Saying Goodbye

I´m off to the airport!

The Only Taoists in Nicaragua

Today, after sitting for a few hours and eveloping an excel spreadsheet to collect data on the chickens project, I go with Oneyda to meet her Taiwanese neighbors (the ones who gave her exercises to do in the morning). Earlier in the day, she had stopped by to buy some fried tofu, which she brought home and and used instead of the traditional fried cheese served with crispy, toasted plantains. The taste, succulent and familiar from my years of hippie cooking, seemed very out of place on top of the traditional tostones here in Nicaragua. We wait by the metal door after knocking. I notice that someone has scrawled in white-out (a favorite medium of vandals in Masaya), "Stupid Chinese."

Oneyda tells me, "I told my friend that I was friends with Lin, and she said she doesn´t like los chinos because they´re bad people-- they exploit their workers in the sweatshops here." It´s true that Korean and Taiwanese sweatshop owners are notorious for the bad conditions in their factories, but it´s quite a jump to condemn an entire race of people for that. The door opens, and a tall-ish woman in a sleeveless, embroidered blouse smiles widely and beckons us inside. The cement floor of the enclosed patio is cleaner than most I´ve seen here. A plastic hose snakes across the floor into a large room with metal barrels and gigantic bags of soybeans stacked to the ceiling.

"This is where they make the tofu," Oneyda offers. But we don´t linger, making our way to the front door. I notice a few pairs of shoes outside the door. Oneyda catches herself, about to enter the house, and laughs. "I forgot," she says, bending to remove her sandals, "I haven´t been here in a while." I step out of mine, and into the house, where Lin offers me a pair of plastic sandals and introduces me to her husband. Both of them offer a handshake and bow slightly rather than leaning forward for the customary Nicaraguan kiss on the cheek.

"Lizzy is familiar with the Tao," Oneyda explained, "and when I told her about you, she wanted to meet you." Lin smiles and nods as her husband busies himself preparing a tray of tea behind her. We´re sitting on a leather couch in their living room. A huge canvas on the wall displays a painting of mountains, trees, and a bridge. The composition looks Chinese but the style reminds me of the colorful folkloric paintings that hang like flags in the city´s market.

"I´m very interested in Taoism," I explain, "so I wanted to meet you. I was curious, how long have you been here? And why did you come?"

Lin nods, and her husband gingerly sets the tea tray on the table. "We´ve been here four years now," she says, still smiling, and then says something else I don´t understand. It´s the first time I´ve heard spanish with a Chinese accent, and the combination (like tostones with tofu) feels strange. I look to Oneyda.

"They came to be missionaries for the Tao," she says, "you know, to evangelize?" Hmm. This is wierd. I didn´t know that Taoims had evangelists. Lin´s husband pours green tea from a pot into

four cups that would fit inside a shot glass, and their cat curls up to fall asleep on my foot. This is also wierd-- I hate cats and they hate me, usually.

We go on to discuss all manner of philosophy, including Jesus and the inadequacy of words to describe reality. I leave thinking they must be the only Taoists in Nicaragua.

Islands for Sale

Yesterday, Elena and I took a half-hour bus ride to Granada with my friend Anibal. I´d already been to Granada, Nicaragua´s original colonial capital (a big tourist destination, full of grand old churches and foreigners´houses), but had never seen the "Isletas de Granada," an archipelago of 380 tiny volcanic islands that extend like an arm from Granada into Lake Cocibolca. And so, we were headed for the islands.

We walked the wrong way from the bus stop for a few blocks, rounding a corner to find ourselves a few steps away from a corral containing three six-foot-tall, dusty-feathered ostriches. "In Granada?" I thought, "How did they get here?" I pictured the great hulks of their bodies balanced on bony legs in some freight car on a barge from Africa, or bouncing down the pan-American highway through cactus-sprinkled Mexican mountains. We had to stop and stare, and they stared back. Anibal pointed upwards, away from the birds-- the explanation: a circus truck.


Eventually we found our way to the central park, a shaded plaza surrounded by colonial grandeur. The main Cathedral, banana-yellow, and several posh hotels look down on the park´s colorful patchwork of vendors and plants. We headed down the hill on a cobblestone street, passing restaurants whose names, like "Cafe Chocolat" or"The Roadhouse," called out from chic signs that would have looked at home in a yuppie neighborhood in Chicago or Miami. We should not have been surprised when a cabbie in this neighborhood proposed that we pay him $5 to take us to the dock (a trip that should cost only 2). Granada is the gem of Nicaragua´s tourism industry, after all.

We did find an affordable ride. At the beach, three teenage boys approach the car waving laminated brochures, and through the open window begin negotiating the price for a tour. We settle on twelve dollars with one curly-haired boy, and he hauls his canopied boat to the water´s edge for us to climb aboard. We occupy three of twelve seats-- we have the boat to ourselves as we push off into the choppy brown water.

