Introduction to the CCBN Choir

E and Me

As the door to the teacher’s lounge silently creeps open, I spot two tiny hands reaching around the edge of the door, quickly followed by a mischievously grinning face. As this little pixie spots me her grin grows wider and she charges towards me, practically knocking me out of my chair as she hugs me. E, the six-year-old daughter of a scholarship student in the CCBN’s daily computer class, has taken to accompanying her mom to the CCBN in the afternoons and visiting all her “amigas” aka gringa volunteer friends. Never mind my not-very-forceful comments that she really shouldn’t be back here, E just keeps chattering away about whatever first comes to mind. She often tells us about her two-year-old nephew’s antics, or the various pets she’s had over the years, or moments when she was surprised or scared. It is a nonstop monologue, incoherently jumping from one topic to another, and it can be annoying and endearing at the same time. But, as with most children here, if you start asking some basic questions about their home lives, you quickly realize that not all is as rosy as their smiles. For example, asking E about who helps her at home and who she talks to, she is quick to respond “No one.” Not in school, she’s often home alone, left to the devices of her own imagination for entertainment. There are days she comes in without having been bathed, wearing the same clothes as the day before, and days she casually mentions they didn’t have any food in their house for lunch. She is fiercely affectionate, and her hugs make me feel much better when I’m having a bad day. Today we spent half an hour playing around with the camera on my computer, making funny faces and exploring different effects. E was eager to learn how to point-and-click on her own, and her giggles of delight cracked me up.

CCBN Photo Book

Check out the photo book Melissa Engle (MCC Volunteer at the CCBN) put together after her year here, and order your copy!

Pictures from Around the Center

Center Profiles: Project FED “Developing the capacity of CCBN students and staff to reduce the risk factors for gender-based violence”

Who is the leadership of the project, and how did you get involved?

Darling, Project Coordinator – I started working on violence prevention when I was 15 years old, at a personal level, by participating in young women’s reflection groups about rights, equality, gender, reproductive rights, sexuality, etc. After about 2 or 3 years I started to reproduce what I had learned and unlearned in those groups with other young women, especially young women in my rural community. I continued to work in and learn from a variety of women’s organizations and initiatives, and for three years coordinated an NGO’s violence prevention project. I was motivated to become a part of Project FED because it’s what I’ve had experience in, but I was also interested in how to bring the gender-based violence prevention theme to the area of arts and culture. I feel a personal and political commitment to institutionalize this work at the CCBN.

Teresa, Psychologist – I have 15 years of work experience on violence issues, including work in a variety of government ministries (health and family) and women’s organizations. My specialties are intra-family violence and sexual abuse, mostly working with survivors. I’ve liked working with women from a young age; my mother was a social feminist leader who taught me a lot. You have to have a lot of sensitivity to do this work, and you also have to be outside the cycles of violence to a certain extent.

Marco Aurelio, Psychologist/Promoter – I have worked in violence prevention since I was 17. I’m interested in all aspects of violence, including violence towards others but also violence towards ourselves. My specialties are sexuality and masculinities. I feel a personal and social commitment to this project, especially because my interest is working on a community level as opposed to an individual level. I want to help people make changes as a community to better themselves.

What is this project about?

This project is interesting for two concrete reasons: the goal of institutionalization of violence prevention (formation, awareness-raising, prevention, etc.) and how to orient everything that the CCBN does towards this institutionalization. In other words, how to give arts and culture activities the face of violence prevention.

What are the most pressing issues for the project?

We must invest energy into working with children and youth. An adult male said to us during one of our focal groups that “the reality is that I’m not going to change.” His attitude can change, and during the two years of the project we will keep sprinkling drops in the bucket and hopefully something will click. But the most important investment right now is with children and youth.

What kinds of activities will the project involve?

Formation activities, trainings, psychological attention, self-care and self-help groups, masculinity discussion groups, and prevention campaigns

Who will benefit from the project?

CCBN personnel, participants, and their families

Why is this project important to the CCBN?

The people have expressed how necessary it is. The CCBN has witnessed an increase in violence among women and children every year. They want to have knowledge about what violence is and practical tools to confront it. It’s a commitment on the part of the administration to figure out what to do to help solve the problem. The resources are all here, but we need to organize them and put them under a vision. It’s really about looking back at the roots of the CCBN, looking at the work that Angel and Margarita did and finding ways to continue that work. Our historical systematization shows how Margarita accompanied women in their transition from housewives to working outside the home. She accompanied them from a social empowerment perspective, telling them they could do it when they didn’t believe in themselves and challenging them to raise their self-esteem and work against the myths society tells women about themselves.

