Nicaragua: Sandinistas… Contras… civil war… Iran-gate… Reagan... For me, those would have been the limited word-associations for “Nicaragua” until only a few years’ ago if I’d really stretched my brain cells. I knew it was in Central America (give the girl a medal!), but, much more than that, and I would have been struggling. I didn’t even know which ocean or sea lapped at its shores. (In fact, it straddles the fragile little wiggle of land that separates the behemoths of North and South America, the Pacific coast being a surfers’ paradise, and the Caribbean side of the country remote and autonomous with little by way of infrastructure or common culture to link it to the political capital of Managua in the west; a dramatic range of volcanoes – Nicaragua’s share of the Pacific “ring of
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