You’ve arrived at “Where Was Mark,” the archives for my current website:
http://markhand.blogspot.com
You can read here about my adventures in Scotland and Nicaragua in 2005 (though without pictures, thanks to a techno-snafu that I refuse to worry about). Thanks for the visit.
Well, readers, Mark is back in Nashville – which, unfortunately, means that the answer to “where is mark?” will be a pretty easy one to answer for the next little while.
As such, this website is on “pause” until I start to wander again. With any luck, that will be in the not-too-distant future. Until that point, Que le vaya bien!
Oh, right – if you’ve been reading occasionally, but I don’t have your email address, please let me know and I’ll give you the heads up when the bell rings for Round II of… “where is mark?”
Home again, home again.
On the last few days of a project, or in any place I’ve spent a good amount of time, I invariably wax reflexive, attempting to solidify those memories that I want to never forget, take the pictures that I haven’t managed to slow down enough to shoot, and have those conversations in which I let people know exactly how important was our time together.
Leaving Nicaragua snuck up on me. I was too busy, in fact, packing in all the life that I could to slow down enough to think about it. I’m glad I did it – the last few weeks and days were full of colors and smells and even new friendships that I wouldn’t have seen or smelled or formed had I been spending time writing in my journal.
My friend Lindsey came in two Sundays ago, with just two weeks to
see and experience Nicaragua. We immediately moved her into the
neighborhood with another family and put her to work, visiting all of
Manna’s projects and introducing her to the community. She did
wonderfully, without much help from or time with me, and it encouraged me to watch a non-Spanish speaker become so loved so quickly. Good hearts don’t need translators.
Meanwhile, I took over high school English, got sick for four days
during my next-to-last weekend, surfed one more time (in linen pants,
even), finally went to the Los Quinchos street kid program, heard from the campaign manager of one of Nicaragua’s illegal presidential
candidates, learned how to make choco-bananos (sort of. I’ve made
one unsuccessful US attempt already), and cooked an American dinner
for my family.
Two things, however, define my time in Nicaragua. One was a pair
of glasses that I bought for my older “sister,” Carolina. Carolina
has severe short-sightedness, and an astigmatism that gives her daily headaches. In exchange for a promise to use her new vision to
further her dream of someday owning her own hair salon, Greg helped
me take Carolina to the eye doctor and purchase a brand-new (and
cute!) pair of glasses. Greg is going to continue working with
Carolina to make sure she has the necessary loans to begin making her beauty-salon vision a reality.
Second, I developed a relationship with the Flores family that lived around the corner. I first met Olga, a twenty-one year old single mother and law school student, in our English class. She introduced me to her mother Lorena, brother Michael, sisters Dayana, Alba and Jensil, and her beautiful two year old son Emilio.
I became fast friends with the family, and Olga eventually shared
with me the economic situation into which she and her family were
sliding. Her father had stopped supporting her mother and her
siblings. Her brother Maicol was looking unsuccessfully for a part
time job that would allow him to finish high school and support his
sisters. Olga, because she was studying and raising a child, she had
fallen behind on her law school payments. Then Emilio developed a
respiratory infection which threatened to break the bank.
Over the course of the last two weeks, Manna Project and I were able to find Miacol a job with some local missionaries, work out payments for Olga’s law school, and get Emilio checked up and medicated at the local clinic. On the last day, Olga asked Lindsey and I whether or not we were Christians. It’s a normal question in Nicaragua, particularly for volunteers who are, by and large, evangelical missionaries. Lindsey and I both hesitated, and Olga said (translating here) “It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in God. I know you are close to God because I’ve watched you with the children here, and because I know how you’ve cared for Emilio and me – not just taken care of us, but cared for us. When you do that, you carry God with you.” And I’ll add, though I don’t know she said it, “whether you like it or not.”
-Marco de Bicicleta
It just doesn’t get any better than this.
Week 5:
- helped construct the “House of Hope,” a soon-to-be complex for reforming prostitutes
- played my first games of Nicaraguan basketball, in which my lack of athletic ability was only made up by my superior gringo height
- learned Nicaraguan guitar songs from the adult English students
- two high school English classes
- two adult English classes
- hit my first Nicaraguan pinata
- found out that my nickname “Marco de Bicicleta” means “bicycle frame”
- heard a lecture on Nicaraguan education by Dona Maria Tallez, Nicaraguan professor and intellectual denied a US visa for participating in the Sandanista Revolution in 1979
- helped throw a fundraiser for the Ben Linder House, a common meeting place for Nicaraguan service providers. The house is named after the first American to be assassinated by US-backed Contra forces in the 1980s; Linder was a twenty seren year old volunteer helping to electrify rural areas of Nicaragua.
Week 6
Up until now, if I had one complaint about my time in Nicaragua, it would have been that, living in the Manna house, I felt somewhat separated from the community that the group is working with. I mentioned this to Greg, the volunteer coordinator, and at his suggestion I moved into the neighborhood last Sunday. My new family consists of my mother Juana (or Juanita), and my two sisters Carolina (28) and Jazmina (20). It also just so happens to be the location of the previously mentioned chocolate-covered bananas, to which I now have unlimited access.