How do you find hope and motivation when you hear so many discouraging stories?

Marco Aurelio – Each of us lived a story of violence in our families. My motivation is that if I’ve been able to bring harmony to my life, others can do it, too. However, they need to have the right information and motivation. So my goal is to provide alternatives to violence that make sense in the context of each person’s reality as a way to lower violence in general.

Darling – Along with coming from a situation of violence, it’s a challenge for me to see how people can do things differently from their families. I’m motivated by the possibility of changing family dynamics and being able to choose the way you want to live.

Tere – Although I didn’t see a lot of violence in my house, I grew up without my father, and this motivated me because I believe that, for a child, it’s necessary for the family to live in harmony. However, if the family is going to live in violence, it’s better for them to be separated. It motivates me to collaborate in making new ways of relating to others, because sometimes people want to change, but they can’t do it alone and they need professional support to be able to overcome their struggles.

Boys to Men

The world is broken. Yes, I knew that before coming to Nicaragua. In fact, I think I’ve had an acute awareness of this fact from a young age. But there are weeks here where I feel like I get hit over the head with evidence of it over and over and over again, and it wears me down, makes me tired, and makes it hard to keep going. On the one hand, when people confide in me, I feel humbled and so privileged to be able to learn from them and accompany them in their pain. On the other hand, I feel so helpless. If all this stuff is just a product of a broken world, what can I really do about it?

And why does it seem like men are so much more broken inside than women? I think women suffer so much hardship and violence at the hands of men, but at the same time, I see that they are stronger because of it; they survive and learn to thrive from it. Men just remain…broken, lost, and unable to identify and articulate how they feel. This is why gender issues are important to everyone, not just women. We are all negatively affected by inequalities based on societal definitions of our anatomy.

According to the book Elementos Sociopsicológicos de Victimología (Sociopsychological Elements of Victimology) from Mexico:

“The traditional model of masculinity is supported by two essential elements that make up a true psychological profile:
•Emotional restriction: not speaking about feelings, especially with other men.
•Obsession with achievement and success.

These two basic characteristics translate into a kind of relationship with the world characterized by:
•Limited affective and sexual conduct,
•Attitudes based on models of control, power, and competition,
•Health problems.”

I see endless examples of this analysis in both my work and community life here in Batahola. Men seeking advice about family and relationships who can’t talk to their best friends about their struggles because they feel a sense of competition with them and a lack of openness. Men who think that their self-worth comes from pleasing all those around them and always succeeding with women. Men who, when asked how they feel, can’t come up with an answer. According to Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, this is not only a Latin American phenomenon. Through his experience leading men’s retreats he has concluded that Western men “[are] trapped inside, with almost no inner universe of deep meaning to heal [them] or guide [them].”

That’s not to say I haven’t met many deeply reflective men in Nicaragua. I have. It’s just that much of the human pain I see here (the pain we all experience as a result of living in a broken world) seems to stem from that explosive word “gender.” And as a young North American woman, I often don’t know how to respond to this pain in a culturally appropriate and knowledgeable way. So I find hope in the sharing of struggle and tend to do a lot of listening, a lot of hugging, and a lot of my own reflecting on how being a woman has shaped my identity for better and for worse.

English vs. Life

This morning I gave an oral quiz in English class. The quiz was about the past tense (“What did you do yesterday?” “What did you do last weekend?”) and neighborhoods (“Are there any banks in your neighborhood?” “Is there much crime in your neighborhood?”) But before I got to those questions, I asked a simple “How are you?” Greta and I try as much as possible to keep up with what is going on in our students’ lives, but that’s not always easy to do when there are 20 of them. And when we do hear about how they’re doing on a more personal level, we are reminded of just how hard life can be here. It’s not that life isn’t hard in the U.S., it most certainly is, but at least in comparison to the places and situations I come from in the U.S., the people that I’m interacting with here on a daily basis have many more serious and frequent problemas. We have students who are struggling with difficult housemates and divorces, jobs where you work 60+ hours a week and unexpected pregnancies, machismo and transformation, and abusive relationships and insomnia. Not to mention the daily tasks required to run a household, raise children, and simply survive. Again, it’s not that these situations don’t exist in the U.S., but that a simple “How are you?” at the beginning of an English quiz brings an overwhelming torrent of struggle, heartache, and stress from several of my students.

