EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third of a three-part series about the 20-year Norwalk-Nagarote Sister City Project, founded and run by Fairfield County residents. Staff Photographer Kathleen O’Rourke and Staff Writer Alexandra Fenwick recently spent seven days in Nagarote, Nicaragua to observe life in one of the poorest communities in one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. A translator assisted them.
By Alexandra Fenwick
Staff Writer
NAGAROTE, Nicaragua – When Norwalk Community College professor Angeles Dam proposed a Spanish-immersion class in Nicaragua, she was met with raised eyebrows.
“Everybody said, ‘You’re crazy,’ ” recalled Dam, who lives in Darien.
With the help of a fellowship at Yale University and the support of NCC President David Levinson, nine NCC students found themselves taking notes this summer in a shaded outdoor classroom in Nagarote’s Casa de Cultura as birds chirped nearby.
Dam designed the collaborative class between NCC, where she has taught for 12 years, and the Norwalk-Nagarote Sister City Project, where she is on the board of directors, after winning a fellowship to the Programs in International Educational Resources at Yale.
The fellowship allowed Dam access to Yale’s libraries and expert talks and workshops on Latin America, capped by a tour of Central America. Dam also designed a course that infused international elements in the classroom.
So she took the classroom to Nicaragua for a three-week six-credit course that placed students with host families and included morning Spanish classes, afternoon community service projects and weekend trips to Pacific Ocean beaches and nearby cities.
The travel and expenses, about $1,800 per student, was underwritten by the Norwalk Community College Foundation, Person to Person and the Community Fund of Darien. Students had to pay the $700 tuition.
Dam does not teach a rote-memorization language course. In Nagarote, her students read excerpts from the book “The Motorcycle Diaries” by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, listened to popular Latin music and reviewed poetry.
During a recent class, they read “A Prayer for Marilyn Monroe” by Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal.
“I use songs, poems, everything,” Dam said. “I think it’s a lot more fun and less dry to give them these things. I’m totally opposed to those teachers teaching grammar, grammar, grammar. Instead, I illustrate the grammar point in using a song.”
The students’ Spanish improved after a week in Nicaragua.
“I think they are doing really well. They are learning like, wow!” Dam said. “They don’t have a choice, the people they are staying with don’t speak a word of English.”
Her course was open to any NCC student who had taken a college Spanish class.
“It’s very hard to get community college students to come to Nicaragua for three weeks,” Dam said. “Most work and have to pay for their tuition or rent.”
NCC scholarship student Sarah Simpson, 21, signed up for the trip, but thought she couldn’t go until Person to Person and a donor from New Canaan supplied her tuition.
Simpson, a Walter C. Briggs High School graduate who wants to be a teacher in a similar alternative high school, said she was grateful for the financial help.
“It feels good to have people care about your dream,” she said. “I know this is going to make me a better teacher.”
The class also includes an emphasis on community service. During their time in Nagarote, the students painted sister city buildings and playground equipment and helped put a dent in global warming by helping the sister city’s Youth Project members in their urban reforestation program.
With the help of 60 Youth Project volunteers, the grant-funded Tree Project has planted nearly 2,500 trees in the past year alone, far more than the 400 originally proposed.
To improve the water table and reduce floods during hurricanes, replenish the nutrient-stripped soil and provide food and shade in treeless sections of town, five trees, two of them fruit-bearing, are being provided to barrio residents for free.
While walking through Barrio Jairo Perez, one of the poorest and most dangerous barrios in Nagarote, NCC students and Youth Project members went to every house to tell residents trees would be available for pickup in the park later that afternoon. Sister city project board member Dennis Bradbury, a Spanish student, remarked that the door-to-door canvassing would be the equivalent of knocking on strangers’ doors in public housing complexes back home in Norwalk.
“This would be like going door-to-door at Roodner Court,” Bradbury said.
Despite some suspicious glances, the barrio residents turned out to pick up their free trees.
Holding her toddler’s hand, Reina Silvana Velazquez was eager to choose her fruit trees. Instead of a mango, orange or lemon trees, she chose two avocado tree seedlings.
“I love them, and I buy them all the time,” she said, smiling as she headed home, where an NCC student helped plant them.
At the end of the day, Norwalk and Nagarote aren’t that different, Simpson said.
“There are less opportunities, but poverty is poverty everywhere,” she said. “When you let someone know their situation doesn’t depress you, it gives them hope.”
That is what the Youth Project’s community service arm is all about, said Tish Gibbs, co-president of the Norwalk-Nagarote Sister City Project.
“I’ve found the community service part of the program is what creates good self-esteem,” Gibbs said. “You can tell everybody they’re wonderful and doing a good job, but you have to realize that for yourself.”
The students found it hard to leave at the end of the three-week program, Dam said.
“They were crying in the airport; it was very emotional for the kids,” she said. “It was stressful because of the heat and conditions and all that, but they learned so much about so much.”
One student wrote in his course evaluation that he had taken water and electricity for granted. In Nicaragua, rolling blackouts that cut off water mean residents always have a bucket of water ready and children joyfully chant “la luz!” when the lights flicker on.
“I really hope I can leave as much as I was given,” Simpson reflected.
Dam said she hopes the class trip will become a tradition that can be taken over by the sister city project with Nicaraguan students as teachers.
