Painting

It all started Christmas 2017 when Derrick gave me some acrylic paints and canvas as a gift... well, that's how Derrick tells the story anyway.

There was a time when I said I would be an artist when I grew up.  However, as the years passed that seemed less and less practical, and I have always had a healthy dose of practical in me.  Once in a while it did sneak back in.  My last semester in high school I just couldn't take another French class and dropped it for an art class.  In my first year at university I had to take one class from the humanities I chose an art class.  I would have done more, but there were always more practical things to do.

Well, it snuck back in and this time I think I may have found a number of practical reasons to have it stay.

In 2018 I needed a distraction from social media and news. I got out those paints Derrick gave me.

(this was multiple layers of "failed" paintings that I finally washed off in the pouring rain one night which turned into something I really liked, map of Nicaragua drawn on top)

Well, painting canvases was not going to be practical... because space is an issue.  So I found an old set of watercolor paints and started painting cards.  This became an act of prayer and therapy during tense months.

I found that it could also function as an act of love and making cards for people has become one of my favorite times of painting. (plus, see how practical it is, no waste!)

Well, it's been almost 2 years since that provident gift from Derrick.  I've invested in some nice paints, paper, and even a sketchbook- for those times when I can be less practical and just learn and explore.  Derrick says I'm an artist, maybe he's right.  Mostly I'm grateful for a way an activity that is bringing me joy and maybe some others as well.

Geckos and mosquitoes

We enjoy the company of geckos crawling around our house.  They are amazingly fast, can walk upside down on the ceiling, make an interesting chirping sound, and although I've never actually seen it happen, they apparently enjoy eating mosquitoes.  I'm told that geckos were brought in to Managua in the 1990s to help with mosquitoes, although the story seems to vary depending who I talk to.  The names for these creatures also vary from person to person or region to region, possibly because there are a variety of lizard species around here.  So to one person they are cherepos, lagartijas, pichetes, maybe perrozompopos or even escorpiones.  And another person will say absolutely not perrozompopos, that's something else, or absolutely not escorpiones, that's something else, and so on.

Anyhow, here's a fun little song with the kids.




Geckos and mosquitoes

Hello, gecko
Wall racer, mosquito chaser
Where did you go?
Thought you were just here
I stand below
What are you after, up the rafter?
I am so slow
Is it me that you fear?
     Can it be so?

And what if I try to catch you?
I try to catch you
I try and try

Oh, mosquito
I've tried to swat you, thought I got you
At my elbow
Why must you be here?
I stand below
Wasting my time, losing my mind
I am so slow
I need some help here
     Where's the gecko?

You are an artist

I've been trying to convince Rebekah to put together a blog post on her artwork.  Maybe sometime soon? In the meantime, here's a sappy little song.

You are an artist

You take a sheet of plain paper

You take water, water and color

Imagine

Like a prism to light

You bring out life

And a bird takes flight

Walk with you through the ordinary

Sunrise like any other morning

But you invite me to see through your eyes

These are joyful sights

You are an artist
You paint love into where the world is darkest
You bring things together into something beautiful
And that something comes from the beauty that is you

Quiet night at the kitchen light, you're making

The elegant and simple drawn from the invisible, creating

Do you know

Where your art might go

Here a flower grows

Sit with you over summer night ice cream

Crickets singing and creaky park swings

Precious time

Your smile and your bright eyes

You're a joyful life

I just want to thank you for listening

Lia in teacher mode, negotiating classroom behavior with Silas and Miriam.

Observations...

1. As I've written in previous posts, sometimes I tend to mull on things and am not as good as I wish I were at processing things through discussion.  Something to keep working on.

2. We live in times of great polarization.  How do we ensure we are hearing one another? Our social networks (in real life or in the digital world) often seem to be narrower than they should be.

3. As a family, we have routine conflicts that we need to work through: finishing homework or a plate of food, following parents' instructions, sharing or not sharing toys, etc. How do we keep our cool and communicate/understand concerns in these conflicts?

Also, thanks again to Lia and Silas for their help with this song.





I just want to thank you for listening

I just want to thank you for listening
taking time to understand
I just want to thank you for pausing
being there you lend a hand

I just want to thank you for sharing
even when it's hard to hear
I just want to thank you for speaking
we must not be held by fear

Hold these words
Take a moment and breathe
In the midst of the noise
We'll find our voice

I just want to thank you for listening
Teach me too to listen well
In your listening you tell me some things
you need no words to tell

I just want to thank you for sharing
hearing you gets me out of me
We will dare to build a bridge trying
to see what the other sees

The Giant Iguana climbs the hills

A little while back I shared a story of attempting to ride the loop around the Chiltepe peninsula, missing a turn, running late, getting tired, and climbing in a caponera in defeat.  Since then, we've had a number of better runs.  It's been fun. Here are a few rides.



