Just back from an amazing trip, April 1-9, 2007—Kit and Marty, Cody, Annika and Shaya—to Nicaragua for the dedication to Maya of Liwa Mairin, a newly constructed community conference center on the North Atlantic Coast.... It was a most memorable journey. Here’s our account.
Background
When MADRE Director Vivian Stromberg called Kit last winter with an invitation to Nicaragua for an event honoring Maya in the Atlantic Coast town of Puerto Cabezas, Kit said “yes,” but the trip seemed distant. Not so at 4:30 a.m. on April 1, when Kit, Annika, Lucia and I dragged our luggage to the waiting van and headed to SFO, bound for Miami and Managua. In Miami we met Cody, the New York contingent of our 5-woman delegation. Gate changes and flight delays couldn’t deter us, and by 10 p.m. Managua time, we were there, sipping Flor de Cana (smooth Nicaraguan rum) in the airport lounge, awaiting our luggage.
Maya’s friends know of her long interest in the Sandinista revolution, her revulsion with the US intervention that became the Iran-Contra scandal, and her abiding concern for the poorest Nicaraguans, the indigenous Miskito of the Atlantic Coast Region. She made several trips to Nicaragua in the 1980’s, and was in contact with people close to the politically complex struggles there. At various times, friends accompanied her – Nancy Raven, Don Carlon, Helen Cohen, Marla Painter, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and others. I recall Maya’s accounts of travel to the Atlantic Coast – iffy little propeller planes, clandestine contacts with Sandinista leaders, concern for women’s rights and above all, her sense of the importance of supporting the Miskito people in their struggle with the Sandinista government over autonomy. Maya informed herself well on the issues, with the help of people like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Blood on the Border) and Mirna Cunningham, whose sensitivity and first-hand knowledge she trusted. Maya respected both sides in the Miskito-FSLN tensions; she hoped to support peace.
”We got what Maya would have loved…”
Dora
Maria Telles and Mirna Cunningham mull over politics.
Maya developed strong friendships on the Atlantic Coast, key among them, Dr. Mirna Cunningham. Lucky for us, it was Mirna, together with her New York–based MADRE compatriot, Vivian Stromberg, who led our delegation. The two planned our time, contacts and logistics, and carried out their ambitious agenda with great spirit. We got what Maya would have loved: the intensity of a full agenda and frank face-to-face dialogue with people of immense vision and passion. We who live in the world’s lap of privilege, are most privileged to have contact with people who face material poverty, yet live “richly” in the collective struggle to make life better. Those were the contacts Maya relished: “trumping” privilege in meaningful ways – figuring out when and how to support those most in need and most ingenious about what to do—was Maya’s gift. Our tour guide compatriots had the sense to give us those contacts.
Fast start in Managua
Our first taste of what the trip was to be came at 11 p.m., when Vivian greeted us on arrival at the Hotel Camino Real in Managua. The warm, sultry air felt immediately “foreign” and welcoming. We dumped bags in the rooms and took seats around a table by the pool for the first of what was to be many fast-paced, laugh-laced, thoughtful conversations with Vivian, a veteran traveler, passionate advocate and activist. She wasted no time laying out the next morning’s agenda and the schedule for flying to Puerto Cabezas at midday, and more about the week’s agenda, before we scattered at midnight for a short night’s rest after a long day’s trip.
To Puerto
Cabezas
Vivian
In chat-time during the days and adventures that followed, we gathered more of Vivian’s story. In 1991, after 22 years teaching music in the South Bronx, Vivian went full time as Executive Director of MADRE. Of Turkish descent, Vivian came of age in Brooklyn, New York during the Civil Rights Movement and played a key role in US-based organizing for nuclear disarmament, peace, and human rights-based foreign policy. In 1983, Vivian helped to found MADRE to bring attention to the US-sponsored wars in Central America. When she later took over as Executive Director, she guided MADRE's transformation from a Central America friendship association to an internationally recognized women's human rights organization that has worked in more than 20 countries. It was on Vivian’s inspired delegation to Iraq in 1991 that Maya and Vivian had the opportunity to work together and deliver several tons of milk and medical supplies to a children’s hospital Baghdad. Vivian has worked extensively with women in conflict zones on issues of: armed conflict and forced displacement; women's health and reproductive rights; economic justice and community development; Indigenous Peoples' rights and resources, food security and sustainable development; human rights advocacy; youth; and US foreign policy. Vivian's work has helped to forge lasting ties between the movements for women's equality, peace and justice and international human rights, reflecting her strong conviction that women's rights are human rights, that US foreign policy is a "women's issue" and that human rights everywhere are inherently political.