The boy began his spiel: "Lake Cocibolca is big enough that the entire island of Puerto Rico could fit inside it. It is big enough to provide fresh water to most of Central America, but for some reason there´s only one city that purifies water from the lake."

"How many of the islands are privately owned?" I ask.

"Three hundred and seventy or so. The government owns three."

This seems shocking. I ask who sold them, and when.

"In the 1930´s, there were some people who owned a farm on the coast, and they claimed that the islands were part of their farm. They made it legal, and then started selling them off," he says.

The breeze off the lake smells sweet. We approach our first island.

"This one belongs to the owners of Flor de Cana rum..."

"And Victoria beer," Anibal chimes in, "like you remember from the bar last night?"

I nod, but my attention is on the island. The owners have built it up so that the edges of the island are a stone wall, as if at the edge of a swimming pool. Their house, a modern construction of wood and glass, sits amidst a multi-tiered garden of stones and tropical plants, and a turquoise-tiled swimming pool sits only feet away from the lake´s brown water. A private paradise.

We pass more islands with private houses, some of them more and some less luxurious than the Flor de Cana family´s place. The majority of the owners are foreigners, and I experience a strange micture of desire to have my own personal paradise and revulsion at this very typical piece of Latin American history, a seizure and sale of native land by foreigners. We pass an island about the size of a gas station whose population of monkeys never leaves, and then an island with a "for sale" sign. (see below) I groan, and offer our guide some trail mix.

Braiding Hair, Creating Futures

Three afternoons per week, a professional hair stylist visits the office from Managua to teach seven adolescent girls hairdressing techniques. The goal of this new program is to introduce girls to various careers-- to encourage them to think of themselves as the creators of their own economic futures. It is a road to economic independence. For now, they are learning hairdressing. And next month´s group? Perhaps graphic design, or gardening, or sewing.

In this photo, Milagros and Xaviera work on braiding Elena´s hair.

Clay and History

I met a woman today, Amparo, whose 107-year old grandmother was lying in a bed next to her pottery wheel. This grandmother is the last of the indigenous people who used to live in the area (what Amparo meant by this, I don´t know, since she´s a descendant standing right there, ostensibly an indigenous person.) Maybe she meant that her grandmother was one of few left who remember how it was before the area was built up, when people still lived traditionally. Now, Amparo´s grandmother uses a wheelchair. Toothless and skinny, she laid in bed in a pink cotton nightgown. Amparo, her grandchild, is a solidly built woman. Her dark eyes are set deep in a face that shines like polished wood, and her frequent smile reveals a gap in her lower front teeth.

"Yeah, journalists come to interview her, on Women´s Day and stuff," Amparo told us. "She was born in 1902, has seen all the wars, everything." The town used to be called "San Juan de los Platos" when Amparo´s grandmother was young, because of all the plates that were made here. "From this clay," Amparo told us, gesturing to the bag of clumped, brown clay in her yard.


She sat at her pottery wheel, rocking back and forth as her foot pushed it. Her hands caressed the spinning lump of clay, drawing it up into a bowl. Suddenly I imagined that this is how God made the earth, by taking a glob of clay and spinning it on a pottery wheel into a perfect sphere. Indeed, some Native American creation myths tell that God made humans out of clay. Mother earth. The perfect roundness of the pots on Amparo´s workshelf belies the rustic equipment she uses.

According to Amparo´s grandmother, the indigenous story goes that people discovered clay when they used it to seal the holes in their baskets, preventing the grain from falling through the cracks. Amparo stood by the brick oven in her yard, explaining this. "Then, one day, there was a fire, and they noticed that the material got hard, like this," she picks up a shard of red tile from the inside of the oven, "so they started to make things with it. They used pots instead of baskets."

Amparo learned from her grandmother to make simple things for cooking when she was a girl. At 12 or 13 years old, she could make any utensil for the kitchen. But then she went to an artisan´s workshop in the 1970´s, where they showed her how to work with a wheel and new designs. They showed her pre-columbian patterns, graphics, new paints, techniques. "Like this one," she pointed to a squat vase with leaves and flowers designed in relief, painted a glossy black and green, "is magnesium oxide." She told us that the pre-columbian designs take more time, and so the more commercialized pots are now the ones that use the natural paints but which don´t feature the complicated designs. "Like the Jaguar," she said, "and the serpent heads and all that. Those take a lot of time. So the art is being lost..."

Chicken Exchange

We waited for about a half hour. Oneyda peeled an orange, dragging a knife slowly under the very outer layer of the rind, leaving the white. She told us about her Taiwanese neighbors, Taoists, who had given her some exercises to do in the mornings for her health.

Finally, Carmen strode grinning through her garden, dressed in a matching purple shirt and skirt. I rose to greet her with the customary kiss on the cheek. After some small talk, we set out in the pickup truck to find some chickens in La Sabanita, an area known for raising La Gallina Criolla, or "Native Hen," which is prized for its flavor and nutritiousness.

