Nicaragua

photo: K. Collins rscj

Entre las páginas que escribí al poco de llegar, encontré esta que trascribo y que por estar escrita en jalapa , como mis primeros descubrimientos y entusiasmos por lo que veía vivir, tiene un sabor a maravilla y a heroísmo, que luego se fue ubicando en la realidad…

“En Nicaragua viven todos los que murieron por su libertad, me golpea este amor a la vida, que se hace muerte para que otros vivan.

Me envuelve este ambiente de resurrección, siento la fuerza, el valor, la entrega de los nicas, su veneración por sus comandantes, siento con ellos su historia, sus años pacientes y sufridos en la montaña y en la lucha, su esperanza y alegría en el triunfo.

Nicaragua libre!!!!!!!!!

El tiempo pasa lento y a prisa.todo se me confunde y entrelaza…no sé si estamos en primavera, otoño, verano o invierno, no sé si comienza el año de trabajo o si termina, todo se une y va sucediendo en redondo…en el centro de la revolución .

En el momento de la lucha, la Iglesia fue Madre, Padre, Hermana, fue ternura y combate, bendición y acogida…Ofrecía su sombra para convocar y reunir en lo secreto a los que preparaban la liberación…
¿Qué te ha pasado Iglesia después del triunfo? Ya no tienes fuerza para convocar, acompañar, aparecen tus contradicciones, desencuentros, la vida de este pueblo se te escapa por los caminos de la confusión…

Cuánto más tendría para decir…solo sé que fue para mí un “tiempo de gracia.”
Aprendí a vivir la resurrección ya en esta vida, a seguir a Jesús con un pueblo que camina entre llantos y alegrías, a esperar y pacientar…

Hoy te lloro Nicaragua, pero espero como tú me enseñaste.

Esther Sastre rscj

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My Experience in Nicaragua

Everywhere around me were signs of the war that was financed by the U.S. government.  Almost every household had lost at least a father, brother, mother, sister and/or child to the war.  Daily, at noon, an unmarked but distinguishably American surveillance plane flew over Jalapa on its way to the Contra camps just over the border in Honduras.  Every night we would hear the mortar fire from those camps. Frequently we went to funerals of victims of war or famine.  I saw people maimed by land mines and/or shrapnel.  It was very hard to sit with so much pain and suffering.  What was worse was that I somehow felt implicated: the U.S. government bankrolled this war (and so many others since).  I did not support the U.S. policy in Nicaragua, but the reality that stared me in the face was that as an American I could go home at any time and enjoy security and comfort, whereas the Nicaraguans couldn’t.  There home was being destroyed by the very system that supposedly protected me.  Why? It was at times disorienting, confusing and painful to see what was before me, to hear those around me, and to feel what it was like to walk the road of Jalapa.  I like everyone else learned to keep an eye out for a darker patch of dirt on the road, a sign of a possible landmine.  This scenario was deeply disturbing and frightening to me at a depth greater than anything I had experienced. Intellectual answers and social analysis didn’t reach the pain.  Sharing in the way of the cross on Good Friday offered words and meaning to the pain.  After Easter that Lent, I went home, but Nicaragua has never left me. 

What attracted me so much to Nicaragua was seeing how base communities could change a whole nation.  I still believe in that.  Before going to Nicaragua, I learned much about the Sandinista Nicaraguan movement to overthrow their dictatorship and build a new Nicaragua; and, about the Counterrevolution (the “Contras”) financed by the U. S. government to overthrow the Sandinistas.  In Washington D.C. I protested against the “Contra” retaliations and the Reagan Administration.  However, political work has never been my passion.   People are!

I worked with the parish priest, a Spanish missionary, preparing the young people of Jalapa for Confirmation, and organizing the Confirmations of the whole Jalapa region. The young Nicaraguans wanted to know, “What does it mean to follow Jesus in our new world?” As the pastor and I carefully reviewed the material we had collected from different Spanish speaking countries and populations we realized how profoundly faith is rooted in Christ but clothed in cultural assumptions of another world.  Our role would be to support the young men and women as they articulated their faith within their own culture. 