Vivian
and Dr. Wilfred C.
Intuiting Maya’s perspective
“A better life” in Nicaragua, poorest country in Central America, would begin with the basics: potable water throughout the country, a dramatic reversal of maternal and infant mortality (only achievable with widespread access to the most basic health care, virtually non-existent now.) Of course, Nicaraguans know well what they lack. People we met are working creatively, strategically, with the too-little resources at hand. Some of the struggle is material; some is political. Meeting just a few of Maya’s compatriots there made it easy to understand why she hung in with them.
Mirna
Maya spoke often of Mirna Cunningham; to me, Mirna was a legend. But in person, she is soft spoken, down to earth, take-care-of-business and fun-loving. It took no more than our first meal together to understand Maya’s great fondness for her. What emerged more slowly, over the days we spent together, was an understanding of the renowned leader Mirna is: An indigenous Miskita doctor and former member of the National Assembly of Nicaragua, trained as a surgeon and teacher, with a Masters in Public Health. “La Mirna” also served as Minister of Health and as Governor of the North Atlantic Coast. She was a founder and Chancellor of URACCAN, the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. She has been General Secretary of the Inter American Indigenous Institute and is now Vice-President of the Indigenous Initiative for Peace, and Director of the Center for Indigenous People’s Autonomy and Development (CIPAD). One of the most fascinating hours on our trip was an informal conversation after breakfast in the garden at Casa Museo (our couldn’t-have-been-lovelier accommodation in Puerto Cabezas). Prompted by a question from Cody, Mirna kept us spellbound as she explained her involvement with ten countries in developing the principles and curriculum for “inter-cultural” education at the university level, part of a vision and strategy to preserve indigenous cultures globally, while developing resources and improving standards of living. In what I’d guess is typical of Mirna’s humility, she had arranged for our meetings with local officials, activists and leaders; her own work, however, she let surface casually.
Mirna,
Cody and Britt
On the Managua agenda
Our initial meeting at the Ministry of Health required a frenetic taxi trip through Managua that took us over cobble-stoned streets past dirt roads, weaving through vehicles with horns honking and people afoot, on bicycles or aboard wooden carts drawn by very bony horses, passing all with what seemed a hair’s breadth to spare. The planned meeting had to yield: Maritza Cuan, the Minister of Health, excused herself to prepare for a press conference with Presidente Ortega. We met instead with a health official who spoke of maternal and infant mortality, the desperate lack of medicines and of reliance on the renowned skill of Cuban doctors to train much needed health professionals.
We returned to the hotel for a lunch meeting with former Sandinista Commandante Dora Maria Tellez. Her disaffection with the current regime and her clear political analysis, revealed a steely commitment to the democratic principles of Sandinismo, and all the quiet passion one could imagine in a small framed, once-armed, lesbian revolutionary. Dora Maria had been an important player in the Sandinista revolution, commanding the forces that took the city of Leon from Somoza’s Guardia. She served as Minister of Health in the first Sandinista Administration in the 1980s. Unacceptable compromises of the current Sandinista government, however, have driven her to form a group that has established a separate party, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS). (Many women are angry at Sandinista support of a new Catholic-backed law prohibiting abortion under any circumstances, even therapeutic abortions that would save the life of the mother.) Dora pins her hope for Nicaragua’s future on today’s youth – 50% of the population is under 15 years old—and she remains sanguine in the face of what she regards as the inevitable shifts in political wind.
