I feel like I've been looking for León all my life. It's a place where I could live.There is a definite temptation, while traveling in Nicaragua, and especially here in León, to leave aside the work of sharing my experiences in this blog and simply allow myself to absorb and assimilate the beauty and the pain of life, shutting out comparisons with the place where I usually live and just letting the Nica world change me. There is a sense of discomfort that comes with looking back on the privilege in which I am steeped “back home.” Perhaps there is an element of guilt involved in making comparisons but, if anything, it is a kind of participation in the collective guilt that arises from the knowledge that I am the recipient of immense, unearned privilege there -- privilege bestowed on me, as a white person, at the expense, in part, of the people of Nicaragua (and El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, etc.). And so, I blog ... to share the love of this country and its people, and to try to open the hearts and minds of the people who live in el norte to the responsibility we have to acknowledge our unearned privilege and to begin to look at ways to address the terrible, everyday inequities in which we participate every day, whether knowingly or unknowingly.
Canada is truly a world apart, a crystal palace constructed of the frozen tears shed by its earliest inhabitants and their descendants, and by those in “third world” countries who toil sewing fashionable clothes in sweatshops, cutting sugar cane, picking coffee beans and hauling bananas out of the jungles. But we who live in the privileged North cannot be faulted completely for the bubble mentality that has been created for us by an entire succession of governments (starting, in Canada, with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and then Government Agents, and now the international finance capitalists) that have been involved in the brutal colonization of the upper third of North America -- that is, we cannot be faulted unless we know.
There is a difference between knowing, in the intellectual sense, and knowing experientially. Anyone who has been educated in a Canadian school system or who reads Canadian newspapers “knows” about the conquest of Canada, about the genocidal policies practiced upon indigenous peoples by such means as deliberately induced illnesses (like smallpox), forced sterilizations, tearing children from their families and placing them in residential schools, differential incarceration rates (with 4% of the population of Canada making up nearly 20% of its prison population), and the continuing racist exclusion of Canada’s so-called “First Nations.“
Relatively few (and here I include myself) have actually seen the reserves without decent housing, drinkable water, electricity, adequate health care and relevant education. And so, I believe that most do not really “know.” I like to believe that, if they/we did know (in a personal, experiential way), there would be no more heart wrenching newspaper articles about “boil water alerts” or about young people sniffing glue or committing suicide because of the hopeless conditions that prevail on so many reserves.
This is, perhaps, another reason I am reluctant to share my experiences and observations about life in Canada. I find that when I do, many people react defensively, thinking that I am trying to lay a guilt trip on them. I don‘t want to provide them with opportunities to exercise their denial -- it serves no one well. At the same time, I cannot keep my opinions to myself, remaining a part of the conspiracy of silence that allows these abominable conditions (and the attitudes that support them) to continue.
It’s strange … I find it easier to speak out about conditions in Nicaragua. Yet, things are the same here in many ways as they are in Canada -- but they're different. One difference is that things are relatively so much better, in the material sense, in Canada that calling attention to injustice and exploitation there leaves one open to being criticised as a whiner or a complainer. And yet, we know that there are many among us whose hopes for a good life are fading day by day as our government makes decisions to remove needed services, wages an unjust, illegal war, participates in "extraordinary renditions," and removes our Constitutionally-guaranteed Rights and Freedoms. Those of us who are not directly affected tend not to see the similarities between what is happening in North America because we are individualistic, trained not so see that "an injury to one is an injury to all."
There is a connection I feel with Nicaragua that I’m only now (since I’ve been here) beginning to explore. My mother once taught Lillian Somoza, the daughter of Anastasio Somoza Garcia (founder of the Somoza dictatorship dynasty). My mother identified more with the ruling class, represented by the Somozas, than with los pobres who were his victims. I, her daughter, have always identified with the poor and have never desired to be in the company of the rich. For this, I was ostracized within my own family; and because of this, I learned to stand alone. In Nicaragua, and especially here in León, I feel at home among those who fought with the Sandinistas against Somoza and who now find that their conditions have changed very little under the government of the Sandinistas (or, as the say here, las oficialistas, making a distinction between those who fought alongside them and those who now rule over them -- although in many instances they are the same people). The people are undaunted.
While far from covering every aspect of the revolution, the Al Jazeera video, Nicaragua: an unfinished revolution, offers an excellent overview of this time in Nicaragua's history. Especially poignant -- and revealing of the character of the people here -- are the campesinos, one who fought on the side of the Sandinistas and the other who fought with the Contras (seen in part 4, at 00:39), who now work together, united in their poverty and their humanity.
"¡Sandino Vive! ¡La Lucha Sigue!"
Peace
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