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Published: November 27th 2007
Welcome to Sarah and Rick's new blog site!
Sorry to switch the address so quickly, but we feel that this sight will provide everyone with a better interface through which to vicariously experience Nicaragua. You may notice that some of the old entries are now illustrated in Technicolor (they have pictures)! As an added bonus, you can subscribe to this blog and automatically receive an email each time we post a new entry. We promise that you won't get any spam from this subscription. Many of you have already been subscribed. We won't be offended if you choose to unsubscribe at any time.
Now, to proceed with the adventures of Sarah and Rick!
Last week we had our first official visitors from the states: Dave and Trisha.
Very excited to play tour guides for the first time, Rick and I stayed up late into the night a week before they arrived, planning the trip scrupulously. We decided that our adventure would begin in Leon, a colonial city about two hours north of Managua. Our itinerary was timed perfectly: Leon Saturday night, the Pacific beach Sunday, a quick trip over to Esteli Sunday night or Monday morning, and
then out to the nature reserve/farming cooperative at Miraflor until Thursday morning, when we would head back to Managua for Thanksgiving dinner at Casa Ben Linder. After that, we planned a day of sightseeing in Managua on Friday, all culminating in a highly contested baseball game between Boer (the Managua team) and Leon. It was the perfect week-long tour of northern Nicaragua. But of course, nothing worked out the way we planned it.
Saturday morning Rick and I hopped out of bed and navigated the bus routes to the airport. We were able to get ourselves within a 50 Cordoba cab ride of the airport, which we were pretty proud of. We arrived at the terminal about 15 mins after the flight from Miami arrived, just in time to see the first passengers enter the baggage claim. We waited anxiously to begin our awesome week. The passegers kept arriving, and in each tall white man's face we looked for Dave, but to no avail.
There was no Dave or Trisha! Frantic, we begged the American Airlines people to tell us if they had somehow missed the flight in Miami, but they insisted that information was confidential. They let
us make one international call as a concession. We left a frantic message on Rick's home answering machine, explaining the situation, hoping Dave might have called to let them know what happened. Then we started making calls on the cell phone. We called our house and had Rachel look up Dave's cell number. She said she would call him on Skype, and call us back with any news. If they had missed the plane, Dave's cell should still work in Miami. For all we knew, though, they had made it to Managua, and were being held in the limbo of immigration for god knows what. We were assuming the worst.
A few minutes later, the cell rang. Rick picked it up. "You're kidding!" he said, "I can't believe it." Apparently, we were mistaken, Dave and Trisha were arriving at 12:35 on Sunday, a good 20 hours away.
We took the little snafu in stride, and decided to make a day of it. There was a market on the airport side of town that we had been meeting to visit, and we wanted to see if we could figure out how to get all the way from the airport
back to our house without taking a taxi. We ended up buying a giant papaya and a pair of shoes at the market, and took the bus all the way home (a good hour's ride). We tried to buy a hairbrush (see earlier entry), but they wanted to charge us 90 cords, and you all know I would have none of it.
The following morning we took the bus all the way to the airport, arriving just as Dave and Trisha walked out of immigration. This time we came prepared with a giant yellow sign that read, "Bienvenidos a Nica, Noodlz and T-bone!" They arrived with their baggage in hand and a couple of things from home. They even brought me a hairbrush! (Thanks, Adrienne!) We were ready to begin our adventure!
Although we lost a day from our original plan, we decided to catch the first bus we could to Leon. After a delicious lunch of fritanga and papaya smoothies, we headed north. Unfortunately, both of the hostels we had planned to stay in were completely booked! We ended up finding a room in a cozy hospedaje for 50 cords each--que barrato! We had planned to eat
dinner at a delicious vegetarian restaurant called CocineArt that we had visited on our previous visit to Leon. However, after walking all the way from our hospedaje there, we found that the restaurant closed early on Sundays! Instead, we found our way to Dave's Shark Pit, a very gringo establishment with excellent food and an English menu. After a few bottles of Tona (beer), we decided to scrap our whole trip plan and try to visit an organic coffee farmer outside of Matagalpa whom Rick and I had met at Casa Ben Linder the week before.
The next morning, after a series of phone calls, we managed to get in touch with our campesino (farmer) friend, Vicente Padilla, who invited us out for Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Vicente's story is quite compelling, and honestly deserves a blog entry all to itself. There is, actually, a blog devoted entirely to his case. The address is http://vicentepadilla.blogspot.com
It hasn't been updated for about a year, but is a good resource, nonetheless.
