by Lisa Wells
I didn’t really want to volunteer. This was supposed to be a “Me” trip: “Me” eating Gallo Pinto, “Me” getting a tan, “Me” flirting with 22-year olds. But as it turns out, I am either conditionally or genetically “mal-equipped” for hedonism and after two weeks my ‘early to bed early to rise’ blue-collar rearing came to kick my butt out of bed. I wrote home desperately about my winter away: “There is no doubt we backpackers face a fate worse than death, the useless limbo of privilege, the numbing repetition…” My paradise sun and its perpetual noon had become the lamp of an interrogator.I needed something to do.
Growth through empowerment
At six foot, with fiery red hair, pale skin, and piercing blue eyes, Dorien van Schie is impossible to miss. She is the founder of Mpowering People, a non-governmental organization based in both The Netherlands and Nicaragua that serves street kids in and around León. Wherever she goes, Dorien is attended by droves of adoring Nicas.
“Our aim is empowerment,” says Dorien. “We’re giving these kids the resources they need to help themselves and their families from the vise of poverty.”
It breaks down like this: in order to attend school in Nicaragua, each student must buy a uniform, books, and supplies and pay a yearly fee that’s justified as a sort of tithing. It works out to about $150 a year. “They say that education in Nicaragua is free but that’s a farce,” Dorien tells me. “If you’re from Tamarindo, and six months out of the year earn a dollar a day harvesting salt, $150 is an impossible sum, and that’s just for one of your children.”
Mpowering People, upon admitting a child to its program, purchases the uniform and supplies they need to attend school, and assigns each student a promoter, a kind of all around cheerleader. The promoters meet with the student and their family once a week, meet with teachers, provide homework help, and ensure that all parties are making good on the agreements outlined in their contract. Many of the promoters end up acting as therapists as well. “Our kids are unbelievably sweet but deeply troubled. You have to remember that they have been surviving realities that mirror our worst nightmares. Alcoholism, incest, emotional and physical violence, gang wars… The list is as long as you want to make it.”
Tamarindo is a village of plastic shacks just off the road to Managua, thirty minutes south of León, and it is one of the hottest parts of the country. The men and boys pull 13-hour days in the salt fields under an oppressive sun while back in the village, the women and girls stand shoulder to shoulder in a ten-by-ten-foot room, packing the salt for sale. Salt is a preservative and robs precious liquid from all that it touches. Consequently many of the workers have severe respiratory problems and skin lesions that won’t heal.
Adiact, another barrio served by Mpowering People, bleeds over into central León. One hardly notices they’re entering Adiact until the concrete road fades to dirt and hungry eyes begin to blink out from the interiors of sheet-metal shacks. If the reader wishes to understand fully what a human requires to survive, I recommend making a visit. Just make it before dark with one of its residents as your guide.
Work hard, love play
For one year, after school and on weekends, the children of Adiact, Tamarindo, and León have been coming together with their promoters under the tutelage of Don Manuel Urtecho to create a play about the history of Nicaragua, the subjugation of its indigenous population by the Spanish conquistadores, and how that colonialism has trickled out in modern Nicaraguan society in the form of sexism and violence against women and children.
After teaching theatre in the States for many years, I have to admit that the prospect of organizing 160 kids from different towns made me want to tuck my tail and run. I didn’t believe it was possible. “Look,” I told Dorien, my stomach a knot of nerves, “We’re a week away from the play. There’s no rehearsal or performance schedule; there’s no materials list; no one comes on time to meetings.”
“Yes,” she sighed in sympathy, “But don’t worry too much. This is how they do things here. Everything will work out fine.”
Once I stepped out from behind my organizational tasks and actually interacted with the kids, I began to share her sentiment. In the States I’ve worked with street kids, the kids of senators, and everyone in between. But I’ve never before met kids like these. Each one of them embodied the saintly composition of helpfulness, self-possession, wisdom, and sweetness. They were hard workers and they loved play, often finding ways to do both simultaneously.
At the end of the day, often to my great confusion, all designated tasks were complete. And I realized that what my kids lack in that hard-lined determination we hype as drive in the States, they make up for with living.
Public dissent through performance
Our first performance was in Tamarindo on December 18th and most of the town turned out. The football court lined with spectators long before the children had donned their costumes. I ran around proudly distributing the handbills I’d spent an entire day translating (failing to consider that aside from our students, most of Tamarindo can’t read), while Don Manuel stalled the crowd with an animated speech on the virtues of performance art.
The children of Tamarindo and Adiact dressed as indigenous warriors in loincloths and body paint opened the play by performing various ceremonies to the sun and moon and “Nature.” The crowd was enraptured, erupting into applause after every scene, sometimes even within a scene. When Christopher Columbus entered (played by one of the blonder children dressed in silky bloomers and white gym socks hiked up to his knees) the crowd hushed. “We have arrived with the cross.”
From behind a backlit white screen, three sinister ships sail to the march of battle drums. We know what’s coming of course. For some of us it is an intellectual knowledge and for others, more an ancestral memory, but we all hold our breath anyway. Soon the conquerors have arrived among our beloved indigenous tribe, slaying the men and enslaving the women; all this beneath the shadow of a giant cross.
In Tamarindo, they laugh often, even at that which attempts seriousness. The actors are briefly confused by this but enjoy the attention and are soon laughing along. Tamarindo is poor but relatively safe, more of a village than a ghetto and this truth reads in the crowd.
The next night in Adiact, the conquerors are met with the angry glares of our audience, the crowd more serious, the political undertones more deeply felt it seems. Nevertheless, both neighborhoods are experiencing their very first play, and most likely, first public display of dissent against the very foundations of their society. They are grateful, and genuinely awed, as if never before had a voice so powerful spoken on their behalf.
Our final performance was staged in León’s Central Park in front of the largest Catholic cathedral in Central America. Many families from the outlying barrios managed to make the trip, some having walked all the way from Tamarindo.
As dusk fell, our audience began to arrive at the roped-off area designated as the stage and by the time the lights came up on the first scene, more than three hundred people had gathered. The microphones we’d rented especially for that night cut out almost immediately, but the kids were on point and raised their volume so that most everyone in that giant space could hear.
In the second scene we lost the lights briefly, and then, just as they came up again on the battle between the indigenous and the Spanish, our ears began to fill with ringing bells. The audience and staff alike looked to one another in a moment of confusion, but to my awe and admiration, the actors remained frozen in their positions. For a full five minutes, the silhouettes of two small boys ringing the bells of the church could be seen: the Bishop’s protest against the “anti-Catholic” message of the play.
Once the bells stopped, the actors resumed their scene, running one another through with cardboard swords, screaming for the church or for the earth. Don Manuel, from the top of the church steps, looked proudly down at the unfolding scene, and in some hidden tower the Bishop congratulated himself: no doubt an illustration of a battle still raging in Nicaragua today. A grave, inspired fact, among others that will spare me from the burden of any “Me-centric” travel in the future.
