by Mary Charles Robinson

Walking along the street in the frontier town of San Carlos, slightly intimidated by all the attention, I heard someone speak to me in English. She came from behind and was eager to show off her English and said “what are you doing here?” She didn’t really wait for the answer and proceeded to talk the entire length of the street.

It was a moment I didn’t want to forget. She told me how she had lived in California for three years and had been too scared to speak much English. Now she regretted it. In her less than perfect English, she said, “no matter your fears, you have to speak to learn it.” My motto from there on was ‘have no fear, just speak.’

by Dean McKinley

Hola mis companeros. Allow me to relate to you a fable for our times. As with all fables, it is more true than less, as well as having a moral.

Once upon a time not so long ago or very far away, there was a sleepy little fishing village situated on a beautiful bay along the coast. The sea and the land were rich and the people lived comfortably on the resources abundant around them. Their needs were met simply and they required only the basics of creature comforts. However it was on a bay, so it had a harbor and in time entrepreneurs came and where once were only panga fishermen, now were big commercial fishing boats and on-land fish processing facilities as well as commercial shipping concerns. Now there were jobs. And while the work was hard, at least the people of the village had at last the effectivo (money) with which to improve their lot somewhat. This meant, however, giving up a way of life that had sustained them and their families for generations only to emerge, in the words of the sociologist Joseph Wood Krutch, “from something like destitution to find themselves all too soon immersed in all the problems, pressures and perplexities of modern civilization.”

by Donna Tabor

On a lofty Nicaraguan mountainside near

This unlikely group of campesinos (farmers) had joined cooperatively in the mid 80’s, a time when political views mattered, yet they left separate ideologies behind them. The cooperative idea enticed ex-Sandinistas, ex-Contras and members of ex-Guardia (the abusive national guard during the Anastasio Somoza dictatorship), to live and work together as neighbors. They named their farm El Porvenir…The Future.

The entrenched politics and ditched efforts of a trans-isthmus passage  

by William Laine

It’s not common knowledge that Nicaragua, rather than Panama, was for hundreds of years considered the ideal place to build an inter-oceanic passage. Nicaragua’s extensive network of lakes, rivers and its access to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans attracted the attention of many countries wishing to make use of its transit potential. Indeed, before the arrival of the Spanish, English, or even the North Americans, the Aztecs had already made use of this potential in order to establish an emerald trade with Colombia.

More than four hundred years ago, countries dreamed of building an inter-oceanic passage realizing that the control of such a passage offered wealth and power. Nicaragua was found, through numerous studies and surveys conducted over the centuries, to have the greatest geographical potential for an inter-oceanic canal. Despite this, political battles, poorly executed deals and bad luck repeatedly stymied Nicaragua’s canal efforts.