Easter
at the Beach
Reunion! And on to Puerto Cabezas
From our noontime meeting with Dora Maria, we headed to the airport and the Atlantic Coast. Our delegation of ten consisted of the “Maya-five” plus Vivian, Mirna and Monica Aleman (Project Director of MADRE and Mirna’s daughter) plus MADRE photographer Elizabeth Rappaport and a young social worker from Chicago, Britt Willey, who came along to scout the prospects for moving to Nicaragua to pursue her interest in women’s rights. Our arrival at the airport turned to unexpected delight, because there to see us off was Karla Bush Bush! As it happened, our reunion—after more than a decade—was just starting. Karla and Maya had become close during Maya’s early visits to the Atlantic Coast, when Karla worked for Mirna. Karla looked after Maya on the fateful visit when Maya badly sprained her ankle and wound up on crutches for a longer-than-usual stay in Puerto Cabezas. Karla later made several visits to Orchard House in Nevada, and Maya and I visited Karla while she was working for Oxfam in Namibia (1995). That had been our last face-to-face contact. Now leaving Managua, we bade Karla a fast hello-goodbye with assurance of more visiting time on our return from the coast to Managua later that week.
The place and the history
Aboard a twin-engine prop jet, full with about 20 passengers, we flew over the arid western terrain. As we flew east, the dry mountains and volcano cones gave way to vast flat green and blue jungle. After a short (loud) hour, we landed at Puerto Cabezas and heard immediately the new languages: Miskito; Creole, with Spanish in the mix too. The place, the terrain, felt immediately new; red dirt roads; houses built up on stilts; abundant banana and coconut palms and flowering trees; bicycles and pedestrians far outnumbering cars. We arrived to warm greetings at Casa Museo, the home-turned-guest house and national treasure in honor of Judith Kain, Mirna’s mother and a renowned landscape artist. Her fame, we learned, extends further than art. She raised 13 children in that home, including some of her grandchildren and the children of others who went off to be part of the struggles during the revolution (some of the community’s adults were with the FSLN, some were “contras”). Mirna’s daughter Monica recalls growing up there with her grandmother. Now Monica’s own 3-year-old, Willie, (visiting with her from New York) adapts easily to the family home where his cousins and neighbors wander in and out. Additions to the house have made it an ideal way-station with guest bedrooms and delicious meals (every day we ate fish and lobster, beans and rice and fresh fruit). There is an art gallery exhibiting Judith Kain’s paintings, and a little museum. The museum tour is a flood of history. From Judith’s old bedroom as it was, full of family photos, it’s just a few feet to the wall of church artifacts (almost everyone on the Atlantic Coast is Moravian) and from there to an outdoor altar with musical instruments. Nearby is a fishing display of a dugout canoe and nets, and life-sized stuffed dolls demonstrating traditional Miskito ceremonies. The history dates from indigenous kings and covers the early 1900s exploitation by trans-national corporations of the banana, mahogany and fishing industries. One wall recognizes the Sandinista Revolution and another is covered with documents spelling out the principles of autonomy and the struggles of liberation on the Atlantic Coast.
Vision and Passion
It’s hard to put a finger on what matters most, but I’d say the unifying factor among the people we met over three days in Puerto Cabezas is this: A vision and passion for what should be. These are worldly people. Computers and televisions are scarce, but have found their way there; people are acutely aware of what others have. As several local women who are entrepreneurs told us, local businesses struggle to stay afloat and yearn to build an industry of eco-tourism that could attract enough investment to carry Nicaragua into the 21st Century. But day-to-day life, we learned and saw, is hard. Development that saves lives should not be left to chance. The fact that governments seem to have little conscience in this regard, is part of what must have kept Maya coming back, wanting to help.
Puerto
Cabezas dock
The Puerto Cabezas People: We learn by listening and asking questions
At the Education Ministry, two men of different political parties, one Sandinista and the other Yatama, welcomed us and explained that because no single party had mustered an electoral majority, alliances like theirs have been necessary. They are developing a curriculum to be implemented very soon, part of the Managua government plan to return to free public education (after 16 years of privatization). Fully in support of the principle, the pair was candid about non-existent resources. The Education Ministry remains uneasy about the future, but hopeful that the Sandinista government, in power since January, will make good on the promise that taxes collected in the Atlantic region should stay there. The schools there need federal funds for books and to attract and keep teachers.
“Uneasy” would describe the circumstances of several of the extraordinary people we met. Cora Antonio, the first woman ever elected to the high post of superintendent in the Moravian Church, conducts support groups with church women and knows more than she would care to about the high rate of domestic violence and the uphill struggle to establish human rights as women’s rights in the country and in the church.
