Cultural and Class Differences in Nicaragua

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When my niece left San Juan del Sur, she left behind some furniture, an SUV, a 13 year old American Maltese puppy dog, (that we would take care of for a year before sending him on to Miami to join her), and a Nicaraguan family that worked for her. Shortly after arriving in San Juan, my niece hired Monica, the mother of four children, to be her nanny and help around the house. Before that, Monica's family had gotten along on the little money her husband Juan could make from the odd construction jobs he might find. Monica would also bring in a little extra money by occasionally cleaning houses or doing other people's laundry by hand. The family lived in a ramshackle house on a hill on the back end of town. The house belonged to Monica's mother, Sonia. The house had been a dance hall before the war and Sonia and her husband had been the caretakers of the property. When Sonia's husband died and the owners of the property went off to war and never returned, Sonia continued to look after the property, even though she was no longer being paid for doing so. She raised her children there on the little money she made from collecting firewood and selling it. Through the years, they patched up the old wooden structure with wood scraps and added a tin roof and an outhouse in back. After the war, when some of the land was redistributed to the poor laborers and farmers, Sonia was given a permanent lease on the property, and later, the town Mayor helped her with the paperwork that would make the property legally hers for good. Sonia still lived there with her severely disabled son that required her full time care. She had long ago signed over half of the land ownership to Monica, her eldest child. Monica and her husband Juan also lived there with their children, 14 year old Anita, Sammy and Daniel, ages 10 and 12, and 3 year old Josie. Monica's 20 year old brother Robbie also lived there most of the time. The rest of the time he stayed at the beaches where he gave foreigners, (especially pretty young women), surfing lessons.

When my niece and her son left, Monica and 3 year old Josie cried for the entire day. They had been taking care of the little guy for almost 8 months and they missed him terribly. At first Monica had been the only one working for her, but when my niece saw their home and how little they had to live on, she'd felt sorry for them and hired Juan as her gardener and caretaker. Juan's job included caring for the car and keeping the outdoors organized. Anita had been hired next. She would get out of school and come over for a few hours to help clean the house. When Juan had worked on construction jobs he would get up at about 5:00a.m. and walk for a couple of hours to get to the job site. Most of the time, the job consisted of digging up huge rocks and hauling them away from the site on his back. He was expected to work until dark. For this, he was paid about $1.50 per day. My niece was paying him about the same amount he'd made working construction and Monica got paid a little bit more. This steady work had allowed them to buy a few things for their home and feed the family on a regular basis. Before my niece left, Monica would arrive at about 8:00 a.m. and make breakfast for my niece and the baby. After that, she was in charge of getting the little one ready for his day. Juan would arrive about an hour later and start working in the garden and the courtyard. My niece would go off for a half day of lessons at the Spanish school. Juan would take the little one for a bike ride while Monica cleaned up and went to the market to get what she needed to cook the meals for the day. Monica cooked one big meal every day and she was allowed to make enough so that she and Juan and any of the children that happened to be around could also eat. In the late morning, Monica would take the little one to the library for story hour and arts and crafts. The library in San Juan del Sur is very small but it has classes and play time for the children and a nice selection of books. One of the first things I did when I got into town was to get a library card. In the late afternoons after the the large mid-day meal called "almuerzo", it was nap-time for the baby and Monica and the family would settle in to watch the afternoon soap operas on my niece's T.V. My niece would usually check in on the baby after her classes and then go out to lunch. Dinner was left in the oven for her for later. Monica and Anita would clean the house in the afternoons. My niece would check in one more time after lunch and visit with her son for a while and then she would go up to the resort to read by the pool or go for a swim or just join friends for chit-chat and happy hour. Sometimes she'd stay for dinner at the resort restaurant. Monica and her family would stay and take care of the baby and the house until my niece returned. Sometimes it was early and sometimes it was quite late, but they just waited for her. They didn't really mind because they had no television at home and they LOVED watching the programs. If my niece wasn't home, sometimes all of the family would come over and join them to watch T.V. in the evenings.

