by Adriana Woods Páez

In December 2007, I visited Nicaragua for ten days. I have routinely tried to create some sort of point to my travels, be it organic farming, archaeological excavation, learning a language, or simply having a yoga holiday. This was the first time that I made teaching yoga the focal point.Who would I teach? And in such a short time span?
Since one of my goals as a yoga teacher is to share the benefits of the practice with people from low-income backgrounds, I did an on-line search for non-profit organizations in Nicaragua. After all, I wasn’t about to break out my mat and start teaching in a random park or shopping plaza in Managua.
Through the Casa Ben Linder Yahoo group, I found two different organizations that were very excited to receive yoga lessons: one in Managua called Pajarito Azul, a center for the disabled (though I was asked to teach the staff) and the other in León, an alternative wellness center.
My boyfriend and I found took an overnight bus from San José, Costa Rica to Managua—about an eight hour bus ride, and the next day set out for Pajarito Azul, on the outskirts of Managua on the highway to León. We were greeted warmly by several of the staff and taken on a brief tour of the home. Everywhere we went there were the bright eyes and smiles of children (and youthful people who I was later told were in their 20s and 30s) looking up from the tables where they were drawing or T-shirt printing. Several followed us and wanted to hold our hands, which we did.
Our hosts told us how Pajarito Azul was founded in 1994 by a group of concerned social workers and teachers who saw the need for an organization to take care of disabled persons, many of them living on the streets, abandoned by their families. The residents of Pajarito Azul currently number 101 and range from 13 months to 50 years of age — though many, because of the nature of their disability, appear much younger or older. Autism, cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome, and sight and hearing impairments are just some of the disabilities that the residents have and learn to cope with.
The center offers many educational workshops such as painting, printing, sewing, dance, and physical therapy. They are also hoping to begin a yoga class for the residents, to help not only with developing better breathing, strength and flexibility, but to reduce stress and aggressiveness, something that characterizes some of the residents due to their specific disability.
After the tour, we were led to the make-shift yoga studio—the sewing room. There were about 12 staff members sitting on thick, short, foamy mats, waiting expectantly. None of them had ever done yoga before. Some were wearing jeans. Nonetheless , we spent a little under three hours going through the basics of deeper more conscious breathing, sun salutation warm-ups, standing poses, forward bends, abdominals, twists, back-bends, and finishing with the most delicious pose—relaxation. We ended the class with “Aum,” which I explained was the Sanskrit word meaning union between body, mind, and spirit; and “Namaste”—the divine in me salutes the divine in you. When I pressed my palms together in front of my heart, they did as well, saying for the first time these foreign words with earnestness.
When I asked them if they had questions, the first thing asked was where they could do yoga in Managua. Good question! When I had done my yoga research on-line, all I could find were a scattering of yoga retreats, none in Managua, conducted by foreigners in convenient price ranges between 1000-3000 dollars for about 12 classes, room and board in plush lodgings with views of the ocean. Should I mention these options to the staff at Pajarito Azul? Instead, I drew – to the best of my stick figure drawing ability – the sun salutation sequence and a few other postures and promised to send them a yoga DVD in Spanish.
The morning after our day in Pajarito Azul, we took a local minibus to León for our appointment with the Natural and Oriental Therapy Clinic. This center for alternative health and medicine is housed in a stunning circular wooden house with a woven thatched roof and skylight. The second floor was like one continuous balcony, with no walls and plenty of hammocks looking out on the secluded property’s trees and gardens. I taught two classes there and about ten people came to each session, including two pre-teens, one of which exuberantly copied my every move.
Like in Pajarito Azul, I was impressed by everyone’s concentration and earnestness in following my instruction and allowing me to physically adjust them. Three or four of them had done yoga before but there was no regular teacher in León. They were all middle class Nicaraguans who had taken time out of their workday to take advantage of the rare chance to receive yoga instruction. I went around the room, pressing each student’s shoulder down or lifting and stretching their legs. I was reminded how the people who need yoga the most are the ones who have the least access to it.
After class, we were, like in Pajarito Azul, treated like guests of honor; there was fruit salad and herbal teas. I talked with two of the founders of the center (it was collectively bought and built by a small group of friends) about the great potential that their clinic had for attracting yogis interested in holding yoga retreats or workshops. There are people in Costa Rica making tidy profits renting out their gardens and gazebos for weddings, parties, and yoga retreats. My hosts nodded and said they didn’t have the finances or know-how to publicize their center, not even for a web-site. The other students lamented that I wasn’t staying longer but also expressed motivation to somehow keep practicing yoga.
It is amazing to me how Nicaragua’s neighbor, Costa Rica, is exploding with yoga retreats, studios, private teachers, gyms that offer yoga, yoga for surfers… but yoga in Latin America for Latinos is still in the budding stages. There are studios that have been around for about ten or fifteen years at the most. Most have sprung up in the last five years and are often part of a gym package deal, the room used at other times for aerobics, kickboxing, or salsa dancing. Doing it in a multi-use facility helps lower the cost charged for yoga classes, the only way it is economically feasible for most Ticos. Unfortunately, a lot of the yoga taught in gyms is diluted by the very nature of practicing in a gym with its aerobics-exercise pace and music, all very body-image oriented.
Yoga is and should be for everyone. I have seen instructional books and classes for yoga for expecting mothers, yoga for equestrians, for surfers, for babies, for dogs and their owners. What about yoga for low-income non-English speaking persons? I can envision teacher training in Spanish that community members especially interested in yoga could take and then return with this knowledge to their communities, spreading the peace and health that yoga generates to a wider sphere of people living in more humble conditions than those of the average “yuppie” yogi. Let’s share our love of yoga with everyone! Namaste.