It is the scourge of bus fare collectors everywhere in this country because people are incredibly unhelpful when it comes to efficiently filling up the bus with people. The ‘cobradores,’ as they’re called, have to jump up to the windows on the outside of the bus and shout at people in the middle to move closer together. I have heard them almost literally threaten to ‘pull this bus over to the side of the road’ if people don’t cooperate and move together. For a long time this frustrated me to no end. Why were people being so selfish? Don’t they care about all the other people trying to get home or to work? I felt bad for the bus workers for having to deal with the situation. Over time, however, I have begun to understand why this happens. I think it has to do with misaligned incentives.

Official capacity: 60. Actual passengers: 121

If you are a Nicaraguan, or anyone, really, who has spent a significant portion of your life on crowded buses in this country, then you know that if you do as the cobrador wants and relinquish your personal space in the middle of the bus, you will be rewarded with a less comfortable ride and the space that you free up will not be distributed among all the other people on the bus. Instead the result will be that the cobrador will try to pack MORE people on the bus. Why would you want to free up more space just so that the bus people can make more money out of your discomfort? Look, we feel bad that some people might get left behind, but this is Nicaragua! First come first seated is a law of the land. If we don’t band together and demand some semblance of comfort and space on the buses, then we’ll continue to get treated like sardines. I’ve seen this situation really get tense when you throw in some serious righteous indignation, like a pregnant woman whose friend demands space and flatly denounces as abuse any attempt by the bus personnel or waiting passengers to fill the space.

I think this phenomenon is perfectly understandable as a result of self-interest and the realization that selfless behavior will go punished rather than rewarded. Nobody is saying ‘thanks’ for your sacrifice of comfort. In fact, everyone may get more uncomfortable if you don’t hold out. From the cobrador’s perspective, he’s only offering to get you from one place to another, so by reducing his ability to make money and denying others the opportunity to board you’re a menace to society. It’s a fascinating conflict and I don’t see any easy way to resolve it. The epic struggle between the middle passengers and the bus workers must continue.

The men cutting down a Christmas tree

Mom and I at the Christmas tree farm

Sara and I, friends through high school, college, and beyond. Too many memories to count...

Bros at the cabin

Expert firewoman at the cabin

Amazing New Year's dinner

Happy New Year!!!

Welcoming the new year together

I had prepared myself for significant culture shock after having been gone for so long, but I didn’t really have any trouble re-adjusting for the brief time I was home. I did feel a bit like I was on the outside looking in at this country of concrete, bricks, metal, and electricity, but it wasn’t alienating as much as it was fascinating and confusing. I constantly found myself wondering, “How did we get all the money and resources to build all of this?” Having lived in towns with scant electricity, unpaved roads, houses made from corrugated metal roofs and wooden boards, and cars signifying extreme wealth, it was overwhelming to see such development everywhere. What does it all mean? I think that I was searching for some kind of narrative or story that I could apply to make sense of the vast differences, but there is no easy explanation. The roots are complex and deep and probably have to do with a huge head-start in terms of accumulation of resources, development of a productive economy, political and economic stability, almost no large-scale destruction in the past 150 years, and huge reserves of natural resources to draw upon. Nicaragua, meanwhile, was a colony for over a hundred years, which limited its growth, and then suffered periodic wars for the next hundred years. Dictators robbed the people of resources that could have been invested in infrastructure and education, hurricanes and earthquakes took their toll on the small country, and the natural resources do not compare to those of the US. Add to that the foreign interventions, the crippling civil war in the 1970s and 80s, the more difficult climate, and a culture and society influenced by all these experiences and the differences make more sense.

In addition to culture shock on my way into the US, I was preparing myself for a difficult re-entry to Nicaragua. I knew apart from saying goodbye to loved ones again that I’d be leaving the comforts of a developed country like indoor toilets, hot water, huge amounts of delicious and varied food, highways, climate control, cars, movie theaters, couches, rugs, nice mattresses, I could go on. Yet when I arrived back in country I slipped easily into Spanish, welcomed the warm weather, and felt almost at home on the crowded ex-school buses that took me home. The word home is always a tricky one once we leave it for college, and in some ways home will always be where I grew up, but in another sense it means wherever you’ve become accustomed to living, wherever you feel most comfortable, and wherever you understand and fit in best. In that sense, Nicaragua feels much more like home than I expected, and it has been a very rewarding and pleasant re-entry. My friends threw me a welcome-home party and the masses of tourists and short-term volunteers here increase my sense of belonging to the community here. I am extremely lucky to feel so happy and comfortable visiting the US and then to have such a happy and comfortable re-entry into the country where I’ll spend my next 11 months. I miss home, but at least I feel at home here too.