During one of her lessons in Nagarote, Dam instructed her students to write a fairy tale using the imperfect past tense. As the students drafted their stories, Dam taught how to write the perfect fairy tale ending in Spanish.
“This is how we write happily ever after,” she said as her marker squeaked across the dry erase board, writing out the phrase she hopes will someday apply to the lives of her students in Connecticut and the Nicaraguan students she helps.
“Y vivieron felices. Comieron perdices. Y col—rin colorado este cuento se ha terminado.”
Day 3 Continued
College is just a bus trip away
By Alexandra Fenwick
Staff Writer
NAGAROTE, Nicaragua – At the parque central here, you can catch a bus to one of two destinations:
“Managua, Managua, Managua!”
“Leon, Leon, Leon!”
As the buses pick up passengers, barkers holler the destination and hang out the open front doors to collect the fare – about 55 cents for the 30 miles to Managua and 72 cents for the 45 miles to Leon.
Nicolas Lopez Suarez and Karen Molina are two students who made the leap – and the two-hour round-trip bus ride – from high school in Nagarote to college in Managua and Leon, where the closest universities are situated.
As more high school students graduate from its young scholarship program, the Norwalk-Nagarote Sister City Project is supporting them as they make the transition to higher education. Fifty-five students receive scholarship money through the 4-year-old scholarship program.
“We’re in the process of deciding whether to offer bigger scholarships for university or trade school,” said Tish Gibbs, co-president of the Norwalk-Nagarote Sister City Project. “A lot of kids would like to go on, and we’d like to support that.”
The $50 scholarship, which covers a year of high school, includes about a year’s worth of transportation between Nagarote and either Managua or Leon.
It costs about $30 a month in tuition to attend college in Nicaragua, not including transportation.
On the 7 a.m. bus to Managua to attend a review for an upcoming exam, Nicolas, 18, folded his arms and dozed. Nico, as his friends call him, is studying pharmacy and chemistry at Universidad de Occidental, a private university he chose because its tuition is low and its campus is close to the mechanic shop where his father works.
Father and son ride a taxi together on some days, but when Nico travels solo, he takes the bus. And whenever he has an exam, Nico takes out his notes and studies during the bumpy hour-long ride.
The old yellow school bus, likely from an aging fleet of school buses sold by U.S. school districts to Latin American countries, was packed on a recent day for Nico.
The bus was decorated with brightly colored racing stripes down its sides, and its mirrors sported blue and white plastic tassels that fluttered in the wind. A bumper sticker declaring “Jesus is my co-pilot” was pasted next to the steering wheel. And the bus’s rumbling engine and blaring radio mingled with the driver’s liberal use of the horn.
After the bus zoomed down a winding mountain road into Managua, Nico caught a bus that navigated the bustling city streets and dropped him off at the university’s campus.
During class, the university is a stark contrast to the noisy, crowded bus. Students sit at attention and hushed voices echo through the halls.
Then classes end, and chattering students spill into the streets or the campus’s Internet cafe, which looks like a typical U.S. college student’s dorm room, covered in posters of counterculture heroes such as Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Che Guevara and Bob Marley.
At first, the whole college environment was jarring, Nico said.
“I was timid because I didn’t know anyone, and I felt lost because I didn’t know where everything was,” he said.
Now, all of his friends are from Managua.
“Whenever we have free time we go to the mall, go to the movies or to the park to play soccer.”
The small-town boy from rural Nagarote still seeks quiet from the hustle and bustle of university life. He often takes refuge from all the activity in a quiet room on campus or in his backyard hammock.
“I really enjoy that because I can concentrate better because I’m alone and no one can disturb me,” he said.
The administration class Nico attended on a recent Wednesday is his hardest and favorite course.
“It’s not just memorization. It’s more critical thinking and writing,” he said. “That’s probably why I like it.”
On a day off from class, Karen Molina, 19, was at home sewing knockoff Jansport backpacks in a two-woman assembly line with her mother. The women churn out about 30 backpacks in a day. They earn five cordobas per finished product, or about six of Karen’s round-trip fares to Leon, where she studies accounting at the public Universidad Nacionale Autonoma de Nicaragua.
The sister city project doesn’t encourage students to leave Nicaragua for the United States, Gibbs said, because an educated person with job skills is valuable in a developing country.
But not only are most students in Nagarote unwilling to leave the country, they don’t even want to leave their hometowns.
Nico and Karen come from tight-knit families and plan to stay in Nagarote as adults. Nico wants to open his own pharmacy, and Karen hopes to find work as a cashier or auditor.
“I prefer it here with my mother, and I feel a bit of fear moving from Nagarote,” Karen said.
“I am used to being here because it is very quiet and calm,” Nico said.
Nagarote is their home.
“They are extremely proud of Nagarote,” Gibbs said of the students there. “They don’t want to go away, and I think that’s a wonderful thing. And they live within commuting distance so there’s no need for them to go away. I’m very impressed with the fact that they don’t want to leave the town – they love it there.”
Happiness and poverty are not always an easy combination for many to understand.
“Whenever people go down there, we have people come back saying, ‘These people are so poor and so happy,’ that sort of thing,” Gibbs said. “What we tend to forget in this country is that income and possessions aren’t really that important, and these kids down there are really, in many ways, much smarter than we are. They know that what matters is their family and their friends.”
