Two Mantras

I have clung to two sentences this week:

·         That is south.

·         This is normal.

My sense of direction, normally healthy, dies in Nicaragua. Without a vista, North, South, East, and West blur together.

South of Granada, visible only from street corners, is Mount Mombacho. It is a tourist compass. Want to get your bearings? Look for Mombacho. That is south.

Each morning when we exit our front door for the seven-block walk to Spanish class, I  think of the mountain behind me and say, “That is south.” We walk east, north, east, north, then finally east—and with each turn I tell myself, “That is south—and then point toward the other three compass points and name them.

Silently, of course. I don’t want Marlo to think I’m lost—or losing it.

Riding the bus to San Juan de Oriente--“That is south.”

Walking home from the bus stop--“That is south.”

Why does my internal gyroscope falter in Nicaragua? I think to it needs the vistas to which it is accustomed, not the narrow corridors and tree-lined roads of Granada.

…

Sweating on a January afternoon, I tell myself, “Here, this weather is normal.”

When seven-year-old Horacio explains Spanish vocabulary to me and helps correct my grammar, I reassure myself that I’m not stupid (tonta).  ”For him, Spanish is normal.”

He’s been learning it longer than I have—and with a younger brain.

Each morning and afternoon, the same ancient man is sitting on the same sidewalk, two doors from our house.

I ask Horacio if the man lives in that house. “No,” Horacio answers. “Es pobre. No tiene una casa. (He’s poor. He has no house.)”

I detach from my momentary pain with my new mantra. “This is normal,” I tell myself.

Reflecting tonight, I wonder.

Normal? Yes.

And also broken.

If I feel too much pain—I shall break along with him.

But with too much mantra--I shall go numb.

God grant me the grace to accept the things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

And, in seeking direction for my journey, may my emotional gyroscope always be oriented toward grace.

...

PS: No photo today. Marlo and I discussed whether or not it would be respectful to take a photo of the homeless man. 

In the end, I didn't need to make a decision. When I was ready to take a photo, he was no longer on the sidewalk.

Different Strokes

It’s conversation time during my Tuesday morning Spanish lesson.

I talk about our gardens—my flowers, Marlo’s vegetables. I learn Spanish names for some vegetables we grow: lechuga (lettuce), rebollo (cabbage), frijoles de vaina (green beans), and verenjena (eggplant).

“You have a big yard (patio)?” she asks?

“Si,” I say.

Then, not wanting to appear too wealthy, I explain that I live in a small town in the countryside. We don’t have as many people, and we have more space between our houses.

We talk about yesterday’s walk with the houses abutted against each other.

“No me gusta (I don’t like that),” I say.

She tells me that in the rural area where she lives, the houses do have space between. The crowding is just in the cities. But the crowding does not bother her.

We talk about weather. She explains Nicaragua’s two seasons: summer and winter. Now (November through April) is summer—the dry season. Temperatures will peak in March and April. The other half year, the winter, is the rainy season. 

But there are no vast temperature changes. This balmy January day with temperatures ranging from 75 to 85 is about as cool as it gets in Nicaragua.

She asks about Iowa winters. I talk about snow, coats, and mittens. I describe walking outdoors in January with a scarf (bufanda) covering my mouth and nose.

She shivers and grimaces.

“No me gusta,” she says.

Ah, yes: different strokes . . .

----

PS: In the afternoon we climb a church tower for an overview of Granada. It is much more beautiful from above. Hmm. . . .

Bell tower in a neighborhood church

View of Granada cathedral from neighborhood church.

Granada—Outdoors and In

Our guest house street

I sit on the bed in our Granada room, computer on my lap. An oscillating fan moves moist air across my face each time it rotates my way. 

Marlo sits at an adjacent table doing today’s homework (tarea) from our morning language class: a composition about our afternoon walk through downtown Granada with teacher (maestra) Reina. (Our first two weeks in Nicaragua we are studying Spanish in Granada.)

Along narrow streets, we have followed her single file on even narrower walks past bright buildings jammed nonstop against each other. Except for the central park (Parque Central ), we have seen neither trees nor plants. Only a long slot of sky signals we are out of doors.

Downtown, the walks grow more congested, with block after block of vendors hawking watches, trinkets, vegetables, and fruits. Assorted people, cars, trucks, bikes, and dogs maneuver from spot to spot. Beggars, both very old and very young, approach us hands outstretched, their faces downcast in careful sadness. When we decline one youngster’s request, he falls backward on the walk in a practiced faint.

After two hours on the streets, I am claustrophobic.

Our guest house courtyard

Marlo unlocks the door to our guest house, and we enter our guest house. A living room and bedrooms line its perimeter. Open to the sky, a hallway, dining area, and courtyard with potted plants and grass fill its center.  At the rear its kitchen and laundry area, too, are open-air.

In Iowa, I escape my house to the outdoor pleasures—gardening or walking in Big Rock Park.  I am, after all, a small-town Midwesterner, at home with open space and a vast bowl of sky.

In this spacious old home I experience a reversal. In Granada, mi afuera es adentro (my outdoors is inside). Today, I escape indoors.

And now, laptop warming my thighs, it is time to write about our walk—in Spanish.

No les preocupan ustedes.  Estoy segura, no voy a exito. (Don’t worry. I shall surely fail.)

Ahead of Schedule

We are not expecting this moment quite yet.

We have joked about it as we shivered out of our garage at dawn Tuesday.

“It’s inevitable,” Marlo said.

 I agreed. “Most likely in Chinandega in about three weeks.”