This perspective on altruism and generosity is decidedly less romantic, but I tend to favor explanations that give the ‘why’ and that do not uncritically judge something to be better than its alternatives. Using this explanation of generosity we can view many cultural peculiarities in a new way. For instance, Nicaraguan birthday parties and especially quinceaños parties involve great costs to the hosting families, who often prepare food for all the invitees and their families, pass out gift bags, and buy a piñata. My perception is that there is a large net loss in most birthday parties here, and it may be part of a spreading of resources among families. Wealthy families are expected to give much more than families of scarce means during these events. The December purisimas celebrations are another example of families distributing food and gifts to the whole community.

There are also norms of behavior that support this value system by excluding or stigmatizing those who display wealth or accumulate more than is socially acceptable. I hear people speak poorly of a single man in my community who has been working and saving his money to build a house and buy a motorcycle for himself but has not yet found a wife and started a family to spread the money around. A regular adjective used to describe anything that is expensive or flashy is ‘fachenta’ which means ‘show-offy’ or ‘snobby.’ If you decide not to buy food from every walking vendor or products from friends selling Avon, then you may acquire a reputation as ‘pinche’ or ‘stingy.’ These social norms train children from birth to value sharing and to suspect stingy behavior as well as maintain generous behavior with social rewards and punishments.

Contrast this with US culture, which is more focused on individual achievement and conspicuous consumption. We are infamous for our every-man-for-himself approach, our shallow materialism, and our weak social security system. We are one of the few rich countries not to ensure that everyone has adequate healthcare (Even Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the world, has universal healthcare). There is currently a resurgence of political and economic thought about shrinking even more the extent to which we band together as a society to take care of those who have less resources. Many of our social norms are sold to us through commercials and television shows and we value rags-to-riches stories and owning cars and iPhones more than we value hosting community events to support those in need (that’s not to say that there is no materialism here; in fact, kids here want computers and Blackberries just as much as kids in the US and television is a central family activity here too.)

I’m not interested in making this into a political opinion piece, howerver. In fact, having seen some of the drawbacks of the Nicaraguan context, I have more respect for the tendency to expect each person to earn what they receive rather than being given it. In the US we have an incredible entrepreneurial spirit, a can-do attitude, a thirst for knowledge and self-improvement, and a drive for innovation that are rare here in Nicaragua. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to connect norms of redistribution to a tendency not to work as hard to accumulate wealth. At times it feels like a balance between being heartless and being lazy, as the critics of each side claim, and maybe it is to some extent. But that doesn’t meant that US society is heartless and Nicaraguans are lazy, it means that each has strengths and weaknesses.

Obviously something as complex as cultural norms cannot be explained by economic environments alone. Nicaraguans are not generous simply because they need to be, nor are Americans stingy because they can be. Each country has a distinct historical legacy that has contributed to its values and to paint these values with broad strokes over heterogeneous individuals is unhelpful at best. So what am I trying to say?

I am often reminded of why so many Peace Corps volunteers ‘go native’ and have disdain for US culture because of the generosity and apparent selflessness of the people in my community. I admire them for this set of values, but I understand that it comes at a cost and that it does not make them morally superior to US culture. It makes them different from US culture. Many people may prefer a more humble, collective existence to the atomized and prosperous one that we have in the US, but not everyone does. We each have things to learn from each other, and I hope that living in this culture and society for two years will help me understand the best balance for myself.

I was handed four or five fruit juices, a sweet lemon, a gift bag, and a bag of rice pudding while still processing what I was seeing. I was fascinated by the change from individual to crowd dynamics and the glazed looks on the faces of those handing out the goodies. My friends Enoe and Ruth would call out to Herty and other relatives, trying to lay claim to this or that flavor of juice or type of food, muttering half-jokingly after not getting the item that they weren’t going to speak to them again. They couldn’t understand why their closest relatives and friends were ignoring their calls and entreaties. I was in sensory overload and could only just barely maintain a grip on my slippery, dripping bags while watching wide-eyed at the scene around me.