Living with the Solis family has fundamentally changed my time in Nicaragua. Instead of reading more Economist articles on a Sunday afternoon, I’m attending a Nicaraguan mass. Rather than check my email for the fourth time in any given day, I’m sweeping the dirt floor of my room and learning how to make Nicaraguan juices and helping machete the fields around my new house. I’m having endless conversations in my fast-improving Spanish, learning the ins and outs of Nicaraguan culture, and doing what I came here to do: make friends with people that might be able to benefit from whatever I have to offer. It has meant finding a part-time job for one of my struggling high school English students, and (next week, hopefully) purchasing glasses for Carolina.
Despite the fact that it was a slow week with regard to “service activities,” I am more proud of what I accomplished than of any other week here so far here. This week will pick up some – our preschool, feeding program, and adult English class which had all been on vacation will resume this week. Last week I took over the high school English class, which is as demanding a job as I can imagine. God bless teachers everywhere. And on top of that, I will have, in just a few hours, a new volunteer to introduce to Cedro Galan! My friend flies in tonight, and she will hit the ground running with a Managua tour and a choco-banano tomorrow morning!
marco de bicicleta
The amount of pictures that I have taken so far in Nicaragua is, to say the least, disappointing. These are a few standouts – but first, some shots from the birthday party of Noah, the (now) six-year old cousin and rock star.
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The pooped birthday boy with his equally pooped mother
What mom wishes she had when I was six
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Now, Nicaragua pictures:
My first Nicaraguan kiss, on the island of Ometepe
One picture of La Finca, our hostel on Ometepe. Note hammocks, of course.
Feeding program kids:
Last Saturday, Manna helped throw the official opening fiesta of the Augusts’ community center. Yours truly was in charge of face painting which, I believe, was a huge success. The boy in the second picture (like the one who received the sideways Nicaraguan flag) may not agree…
Some of my new Nicaraguan friends and swimming students, along with Jeannine, another summer volunteer from Yale.
More pictures and stories coming soon, I hope. Any suggestions?
One of the requirements of the scholarship that brought me to Manna Project is a set of bi-weekly updates. Here is the one I wrote for today – a little dry for my tastes, but it’s what I’m up to!
Read the rest of this entry »
So I spent an hour of my life attempting and failing to upload pictures onto this stupid computer. Sorry, Mom.
As a way of re-introducing myself to the guitar, I’ve decided to make a (short) list of all the songs I know how to play, and another (much longer) list of the songs I want to learn. Want to help? Respond with one of the following:
1) Songs you’ve heard me play and like,
2) Songs you’ve heard me play that I should never play in front of people ever again,
3) Songs you think I should learn, or
4) Songs that you don’t have any idea whether or not I know, but by golly I should.
After having sampled the various activities of Manna Project – please ask me questions, because every day has its own story – I’ve decided to focus in on a few activities:
1) High school English teaching. Four hours a day, two days a week, for kids mostly between fifteen and nineteen. Remember how mean kids could be in high school? Well, now imagine that they can say all those mean things to your face because you can’t understand what they’re saying anyway. Let’s just say I’m going to pick up a very… specialized… vocabulary at the Cedro Galan High School
2) Adult English. Two hours a day, twice a week, about fifteen college-aged kids (young adult? Am I really a “young adult?”). These kids will most likely become the leaders of this community, and therefore may be Manna’s best shot at affecting Cedro Galan’s future.
3) Beisbol! (Baseball!) Apparently, there’s an American named Marshall that’s supposed to come this weekend; when he does (he doesn’t know this yet), I’m planning on being his assistant coach on the Chiquilistagua beisbol team.
4) Spanish, Spanish, Spanish. I don’t know if I can list the number of times I’ve had to swallow my frustrations at not knowing Spanish and being able to communicate. Ergo, I’ve started taking Spanish lessons for four hours every weekday morning, for as long as it takes. My teacher’s name is Milagro (“miracle” in Spanish), has two kids named Miguel and Nahom, and fought as an eight-year-old in the Revolution.
5) Guitar. I’ve played more guitar in the last two weeks than in the last three years. Have any songs I should learn in my downtime?
6) Huey Long. I gave up on Crime and Punishment, and have started reading Huey Long, the biography of the old governor. Given that when I read Truman I wanted to be President, and when I read Surviving the Extremes (Ryan Webb, you HAVE to read this book) I wanted to be a doctor, I’m a little nervous reading about the “despot of the delta.”
Thursday morning, I sat in on a conversation in which seven or eight Nicaraguans – now all grandparents – shared their experiences during the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution and under the subsequent Sandanista socialist regime. As they talked about the triumph of the revolution, the honeymoon years of socialism in the early 1980s and the following US-inspired civil war, they spoke of the overwhelming solidarity among Nicaraguans and Central Americans.
When one of the gringos asked how we could be in solidarity today with Nicragua, the second poorest Latin American country, the refrain was strong and clear: Nicaraguans, Central and Latin Americans, and their brothers in the developed world must fight the evils of the current economic world order (which I studied this past spring at St. Andrews): globalisation, the WTO, IMF and World Bank, economic imperialism, underdevelopment, CAFTA, and – above all – multinational corporations.
The more I listened, the more I think that MNCs may be “where it’s at” for me. A discussion of multinational corporations covers politics and business. In Latin America, liberation theology means it’s about religion, too. I don’t know where I stand on economics yet; the discussion was a little too leftist and reactionary for me. But the economic underdevelopment of many countries, to me, presents a worthy challenge. I wonder if my role will not be running, fighting, regulating, studying, or being somehow engaged with multinational corporations, which I think are at the heart of the economic challenges facing developing countries, and the locus of economic change, both positive and negative, that will occur in our lifetime.
