Empty Nesters on a Green Global Trek

Peta and I were invited by one of our neighbors to participate in our first community action meeting. The particular theme of the meeting was “preparation for the upcoming holidays” (Xmas and New year). We both felt that being invited to participate in the first (of many) organizational meetings for our street is yet another sign of our successful integration into the fabric of Nicaraguan society.

(For a bit of context — skip this paragraph if you are not interested in political/historical context: Much has been written in the press about the Ortega government’s use of CPCs, ie Soviet era type neighborhood associations designed to know all that matters at the very local level. These community associations are headed by Sandinista loyalists. The objective is to build up ground root support for Sandinista officials and policies. I am often reminded by Nicaraguan collegues that the fundamental difference between the right and the left in Nicaragua lies in their approach to power. The Sandinistas work bottom up and spend a lot of their political capital to deliver on projects of immediate value to local communities (ie a bridge, a road, a program to give, a cow or chickens to a deserving family), whereas the right tends to work top down. We have seen this recently with opposition politicians (on the right) hyperventilating in the media about the Ortega administrations power grab, but while this media push makes politicians famous for a nano second, their opposition to Ortega’s policies only gain visibility during a single news cycle of twenty four hours. Even historic development such as the recent supreme courts decision to allow Ortega to run in 2011 which the right deems to be the first step toward dictatorship, has very limited shelf life. As demonstrated by the last two rounds of elections, the Sandinistas’ grasp of community-level needs is a key asset and a core strength of the Sandinista political machine.)

We arrive at the karate school down the road, which is being used for the meeting. The room is lined with plastic chairs. It feels a bit awkward walking in to a full room, as the only gringos but we are warmly received and two more chairs are brought from the back . It turns out that our friendly neighbor who invited us to participate with a declarative statement “Ahora hacen parte de nuestra calle!” (Now, you are part of our street!)

The best way to describe the meeting was to say it was “organic and dynamic”. There was one self appointed leader who started to set the tone for the meeting. His objective was to launch the annual preparations for December 24 /25 and Decemer 312t/January 1^st. Note that for three years now, we have observed that our street is particularly festive and had never considered how it got to be this way.It never occurred to us that the celebrations that we have witnessed in the past had been the result of much planning and organization at a street level. Round one of the discussion was to confirm that as always there would be piñatas for the kids, a live band, decorations in the street.

The conversation entered round two when a delightfully sarcastic and passionate ( gay) man launched into a monologue about the inappropriate deterioration of Christmas – in the eyes of children it has become merely as an opportunity to receive gifts. He deplored the disconnect to the original birth of Christ story and made a motion to try to recalibrate this years festivities. Much discussion and laughter at his delivery style (a combination of flowery and cussing) and a consensus emerged that since our street starts at Convento San Francisco, this years activity should include a procession from the church at the top of the street, to the bottom of the street. This would include the Virgin Mary and some portable altar to up the religious content. An assignment was made as to who would be in charge of the procession and would convince the priest to launch the procession with a sermon.

Another member of the community until now quiet, described what he witnessed in Guatemala a few years ago over xmas, namely an ornate altar which would be a natural location for families to go and pose for family pictures. Another task was handed to someone else to be in charge of the altar. Then the man who had until now led the meeting bolted out of his chair and started to run down the street….. he had seen a “rich” neighbor and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to invite her to the meeting. Seemlessly somebody else in the group picked up from where he left off and kept going with the organization until his return. Having discussed the activities and the probable budget, the obvious topic of how to pay for all this (music, piñatas…) led to a decision to hold a series of activities that would essentially begin right away until the end of December. The activities, again true to the spirit of street level actions, will start with a kermas (fair) on December 6^th and every house represented at this meeting, 22 in total, committed to cook something that will be sold on that day to raise funds to pay for the festivities. But that is not enough to raise the necessary funds, hence the decision to hold a series of four raffles once a week.

I made the suggestion to leverage the few businesses that exist on our street and try to get some in kind contribution that could be raffled off. Motion approved and I was assigned the task of securing said goodies. As of this writing, I am happy to report that our network of gringos has yielded the following assets for raffles: a dinner for two at the little (Canadian owned) restaurant on our street, a massage at PURE, the spa/gym across the road, and a one month membership at the gym. Our honor is safe, we have delivered on our community task.

We felt honored to have been invited, but more importantly we witnessed and were a part of, first hand community level decision making . The meeting gathered momentum and resulted in a full blown action plan, clear assignments, clear timetable and a big round of applause to congratulate ourselves of the fine job we were committing to do to make this years festivities a success.

What was most surprising to me was the accurate verbal house count done and qualitative assessment, based on years of experience, who would participate in the preparations, who was too poor to participate, who was too cheap to participate and who would likely buy the raffle tickets. In all, a universe of fifty eight households were so categorized one by one, with much commentary and laughter on household behaviors. I was pleased to note that the gringos were lumped as an opaque group that were unpredictable but likely to help out if asked by the right person. The gringo population on our street is: us, a Danish family with two kids, Lucy an American who runs a small hotel, Warren who owns PURE, and Paul and Heather (Canadian) who run El Garaje, the little restaurant a few doors down.

In an amusing and unexpected development last night, as we went for dinner after yoga with our friend Nieves, one of the organizers approached us and asked her if her daughter would like to be the Virgin Mary for the parade as she was so “linda” (pretty), with her blonde ringlets and Danish complexion. I am tempted to point out the historical absurdity of defaulting to a blue eyed blonde haired virgin Mary (as Mary was a resident of Bethlehem, which last time I checked had a Middle Eastern ethnic population, hence more likely to have been dark haired and dark skinned).