After about 15 minutes of watching and passively accepting anything that was handed my way I noticed Herty struggling to hold a sack of gift bags out of the reach of grabbing hands and I asked Ruth, chuckling, if maybe I shouldn’t lend him my height to lift the sack out of the fray. Her eyes widened with surprise and the prospect of an entertaining outcome and said “Sí, sí! Vaya! Dame las bolsas y vaya!” I handed over the bags and my lemon and walked over to him. I caught his eye and called out “Te ayudo!” He understood immediately and seemed thankful to be relieved of his duty. The way it worked in my mind was that I would hold the sack up high and would hand the bags to Herty, who would then distribute them, but as Herty handed over the sack and stepped away I found myself suddenly responsible for handing out the bags myself. The forest of fingers shifted their focus from him to me and I saw people’s surprised amusement at my height and the novelty of a white guy handing out the gift bags. As soon as the shouting and jostling rose to meet me, however, my surroundings took on a fluid and indistinguishable quality. Everything was colors, shapes, and noise and it was all I could do to take out the few remaining bags and drop them into the open hands that crossed my immediate field of vision. My mind was nearly blank except for the necessary motor functions of remaining standing, breathing, and mechanically passing out the goods. The only face I recognized was Herty’s and as I handed him the last few bags I dropped my arms in surrender. The crowd quickly realized that there was nothing more to be had and shifted its attention to the next nearest source. I chuckled, stunned, as I made my way back to the sidelines.

For the next few minutes people I knew walked up to me and, with disappointed looks and good-natured rebukes, asked me why I hadn’t given them a bag when they were calling my name? I could only stutter an apology and reply that I hadn’t heard them or seen them. They shook their heads, disbelieving, and turned away. I could see that from where they were standing they were speaking perfectly clearly and were the most visible people in the world. They were perplexed by my obliviousness or possibly intentional ignoring, but from my perspective the experience was radically different. If I were blind and deaf I would hardly have had more trouble distinguishing anything within the formless sea of sounds, shapes, and colors swirling around me. It was like having tunnel vision, but without the narrowness that ‘tunnel’ implies. I had my full field of vision, but the meaning of what my senses were taking in was being entirely lost, as if someone had cut the cable that went from my video camera to my processor. The images were displayed, but nobody was decoding them. It reminds me of descriptions that Oliver Sacks gives of the perceptual difficulties some of his patients have. Everything they see is a collection of meaningless lines and shapes and they are unable to connect them to their significance(click for more information). Our experience of the world is contingent on our ability to give meaning to what we see.

We take for granted that we recognize a person or a house instantly, but what really goes on is that we see a collection of colors and shapes and our brain unconsciously compares this pattern with templates built up over our lifetimes and matches it with the concept of ‘person’ or ‘house’ and all the associations that you have with those ideas. We tend to think of perception as a direct experience of reality. What you see is what you get. But my experience highlights the intermediate steps between what is and what we perceive that are affected by a whole slew of environmental, chemical, and neurological variables. Drugs interfere with perception, as do emotions and the previous experiences that literally shape our neural connections. In moments of intense experience our perception can change radically. They can be warped, hindered, heightened, or deepened depending on the situation. Think of how time slows down during an intense or dangerous experience. How quickly our senses prick up when we’re frightened. How carried away we become as we’re swept up in a crowd. If our perceptions and actions are so sensitive to changes in our internal and external environment, it brings into question the existence of an objective truth, reality, and even a free will(I talk about these topics in my review of The Social Animal). What is real when little chemical or neurological differences can fundamentally change the way we perceive reality? What is free will when our bodies act instinctively and unconsciously conform to social or environmental stimuli? To pick a metaphor, I think we’re more like kayakers without a paddle in a strong river current than motorboat captains on a placid lake. I think we like thinking we’re in control despite the evidence to the contrary.

But I’ve gotten far from my original experience. I left off at my realization of the radically different perceptual experiences in the purísima. My friends thought I willfully ignored them because they based their reasoning on their perceptual framework, while I had a very different perceptual experience and was not conscious of their presence. People quickly began disbursing and the event ended as quickly as it had begun, though with fewer fireworks. I went home and stashed my loot in my fridge, pondering all these things. It was a fun experience; I learned about a cultural tradition in Nicaragua, saw a bit of how crowd psychology works, and experienced firsthand the fragility of perception. I wish I had taken pictures.

