Nicaragua

The image above comes from Granada, Nicaragua.  The words below are excerpted from my book 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia:

Not many years ago (in the grand scheme of things), most of us were in diapers, not yet knowing what country we were from or even what a country was.  We didn't yet know we were Christian, Muslim, Atheist, or whatever.  We didn't know we were Republican or Democrat, male or female, or that we needed to fear and maybe hate one another, or that this might lead us to one day kill and die.  As babies we looked out at the world with wide eyes, reaching out for anything we could grab, wanting to feel and understand it.  We were open to learning and we trusted, even when it wasn't wise to trust.  And then we became adults.

It is not bad being adult, but sometimes I wish we were all in diapers, or at least had something of the spirit of those babies who are.

On the road, one of the most common questions the traveler is asked is “Where are you from?”  It is a fair question, but if you hear it daily for months in a row you may begin to wonder what it really means, just as you wonder what it really means when you answer “the United States.”  Your reply helps someone place you on a map, but it tells them nothing about what you believe, what you’d die for, why you’re at this very moment sitting at a table so far from your answer.  It simply tells them what culture you’re most familiar with, which usually is also the place where your parents brought you into the world and raised you (something in which you exercised no choice).  That is, though your reply locates you in the world, it says nothing about what you are choosing to do in the world.

Encounters that don’t progress beyond this question are transitory and quickly forgotten.  Ones that probe deeper—asking not just where fate delivered you onto the map but what you are trying to there—are the ones you most remember.  These encounters are part of what make a mountainside in Vietnam, an old city wall in Colombia, or a living room in Palestine a kind of “holy ground,” for here encounters happened that affirmed, challenged, or strengthened you.  Here encounters transcended the map and issues of nationality were absolutely peripheral.

Thomas Merton, the 20th century Trappist monk and writer who enjoyed getting to know people such as the Dalai Lama and Vietnam’s Thich Nhat Hanh, met an untimely death in a Bangkok bathroom in 1968.  While he didn’t have the chance to flesh out his Asia travel experiences in a book, we do learn through his journal how enriching were his encounters with the men and women he met.  The accounts are sometimes captivating.  And I suppose they're not all that surprising, given that Merton once wrote the following:

If you want to identify me, ask not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I’m living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

Photo note:  This picture was taken while walking in Nicaragua's Masaya Volcano National Park

In November, on the steps of a church, I came across a man who reminded me more of Forrest Gump than a beggar.  When I asked if I could take his picture he was gracious in his reply and never once expressed interest in me giving him money.  Picture complete, we sat together a while.  Our sitting was mostly done in silence since within seconds I had run through the limits of my Spanish, but every so often he would sincerely say something I didn't understand.  He was gentle in both speech and movement, a simple man in the best sense of the word, the sort who reminds you that you wish to be a tender person.  I've always liked the line in As Good as it Gets where a gravelly Jack Nicholson says to Helen Hunt, "You make me want to be a better man," but it is a sentiment not confined to romantic relationships.  One can experience it in the most unexpected settings, even with a down-and-out stranger on the steps of a cathedral in Leon, Nicaragua. 

It was while sitting with this man that I thought, as I sometimes do, of Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran bishop who regularly irritated Right and Left alike.  Gunned down in 1980, his homilies still circulate in books such as the Violence of Love, reminding the reader of that terrible period in El Salvador’s history as well as challenging us with timeless, sometimes deceptively simple, themes.  It was 30 years ago this week, on Easter Sunday in a country wracked by poverty and oppression, that he spoke the following:

You that have so much social sensitivity, you that cannot stand this unjust situation in our land: fine – God has given you that sensitivity, and if you have a call to political activism, God be blessed. Develop it.

But look: don’t waste that call; don’t waste that political and social sensitivity on earthly hatred, vengeance, and violence.

Lift up your hearts. Look at the things above.
 

(If interested in more images from Leon, Nicaragua, I've posted a few black and white shots HERE.) 

In Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, there is the following description of Rose of Sharon, the Joad’s pregnant daughter:

Her round soft face, which had been voluptuous and inviting a few months ago, had already put on the barrier of pregnancy, the self-sufficient smile, the knowing perfection-look; and her plump body – full soft breasts and stomach, hard hips and buttocks that had swung so freely and provocatively as to invite slapping and stroking – her whole body had become demure and serious.  Her whole thought and action were directed inward on the baby.  She balanced on her toes now, for the baby’s sake. And the world was pregnant to her; she thought only in terms of reproduction and of motherhood.

Since at least kindergarten, when I would sometimes see one of the second grade teachers, Mrs. Remillard, leading her class down the hall toward the lunchroom, herself being led by a protruding belly, I’ve been captivated by pregnant women.  It was—and is—the curves and expectation, the bodily transformation and the mystery of new life.  While I never thought of slapping and stroking Mrs. Remillard (at any point in her life), I do remember keenly wishing I could touch her belly, to trace its curve and see if I could feel the baby kick, as some of her students had been invited to do.

Angela, a 26-year-old Nicaraguan, is the woman in this photograph.  She works at a pharmacy in the town of Granada and was seven months pregnant with her second child when I took the photo in November.  Recently I received an email from her coworker saying she had delivered a healthy baby (the email didn’t say if it was a boy or girl).  One day, if I return to Nicaragua, I will take Angela up on her invitation to visit her home for a fish lunch, and to photograph her entire family.  If interested in more pictures from the pharmacy, including Angela’s face, as well as a brief story of how we met, click on “A Pregnant Plea in Nicaragua.”

Half an hour from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, sits Masaya Volcano National Park.  The vultures love it here, catching the warm sulfur-scented air that billows out of its crater.  A sixteenth-century Spanish friar once called the place "La Boca del Infierno” (The Mouth of Hell).  The birds, however, if they spoke Spanish or English, would probably just call it a fun ride.

Or, if the birds knew Russian, they would perhaps sit in trees and read Dostoyevsky, conversing with one another about the wisdom latent in passages such as the following, from The Brothers Karamazov:

My brother, a dying youth, asked the birds to forgive him.  That may sound absurd, but when you think of it, it makes sense.  For everything is like the ocean, all things flow and are indirectly linked together, and if you push here, something will move at the other end of the world.  It may be madness to beg the birds for forgiveness, but things would be easier for the birds, for the child, and for every animal if you were nobler than you are—yes, they would be easier, even if only by a little.  Understand that everything is like the ocean.  Then, consumed by eternal love, you will pray to the birds, too.  In a state of fervor you will pray them to forgive you your sins.  And you must treasure that fervor, absurd though it may seem to others.