have been older than seven - attached themselves to Arthur and followed him all around the buildings, reaching for his hand if he let go of theirs to gesture as he talked to the superintendent. As Trevor was filming a group of boys goofing off across the schoolyard, a little girl in a bright red dress who looked like she was about five years old walked up to him and wrapped her arms around his legs. Trevor is six-foot three, so she didn’t even come up to his waist. He looked down at her for a second; she looked up at him and then just toddled away.
We somehow managed to tear ourselves away from the kids and made our way back to Betania, where we had another delicious meal, said our goodbyes, and caught a ride back to the Chinandega market. Instead of a bus, this time we rode in a van - four rows of seats, luggage crammed in every nook and cranny. The ride was not quite as enjoyable, and no one fell asleep, but wheels are wheels, and we made it back to Managua intact. The first thing all three of us did was get our sticky, sweaty, smelly selves into a nice, cool shower. We’re going to sleep very well tonight.
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July 12th, 2006 at 8:46 am
[…] Our friend, Norma, was giving us rides for the morning. After the defeat of the Sandinista government in 1990, Norma’s parents had opened a small, private Catholic school in Managua. The school flourished and today provides incredible educational opportunities to over five hundred students, from preschool to twelfth grade. When Norma asked us if we’d like to kill time by taking a short tour of the school, we were naturally enthusiastic. One of the highlights of our last trip, for me, were our shoots at schools founded by Padre Marcos as part of the Mission of Betania. Countries vary by geography, economy, politics, and history, but kids are pretty much kids no matter where you travel. Being around them is one of the best ways I know to remind myself that beneath those differences about which Grown-Ups like to make so much noise, we’re all just human, and we’re all in it together. […]