Next up: I’d like to talk about how the purísima fits into a larger cultural trend I see here of generosity in the community, so stay tuned!

The crowds leaving mass to begin the procession

The procession also does a kind of shuffling dance with branches in the air to represent an event that happened long ago. It is said that once, when there was a terrible plague of leafcutter ants, the townspeople called on the saint to rid them of the pests and save their crops. The saint performed a miracle and the people began to dance and swing branches to kill the ants and save their livelihoods, so every year they celebrate the saint by doing the ‘baile del zompopo’ through the town for hours.

You can see San Diego's head through the branches...

San Diego being carrid on the shoulders of the faithful

Being a part of the parade was like walking in a forest of bodies, arms, and leaves. The air was crisp with green plant smells and the sun beat down between the branches we held overhead as we danced slowly forward. At various points along the route the people carrying the statue would put it down and everyone would crowd around to touch the figure and pray. I could only last for about an hour and a half before I sought out shade, but it was a really neat event to observe and participate in. After the procession and lunch at my friends’ family’s house we went and watched the bull-riding. I’m not a particular fan of bull-riding, mostly because it consists of 90% waiting for them to get the bulls to cooperate and 10% actually watching things happen. A big draw for the town is to watch the drunk men make fools of themselves in the ring. Apart from the actual person riding the bull a crowd of young hotshots and old drunk guys slosh around and try to use a cape to bullfight and just get as close as they can without getting mauled. It gets old fast.

The Volcano Concepción

A couple of weeks later I finally got the opportunity to climb the larger, active volcano on the island with a few friends of mine. Concepción volcano is 1,610 meters above sea level and is often shrouded in clouds because of the mixing of hot air from the volcano with cooler air around it. I met my friends at 6 AM and we began our trek at about 6:40. I knew the climb would be significantly more challenging than the smaller volcano, but I assumed that it would be similar. I was wrong. The rocky terrain made for a more dangerous and challenging climb and the 200 meters of additional altitude compared to Maderas volcano made much more difference than I anticipated.

Me on my way up Concepción volcano

The trail was very rocky and steep most of the way

It was still a really great climb and we got some great views at about the halfway point, before we entered the clouds that obscured the rest of our ascent. After what seemed like hours of hiking through 20-meter visibility, a 45 degree incline, low bushes with massive leaves, and a steadily cooling damp air, we arrived at a stopping place only 15 minutes from the top. I had brought a huge tupperware of veggie spaghetti that I made the night before and it proved to be exactly what we were craving at that moment. We had been hiking uphill for four hours and we rested for about a half hour before leaving our bags and pushing to the top.

In the last 50 meters or so the wind really began to pick up until the edge of the crater appeared out of the mist. It was a sharply defined rim around a chasm of indistinguishable depth and as soon as I got to the edge I could feel the heat emanating from the ground. The smell of sulfur was so strong at the top that nasal passage constricted in protest, not wanting to draw any more in. The wind must have been about 20 miles per hour and its insistent pressing seemed to urge a leap into the abyss. We were all pretty careful, knowing that the dropoff was so steep that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to climb out. As we waited for everyone to make their way to the top the chill began to sink into our skin and bones and we hugged the loose sand and gravel for warmth, marveling at the thought that we were embracing the heat from an active volcano a mile in the air.

Pointing into the crater at the top of Concepción

The hike down was treacherously steep and difficult, not the least because our legs were shaking from exertion. It seemed to take forever, but we kept ourselves distracted by telling jokes and working out math puzzles. We knew that a good meal and some beer awaited us at the end of our journey.

The view of Maderas volcano from Concepción

The tired and triumphant crew at the bottom once again.

I have rarely in my life slept as well as I slept the night after climbing this volcano. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and has a good start to their December. Cheers!

