Myths and Legends

I took a one day hiatus from blog writing because I’ve had a couple of late nights, though all for good reasons. Yesterday was spent working, per usual, on our consulting project. To recap, my half of the group is working with Ruido Verde on how to use Excel, collect and analyze and present data. The work is turning out pretty well, and I think we’ve made good strides in improving aspects of our training that we omitted or fell short of last time. It also really helps that the people we’re working with are guys only a few years older than us, if not the same age, who are relatively tech savvy and are very approachable. Jessenia and Marvel were a little timid and shy, which made engaging with them difficult. 

Yesterday, we also went out to a small town called Máximo Jerez, about forty minutes outside of León. There is going to be a Saturday campaign, per usual, with two asesoras named Faviola and Suge (I’m not sure if I got the name spelling correct, but it’s pronounced SOO-hey). The SolCom module is to do door-to-door publicity on Wednesday, three days before the actual event. Publicity entails walking to every single house in the town (which is usually not difficult because there are usually no more than 100 houses in a town, and between eight or ten people, we can visit everyone in two hours). We also stick posters up all over town. I actually highly enjoy talking to people and getting invited into their houses to spread the word about campaigns. A lot of the time, the town people are very shy and quiet, displaying very little emotion or excitement about the event. This is only to be expected, Suge assured me, and her most successful campaign belied how poorly publicity had gone a few days before if one were to judge based on level of enthusiasm demonstrated. Still, Nicaraguans are unfailingly kind and always pull up a chair for you. It’s also fun to find ways to get people to open up to you, such as commenting on the music that is unfailingly blasting in their backyard (Caraluna was playing) or discussing (briefly, because I don’t know much) the soccer game going on in the background. Suge and I also got to talking about her life, about her experience, and all manner of things; I’m looking forward to seeing her again on Saturday. 

Suge!

I bought myself another papaya last night and enjoyed a refreshing snack in the middle of the afternoon. Que rico!

I’m liking the hostel more and more. At first, it seemed a bit shabby compared to La Buena Onda, especially since we have to share an adjoining bathroom with the guys room. During the day, a musty, wet smell emanates from our room which is a little unsettling as well. However slimy the bathroom is and how crowded it can get, us girls have managed by using other sinks creatively (brushing over the kitchen sink anyone?) and closely spacing our bathroom uses so that the guys can’t get a foot in the door. There’s the ubiquitous garden with hammocks, a kitchen that we’ve used in the past three mornings to make fresh breakfast, and lots of friendly travelers. Case in point: the funny Europeans I was blogging about last time? I take by my semi-unfriendly comments, because they kindly offered us chocolate cake in celebration of one of their belated birthdays. 

For the next two hours, I became immersed in a conversation with a Turk turned Columbian turned consummate traveler (the average traveling time between the group - who had only met each other the night before - was around 7 months), where he shared his fascinating observations as a backpacker for the past seven months. After taking some “time off” (read: quit his job) and starting up in New England, he hitchhiked, bused and couch-surfed his way down to the south of Mexico, hit every country in Central America and will end at the end of this year back in Columbia. His spontaneity and approach to life, as well as his inquisitiveness and observation skills. It’s hard for me to comprehend what it’s like to travel by yourself, constantly making new friends and saying goodbye, staying in different hostels and different countries. Ali rightly pointed out however, that often traveling with another person causes you to pay more attention to them rather than observing your surroundings. Yet at the same time, he’s made great friends because as he noticed, correctly so again, that even spending two whole days living, traveling and eating with another person is more time than we cumulatively spend with some of our closer acquaintances every day. While backpacking seemed a bit of a mystery to me before, its motivations and the kind of people it attracts have all proved to be intriguing.

Because Thursday is our cultural day, we visited two museums in the morning. One is called the Myths and Legends and the other was a wonderful art museum housed in a beautiful old house re-appropriated from some rich family after the revolution. The Myths and Legends museum is right next to the place where the other half of the group is working with Reyna, a dour-faced artisan who is working on preserving the traditional crafts and stories of Nicaragua through artisan goods. She makes the gigantosas (the big wooden women things that I took a picture of the first day in Granada) and “short with a big head” dolls. Nicaraguans are very superstitious in addition to being religious and seem to have many stories of either really ugly, slighted and vicious women who attack cheating men as well as costumes that make fun of Spanish soldiers and sprouted our of colonial times. My favorite story was the one called “Toma mi tete” (Grab my Tits) which is the myth of an extremely ugly woman (according to our guide, who didn’t speak English so well, “she was so ugly, so terrible”) who couldn’t find a husband. Her defining characteristic was an extremely large bosom, which she would display. Lurking on street corners, she would find a handsome man and latch on, refusing to let go until he grabbed her tit and then “abruptly died.” Strange. 

The courtyard in front of the entrance to the museum, a former prison.

The mosaics on the walls of the courtyards displaying many of the myths and legends of Nicaragua. I thought the mosaics were wonderfully done, in contrast to the freaky dolls inside the museum.

The museum itself was intriguing...it was housed in a former prison called 21, in which political prisoners were tortured in horrible ways. The visuals for how prisoners were tortured are painted all outside the walls of the museum. Inside, the museum creators used garish, horribly disproportioned dolls to illustrate each famous person, myth or legend and then narrated in broken English. The “scary” room for example, which displayed myths of witches and spirits that haunted Nicaraguans, looked like a cheap Halloween display. The state of the museum’s handouts consisted of two torn and battered collection of stories about each large doll. And this is supposed to be one of the most well known museums in Nicaragua! Still, as Tess informed us, many Nicaraguans honestly believe in these myths and legends, which they insist come from truth. Interestingly, modern, 20th century myths have evolved around the Pelas family, the Italian family that owns every large industry (whether it be liquor, banking, cars, sugar cane, etc) in Nicaragua. Nicaraguans claim that they made a pact with the devil when they first arrived here at the end of the 18th century, trading human souls every year to maintain the pact. Thus, all the victims of IRC I discussed yesterday are due to the fact that their souls have been bartered to the devil, an annual ritual enacted on one of the local volcanos by members of the Pelas family. Other myths talk about workers being turned into cows or that their spirits continue to work the fields at night. 

Paintings on the side of the prison walls, chronicling history and torture methods. It was undoubtedly strange to go from "here's how they tortured people within these very rooms" to "here's another wacky myth of Nicaragua."

To give you a gist of what the museum was like, they put a garden gnome to demonstrate the myth of the "Gnome." 

I had lower expectations for the art museum, but it turned out to be pretty good. The house in which the artwork was housed was beautiful, all stone and wood and outdoor courtyards. Unfortunately I couldn’t get any pictures because pictures were forbidden. Some of the collection (especially the old European paintings) were “taken back for the people” when all of Nicaraguans wealthy fled after the revolution. Others were recently collected and often, disappointingly, seemed to overtly copy the styles of modern and postmodern painting in the US or Europe. There was a great collection of modern pottery that I loved however. 

My favorite caption.

Tomorrow is a big day! We’ll be delivering out consulting work to Ruido Verde. Wish us luck!