Coro Angel Torrellas on YouTube

Go here to see videos of the CCBN's choir singing a wide range of opera choruses in last year's National Choral Season.

June In Review

So it has been a while since we've updated the blog, which we apologize for, but truly, the last two months have been absolutely crazy. Here's a brief summary of some of our recent activities:

The month of June began with the yearly visit to the CCBN from Immaculate Heart of Mary parish in Cincinnati. IHM has had a twinning relationship with the CCBN for over 10 years, and each year a group of youth and adult chaperones makes a visit to the CCBN to learn about its work, gain some perspective on Nicaragua's reality, and build relationships with the community. Their 3 1/2 day stay at the CCBN was packed full of class visits, puppet shows and play dough with kids, reflections, arts exchanges, and conversations in both broken Spanish and English. One of the highlights of the weekend was Sunday morning's mural painting at the local Carlos Fonseca elementary school, also founded by Fr. Angel Torrellas and Sr. Margarita Navarro. Scholarship students from the CCBN joined forces with the IHM delegation to brighten the perimeter wall of the new preschool area at the school, and CCBN artists collaborated by drawing educational figure outlines on the wall and guiding the youth through the paint process. The wall turned out spectacularly, but more importantly, paint replaced language as a means of cross-cultural communication.

I spent the middle of June back home in Fargo, sharing stories from my work here with some of my community of support and celebrating my parents' 25th wedding anniversary. Initially, setting foot on U.S. soil (aka the Houston airport) after a year was a little overwhelming, but the support of my friends and family made the visit incredibly meaningful and a lot of fun. I was able to do a presentation on my time here to close friends and family, as well as visit with my church about my work. Favorite moments included eating lots of dessert with my best friend, playing mini-golf with my brother, and getting driven everywhere by my parents because I was too scared to get behind the wheel after a year!

Then, I hit the ground running by arriving back in Nicaragua the same evening as another group from Cincinnati, this time made up of a dozen soon-to-be seniors at St. Ursula's all-girls school and two of their teachers. These young ladies spent their time taking in both the rural and urban reality in Nicaragua, as well as sharing with a small group of CCBN youth about school, relationships, the World Cup, and whatever else might come up in conversation. After learning a little Nicaraguan folklore from the dance group, the St. Ursula's girls taught the dancers here the Cha-Cha Slide. So much laughter!

The weekend of July 4th was our semester closing at the CCBN. Instead of a graduation ceremony, the Cierre Cultural was a cultural extravaganza. Music, theater, food, painting, handicrafts, and dance, including our own performance with the Latin Rhythms class, made for a fun morning of sharing art, laughter, and nerves.

Now, it's back to a regular routine of English class and arts youth activities for me. I'm hoping to get more involved with the CCBN's new gender violence prevention project, so more on that coming soon.

Community Organizing

Last week I spent three days at a Cantera workshop learning about community development and organizing. We reflected on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to community organizing in a Nicaraguan context, and we shared a lot about our personal organizing experiences. Cantera workshops are always excellently facilitated, and I particularly enjoyed this one because it gave me so many good, concrete tools that I can use in my work at the CCBN. One of the greatest strengths of Cantera workshops is the diversity present in the room. People from all over the country, from NGO’s, from political organizations, and both paid workers and volunteers with a variety of educational backgrounds and economic circumstances, come together to share their experiences and learn from one another.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the workshop for me was seeing so many of the same theoretical concepts that I had learned at Industrial Areas Foundation’s national training in 2008, but with different methodological tools. For example, IAF’s basic organizing tool is the relational meeting, sitting down with someone one-on-one and probing them about their hopes, fears, and dreams, in order to identify their self-interest. At Cantera’s workshop, we learned about the importance of self-interest and of tapping into people’s dreams, but instead of starting with a relational meeting, Cantera gave us la muñeca, or the doll, as our initial organizing tool. You being by drawing the figure of a doll on butcher paper. Placing the community’s dream at the head of the doll, the committee writes down their resources and places those at the right arm of the doll. Next they place challenges at the left arm of the doll, and their personal commitments at the heart of the doll. Finally, the group makes a list of the initial steps that need to be taken to make the dream come true and places those at the doll’s feet. This tool is very effective in terms of visually laying out where the community stands in relation to their dream. Seeing these methodological differences caused me to reflect on how context determines effective organizing strategies. In the U.S. organizing context, we are looking for a way to take a much more individualistic culture and make it about community, whereas here, the assumption is that there is already an organized structure in place in the community, and that an outsider (such as an NGO) must learn to work within that structure.