We walked down the dusty path, stopping at gate after gate and calling ¨Are you selling chickens?" The answer was always the same: "No, they´re too small." Why no chickens in this region famus for its chickens? La Gallina Criolla is what most Nicaraguans cook for Christmas dinner. They sell for five dollars a piece, which is a big chunk of money for a family that makes its living farming. Most families raise these chickens and then sell them for the holidays, eating the eggs in the meantime. Since it´s just after New Years, most families are raising a young flock of chicks-- too young to sell, since it´s difficult to tell from a chick what the mature bird will look like.

I asked Carmen how people kept theives from stealnig their chickens. "It´s a small community," she explained, "and you know what your animals look like. They don´t wander far, and if someone sees a person in the market selling a chicken that looks like your chicken, they tell you. But it is hard sometimes, because yuo don´t always catch them."

Carmen emerged from the last house, where a pig the size of a LazyBoy rooted in the muddy yard. "We´ll have to wait a couple months," said Carmen as we walked back to the pickup truck.
"But aren´t the women who are coming to the meeting expecting to receive chickens?" I asked. "Yes, but we´ll have at least some because the women from the first round of the project will be bringing their hens back today," Oneyda explained.

Back at the house, Oneyda, Elena, and I sat back down on the porch while Carmen busied herself in the house. We unstacked the tower of plastic chairs she brought, arranging them in a circle on tha patio. Ten minutes later, they were all full. Twenty women had arrived-- half of them carrying chickens. Some held their birds upside down by the feet, blinking, wings hanging helplessly. Others carried mesh bags that twitched and clucked softly. One woman cradled two chicks between her forearm and her bosom. A little boy held a mahogany-colored hen´s wings closed in his hands, as I had learned to do earlier that day.

"How are we going to do this?" I wondered. Then Carmen stepped to the center of the circle with two large baskets and explained the process in Spanish too fast for me to understand. She began calling out the women´s names as Oneyda stood poised, pen to notebook.

"Maria Teresa Aleman Gonzales," she yelled.
"Four," a woman answered, and brought forth her bag of hens. One by one, she lifted the four hens from the bag and placed them in the basket. Their feet were tied, but some struggled, ending up awkwardly sideways. Carmen lifted them and rearranged them, and, as if by magic, they sat still on their fat chests in the basket, blinking. With each new addition in the baskets, feathers ruffled and stretched, and a hen or two found a way, even with feet tied, to climb out of the basket, dragging the wing or foot of another with her. The clucking grew louder until we had to yell to hear over it.

Then, Carmen began to call the names of the new women. Each took three hens and a rooster, re-tying their feet and placing them in bags or upside-down for the journey home. And then it was done. The Gallina Criolla Project had finished its first round and begun its second. Even without a hundred percent attendance, we had exchanged 36 hens-- up from the 24 that had started the project.

Chickens

Today, I held a chicken for the first time. Tobias, Oneyda´s husband, and I were in the back yard at Comunicada´s office. There, two hens and a rooster pecked at the bare dirt ground in the shade of an avocado tree.

"Here," he said, "I´ll show you. You have to make sure they weigh enough when you buy them." He creeps towards one, and then swiftly grabs it and folds its wings between his hands. "See," he said, "pesada." Heavy. He held it out to me. I shook my head. I´ve never held a chicken before. I was afraid I´d break a wing, get scratched. "No, no," he said, "It´s OK. You just hold it like this." So I took the hen, holding its wings closed. She blinked and craned her head toward the ground. Black and white, her feathers felt silky under my fingers. I could feel the bones in her wings, feel her lungs expand and contract as she breathed. She blinked again, and I bent to the ground to release her. Away she strutted.

"They sleep in the avocado tree," he explained, "and we don´t have to feed them because when there´s no food they eat the leaves of the tree." A good arrangement. "These chickens, they taste much better than the industrial ones. That´s why they´re expensive. People save them for a special occasion, or for when they´re sick. You make a soup of one of these, and it´s very nutritious. It helps you get well..."

Later that day, Elena and I rode a dusty 20 miles in the back of Oneyda´s pickup truck to El Pochote, a community on the other side of the volcano from the city of Masaya. We covered curving stretches of brick road, passing horse-drawn carts, roaring buses, and whitewashed churches-- all of which praised the Lord Jesus Christ in colorful handpainted letters on their sides.

We drew to a halt on a dirt road in front of a turquoise house beloning to Carmen, the woman who runs Comunicada´s Chickens Changing Lives project. A few hens pecked at the ground in her garden: a carpet of shiny, low-growing greenery punctuated by shrubs and ruffled flowers.

Her daughter dragged two rocking chairs onto the porch for us, and brought a bowl of glistening, freshly washed bananas and oranges she had picked earlier in the week. We sat down to wait in the shade. As Elena was about to find out, there is a lot of waiting involved in community work in Nicaragua. Many people have no telephone, so there is no way to know for sure than someone will be at home when you come to visit. So we waited, and we talked about chickens.