Where I live

         

             As I padlock the iron gate in front of my house, a passerby on a bike shouts “que linda,” the beginning of an ongoing stream of unsolicited commentary about my appearance that I will be on the receiving end of throughout the day.  I wait for a carriage pulled by an emaciated horse to maneuver its way around a taxi and then mount my bike and begin my ride along the cobblestone street, passing the pulperia where a stout women with her hair twisted into a bun waves an old rag over homemade bread and browning bananas to keep the flies off.  This is the city of Masaya, the capital of Nicaraguan Folklore, known for its festivals, its handicraft market, and its surprising abundance of men in drag.  It sits above an old volcanic lagoon, beautiful to look down on but too polluted to touch, filled with the trash that floats along the flooded streets to the west end of the city every afternoon during the rainy season.  It’s dotted with old Spanish cathedrals, their paint peeling and their spires rising above the rest of the city, the only structures brave enough to stand above two stories and tempt the fault line that lays below the streets.  Clustered around the cathedrals are barrios filled with elaborate homes with courtyards and cooks, humble dwellings with tin roofs and dirt floors, and an excess of mango trees and stray dogs.  This has been my home for the last year and a half.

What I do

I moved here in January 2012 to work with Bridges to Community, a community development and service learning organization.  Bridges runs various programs to empower communities in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.  I’m stationed at the Masaya site in Nicaragua, and though the communities where I work are just a short bike ride outside of the city of Masaya they feel distinctly rural.  As soon as I cross the highway I find myself on a dirt road marred by deep ruts and frequented by chickens.  I note the pungent smell of burning trash and the more humble size of the homes around me.  I pass fields of peanuts, squash, yucca, beans, bananas, and grazing cows.  In an effort to help these communities organize while effectively addressing their needs, Bridges requires each community where we work to form a committee of community leaders who are responsible for telling us what the community’s needs are.  Sometimes they ask for a project that benefits the whole community, like a health outpost in an area where people have to walk miles to see a doctor or new classroom for an overcrowded school.  Other times the greater need is for projects that benefit individual families, like latrines or houses.  When that’s the case, we ask the family to pay for a portion of the cost of the materials over a ten-year period.  Those payments are then added to a “community fund” that the committee of community leaders has control over (after they’ve done workshops on handling money).   After about five years of working in a community we step back, leaving the community leaders with a pretty sizeable fund and hopefully an understanding of how to use it for sustainable projects.

Every time we build a project, we bring down a group of volunteers, usually from the U.S., to assist in the construction alongside volunteers from the community and our team of local masons.  They usually come from very privileged backgrounds and pay a substantial fee to volunteer with us, which is how we fund our projects. While they’re here they live in the community they are working in, in similar conditions to the way people around them live.  They eat rice and beans at all of their meals (yes, even breakfast), they go without hot or running water, and they use latrines.  Each day we incorporate some kind of educational activity or reflection, such as a discussion about what causes poverty, a lesson about Nicaraguan history, or a game with community members so people can get to know each other.  My job is basically to take care of these groups of volunteers.  I pick them up at the airport, sleep with them in the community, translate for them, work with them on the construction site, and help them make sense of what they are seeing and experiencing.

My hope is that we are empowering the leaders of the communities where we work here in Nicaragua as well as the individuals from the U.S. who volunteer with us to create positive change, and I have seen that happen in exciting ways on both fronts.  One of the communities where we work, Los Lopez, is now using their community fund to give out microloans (independently of Bridges) so that people can buy seeds for their farm, start a small store in their house, or fix their roof.  They have a 100% payback rate.  I have also seen many of our volunteers from the U.S., especially high school kids, have incredibly transformative experiences, and I can tell that what they learned here is going to shape how they live and what they value for the rest of their lives.  Of course, there are community members who receive a project that benefits their family but never make payments on it, viewing it as more of a gift than part of a movement to better their community.  And of course there are volunteers from the U.S. who go home feeling good that they helped someone and grateful for the privileges they have but don’t think critically about what causes the poverty that they’ve seen or what they could do on a more regular basis to combat it. 

There are days when I doubt whether what we are doing matters, whether we are just putting a band-aid on a profound and complex problem while giving already privileged North Americans a chance to feel good about themselves.  But most days I am distracted from those doubts by the depth and sincerity of the friendships that I watch form between businessmen from Westchester, NY and campesinos from La Ceibita, Nicaragua.  I am reassured and inspired at the thoughtful remarks about the complicity of the wealthy in world poverty that I hear from 16 year old high school students.  And I am repeatedly humbled by the community members who show up to sweat and dig and carry bags of cement alongside their neighbors, expecting nothing in return.