Thursday, October 15th 2009

By Peter Goffin

The four-by-four was going just fast enough to kick up red dust on the hard dirt road, just fast enough for us to feel every incline and irregularity in the ground beneath the tires, enough for me to get tossed roughly around the front seat. A man off to the right held back on tossing out a bucket of dirty water just long enough for us to pass, as his semi-clothed children ran out to play in the gritty haze we were leaving behind us. We were loping past an eternity of corrugated metal roofs and cloth blanket walls, following a road outlined by discarded garbage. This was the Barillo St. Ignacio, outside city limits, Granada, Nicaragua.

Six months earlier I had signed up to do volunteer work with an organization called Global Youth Network. They send teams of students from universities around Canada to developing countries around the world. I had never put a lot of thought into volunteering at home or abroad, but I had, at some point, caught the wander-bug. I wanted to pick up and go somewhere, get out of suburban Southern Ontario, and this seemed like my best chance. And it was never too late to try being a selfless human being.

In all honesty, I had known very little about Nicaragua prior to going. I knew it was in Central America, that there had been a costly civil war there 20 years ago, and that there was poverty. A lot of poverty. And, because everyone I had told about the trip had told me so, that I would do worlds of good by going down there. I don’t know that I was so sure.

But after all those months of anticipation and shopping and planning and orientation, we had arrived. My group of nine McMaster and Mohawk students had touched down in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, in the middle of the night and been driven the hour and a half North to Granada. I had never seen a palm tree before, and now here were thousands of them, in front of the airport, in people’s yards, on the highway’s median. There were day-glow painted houses and the sweet hot air of the equator and motels with saints’ Spanish names. I was on sensory overload.

Thirty hours later I would be reeling down the passenger window of the four-by-four, trying to explain to an elderly woman why a car-load of gringos had ventured so far off the tourist path into the slums. I would be sifting through a phrase book. Our faithful driver and guide was an American, he spoke no Spanish. “We’re here to paint the new school. Escuela? Pintura?” Then the answer comes back: “Por que?” Why? My nose goes back to the page, but I’m not looking for a translation so much as an answer, which I won’t find in any book.

Because Jesus, man, they already have a school. They have the bricks and the cement, and a fence and bars for the windows. What do these people, who have never had a school in their barillo–municipal zone–before, care if it’s painted? But by the time I look up, she’s gone. Fifty yards down the road, which just goes and goes and goes along the flat dry earth. She’s going from house to house making albatross strokes with one arm, signing “They’re painting the school up there, those strange gringos.”

And that was my introduction to Nicaragua: my own uncertainty, brought to me by a curious old woman putting my ten words of Spanish through their paces in the poorest slums–the only actual slums, really–that I had ever seen. But over the course of the following month, I think I was able to come up with an answer for that woman.

Yes, my teammates and I painted a school. But we did so much more. Our second week in country, we went up into the mountains, up North, by Jinotega, to a coffee and banana and sugar-farming village called Los Robles. Six days there and you feel entrenched in the society. We pulled weeds out of the coffee fields on a fair-trade farm, and built woodburning stoves from mud and iron rebar for people who had previously cooked over an open fire inside the house, with no chimney. Only Los Robles has no hacksaws, so I cut rebar with a hatchet and hammer until the hammerhead slid off. That’s how I learned about construction in the Third World.

We dug vegetable gardens for the local school while simultaneously ruining the lesson for the day, as the uniformed kids pressed up against the windows and snuck out of class to stare at us us, talk to us, draw us into schoolyard games. The night before we left, the farm hands and their families came up to the farmhouse to see us off and their kids put on a show.

It was then off to Leon, a vibrant city on the dry, 45-degree Celsius, volcano dotted plains of the mid-country. We were there under the guise of teaching English to a community centre full of seven to twelve-year-olds. In that capacity we failed spectacularly. But the amount of just pure fun I had while trying was off the charts. By the third day, 12-year-old Junieth had appropriated my phrasebook and was teaching me Spanish. Seven-year-old Juan had decided he would rather I throw him in the air than help him pronounce “Hello my name is…,” though little Keven and Emely were still happy to draw dogs and cats on a sheet of paper where I had written “dog–perro” in crayon, while telling me, I think, about their pets.

By the end of the week the group and I were haggard, each about 10 pounds lighter, but still reluctant to leave the community centre behind. But there were schedules to keep and more work to be done and it was off to the South, San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast. Once an old fishing village, it had been glitzed up, a little too much I thought, in an attempt to draw sun-worshipping tourists and surfers. But there was still the same communal spirit of bienvenida we had seen up in the mountains.

Dona Sara, who ran our hostel, was somewhat San Juan’s matriarch and fed half the town out of her six foot by six foot kitchen. All any of us had to do was say that we were staying with Sara and shopkeepers would give us bottles of pop without charging us the deposit fee for the glass, or hand us take-out food in proper dishes. We were Sara’s chicos, after all. And in between sessions of her mothering, we distributed books on a mobile library, made crafts with students at a school for the handicapped, and played basketball with kids from the neighbourhood.

And there was more. I did so much more, saw so much more, felt so much more. I saw massive, incredible beauty up North, lush and untouched. I saw and climbed volcanoes, both active (with steam billowing out of the sandy-rocky-ground) and dormant (covered in rainforest and monkeys). I saw nauseating wealth inequality and the touching resolve of people who push on with scraps.

But most of all, and the reason I would go back today on no notice, I met some amazing people. Like Jose, the contractor who helped us paint the school at St. Ignacio, who shared with us the food his wife had made for his daughter’s birthday, then gave what was left, along with some much prized water buckets, to local children. Or the villagers up in Los Robles who ride horses and drive ox-carts but worship a god called baseball.

To them, I am “the Curly One” (because of my hair, I assure you). And there were the children we pseudo-taught in Leon, and Dona Sara in San Juan and so many other who guided us up volcanoes or welcomed us into their homes or just wanted to talk, about anything. And, of course there were the eight other students I traveled with, most of whom I barely knew before the trip, all of whom are now extended family. I have never been so close to anyone, anywhere, and through it all they tolerated me and enriched every experience we shared.

To the cynical, volunteer trips like ours must seem a little airy-fairy. After all, it was just a lot of little projects, some painting, some hardware assembly, some teaching-cum-babysitting. For all the volunteering my group and I did, there is still poverty and there is still hunger and there is still injustice. No, I didn’t save the world. But I did get to know and understand a whole new part of it. That’s what I wish I could tell that woman in St. Ignacio. That a painted school is nice, but the real reason I’m here is to get to know her and the way she lives.

I went down there on what was basically an adolescent whim, trying to find an answer to my restlessness and boredom. But what I found there blew all of that clear away. I found other cultures and other attitudes about life and other ways to live it. I fell in love with Nicaragua and the people who showed it to me. Every new place we went to was more incredible than the last, and the people, wherever we went, were kind and proud and welcoming and generous. It could be sad at times, difficult at times; it wasn’t a resort trip. But the spirit and physical beauty of that country was enough to hook me. And I will be back. I don’t know when or in what capacity, but I have to go again. That’s the effect of Nicaragua’s.