Ambassador Callahan, my host mom, and I at my swearing-in ceremony last year

On November 22^nd, 2010 I attended the swearing-in ceremony in a fancy hotel in Managua and changed my job title from ‘Peace Corps Trainee’ to ‘Peace Corps Volunteer.’ The change felt small and mammoth at the same time and I believed in what I was swearing to do. I still do believe it. I am here to build relationships, learn about others, teach others, and support a community that lacks the resources necessary to fulfill its potential. I never had illusions that these things would be easy and I’ve had to constantly revise my internal goals and strategies to feel productive and successful. So here I am, at the halfway mark in my service. Here are some reflections about what this last year has meant: (my previous reflections on my year in Nicaragua including the three months of training can be found here)

One year in Service: Am I succeeding?

This is a question that has been on my mind ever since I began training: What does it mean to be a successful Peace Corps volunteer? Change one life for the better? Do no harm and learn new skills to bring back to the US? What is the balance between personal growth and meaningful change in our host country? How would I know if the time and money being spent on this endeavor are worth the outcomes? I have no final answers, but I feel more comfortable with my role now and here’s how I think about it:

I judge success in part by referencing the three broad goals of Peace Corps. Provide technical assistance to countries who request it, bring information and goodwill from the US to other countries, and bring the host country into clearer focus for the public back in the US. These are not sufficiently specific measures to judge success, but they point in a general direction. In addition, I had my own personal goals of examining my life and my place in the broader world, challenging myself, and learning new things. These are an important part of any volunteer’s experience, too. So how do I feel like I’ve been doing?

In terms of my program-specific goals (I am an English education volunteer), I feel like I have been only moderately successful. I work with local English teachers to improve their English ability, teaching skills, and material use in the classroom. They are good goals, but when reality intervenes it can be extremely difficult to stay focused on making progress in these areas. By reality I mean the institutional and psychological resistance to change inherent in all humans. We are constrained in our work by the educational environment, the economic environment, the political environment, the local infrastructure, and the historical legacies that influence every aspect of culture and society. Some specific examples could include low teacher pay that forces teachers to find second jobs and retracts from their ability to plan and focus energy on improving their teaching, lack of materials and training necessary to face the challenges of impoverished schools, political influences in the educational system that warp incentives and shift the focus away from education, and the lack of regular and effective transportation to facilitate collaboration. I have tried to face some of these broader issues in order to make progress on my primary goals by providing trainings for teachers, organizing initiatives to improve collaboration and focus on student education, and get creative with the bus system to find a reliable schedule for planning with my counterparts. I don’t think I have made much impact on these broad and systemic challenges, but it has been a good learning experience and I know that I won’t be able to succeed if I stop trying new things.

After a teacher training session about using new materials in English education.

I am lucky to work with engaged and interested counterparts, but they must labor in a failing education system which not only limits the progress that we can make together, but saps their energy, optimism, and interest in trying new things. After a decade of seeing the same dysfunction, would I want to spend time and energy on some ideas that a kid from the states has for my classroom? Maybe, but it’s not as easy as it originally sounded. I have no doubts that I am a valuable resource to my counterparts and students because of my English skills, but acting as a walking dictionary and pronunciation machine alone does not make me feel like a successful volunteer.

My excellent counterpart Dagoberto and I at a training event

In my other projects I have felt slightly more success, probably because I can work more directly rather than indirectly. My community classes are well-attended and seem to be achieving measurable progress in terms of helping a number of interested people acquire language skills that will serve them personally and economically. Probably can’t hurt, anyways. I have supported the local community center that offers a public library and computer classes. I give intermittent trainings to local teachers on new teaching methods to help education more broadly and have had positive feedback from these initiatives, though how much impact it is having in their classrooms is likely to be small.

My first community class.

I also work on initiatives to help fellow volunteers be more successful in their service by sharing my experiences, posting lesson plans, and trying to create a collaborative culture to speed along everyone’s learning curves. My goal is to decrease the amount of energy and time each volunteer spends doing the same thing that other volunteers have successfully done in the past. These initiatives have been met with some success, though the institutional culture of Peace Corps has its own problems and the access to technology that would make collaboration possible in the internet age is not available everywhere.

I am finally feeling socially successful here, though it has been a long, slow process. It takes a great deal of time to meet a critical mass of people, learn the right names, walk through town X amount of times, and figure out the correct casual banter in Spanish to not be awkward in social situations. Moving out of my host family’s house recently has made a huge difference in my ability to just hang out, which has been important to feeling like part of the town. I tend to identify more with the locals than the tourists, finally. I’m on the inside looking out and it’s a great feeling.

