Semana Santa

I’m BACK! Have no fear—I’m still alive and kicking strong! So why such a hiatus? ¿Porque tanto tiempo? Well lots has happened and lots will be happening in the next few weeks. Let me bring you up to speed: since the beginning of April, when I last wrote an entry, Semana Santa (Holy Week) has come and gone (thankfully, its gone—I’ll explain in a moment) and our water filter team has had two very productive meetings and the project is picking up substantially. I would say most of the activities over the past two weeks fit into those two categories.

If peace and quiet is what you are looking for, San Juan del Sur is, for the majority of the year, a good choice, especially considering the access it gives visitors and (although less so in recent years) residents to the beautiful and relatively secluded beaches to the north and south of here. However, during Semana Santa (and from what I hear, a few other times during the year) this place becomes an extension of Managua via the various discos that pitch camp on the beach, street vendors hoping to make a quick buck, and hordes of people from inside and outside of the country that arrive to vacation. People camp out on the beach or sleep in hammocks strung up between any trees they can find or flood the houses and apartments of relatives (at times, distant relatives) in order to join in the revelry, dancing, and of course drinking. The music from the discos competes with the music from various house parties until about 4:00 in the morning. On some streets, the crowds rival an inner city strip during peak hours. The population of the town more than doubles. While it was of course “an experience” and I did get to see a band called Kudai in concert (they are from Chile and I had never heard of them, but thoroughly enjoyed it), for someone that came to Nicaragua to do volunteer work, it was not what I expected nor really what I was looking for. Hence, on the afternoon of Easter Sunday, when the hordes of people began to make their treks back from to where they came from, I shared a sigh of relief with most every year-round resident here.

Semana Santa was an experience in, if anything else, Irony. On that Friday (Good Friday), there was the traditional Via Cruces procession through the streets of San Juan with statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. One stretch of the procession was along the road which follows the beach where discos has set up their temporary stations. There, the various religious signals were interdigitated with beer posters advertising, Victoria beer, one of Nicaragua’s national brews. (See the picture in this post.) The juxtaposition of religious and commercial symbols was truly ironic to me. In addition, while the influx of people was inevitable good for local business and restaurants, I have come to believe that the majority of profit that came from the five day fiesta was diverted back to Managua in a strange perversion of the natural beauty of the San Juan del Sur Bay whereby the large discos used the land for their own profit and on Sunday left behind only the hordes of trash along the beach which was eventually taken out to sea by the high tide. As was explained to me by my “uncle” (El Pajaro Loco’s youngest child, Bosco) who slept in the room next to mine during the week, “Nicaraguans work to prepare for Semana Santa and when it’s over, we prepare for the next big vacation in December.” Taking this to be true and combining it with the knowledge the San Juan del Sur is likely the most popular vacation spot for Nicaraguans, I at least have a vague understanding of the general aura of obligatory partying which permeated through the streets during the Semana Santa.

But that is all over now and we are back to life as usual in this town. Yesterday, I went with Fidel Pavon to Papaturro to collect samples of water from the remaining houses in our Pilot Project (the three pronged approach of 1) Filters; 2) Education; 3) Anti-parasitic medication). He is the technical expert on our water filter team but defies the American stereotype of “technical expert”. He is very strong, likely from lugging the 170 lbs filters around all day, and is very charismatic. The two of us went house by house with one of the health workers in the town and collected a total of 24 water samples. It was exhausting but we now have a (more or less) full data set of results from the families in Papaturro to see exactly how their filters are working. This is good.

In the next few weeks, the Ministry of Health (Ministerio de Salud—MINSA for short) will be taking part in a nationwide vaccination campaign and in doing so will visit each community in the Campo. This is fortunate for us, since transportation is always an important consideration, and often difficult challenge. The hope is that we will be able to tag along with the trips to these rural communities and collect samples from each filter in the field so that we can answer the question, finally, “Are these filters even working correctly?”