Behind us in our minivan were two suitcases and two carry-ons for each of us, stuffed with meager wardrobes and 137 copies of On Mended Wings.

Maxed-out luggage and “mule” service are familiar territory for us because Nicaragua postal service is not reliable. (On a 2008 trip, our church’s service-and-learning team transported $16,000 in audio visual equipment in our allotted luggage.)

Wednesday, Marlo and I made our first hotel stop in Lexington, Kentucky. Our hotel heater was under-powered. We shivered through a game of gin, robbed the adjacent bed of its blankets, and finally warmed up at 2 a.m.

The next day, West Virginia was 20 degrees and windy. We asked a visitor-center hostess “Is this weather typical for a West Virginia January?”

She grimaced and nodded.

During our Raleigh visit, our son called a repairman. His heat pump was running non-stop, and not keeping up.

We sighed as we read Iowans’ Facebook posts about wearing shorts and hanging laundry in stocking feet.

This morning we are skirting the Atlantic Coast south toward Miami on US 95.

We stop at a Wendy’s near Jacksonville for soup and salad.  I gather plastic ware, straws, and napkins and then choose a sunny south window. Marlo follows with the food tray.

He chows chili, I munch salad—and then it happens.

His upper lip starts to sweat, then his forehead.

He looks at me and—way ahead of scheduled—utters the inevitable sentence.

“You know,” he says.  “I am really too hot.”

Postscript to Previous Post

Yup.

Effortlessly.

With HALF a pinky.

Getting Eager

Classic Nicaraguan Pottery

We sit surrounded by gorgeous Nicaraguan handicrafts—and we have not yet left the United States.

Marlo and I have stopped at a huge colonial house Williamsburg, Virginia, where we are selecting Nicaraguan ceramics and jewelry to sell at Pella’s Tulip Time and other Midwest festivals this summer. This mansion is the warehouse for Chaka Market Bridge, a five-person, fair-trade importer with a goal of providing incomes for Nicaraguan artisans.

Its finance manager Geoffrey Geiling shows us vases, candleholders, bowls, necklaces, and rings that his company imports. Attached to each piece of hand-signed pottery—some classic, some funky—is a card with a photo of its creator and a short biography.

Funky Candleholders

We tell Geoff about the goals and plans of Friends of Chinandega, for these products—not only to provide income for Nicaraguans by our purchases, but to use our retail profit margin to further develop our organization’s relationship with our Christian friends in Chinandega.

When we confess we are totally new at this, Geoff gives us tips for arranging an attractive booth, setting up charge-card services, and repacking merchandise.

We make our product selections, write a check, and drive off. Geoff will pack our merchandise, and we’ll stop for it en route back to Pella in February.

We’re not yet in Nicaragua, and our eagerness is up a notch.

We’ll need to suppress it, though, during our next stop—a visit to our infant granddaughter in Raleigh.

I suspect she’ll have the charisma to manage that suppression.

Effortlessly.

With one pinky.

Broken Butterflies

It’s February 2011 and I have  just returned from my fourth trip to Nicaragua, the last fact-gathering trip before book publication. 

I open my suitcases, still streaked with Nicaragua’s ubiquitous dry-season dust, and discover that, despite cushions of newspaper and clothes, one of the three ceramic butterflies has cracked in half during the flight.

I’m sad. Out-of-proportion sad.

Ever since a butterly  alighted on my wrist during outdoor morning meditation, butterflies have been a resonant image for me. A three-foot silk butterfly that emerged from its cocoon week-by-week in our church sanctuary during a fruits-of-the-spirit sermon series, now hangs in my sun porch.

On this latest Nicaragua trip, I admired the ceramic butterflies perched on cement toadstools in the courtyard of Managua’s Nehemiah Center, and asked where I could purchase them. Juan Granado, the center’s  business manager, told me that crafts people made them at Masaya,  an hour or so to the southeast.  “Great!” I said. “Our team is travelling there next Friday.”

The following Monday, however, a proudly smiling Juan presented me with three ceramic butterflies.  He reassured me that he did not make a special trip. He was passing Masaya on the weekend to visit relatives, and stopped for them.

I was touched. I had only a nodding acquaintance with Juan. I was quite certain that, as a percentage of income, those butterflies cost him more they would have cost me. I asked if I could reimburse him for the cost. No, he insisted, they were a gift. It was his pleasure. Truly.

The moment etched itself in gold letters on my heart. I thanked him profusely. I wrote him a thank-you card.

Juan, I learned later, had purchased and placed the butterfly-and-toadstool ornaments I had admired in courtyard just prior to my arrival—to varied reactions from the staff members. The Nicaraguan staff had thought they were a wonderful focal point. The North Americans had been a little less enthusiastic.

My admiration had validated Juan’s taste.

I was told about this varied reaction when our  church service-and-learning team decided to investigate distributing these yard ornaments in the U.S as a fundraiser.

And now, this butterfly--hand-painted in vibrant Latino colors, an unexpected gift, an emblem of different cultural tastes, a harbinger of future hopes--has lost its wing.

Marlo, my solution–oriented, engineer husband, picks up the pieces, nests them together, turns them over, and pronounces the wing repairable “I can glue it and reinforce the bottom with a metal strip,” he says. “From above, it will hardly show.” 

My butterfly can be transformed.

If only a little glue and a strip of metal could transform Nicaragua.

Or, for that matter, North America.

That task belongs to Bigger Hands.

And in those hands, perhaps I can be just one glue-drop of the change I hope to see.