Two of my closest friends, Ruth (L) and Enoe (R)

I have felt the most concrete and meaningful changes to be the personal changes that I had set as goals from the beginning. I cannot know the changes that I am effecting outside as well as I can sense the new skills and ideas that I have acquired myself. My Spanish has improved significantly and I feel very confident that it will serve me in my future life and careers. I have gone from ignorance about teaching to considerable ability in organizing a classroom, designing curriculum, and training fellow teachers. I have developed important conflict resolution skills, communication skills, coping-with-change skills, social skills, cooking skills, nunchuck skills(j/k), and organizational skills. I have stayed intellectually active and listen to podcasts, read articles, read books, and written often. I have a goal to read at least 100 books during my time in the Peace Corps and I’m up to 60 so far. I have maintained and deepened my long-distance relationship with my girlfriend and my family, though I have not stayed in touch with even a fraction of the people I would like to. I have felt, at times, lonely and selfish for this focus on my own personal development and often fear that it detracts from my ability to do the larger goals for which I am here. Still, they have provided a refuge from the frustrations of slow institutional change that I am working against and have given me a small arena in which to feel clearly successful.

Overall my sense of being successful or not is a mix of all of these things. Social, personal, professional, cultural, and linguistic. Initiatives, goals, challenges, setbacks, and experiences. I have contributed in small ways to the quality of the education system in Nicaragua, I have helped Nicaraguans better understand the United States and its citizens, I have tried to provide information to those reading this blog about my experiences here, and I have grown as a person. I have certainly done very little harm (I think) and have created some small benefits for others and greater benefits for myself. I am prepared to say that I am being a successful volunteer in these modest ways, but determined not to become complacent. In order to continue feeling successful I must constantly assess my problems, challenges, failed initiatives, and mistakes to find constructive new solutions. Maybe the best definition of success is simply never giving up. Well, I’m not about to.

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements.”

Larry Ellison CEO – Oracle Corporation, 2008

Are you tired of living your life tied down to reality? Do you forget dates, miss TV shows, get sick, or wish you could show your friends the most recent sequence of pictures of your newborn burping? Then you need to enter the world of cloud computing. All you need is a fast internet connection and you can do anything that people with high-end computers can do, which is everything worth doing. Need to share those photos? Do it on the cloud! We are so secure that you can’t delete the pictures even if you want to. Want to watch 72 hours straight of Lost? The cloud has you covered. Want to collaborate on calendars, documents, crossword puzzles, or trash-talking? Doing things in person is going out of style fast, so do it on the cloud. You can interact and counteract in real time with anyone in the world without the hassle of moving. Farm on the cloud, sing on the cloud, cry on the cloud. Everyone and no one will hear you. Rising healthcare costs will soon be a thing of the past. Need to visit the doctor to have a lump looked at? We can connect you to doctors in India who will have a look at it and email you a prescription in minutes (not to be confused with Chatroulette, which may also involve people asking to look at your lumps). Keep all your finances on the cloud and the cloud will file your taxes for you. You can shop on the cloud, talk on the cloud, mock on the cloud, and vote on the cloud. Politics has never been so transparently meaningless as it is when it’s done on the cloud. Occupy the cloud! Tweet, post, like, comment, and repeat. On the cloud! Dating is risky when you have to be in the same room as a potential loser, so why not do it on the cloud? Sex is messy! Do it on the cloud! (Apple has no app for that, but you can find them in the Android store) Watch your children in the adjacent room, check the puppycam in New Jersey, and order a pizza for dinner, all on the cloud. You can access the cloud from your home, your car, a public bathroom, or from any of our new partner cloud-connected airlines. Sign up now and get a five minute trial for free. It’s all you’ll need. Stop living on boring old earth and start living on the cloud today.

Not sure what cloud computing is?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703961104575226194192477512.html

I’m trying out different writing styles and in this one I’m copying the style of ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ from the New Yorker. I’d love some feedback.

