Before School Starts

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 1^st 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