MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1999
Serendipity
By Tim Jeffries[Tim Jeffries is Coordinator of the Bend-Condega Friendship Project and a member of the Nicaragua Network Executive Committee.] We were heading to the Honduran border from Esteli when the minibus driver announced that we didn't have enough diesel to make it there and back.
I had been reading about Latin America since the Wall St.-Washington overthrow of Salvador Allende's democratic government in 1973. Then, in 1978, the Sandinista muchachos took over the National Palace in Managua in a bold move that got everyone's attention, if not respect.
When the Nicaraguan people defeated the U$-created and imposed Somoza dynasty, I, like so many dreamers of a just world, was giddy with admiration and joy at the proof that a determined people could stand up to the world's biggest bully.
The first Bay Area Construction Brigade was forming in 1984 and, as an electrician, I signed up with great anticipation. After several meetings, the project that was chosen was not to be electrified. Instead of remaining dejected I booked a trip in March, 1985, with TurNica, the then-official Nicaraguan travel company, to do my own little fact-finding.
A man flagged us down and when asked said, sure, he knew where there was a station -- right up the road in Condega. The driver dropped us off in the town square while he and the helpful guy went on a wild-diesel chase. The guy just wanted a ride.
For the next 40-50 minutes the busload of college students and old lefties walked around and conversed with the assembled townsfolk. I took some photos that are still some of my favorites, especially the one of a 17- or 18-year-old soldier (one of the "commie killing machines" who scared the hell out of Reagan's boys) strumming his old guitar and sweetly serenading his equally young girlfriend on a park bench.
Then some kids invited a few of us to see the town museum. To us, it was just a small, dark, dingy hole in the wall off the main square, with one 25-watt light bulb and spider webs everywhere. In a rack were tracts and comic books, used as part of the Sandinista literacy campaign. These young people were swelling with pride by the fact that they could finally read and write, and they were now traveling throughout the municipality, teaching others.
I was so struck, so impressed, by their simultaneous pride and humility. With so little they were doing so much: teaching their parents, their country, that which, for generations, had been denied to all but the rich. The literacy campaign, the health brigades, writing their own constitution and fighting to defend their new nation--the Nicaraguans decided they were going to make their own history. Now, here was a revolution!
After I returned home to Marin County, a few of us in a grassroots peace and environment group established the Fairfax-Condega Sister City Project, California's first official sister-city relationship with Nicaragua.
Nineteen years and 20 trips later, the love and respect are still there. We're now the Bend (Oregon)-Condega Friendship Project, and there are many more delegations and projects to come.
What Nicaragua did for me, among other things, was to change my orientation from just struggling against "my" government's continual atrocities, to working with people who, having so little material wealth, employment or opportunities as we know them, still get up every day and go about the business of trying to make their, and their neighbors', lives better. What an inspiration they have been.
A mis compañeras y compañeros valientes, gracias por darnos, todo el mundo, tanto. ¡Les saludo!
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