22 Jan 2014
The school year starts in about a week and a half! Where has the time gone?? Katie, Colleen, and I have been aprovechando –
or making the most of – our time until our work at the Fe y Alegria schools
begins. In addition to some scheduled events, like talks on education and
ecclesiology as well as a weekend retreat, we've been adding some personal
touches to the house we're living in as well as doing some general cleaning and
rearranging. Like any house, ours has experienced some wear and tear over the
years, with Jesuit Volunteers first occupying the space here in 2008. Before
the volunteers, nuns who
worked at a local school and, later, German doctors working at a clinic lived here. Right now, the lot we live on has two houses, one for us and the
other for three teachers in the area.
Katie, Colleen, and I each fully painted one
of the walls in our room. It was our 1st year group project. (see
pictures below) We might paint Rose and Edwin's rooms if they're up for it. We
found a paint stash in our storage room here and decided to give the rooms a
little more life, especially before we begin the academic year. I reallyfeel
thankful for the time we've had to transition into the year. I'm certain things
will become busier, but with this, hopefully new relationships will be built,
along with those of my community-mates.
The talk on education was limited by time,
but we learned the structure of different school systems here in Nica. We were
told that there are public, private, and semi-private schools here. All fall
under the government's educational branch called MINED. While the public
schools receive all funding from the government and private schools receive much
from tuition, the semi-private schools are a little different; they include
parochial schools – which receive half gov. money and half from the
institutional Church – and the Fe y Alegria schools, which receive all their
funds from the government, even with the relationship to the Jesuits. [As an
aside, there is a separation of church and state here in Nica, however, I do
remember seeing nearly life-size Nativity scenes along the major road downtown,
each one sponsored by different groups, including ministries of the
government.]
We were told that Fe y Alegria is more of a
movement than a school system, and focuses largely on two things: popular
education and social promotion. Under popular education, I believe fall two
core tenets: a system of quality as well as gender equality; it was implied
that we would have more exposure to these tenets as time goes along. We also
talked about holistic approaches to education as well as how the students are
the protagonists in personal and communal development.
In our talk on ecclesiology with two
ex-Jesuits, we touched on what the role of the Catholic Church as well as
Evangelical and other churches look like in modern-day Nicaragua. We also
touched on images of God that each of us carry and images that might be projected by certain faith groups in Nica. We touched a bit on liberation theology, a
theology that was born in Central America in the 60's and 70's that emphasized a
Catholic church for the materially poor and related themes of social change and
being agents for change. Gustavo Guiterrez and Oscar Romero are some names that
come to mind with liberation theology. It appears that while in its earlier
years this type of theology was formulated on an intellectual level, it is
being laid out more practically these years.
To quickly touch on another experience in
the last weeks, the ten Jesuit Volunteers here in Nica had a Life Graphs
Retreat where we shared life stories at a retreat center to deepen our relationships.
It was nice to have a sacred space to do so and, in turn, build community among
all of us who will be spending the next year together.
Finally, this morning, Katie, Colleen, and I
attended a talk at, what I would call, a consciousness-raising center called
Casa Ben Linder in Managua. Casa Ben Linder is named after the first U.S.
citizen who was killed by the U.S.-backed counter-revolutionaries, or Contras,
in Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolutionaries won the civil war in 1979.
Ben Linder was from Portland, Oregon, and decided a few years after college to
offer his engineering talents here in the country. While working in rural
communities to bring electricity into them, he was assassinated. His life and
story are much richer than my sketch here, but suffice it to say, Ben Linder
became the namesake of the house in Nicaraguan's tradition of naming buildings
after their heroes and martyrs. The talks at Casa Ben Linder take place every
Thursday morning. This morning, we listened to a Nicaraguan group called ArtePintura that
brings art and music classes to communities that might not otherwise have
access. We were there alongside a delegation from a non-profit called
International Partners in Mission, the same non-profit I went with to El
Salvador. I was able to reconnect with one of the same guides I had nearly two
years ago!
Coming up on the agenda before work starts:
a talk on politics, more on Fe y Alegria, more cleaning, some local trips, and
plans to have Fernando Cardenal, a Nicaraguan Jesuit, major player in both the
revolution and world-renowned national literacy campaign of the 1980's, and one
of the namesakes of our house, over to our home for dinner to celebrate his
birthday next week! We're hoping to confirm the dinner soon and plan the
celebration! How cool it would be to meet him in-person.
Til next time,
Alex