A few days after my niece left, Monica talked to me about whether or not she could continue to work for us. She told me she realized that my 17 year old daughter didn't need a nanny, but that maybe she could be a companion to the both of us and continue to take care of the house and Juan could continue to do the yard work and the gardening. At home I'd had a cleaning lady in every other week when I didn't have time to clean my own house, but I'd never had "servants". Yes, that's what I said..."servants". You can give them a fancy name like housekeeper or gardener, but basically, these people are willing to serve you in any way they can just to have a little bit of an income. They were desperate for work and I didn't have the heart to tell them I didn't need their help. I would rather have had the house to myself. I need my time alone. I also didn't really have the extra money to spend since I wasn't working and we were living off the proceeds from the sale of our house. In the end, I just figured it was for a good cause. I just couldn't cut off the only income this family had. Monica told Anita to stop coming after school since she had more time to clean now without the baby. I told her she could come at 9:00 a.m. with Juan instead of 8:00. Looking back now, I think it was a mistake to keep this family on as our "servants". We didn't know HOW to have servants. From the moment my daughter arrived, she would make a pot of tea and some toast in the mornings and insist that Monica and Juan take a "tea break" and sit with her at the dining table. She would serve them both a cup of tea and toast with jam. They loved her for this, but I could tell that they were uncomfortable with it. At least at first they were. Especially when my niece was around. This didn't stop my daughter. She started to insist they sit at the dinner table with us for lunch too. Before this, Monica and Juan had eaten their lunch in the kitchen or out in the courtyard. Juan continued to eat outside. He wasn't comfortable sitting at the dining table with the family. My daughter wouldn't take no for an answer from Monica and she was soon sitting with us for breakfast and lunch whenever we were home. I told Monica that she didn't need to cook a meal for us every day because we were usually not home at midday. But my daughter soon brought it to my attention that if they didn't fix a meal, they would have nothing to eat for themselves, so I had Monica go back to making a midday meal, mainly so that she and her family could eat. After my niece left, my daughter continued to insist that this family become more like friends than like employees. She started to invite them to go to the beach with us. Monica didn't have a bathing suit, so she gave her one of her own. We often took them out to dinner with us or up to the resort swimming pool. Monica once told me that she liked working for foreigners because they treated her kindly. She said she would no longer work for the rich Nicaraguan families because to them she was just a "servant".

Monica still missed the baby a lot. We planned to go to Miami in a few months to visit my niece and I wondered how difficult it would be to take Monica with us on this "vacation". It would turn out to be EXTREMELY difficult. Just getting Monica a passport became a project that took many hours of waiting around in offices in Rivas, day after day, trying to see people for pictures and applications. ANY kind of paperwork takes FOREVER to get done in Nicaragua. There are people who know the systems and make their living by doing this legwork for you, but it is a lot more expensive than doing it yourself. It was very frustrating and turned out to be quite expensive anyway, and of course Monica couldn't afford it, so we paid for it ourselves. When Monica finally had a passport, the REAL work began. Getting someone with very little money out of Nicaragua, even for just a vacation, is VERY difficult. For this, we had to make an appointment with the American Embassy in Managua and write MANY letters explaining why Monica wanted to visit the United States. Once again, this process took many hours of work and we faced lots of frustrating dead ends. Looking back now I know this is NOT something I should have taken on, but once we got started, it became somewhat of a "mission". To get a Nicaraguan person to the U.S. from Nicaragua, one must PROVE to the American Embassy that this person is going to return to Nicaragua. My letters explained that Monica had all of her family and also property in Nicaragua and that this was only a vacation. The first time, she was turned down. It cost $100 American dollars, just to make this appointment. That money was lost. A month later, we made another appointment (another $100 dollars) and this time she was given a VISA to visit the United States. She came with us on our vacation. She was ecstatic about going to the U.S. and seeing the baby again. Then one day she disappeared in Miami after saying she had been in touch with a relative. We didn't hear from her for several days. We were very worried. She finally came back and said she had gone to visit the relative and had seriously thought about never going back to Nicaragua! She finally decided she couldn't leave her 3 year old daughter behind. That was it. The rest of the family hadn't been an issue. It had only been her 3 year old daughter that brought her back and she admitted to me that she still wasn't sure she should have come back at all!