I will try to give a very brief synopsis of why Vicente's farm is of particular interest and how Rick and I even know him:
After serving in
the Nicaraguan Army in the 80's Vicente decided to buy some land to cultivate an organic farm. He chose a plot outside of Matagalpa in an area called Yesica Sur. The plot of land he purchased measures about 8 Manzanas, or roughly 16+ acres.
He purchased it in the early 90's and cultivated a diverse crop of coffee, fruit, and medicinal herbs. In the mid nineties he began to have some trouble with a man by the name of McEwan. McEwan claimed to be the true owner of over 1800 manzanas in the area, and worked to push Vicente and many other poor farming families off of it. In reality, the McEwan family, who had previously owned th land, had accepted payment for it years earlier, relinquishing ownership. The effort to reclaim the land was actually powered by a large U.S. based coffee company named State Street Coffee.
Anyway, starting around 1996 McEwan, a very wealthy and ruthless man, began to buy off public officials and hire armed guards to take over Vicente's property. He claimed 3 manzanas of the land and guarded it with private guards who carried automatic weapons with them. A legal battel pursued, funded
by a number of North American Ecumenical peace and justice workers who reside in Managua--the same people who run Casa Ben Linder.
Thus, Rick and I attended a Thursday chat at Casa Ben Linder when Vicente came to give an update on the battle over his land. The men who are working to take Vicente's land have tried very hard to erode the gringo support network behind Vicente and his family. They even went so far as to prosecute (sucessfully, although not necessarily justly) a young woman from the states who wrote about Vicente's case in a fairly prominent Nicaraguan journal. She has been charged with libel and, should she ever return to Nicaragua, will have to pay someone 20,000 cordobas. This sentence was announced a few months ago, and Vicente came to Casa Ben Linder to ask people to accompany he and his family on their farm, to show that his support network has not wavered as a result of this unjust trial.
So, in light of his request, and the fact that our perfectly planned tour already seemed to be falling apart, we decided that we would take the opportunity
to learn a little bit about organic farming and social justice.
Monday afternoon we caught a bus to Esteli, about 3/4 of the way to Matagalpa. On the way into Esteli we stopped at a lovely organic garden/restaurant called La Casita, which deserves a brief mention. Tuesday morning we went to Matagalpa and caught the bus to Vicente's house. Vicente is pretty famous in Matagalpa for his valiant fight against the man, so it wasn't hard to find his house: the bus driver knew exactly where to drop us off.
We spent the next two days listening to Vicente's story and learning how he maintains his lush organic farm. He had up picking coffee, hauling compost, and hoeing the garden. I can honestly say it was more manual labor than I've done in months. Carmen, Vicente's wife, cooked delicious meals for us, and we enjoyed playing games with his five children--all of whom are incredibly well mannered and well-adjusted, especially in light of their having witnessed years of unjust persecution, and even brutal beating of their father. I have plenty of pictures from our trip, some of which i will post here. Others can be viewed at picasaweb.google.com/sarah.ilene
The visit ended too quickly, as we needed to catch a bus back to Managua on Thursday morning. Rick and I will definitely be visiting our new campo friends again soon--perhaps over Christmas to help with the coffee harvest.
Our bus ride home was a real treat! We sprung for the 50 cordoba express and got to watch a B-grade movie entitled "Lasko Deathtrain". It was dubbed into Spanish, which i imagine only made the screen writing more palatable. Just as Lasko, the incredibly striking catholic monk, saved the charging train of clergymen (and ostensibly, the rest of the world) from an incurable bought of bubonic plague, we rolled into the bus station in Managua: just in time to make some garlic bread, buy some rum and head off to gringo Thanksgiving at Casa Ben Linder.
Unfortunately, in the mix of travel, Dave managed to pick up an ugly stomach bug and a fever of 102. Instead of visiting the tourist sights of Managua Friday, we got to tour the inside of Hospital Bautista, as poor Dave had all of his fluids tested. We left with some antibiotics and a hefty load of re-hydration salts. As it
turned out, the baseball game was actually Saturday night, so it didn't matter that we were all too cranky and exhausted to go anywhere.
Early the next morning Dave and Trisha caught a cab back to the airport and said goodbye to Nicaragua. It may not have been the whirlwind tour of northern Nica that we had planned, but even Dave said he'd drink the water in Matagalpa to do it again.
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