Sunday November 6th is election day here in Nicaragua. There is a great deal of uncertainty about what this will mean for the country and for our work as English volunteers. We don’t know if school will be canceled due to political unrest afterward or if things will go on as normally scheduled. Here’s the lowdown: There are three major-party candidates; current president Daniel Ortega for the Sandinista party, ex-president Arnoldo Alemán for the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, and Fabio Gadea for the Independent Liberal Party. According to the Nicaragua Wikipedia page, citing recent Gallup polls, Ortega will have 44% of the votes, Gadea 32%, and Alemán 13%. I don’t really know the substantive differences between their policy proposals because neither of the two major newspapers make it out to my town, and even when I do track one down they are not very balanced or particularly well-reported. In this post I’ll give a brief overview of the historical context, and then describe some of the issues surrounding the current election.
Daniel Ortega was one of the Sandinista revolutionary leaders who helped overthrow the military dictator Somoza in 1979 and rose from the junta to be the president by the late 80s during the end of the ‘Contra’(counter-revolutionary) war. The US was supporting the dictator in the 70s(because the Sandinistas were communists) and they funded virtually all of the ‘Contra’ war during the 80s to fight against the revolutionary government(When congress cut off the funding that Reagan was funneling to the war, his administration sent money illegally through intermediaries. This was revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal). While the revolution was very popular domestically in the beginning, the revolutionary leaders made some serious errors during the Contra war, like trying to force farmers onto communal farms and relocating indigenous people suspected of sympathizing with the Contra forces. These problems along with crackdowns on the press and regime critics led to the surprise defeat of Ortega by Violeta Chamorro in 1990. There were accusations that the Sandinistas used their remaining time in power to rob the public coffers before Chamorro took over. What followed was a messy decade and a half of politics, a shift towards a more market-based economy, and continued corruption (especially by Arnoldo Alemán, who was convicted on corruption charges and sentenced to 20 years of prison until the verdict was overturned under Ortega in 2009).
In the current election Ortega is accused of running illegally because there is a provision in the constitution that prohibits any person from being president more than twice (Ortega was President in the late 80s as well as now). My understanding is that when the case was brought to the supreme court of justice, they ruled that these sections of the constitution did not apply. I’m not sure what the justification was, but the decision was made in a political maneuver by excluding non-Sandinista judges. Other accusations have surfaced about unequal issuing of voter identification cards. According to La Prensa, the anti-Ortega newspaper, members of the Sandinista political party were receiving their ID cards, which are necessary to vote, much faster than anyone who did not belong to the party were. It’s unclear how widespread this was or how much of an effect it will have on the ability of opposition voters to vote. Another issue was the ability of the opposition parties to file the paperwork for all of their municipal candidates to get on the ballot.
International election monitoring is another cause of concern for onlookers. I don’t understand these details all that well either, but from what I read the rhetoric from the Sandinistas was accusatory about international ‘interventionists,’ as they were labeled, entering the country and lending support to the opposition parties. The United States embassy will be observing unofficially because their proposal was either rejected or they were unwilling to accept the limitations imposed on those applying to be official observers. There will be international observation from some European countries, I believe, as well as a few approved international NGOs, but after widespread accusations of fraud in the previous municipal elections many people do not see this resistance to being observed as a good sign.
The opposition to Ortega is split between Alemán and Gadea and there are suspicions of foul play here as well. Some people suspect that because of the pardon that Alemán received from Ortega’s administration he’s cooperating to split the opposition and give Ortega the plurality that he needs to win re-election. This collusion is referred to as ‘The Pact.’ Indeed, it appears that Ortega will have an easy victory, though this will likely mean a considerable amount of unrest from the opposition parties who have been making these accusations throughout the run-up to the election. In any case, it will be an interesting next couple of weeks.
I have no concerns for my safety, and Peace Corps is taking plenty of security precautions. We are not allowed to leave our sites for a couple of weeks to avoid traveling in major cities and to stay in communities where we are well known and safe. We receive almost daily updates on the political situation from our security coordinator and the US embassy and I have experienced absolutely zero ill will as a US citizen. I don’t have strong opinions about the election personally, partly because of my ignorance of the context and partly because who am I, as an imperialist American, to judge? I’ll try to learn more about the context in the coming days and give an on-the-ground appraisal of what I see, though I am limited in what I can say publicly if it would have a negative impact on the ability of the Peace Corps to work in the country. I’ll stick to non-controversial observations only.
If you’re interested in learning more about the history and politics of Nicaragua since the early 1970s, I highly recommend Steven Kinzner’s book, Blood of Brothers. It’s extremely well-written, balanced, and informative, through it was written in 1991 and thus does not deal with the modern political environment.