Update, Activity

Sorry I have been rather bad at updating this lately. To put it simply, I traveled the past three weekends and tried to immerse myself every minute I have had in Managua. So, here are a couple of the happenings down here. More to come later…

Huelga-Setting: UNAN, the university I attend is public and autonomous in the uniquely Latin American way. This means that tuition is free, the students are politically active and neither police nor military are allowed on campus. Recently, UNEN; a “student group” (highly funded and membered by non-students and the FSLN), staged a strike on my campus in solidarity with the outlying campuses in their struggle to get representation on the governing council of the university. Now this wasn´t your peaceful group of W&M students yelling in the sunken gardens. On the first day we arrived and didn´t know what was going on since all the gates to the campus were chained shut so we dutifully climbed the fences to get to our classes (cancelled of course). For the next two weeks, we couldn´t go to campus because classes were cancelled, the gates remained chained shut, the fences were greased to keep the studious from scaling them and the few students who tried to get on campus got beat up. When another group of students began to protest the strike things got violent and all across national noise were the pictures of Molotov cocktails, masked protesters and one student being beat with a mortar launcher. The strike eventually did end (to everyone´s surprise no one died) and classes resumed.

North-I never really believed it could be cold in Nicaragua until I went to the northern highlands for a weekend. Our first night, we stayed at Garnacha, a former Sandinista co-operative that is still functioning and has made a name for itself by making organic Swiss cheese. Upon arriving, we ate a heart lunch and embarked on a long hike to visit an aged artist who carves stories into a cliff. Illiterate, 80 yrs, and heartbreakingly poor, he carves what he hears from the people who visit, what he saw when he was young and traveled and what he pulls out of his imagination leading to a conglomeration of Christian iconography, political happenings and African animals gracing the rocks near his home. From there we hiked up to the top of a mountain to an overlook from where we could see the sun setting over both Honduras and El Salvador. Seeing as Garnacha is a tiny community at the end of a gravel road, there really isn’t any nightlife at all so everyone in my program got together for a wine and cheese. This meant sips and nibbles for me seeing as I was suffering from a stomach virus (turns out the best hospital in Nicaragua had misdiagnosed me and I actually had worms but at that time I still though I just had a virus). The following day, we toured the cheese making facility, goat shed, vermiculture setup, and organic vegetable fields before heading to a waterfall for dip. We spent the evening in Somoto, a small northern town known for donkeys and the legendary musical family of the Mejia-Godoy’s. Rising early the next day, we headed to the Somoto Canyon which we followed first on foot, then floated down a portion in life jackets, then in boat and finally returning on foot to the bus. The canyon has stunning carved out, golden walls that reach straight up with orchid s and bromeliads clinging to the sides. A national landmark, the canyon is on the 50 cordobas bill. After this beauty, we returned to the heat of Managua.

Coming up: Ometepe, Leon, my sister visits, perceptions of Managua, a baby comes to live in our house