Coconut milk is good with everything

I´m completely blown away by the caribbean coast. I expected something like the campo, only more depressing. Instead, I live with a social activist by the name of Wesley Williams. He now runs a guesthouse, where I and 8 other students live. The name of the town is Pearl Lagoon, and we´re staying here from Wednesday to Saturday. Every day we talk to two representatives of the various organizations and NGOs around the town. They are incredibly dedicated and eloquent, something we pick up more easily here than on the Pacific side since most choose to speak in English with us.

The town is a mix of shacks, cement houses, and something like bungalows. It sits right at the waterside, but since it´s a lagoon we can´t see the ocean. The town mostly fishes for an income, and does some subsistence farming of the side. Although the town has about 1000 houses or so, the roads are generally not paved. This is only an issue on the roads cars pass through--most is pedestrian oriented. There´s also a lot of four wheelers, such as the one used by the police. There´s only 7 police for the entire municipality (like a county), so they can´t possibly be very effective.

Anyway, the town has two primary schools (one public and one private, although the private one costs less than a dollar a month to attend) and a secondary school. The university is a 40 minute panga ride away to Blufields. A panga is a 12 seater boat with an outboard motor, which the group has been using extensively, first to get from El Rama, where the road basically ends, to Bluefields, where we spent a night.

I´ll say a bit about Bluefields here. It´s mostly a spanish-speaking community, and the biggest town in RAAS (Southern Atlantic Autonomous Region). We stayed in a guesthouse right on the shoreline--the panga pulled right up to the restaurant part. I went for a walk around with some others in the group, and we mostly saw a lot of brightly colored cement houses, used clothing stores, clothing boutiques, and street music vendors. I´m still not sure how I feel about the town, which is fine since I only spent one day there and probably shouldn´t pass judgement on it.

As for food, it´s been great. We had the regional dish, rondón, for lunch the first day. That´s a type of fish, cooked in some kind of sauce. Very rich. They also cook up coconut bread, which everyone should try. They have rice and beans on the coast, but they stew it with coconut milk as well. We´ve also had shrimp, probably the best I´ve had in my life. Not even that weekend in Vietnam´s Ha Long bay compares to it. Although there I had great clams. And lobster. And, like all Nicaraguan exports, the best lobster goes to the States, so we haven´t seen much of that around here. People have been over fishing them, so now there are penalties if the fisherman keep lobsters below a certain size.

This is just a sprinkling of what I´ve learned here, but I don´t want to overwhelm everyone. I´ll just say we´ve so far spoken to the caldía, or mayor, of Pearl Lagoon, the municipal director of FALDCANIC, and a member of CONADETI.

FADCANIC stands for Formación del Autonomía y Desarollo de la Coasta Atlantica de Nicaragua. That translates into the Formation of Autonomy and Development of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. It is an NGO with funding from Austria and Norway to develop the capacity of the people here to live sustainably. What I like about the NGO is its consciousness to empower the communities themselves, and not impose improvements on them. The organization first talks to the comunity to see what needs to be done to improve it and help mitigate the poverty, then provides education and microcredit to give the people the capacity to provide a livlihood for themselves. For example, FADCANIC funds a school in Pearl Lagoon, in which all the teachers are from Pearl Lagoon. The NGO provides workshops to improve their teaching skills, and funding to attend the university in Bluefields. The schoolboard is comprised entirely of the student´s parent, and they are the ones who manage the direction of the school. So of course the NGO is effective in helping the communities here--it´s run by the people who are familiar with the community, know what the problems are, and now have the capacity to solve these problems.

CONADETI is the Comisión National de Demarcación Territorial Indigenas y Etnicas. I don´t think that needs a translation. The issue is that the indigenous people of the coast are used to working the land communally, but the mestizo community migrating east from the Pacific side have a European understanding of land, which requires titles of ownership. So this commision was created in 2003 to set up a way of giving the people communally titled land. But of course this is hard because people fight over which communities have the comunal right over what land, and the process has been really slow. It doesn´t help that the government doesn´t provide them with much of a budget--it´s mostly funded by UNESCO. Also, the reason the word Territory is used over Land is because Land only applies to earth, and Territory to land, water, minerals, and the cultural tradition itself--so the idea is to preserve not only the land for those who use it, but also this cultural history that comes with comunal ownership.

Finally, I´ll say a little but about the Garifuna. They´re a very small ethnic group, whose history is rather recent. Their ancestor are escaped African slaves and the Arawak indigenous group. They originally lived in Honduras, but have since migrated to Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Orinoco, where the other group went, is home to the largest Garifuna population in the world. The entire group is currently involved in preserving the Garifuna language, which only 10 can speak fluently, as well as codifying their culture and traditions. This is also funded by UNESCO, but they´ve only given $20,000.

I´m so impressed by the people here. This is nothing like the campo organizations, which suffered from a lack of involvement in La Amancia. Which I think is a product of dependency on the government or NGOs to swoop in the fix everything for them. What I´ve seen here is a history of people who want self-determination, and are in the process of working towards that. It´s very uplifting. No wonder so many SIT students go to the caribbean coast for their projects.

Also, I might be going to the Pearl Keys, apparently the tourist hot spot on the caribbean coast. Stay tuned.