Dr. Wilfred Cunningham, until recently, the only OB-GYN in Nicaragua’s North Atlantic Coast Region, cites rates of maternal mortality are so high they are comparable to Botswana and Mozambique. We listened to a tragic account of the most recent death: a pregnant woman who was in labor 3 days without expelling the dead fetus in her womb, then was carried by truck for hours downriver on the rough road from Waspam to the health clinic in Puerto Cabezas where she died. Local access to health care would have saved her. His clinic, CADAMUC, has the only ultrasound equipment in the region, a benefit of affiliation with MADRE, which since 2001, has give the clinic material aid for equipment and medicines.
Margarita Antonio, Miskita journalist, is Director of Radio Caribe (Puerto Cabezas) and a founder of Network of Community Radio Stations at the Region’s University (URRACAN ). Her efforts to educate the community by reporting local news via television are hampered by the flood of international programming that reaches Nicaraguan television and contributes nothing to educate the public about events and issues that impact their lives.
Shira Downs takes a highly politicized view of her work. The Movimiento De Mujeres, Nidia White (“Women’s Movement, Nidia White”) provides a meeting place and when needed, a shelter. Shira, the firebrand director/organizer, conducts workshops with women that focus on human rights at least as much as mutual support. We sat in a circle on benches and chairs in the main meeting room, open to the noisy street right outside. Some of the women who joined in our discussion indicated that it is easy to find a rapist around town; the perpetrator may brag, and the act is not treated as a crime. We met the woman doctor who examines and treats victims of abuse at the shelter, and toured her exam room upstairs. The bedrooms were upstairs too, and several young children were evidently staying there—they listened to us talk and amused themselves by sliding on their bare bellies headfirst down the rickety stairs. We met a psychologist and saw the curtained area and computer setup used for counseling on the main floor. An elected representative to the national assembly, one of just four women currently serving in that governing body, also joined our conversation.
Throughout the meetings, Marty and Kit had the great satisfaction of seeing our kids in action in Latin America. Cody, who has spent a summer in Nicaragua, calmly absorbed the many presentations and asked important follow-up questions. Annika and Shaya (who now have 4 years and 2 years of Spanish) were very attentive and understood much of the discussion before it was translated. The girls showed fresh insight in conversations about our experiences, and they took wonderful pictures (see our photo links!)
Puerto
Cabezas household.
After-hours pleasure
The meetings were intense, but our guides didn’t neglect tourism entirely. We had a lovely sunset walk on the port town’s main dock, a place that has seen pirates and Columbian drug runners, as well as fishing boats. The “fleet” of high-speed Nicaraguan Navy vessels, we were told, has been assembled by confiscating drug boats. “The Navy could never have bought such expensive, fast boats,” according to a local. A swim in the Caribbean, walks in the neighborhood of Casa Museo, and priceless conversations with Mirna, her savvy daughter Monica, and with Vivian, about our impressions, their experiences and just nonsense, made the trip! For Vivian, whose last trip to Puerto Cabezas ended abruptly when she had to return to the US very ill, this seemed to be a homecoming. Everyone we met knew Mirna and Vivian, and the pleasure, questions and political overtones of the visits were reminiscent of probing conversations with Maya around the dining table at Orchard House.
THE MAIN EVENT: a vision of Liwa Mairin
The dedication of Liwa Mairin, a newly built community conference center, to Maya, Vivian and (MADRE Founding Board Chair) Anne Hess, was a completion, a beginning and an act of love!
With Mirna’s encouragement, one focus of Maya’s trips to Nicaragua was the construction of a “Peace House” in Puerto Cabezas. The house – built mainly by North American construction brigades—was a headquarters for international peace-keepers during the 1980s, when many people feared an outright U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. The Peace House accommodated many visitors – political representatives, aid workers, health workers and other professionals – and served as a way-station to help the very poor coastal region take advantage of opportunities for aid and development without further imposition on local families. After the Contra war, the Peace House was offered by the Sandinista government to a group of Contra fighters who agreed to lay down their arms in return. Such acts of reconciliation helped bring Indigenous Miskitos and other Nicaraguans home from their exile in Honduras and elsewhere.