1. Return to Chiltepe

My friend Francisco and I went back on a couple occasions to ride segments of the peninsula.  It was nice to not feel the need to do the whole loop. It was easier to enjoy the beauty of the area this way as well.  On a third run, we rode with a group organized by a bike shop and did the whole loop.  Very satisfying.

2. Los Sarrosos MTB

We made a connection through another school parent to a mountain biking group that rides every Saturday morning.  They are a jovial bunch, calling themselves Los Sarrosos MTB - "the Rusties" mountain bike group.  They take lots of breaks, drink coffee along the way, and are either laughing or out of breath.  The routes are often a lot of up hill climbs, with a culminating ride back down hill.

3. Bikers' breakfast

Last week's ride was actually a little on the shorter side, and some of the riders decided to wrap up with breakfast.  Coffee, gallo pinto, eggs, salsa ranchera, tortilla, and actually the first time I tried leche agria. Leche agria is sour milk and the name has always made me reluctant to try it.  But it's kind of like natural yogurt, and after a bike ride and with good company, it's just fine.

4. Casa to Km 17 Carretera Vieja a Leon to Monte Tabor to Casa

This morning was a ride we had done with Los Sarrosos a few weeks ago, but this time instead of driving to meet up part way, we started from home and rode all the way up the hill, a good 2,560 ft of climbing between pavement and dirt roads.  A nice decent at the end and a great nacatamal made by Miriam's babysitter Yahaira for breakfast.

The rebirth of the Giant Iguana

I've missed biking since coming to Nicaragua.  Most every road is a multi-purpose road filled with trucks, cars, motorcycles, mototaxis/caponeras, horse carts, pedestrians, and bicycles too, but they are certainly all vulnerable in the mix. And its warm here too, so energy for exercise is sometimes hard to find.

Several months ago I talked with a neighbor, Jorge, who I saw riding a mountain bike and he told me about some trails he enjoys.  He offered an open invitation to join him sometime, but I didn't have a bike and wasn't sure when or how this would work.

Around a month ago I finally decided to see if this could work out.  I connected with Lia's classmate's dad, Corstiaan, a bike enthusiast from the Netherlands, and he graciously offered to lend me a bike and shared his experiences.  With this bike I set out on my first ride, a loop from Linda Vista, up around the hill by the Asoscoca Lagoon, down past Ciudad Sandino to the Xiolá lagoon and back (around 18 miles). Several days later, I went on a trail / dirt road with Jorge.  It was a sandy path, but it was fun to be out in nature, even though we were hardly out of the city.

It was time to return the borrowed bike, but I now was getting an idea for what might be possible for riding enjoyably in or around Managua.  I went ahead and stopped by a bike shop here and bought a used Giant, model name Iguana, which sounded like an appropriate name for a bike in Nicaragua.  It reminded me of the simple mountain bike my dad used to ride when we were kids.

A few days later was the May 1 holiday for Labor Day, and I heard about a group ride around the Chiltepe peninsula nature reserve, which includes the Chiltepe volcano and the Xiloá lagoon. I got there at the announced time of 6:00 am, but only the event organizer and a handful of riders were there.  The riders set off east on the loop, and the organizer said when the others get there they'll go west, because it's an extra challenge with a headwind and terrain and all.  I was hoping to be somewhere else around 8:00 or 8:30 and I didn't need an extra challenge so I set off with these other riders.  This turned out to be a mistake.  They were friendly, but after a while, they decided to pick up their pace and I was on my own.  It was also a problem because I would later miss what turned out to be an important turn to get me back to the starting point.

The dirt road goes around the perimeter of the peninsula, so there are views of Lake Managua (Lago Xolotlán), and volcano Momotombo and Momotombito in the distance on one side.  

On the other side, there is the view of the hill which is the old volcano Chiltepe.  Rebekah asked me to send her a selfie, so here I am with my Giant Iguana and Chiltepe.

As time went on, my energy level started to wane, and I started to be concerned about when I would finish.  Like I started to say, I was hoping that by 8:00 or so, I could go with Lia and Silas to help the Anabaptist Emergency Committee (CAE) pack seed for a distribution they were doing that MCC was supporting.  I called them to say I was running late, but maybe I could be there by 9:00.