Scripture speaks clearly to the hearts and minds of people who are as close to nature as are the people of Jalapa.  As a member of the pastoral team in Jalapa, each RSCJ took her turn leading the catechist training weekend, while the rest of the team helped coordinate and support the catechists.  Approximately 70-100 women and men would come as far as 3-4 hours on foot to study scripture and strengthen their ability to communicate their faith in the base communities at home. The faith of the Nicaraguan people impelled and enabled them to build a new world.  The questions they asked themselves were profound and courageous.  Once it was known that Amnesty was to be granted to the Contras,  Ana Perez told us how during the reflection on the Word one member of a base community wrestled with whether, if he saw the Contra who mutilated and killed his daughter and maimed his wife, he would really be able to forgive the man. He feared he would be unable to stop himself from killing the Contra. He did not ask if he had to forgive but how he could become more able to forgive?  This and similar reflections are not those of a spiritually cowardly people!

Women catechists concerned with the diminishing resources due to soaring inflation approached the RSCJ community to ask for support in forming a “collective” within one of the large agricultural cooperatives south of the town of Jalapa.   When I arrived I was asked to take responsibility for the women’s project.  My first task was to help organize a women’s sewing collective.   It was my understanding that this project was a revitalization of an earlier project carried out by Esperanza Orvañanos to teach women to sew.   After meeting each other, the women and I combined our resources:

• their sewing skills and knowledge of the community and its needs;
• the sewing machines previously donated to the earlier endeavor by the John XXIII Center in Managua thanks to Ketxu Amezua;
• the theoretical knowledge I had picked up 8 years earlier in my studies and reading about the Mondragon Producer Cooperative in Spain;
• the information we gathered from our visits to sewing cooperatives in Jalapa and Esteli about government requirements and resources for sewing collectives;

and, thanks to the help of Mavie Coakley,  and in response to a talk given by Mickey McKay,

• a financial donation from a women’s group in Ohio to buy material with which to begin the collective.  

With that we sat down to design the method, structure, and by-laws that would meet the Cooperative’s and the city government’s requirements, and most importantly, the collective’s goal of clothing the children.  The women had saved the patterns they had already used.  We had to calculate the cost of material, and labor, then adjust it according to the projected level of inflation.  I found myself teaching mathematics and bookkeeping.  But, soon the children, then the adults, in the village, then people in the larger region were wearing the results of the collective’s work.  In the process, these women transformed the uneasy relationships of suspicion so prevalent in a small village into a climate of mutual trust and support.  It was a wonderful work that I fear may have become a victim of inflation and the change of government in 1990.  My hope is that the trust and leadership these women developed will have continued to flourish.

At the very end of my stay, in an outreach to women healers distanced from the faith communities, I began to visit some out-lying towns to identify women who knew about natural medicine.  Many of them had been illiterate most of their lives until they learned basic skills in reading and writing with the Sandinista literacy campaign and still considered themselves ignorant.  However, their knowledge saved many neighbors and their children. One woman in a village, looking at me somewhat askance,  explained to me how natural medicine had been highly suspect as witchcraft in the past.   I started to interview her and other healers, and together we codified some of their expertise, which far outdistanced my knowledge of botany and medicine.  When I left the work was more of a preliminary pilot study than a reality. These and much more wonderful things were done by the people of Jalapa, and in Nicaragua by RSCJ from different countries.

The paradox is that the greatest gift came for me through our international living in the war zone.  Outside the community, we RSCJ were at our best: in classrooms or with youth groups; in homes and halls animating others in face of loss, fear, or disillusionment; or learning patience and resilience from the example of the Nicaraguans themselves.  But at home, we could see how our personal and cultural “boundaries” were being stretched to new, at times intolerable, limits.  One by one our weak points surfaced.  We all got sick in one way or another.  It was hard to make sense of what was happening to us.  All we were living and seeing was transforming us.  This process is seldom smooth, pretty and painless.   I would like to think that the RSCJ Project in Nicaragua has become Nicaraguan because each one of us that walked that road to Jalapa opened herself to be touched deeply, challenged and changed.  It is not a process that ends …. it only begins.

Eleven years after I left Nicaragua the Chapter of 2000 expressed this process as interculturality:

Called to be ” women of communion, compassion and reconciliation,”… We are impelled to enter into the reality of the other, to allow our boundaries to be expanded in truly reciprocal and hospitable ways. To participate in the process of transformation, we must learn to live interculturality among ourselves, with others and in all that we do.  The process of interculturality will allow us to open ourselves to the Spirit present in each culture and to engage in a dialogue that will enable us, together, to celebrate the banquet of God, where each one has a place, sons and daughters of God. ( p.33, Eng.)

I think the future of the Society depends on our being able to live this interculturality.  In my experience, that is the lesson Nicaragua shares with the Society. 

Georgiana Logan, RSCJ
Province of the United States