Having done this huge thing for his wife, I felt bad for Juan. Especially when I knew that his wife would have left him behind so easily. When I came back, I got into a conversation with Juan and asked him what his dreams were. I asked him if money wasn't an obstacle what would he want to do. He told me that his biggest dream was to get a driver's license. He said that he knew this would be impossible because the lessons at the school in Rivas were very expensive and he didn't even have the $1 dollar it took to get to Rivas, never mind the money for the driving lessons. I realized that I could help this man with his dream. It was SO expensive for him but it would cost less than $200 dollars for me to help this man make his dreams come true. So I started teaching him how to drive my car first. It would be a little cheaper if he already knew how to drive. The stick shift was tough but he picked it up after a few lessons. When I thought he was ready, I gave him the money to get back and forth to Rivas every day for classes and I excused him from his job and continued to pay him his salary. Within a month, Juan had a driver's license. He wanted to someday buy a car and get a taxi plate for it, but I don't think he has done anything about working towards that goal. I also paid for Anita to go to the private school in town which was only a small amount of money but provided a much better education. I helped her to apply for a scholarship that also paid for her uniforms. Uniforms are a BIG obstacle for school children in Nicaragua. Many of them don't go to school because they can't afford the white shirt and blue pants or skirt which is the typical Nicaraguan school uniform.

What happened with Monica and Juan and the family in the end, is that the more we did to help them, the less they wanted to do to help us. I noticed they were spending less and less time doing any work at the house and more and more time watching T.V. My daughter and I watch no T.V. and thought the big television was a nuisance. So when we finally emptied out the living room to make room for our Yoga studio, we moved the T.V. into a far corner and covered it with nice fabric throws so it was no longer available. After a year, I had given the family a substantial raise. Now Juan and Monica were making the same salary and that salary was more than any other "domestic help" workers were making in town. When we opened our Cafe and they were asked to come in earlier, they complained about it and wanted to be paid more money for coming in at their original starting time. Something happened to the relationship between the employees and the employers. The "employees" had become our "friends" and they resented us for being their employers. Boundaries had been crossed and there was no way to go back. I heard from a few of Anita's friends that she no longer wanted to be friends with them because they didn't go to the private school like she did. She wouldn't even talk to them. They said she thought she was too good for them now! We had tried to do what we thought were nice things for this family and in the end, they didn't like us for it. I finally had to talk to them about what was going on. Juan said he couldn't help us with the Cafe because working in a restaurant serving people was "woman's work". He quit. I told Monica that for the sake of our continued friendship, I thought it would be better if she no longer worked for us, and she agreed.

A couple of weeks later, I was shopping at the corner "pulperia", a small convenience store, (and the town gossip center). The owner of the shop (that I had grown to know well and respect) told me that Monica and her family had been "bad-mouthing" us all around town. She was telling everyone that I had wanted them to do a lot more work, and that I didn't want to pay them for the work, so I had fired them! I am not one for gossip, or take gossip seriously, but this piece of news, coming from a respected source, really hurt my feelings.

What I learned from my experience with this family is that you can't mess with people's lives. Even when you think you're doing them a favor. People are used to doing things a certain way and changing these ways drastically messes with the balance of things. When I discussed this with my friends later, they told me that they had heard other complaints about what we were doing. Other workers were jealous of Monica's family because they were being paid more than them. Monica's family was resented by their friends and neighbors because they were joining us at restaurants and at the resort where none of the them had ever been. They were saying things like "who did Monica and her family think they were, foreigners or tourists?" It turns out that in their own community, we weren't helping but hurting Monica's family status. Yet having said all of that, I am still torn between the idea of keeping people at their own "class level" by paying them the small "going rate" salaries they make in these poor countries, or introducing them to what is possible and trying to help by showing them ways out of their own poverty. One of the things that upset me the most about the poor people of Nicaragua was their acceptance of their poverty. Monica and Juan both told me that "if a Nicaraguan was born poor, he would be poor all of his life". We had many conversations where I tried to challenge this way of thinking and give them ideas for ways out of there accepted plight. I shouldn't have kept these people on as my "servants". We didn't see them as "servants" but that is certainly how they saw themselves. I could have tried to find a better way to help them. I am still trying to find a better way, and someday, maybe, I hope to be able to really help.



The Journey / Travel With Me

A. Zudro a.k.a. Gloria

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