gatito documentary

Good Friday morning. It was hot, and I was still in bed groggily trying to decide if I would be able to sleep a little longer in spite of the heat and take advantage of my vacation while it lasted. The Center was closed during Holy Week except for evening choir rehearsals. As wonderful as it is to listen to all the CCBN’s activities, it sure was nice to sleep in past 8am without being woken up by trombone lessons or recorder class. However, instead of the normal musical din I soon began to hear different kinds of sounds coming from outside, just below my window. It sounded like a kitten. I remembered that the volunteers who lived in the house before us had gained a reputation for taking care of unwanted strays. Groaning inwardly, I rolled over and decided that if it was still there when I woke up again I would figure out what to do with it.

Sure enough, when I opened the front door mid-morning, I found a wee bit of a kitten crying miserably in the corner of the porch. It was still wobbly on its little legs and obviously couldn’t have climbed up the steps by itself, so someone must have left it. Funny, people usually take things from our porch, not leave them (e.g., laundry drying on the line).

I had never taken care of a kitten this tiny, and Amanda hadn’t had any pets at all growing up. Luckily, Laura, one of the previous FOB volunteers and daughter of a veterinarian, had left us a small baby bottle and powdered infant formula for just such occasions. At his arrival, the kitten was so tiny that he even had trouble taking milk from a bottle, and one eye was swollen shut. Now, his eye has healed thanks to some drops, his fleas are gone thanks to a bath, and his little tummy is getting quite plump. He’s even starting to scamper and loves nothing more than to sit between our feet while we are cooking or washing dishes, making it a bit awkward for us to move around the kitchen without stepping on him.

Few of our Nicaraguan friends are as taken with the little guy as we are, but our friend, co-volunteer and freelance filmmaker Melissa Engle has put together a little documentary based on her observations, featured above. At first we were looking to give him away, but no one really seemed interested. Now we’re rather fond of the little guy (okay, okay, I admit I was ready to keep him from the start, but it seemed like Amanda needed a little more time to get used to the idea).

So far we’ve just been calling him “gatito” or “kitty” (not very creative, but easier than felis catus). Other suggestions have been Garfield, Fuzz, and Samson, but we may just end up calling him Tiger. If nothing else, it’ll give him something to aspire to.

Center Profiles: Ansony Gutierrez Jimenez

How old are you?
24

What was your first experience at the Center?
My first experience was studying the first level of Adult Basic Education. I got to know a lot of friends through this experience. It was both a fun and sad experience because I was scared to go to the Center sometimes, I was nervous about participating.

What do you currently do at the Center?
I help the guys. I help with security and maintenance, and I’m also in the painting class. The painting class is not easy, when I started, I couldn’t imagine getting involved, it’s a scary thing to put yourself out there, but if you say you can’t, you won’t be able to, and if you say you can, you can. The hardest thing about painting is painting faces. I’ve been painting for almost four years. I still remember my first painting, which I gave to my Adult Basic Education teacher, it was of a boy with a beautiful background of a tree with leaves in the fall, and around the tree were a bunch of kids. Painting has helped me economically because I sell my paintings and that’s helped me meet a lot of people.

Where do you live, and who lives at your house?
I live in Batahola Sur, and I live with my grandmother, two uncles, one aunt, and two cousins.

Who, of those that live at your house, work, and what do they do?
Only one of my uncles works. He works in a cosmetics store.

What do you like to do in your free time?
I like to go out, hang out with my friends, wash my clothes, iron, and go to the gym.

What is your biggest dream?
My biggest dream is to be with my mom in the United States. She has lived in Miami for 14 years and I haven’t seen her since she left.

What is your biggest fear?
My biggest fear is walking into a haunted house!

Why is the Center important to you?
The Center is important to me because I like helping the guys, they help me too, and I’ve learned I don’t need to be too proud. I go to the Center to leave behind my sadness. Once you enter here, you lose your sadness. My sadness is that my house doesn’t have food, that I’ll have to go to bed without eating.