But I missed my turn and ended up going out into the town of Mateare and then out to the highway, the Carreterra nueva a Leon.  There, I hit the headwind that the organizer had talked about.  I pedaled along slowly, tired, and stressed.  A guy who was simply biking to work passed me, which made me feel even slower.  Eventually I came up to another small town, where I stopped at a gas station for a drink (my water bottle was empty), and then I saw the mototaxis and caponeras across the street.  With great embarrassment, I pedaled over and asked for a ride.  I must have been amusing to the drivers: this gringo with his bike gear asking for a ride to his car.  I climbed into a caponera, we squeezed in the bike, and the driver took me on a back path to return me to the car.  There was the pack of riders who had already finished and were resting.  I quickly put my bike on the back of the car and drove home.  I had set out to conquer the peninsula; I returned feeling the peninsula conquered me.

A couple weeks later, I went with another friend, Francisco, on a shorter ride.  It was great to have company and hopefully we build up our energy and trail options as we go.  And we'll be back to Chiltepe.  The Giant Iguana will rise again.

Book review: Las Fiebres de la Memoria (Belli)

We’re coming up on the anniversary of last year’s protests, which has led the country into an economic slump that may take years to recover from.  Interestingly, I posted something of a book review on that pivotal date last year.  Here's some thoughts on another recent novel by a different, noted Nicaraguan author. The book is called Las fiebres de la memoria, by Gioconda Belli (Seix Barral, 2018).  

At the moment, I’m writing from our favorite place to escape Managua’s April heat, which is Selva Negra, Matagalpa.  One of the eco-lodge owners is artist and historian Eddy Kühl Arauz, who I had a chance to talk to some this time, and his family represents German immigration to this area in the 1800s, to work in coffee.  Here are two of his paintings on the wall at the restaurant:

The artist-historian and the author, Belli, share this particular couple in their ancestry.   Do you see it says “Paris” below Jorge’s portrait? Here’s the connection.


Shortly before the French rose up to oust King Louis-Philippe de Orleans and his family in 1848, there were a couple trigger issues that infuriated the people against the ruling class.  Some decades earlier, the French revolution aimed to end the monarchy, but that didn’t seem to be last.  Soon enough they had an emperor (Napoleon) and a new wave of nobility and royalty.  One of the trigger issues in the new wave of unrest was around a duke, Charles Choiseul de Praslin, who was imprisoned for murdering his wife, but somehow accessed arsenic in prison to poison himself. People said that the king supplied the poison to save the royals from the shame of going to trial, or even that it was a farce in order to let him slip away.  The official French account says Choiseul de Praslin died in prison.


Kühl and Belli are among the Matagalpinos who suggest might not have ended there.  The story Belli tells (which is apparently inspired by Kühl’s research) traces Choiseul de Prasilin’s journey from the faked suicide, to England, and then to New York where he meets Cornelius Vanderbilt. This was the gold rush era, and Vanderbilt had a transportation network to take ships south on the Atlantic, across Nicaragua’s Rio San Juan, to Lake Colcibolca (Lake Nicaragua) and then travel over land to the Pacific.  Choisuel de Praslin, who had taken the pseudonym George Desmoulins, joined Vanderbilt on one of his trips through Nicaragua.  George/Jorge gets sick with malaria and stays in Granada until he recuperates.  He’s persuaded by another traveler to travel with him in Matagalpa, where he marries and has a (second) large family.


There are various themes in the book.  There is a 'Crime and Punishment' kind of psychological struggle with guilt and freedom; reflection on how his marriage fell apart; and also a struggle with identity, class, and power.  With this last point, it seems there are parts of the story that are trying to describe something of current events. Belli is one of the early Sandinistas who have been critical of the Nicaraguan government in recent years.


As the character George leaves France, he takes the last name Desmoulins. He says he admired Camille and Lucille Desmoulins, leaders of the French revolution, but the people later turned on them and they ended up in at the guillotine. “Revolutions eat their own children.” Then he hears of the unrest and how King Louis-Philippe cracks down, banning public gatherings, declaring curfew, and a massacre at Boulevard des Capulchines. In turn, chaos ensued, stores were looted, and hundreds of barricades were piled up in the roads. The king left the country to avoid more bloodshed and the National Assembly declared the 2^nd Republic of France.


George/Jorge comes to Nicaragua where there is violent struggle between the Liberals, Conservatives, and even this U.S. imperialist William Walker who takes over the country for a time.  The message seems to be, anywhere you go, there are struggles and swings in power, but they seem to present little hope for lasting change for everyday people.  The book seems to suggest that the one glimmer of hope, maybe, is that at a personal level, a new start is always possible.  And that the beauty of Nicaragua and its people is where that can happen.