For Mirna and others, though, the Peace House vision lived, and grew! A gift of land to MADRE in New York state was sold, and the proceeds were transformed into the stately structures—guest rooms, meeting hall and lounge—that comprise Liwa Mairin. Two doors down the road from the original “Peace House,” it is perched on the same bluff overlooking the jade-to-emerald colored Caribbean. Liwa Mairin was blessed in a community ceremony, and dedicated to three women who helped make the community vision a reality. All of us lit candles in a Miskito ceremony, and Mirna recounted the involvement of the three honorees for the 60 or so guests. Kit spoke (in Spanish, of course) of Maya’s great affection and admiration for the people and their vision; Vivian spoke passionately as well. The meetings that taught us about struggles and poverty in the region, also prepared us to appreciate the realization of Liwa Mairin, and to recognize the optimistic future that it represents! Maya belongs there, alright.
There's something in all of us that hungers after the good and true, and when we glimpse it in people, we applaud them for it. Through them we let the world's pain into our hearts, and we find compassion. When things go wrong or have been terribly wrong for some time, their inspiration reminds us of the tenderness for life that we can all feel.
Bishop Desmund Tutu
View of
Shaya and the Caribbean from Liwa Mairin Conference Center.
With Karla in Managua and environs
We five bade warm farewells at Casa Museo and caught the early morning La Costeña airlines single prop puddle-jumper (10 passenger capacity) for our return to Managua and Karla Bush Bush. Picking up where our fleeting reunion left off, we spent most of the next three days adventuring with Karla. The streets of Managua were easy maneuvering, deserted by the locals for the Easter holiday (Semana Santa) – everyone else was at the beach! But we followed the crowds – to the shore of Lake Managua for a boat ride at Granada among wooded islands and stately egrets, then a walk around the colorful, colonial town plaza crowded with vendors, playful children and leisurely adults. Our drive to the Masaya market for a bout of touristing turned up an empty marketplace – closed for Good Friday. Undaunted, we headed for a lobster lunch, delayed awhile on a narrow cobblestone street, while one of several “resurrection processions” we were destined to see made its way across the town. Going further turned up a ceramics vendor who, with Karla’s charm, brought us all through the home and yard to the ovens where the ceramics are fired – much more interesting than a tourist market scene!
In our drives outside Managua we passed huge boxy buildings surrounded by barbed wire, and learned from Karla that each one is a “Zona Franca” or Free Trade Zone – a Taiwanese, American and Chinese factory (sweatshop?) employing Nicaraguan women to produce clothing and other goods for export. They are one result of CAFTA, the Central America Free Trade Agreement, which, like NAFTA, relaxes barriers to international trade, manufacturing and land development. Another result of CAFTA that we heard about is an invasion of foreign real estate companies purchasing large tracts of Nicaraguan land with big plans for foreign second home and tourism development.
Mirna
and Kit party at Liwa Mairin dedication.
Visits, sight-seeing and goodbye
Back in Managua, we were treated to a meal on the breezy upstairs porch at Karla’s rustically furnished, fantastically decorated home. We had a visit with Charmin, Karla’s daughter, a college junior home for the holiday. Karla’s ultimate kind deed was taking us to the Managua market, not once but twice! She was saintly patient as we wandered through the narrow stalls and stifling heat examining small folk paintings and coconut jewelry. Karla took us, too, to the compound in Ciudad Sandino where Cody spent a summer volunteering to support sustainable community development. Karla filled her pocketbook with fresh mangoes off the tree and Cody caught up on news and people she hadn’t seen for two years.
Our last evening in town, we met Karla at the National Palace by Lake Managua – the shell of the National Cathedral still stands nearby, eerily empty since the earthquake that leveled much of the city. The cathedral remains un-restored, although a couple of government buildings have been erected nearby (by the Taiwanese). For many city blocks, there is nothing but bare ground. We drove from the vacant downtown to a hilltop of memorials: a many times larger than life Sandino silhouette; inscriptions honoring heroes of the Sandinista revolution; and a display of the broken down remnants of what was once a huge bronze statue of Somoza on horseback. The politics at the hilltop faded into darkness as sunset glinting on clouds near the peak of the Momotombo volcano commanded our attention. Next morning, we headed home.
Our Gang
with Karla Bush Bush in Santa Catarina.
Streets
of Granada.
Sandino
sunset, Managua.