Features
From Hamilton to Nicaragua
By Elizabeth Lvov ’17
April 10, 2015
Time seemed to warp as we flew the final two-hour stretch to Managua, Nicaragua from Miami International Airport. The sunset outside the window was a horizontal series of black and red lines, quickly fading to a darkness that accentuated the constellation of faint city lights for which our plane was inevitably earthbound. The prospect of actually going to Nicaragua had seemed unlikely to me, even as I booked the plane ticket. The reality of the experience didn’t fully sink in until I found myself in the sudden humid warmth of an orange-lit parking lot, fatigued yet laughing nonetheless with my wonderful fellow global volunteers, the lush foliage of the surrounding trees full of strange and unfamiliar animal sounds. The light pollution from the nearby city tinted the sky a pale lilac color as we waited for the luggage to make it through customs. In the bumpy van ride to the farm, I fell asleep folded over on the lap of Sarah Gamblin ’17, barely registering through my exhaustion that a “Gangnam Style”/LMFAO mashup was playing on the van’s stereo. The windows were open and the strange scent of the wind was entirely foreign on my face. Occasionally I would wake up, seeing vague outlines of hills, strange fields of blue lights. I was definitely in Nicaragua, but she was still a mystery to me. It wasn’t until I woke up and went outside my cabin to discover myself in a jungle of misty mountains rolling out to the horizon that I comprehended the magnitude of being where I was. And that was even before I had tried the coffee.
The farm where we stayed is called Finca Esperanza Verde, or the Farm of Green Hope, and the solar-powered eco-lodge certainly does live up to its optimistic name. Nestled in the mountains, the farm is a perfect study in color; the vivid greens of the foliage have a tendency to capture sunlight in a way that makes it seem an almost tangible gold, while the sky above is full of ever-expanding clouds constantly shifting in formations that become like abstract brushstrokes with fading daylight.
As Global Volunteers, we found our days incredibly full with work and rich with experience and impressions. Rising early, we would spend our pre-lunch hours doing farmwork, feeling the weight of the labor in our arms and backs even as our banter stayed light and easy. As the week progressed, we slowly ventured out of the relatively sheltered environment of the farm, first through halting Spanish conversation with the farm-hands (who carried 200 pound loads of soil up steep stairs while we struggled with 50 pound bags), eventually taking a trip to the nearby city of Matagalpa where people stared in open fascination as we explored the city streets so sharply juxtaposed with uneven cobblestone to the rainforest trails to which we had grown accustomed. We went to a nearby school every day the second half of the week, and enjoyed a handful of hours blissfully playing with the children, dancing and playing kickball and tag, oblivious to the midday heat. We beaded bracelets with a women’s collective and picked passionfruit in surreal orchards of thickly tangled branches. We swam in waterfalls to wash off the sweat and dirt of our work, we drank fresh exotic fruit juice and encountered bugs that seemed almost prehistoric in their size and anatomy. We saw the stars shine with unprecedented clarity in breathtaking magnificence.
Condensing such a complex experience to a limited space is not easy; I feel that the most important thing to acknowledge about it is the cognizance we as a group maintained about the implications of our presence in Nicaragua. We did not shy away from difficult conversations about the nature of what we were doing, regularly discussing concepts ranging from voluntoursim to capitalism to different values of happiness.
We drove back to the airport in the daylight, and saw the landscape unfold. Nicaragua was now familiar to us, with her hills and her people, but we comprehended that in no way did our experience give us a hold over her. The trip taught us many things, but most of those things resulted from introspection rather than the clichéd revelations of witnessing poverty for the first time. From our home-bound plane we watched Nicaragua recede, green and mountainous, somewhere below.