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Where to begin? Firstly, THANK YOU for supporting our trip; it was unbelievably successful. The money we raised, along with our participant fees, was added to the others' on our work team and together we were able to buy the supplies needed to build a home for our new friend Felix and his two sons, Bryan and Jose. It was such a privilege to be able to do this. Felix is an amazingly hard worker and really great guy. He is a subsistence tenant farmer living in a very poor rural area and this new structure will allow him to get his kids up out of the dirt into a dry and cleanable space. He is overjoyed because for the first time he owns something and now may even be able to get credit and perhaps buy a pig or needed farming supplies.

 

I thought I knew something about Nicaragua, having been there on a cultural exchange as a child, but I was ignorant as to the difficulty the people there have endured. Our involvement there began as far back as our own Civil War, when a disgraced Southern General fled there with a private army and actually took over the entire country for a time. Later, the US propped up the brutal Somoza dictatorship (from the 50s to 1979), and the people suffered greatly (he literally threw people into the volcanoes). When they could take no more, they revolted and the socialist Sandinistas came to power, but the US quickly cut ties to the country as it had done with Cuba. With no Western trading partners, the Sandinistas turned to Russia and Cuba for meager support. Then the US began backing the Contras, and the Sandinistas became desperate for soldiers. They started rounding up young men and sending them, untrained, to die in the mountains fighting the better-armed Contras. This is why so many of them fled to the US at that time, including to places like Waukesha. When the Iran-Contra deal was exposed, the Sandinistas prevailed, and are still in power today, but the one-time liberator, “President” Daniel Ortega, has become the dictator he overthrew. Corruption is rampant, the elections are rigged, and the people get the short end of the stick once again. Ortega and his extravagant wife beam down from the billboards that line the major roads, their beneficent faces covered with rotten tomatoes.

 

And that’s just the politics! Nicaragua is beset by deadly earthquakes, (very beautiful) volcanoes, hurricanes and disease. They lack infrastructure and economic development. The environmental degradation is serious in some regions.

 

You would think they would be resentful toward Americans, or at least sad, angry and hopeless, perhaps even violent. But that is far from the case. While Nicaragua is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti) it is the second safest (after Canada). The people are friendly, helpful, and kind. Most notably they have a very strong sense of community. We felt very safe there, even walking alone at night in very remote areas. Sadly, we felt safer there than we sometimes do in Wisconsin.

 

Nicaragua is a startling place. It is at the same time stunningly beautiful and disgustingly dirty. But not the people! They are very clean (how do they do it?) and polite and welcoming and very genuine. And it is startling to see just how unfair the distribution of wealth is in our world. And trust me, it is not for lack of hard work or effort on their part. The two families we worked with, along with their neighbors, worked insanely hard building the houses, then took the bus, or donkey, or walked to their jobs in the nearby city or the fields.

The pictures below are just a few of the 1500 or so we took! Most are from the work site outside Massaya. The “touristy” ones were taken after the official trip.  The 4 of us stayed on a few extra days to visit the historic city of Granada (oldest in the Americas) and to travel to the southwest Pacific Coast.  Don’t worry, your donations did not pay for that part of the trip :)